Bosworth, by Chris Skidmore – review

Although Richard III was five foot eight, his spine was so twisted he stood a foot shorter. Imagine him hacking his way towards Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth; a furious human pretzel, ‘small in body and feeble of limb’, as a contemporary noted, he cut his way towards his rival ‘until his last breath’.

Earlier this year, five million people watched the Channel 4 programme The King Under the Car Park which first revealed that Richard really did have slight bones, and one shoulder higher than the other, as the earliest sources had always claimed. It caught the national imagination with the details of the injuries he suffered at Bosworth bringing the violence of the battle to life. Chris Skidmore’s Bosworth could scarcely have been published at a better moment, and it is just the right book for all those whose interest has been piqued by the archaeology.

For admirers of Richard III, including all those who were convinced that tales of his twisted spine was Tudor propaganda, there is little comfort in Skidmore’s narrative. He expresses few doubts that Richard did away with his young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, in 1483. Nor does one warm to a king with henchmen like ‘the black knight’, who, tradition has it, punished offenders by rolling them downhill in spiked barrels. According to Skidmore, by the summer of 1485, Richard was haemorrhaging support so badly that even the servant who had dressed the king for his coronation abandoned him. Even so, England was not simply there for the taking by the obscure Henry Tudor.

Henry’s sole blood claim to the throne came through his mother’s illegitimate descent from John of Gaunt, which amounted to no claim at all. His army was an invasion force, backed by France, and over half the men in it were French, with the rest made up of Scots and Welsh, as well as English.