Qualla: Battle of Bosworth Field

Battle of Bosworth Field: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Begner (according to signature on bottom left, first name illegible), Public domain. On 22 August 1485, a king rode into battle and never rode out. Richard III, the last Plantagenet monarch, charged directly at his rival Henry Tudor across the fields of Leicestershire, crown reportedly circling his helmet, sword swinging. It was the most reckless gamble in English royal history, and it failed. Richard was hacked from his horse and killed, the last English king to die in combat. His naked body was slung over a packhorse and paraded through Leicester. Five centuries later, archaeologists would find his bones beneath a car park in that same city, his skull cleaved by a bladed weapon. But on that August morning, what mattered was simpler: a crown changed hands, a dynasty ended, and another began.

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Image: Begner (according to signature on bottom left, first name illegible) | Public domain

Battle of Bosworth Field: The Roses and Their Thorns

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Creator:Charles Raymond Booth Barrett, Public domain. The Wars of the Roses had bled England for thirty years before Bosworth. The houses of Lancaster and York, both descended from Edward III, had traded the throne back and forth through a grinding cycle of battles, executions, and betrayals. By 1483, the Yorkist Edward IV seemed to...

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Image: Creator:Charles Raymond Booth Barrett | Public domain

Battle of Bosworth Field: A Welsh Heir's Gamble

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Infidel - שיחה 20:48, 17 במרץ 2011 (IST), CC BY-SA 3.0. Henry Tudor had spent most of his life in exile, first in Brittany, then in France. His claim to the throne ran through his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, whose Lancastrian lineage descended from John of Gaunt through a legitimised but originally barred line. It was not a strong...

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Image: Infidel - שיחה 20:48, 17 במרץ 2011 (IST) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Bosworth Field: The Treachery on the Field

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edmund Blair Leighton, Public domain. What decided Bosworth was not military strategy but loyalty, or its absence. The Stanley brothers, Thomas and William, commanded a large force and had been summoned by Richard, who held Thomas's son hostage as insurance. The Stanleys positioned themselves on the flanks, watching,...

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Image: Edmund Blair Leighton | Public domain

Battle of Bosworth Field: A Crown in the Mud

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unidentified, signature at bottom right, Public domain. According to tradition, Richard's crown was found in a hawthorn bush after the battle and placed on Henry's head atop Crown Hill, near the village of Stoke Golding. Henry VII, as he became, married Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter, uniting the warring houses under the new ...

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Image: Unidentified, signature at bottom right | Public domain

Battle of Bosworth Field: Where England Turned

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Henry Ramsay (1859–1925)[1], Public domain. Bosworth Field remains one of those rare battles where a single afternoon genuinely altered the course of a nation. The Plantagenet line, which had ruled England since 1154, ended in a Leicestershire field. The Tudor age that followed would see the English Reformation, the defeat...

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Image: James Henry Ramsay (1859–1925)[1] | Public domain