[162a] “Margaret Beaufort, sole daughter and heiress of John Beaufort, first Duke of Somerset, became Countess of Richmond by her marriage with her first husband, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond; her second husband was Sir Henry Stafford (a son of Humphrey Stafford, first Duke of Buckingham, slain at the battle of Northampton, and a brother of Humphrey Stafford, Earl of Stafford, slain at the first battle of St. Alban’s, and also a brother of John Stafford, Earl of Wiltshire); and her third husband was Thomas Lord Stanley, afterwards Earl of Derby. The Countess of Richmond had only one child, viz., Henry Earl of Richmond, afterwards King Henry VII., by her marriage with Edmund Earl of Richmond (see Pedigree No. 4, chap. ix. p. 201); and she had not any children either by her second or third husband, as if, to use the words of Sandford, in his Genealogical History, p. 319, ‘she had been designed to be the mother of a king onely.’ She lived to see her son Henry VII. and her grandson Henry VIII. successively kings, and died in the first year of the reign of the latter, on the 3rd July, 1509, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.”
[162b] Hutton’s Bosworth Field, Additional Particulars, pp. 196, 197. Baker, in his Chronicles calls the hill, Anne Beam; and, considering the age when he wrote, the spelling is not so very much amiss. It is now called Ambien Hill, and also Amyon Hill.
[163a] Hutton’s Bosworth Field, p. 94.
[163b] Hutton’s Bosworth Field, p. 97.
[163c] Hall, Holinshed, Grafton, Baker, Speed, Stow.
[163d] Hutton, p. 96.
[163e] Hall, Holinshed, Grafton, Baker, Speed, Stow. It must be borne in mind, that the morass formed part of what is at present the wood, and that a portion of the latter extends nearly to the well. Henry’s army, in advancing, would naturally bear away a little to the left, in order to avoid the morass.
[163f] Hutton, p. 69.
[163g] Ibid., pp. 87, 94.
[164] Baker, in his Chronicles, fo. 232, states, that Richard’s “vanguard was led by the Duke of Norfolk, which consisted of one thousand two hundred bowmen, flanked with two hundred cuyrassiers, under the conduct of the Earl of Surrey; the battel King Richard led himself, which consisted of a thousand bill-men empaled with two thousand pikes; the rereward was led by Sir Thomas Brackenbury, consisting of two thousand mingled, with two wings of horsemen, containing fifteen hundred, all of them cast into square maniples, expecting the Lord Stanley’s coming with two thousand, most of them horsemen.” Instead of Sir Thomas Brackenbury, Baker probably meant Sir Robert Brackenbury, who lost his life in the battle; but in either case, he appears to be in error, as to the commander of the rear of Richard’s army, which not only other old historians, but even Baker, on the next page, states, to have been commanded by the Earl of Northumberland. “In this battel Henry, Earl of Northumberland, who led King Richard’s rereward, never strook stroke.”—Baker, fo. 233.