Bosworth made Henry VII king, but the wars ended in 1487

The Battle of Bosworth, fought on 22 August 1485 in Leicestershire, killed Richard III and made Henry Tudor king as Henry VII. It did not end the Wars of the Roses, though. Their last battle was fought two years later at Stoke Field in Nottinghamshire.

Richard had the bigger army and lost it through other men’s choices. In the account given by the battlefield’s heritage centre, Henry’s vanguard under the Earl of Oxford attacked the royal right wing. The Earl of Northumberland’s large force on Richard’s left never moved. When Richard charged at Henry’s standard, Sir William Stanley finally joined the fight on Henry’s side. Richard’s horse stuck in marshy ground, and he was surrounded and killed on foot, the last English king to die in battle. Tradition says his coronet was found in a hawthorn bush.

What happened next

• August 1485: Richard is buried in the Greyfriars friary in Leicester. The friary is pulled down after the Reformation and his grave is lost.
• 16 June 1487: Yorkist rebels fight for Lambert Simnel, a 10-year-old pretender passed off as the Earl of Warwick, and are crushed at Stoke Field, with casualties put at around 7,000. The wars that began at St Albans in 1455 are over, and Henry gives Simnel a job in the royal kitchen.
• 1974: A visitor centre opens on Ambion Hill, where the battle was then thought to have been fought.
• 2000s: A five-year Battlefields Trust survey finds lead cannonballs and, in 2009, a silver-gilt boar badge. The finds show the fighting took place about a mile south-west of Ambion Hill, on either side of Fenn Lane.
• August 2012: Archaeologists find Richard’s skeleton on the lost Greyfriars site.
• March 2015: He is reburied in Leicester Cathedral.

So Bosworth decided who wore the crown, but the Tudors had to win it a second time at Stoke.