The Battle of Bosworth Field, two years previously, had established Henry VII on the throne, ending the last period of Yorkist rule and initiating that of the Tudors.

The Battle of Stoke Field was the decisive engagement in an attempt by leading Ricardian Yorkists to unseat the King in favour of the pretender Lambert Simnel.

[3] Though it is often portrayed as almost a footnote to the major battles between York and Lancaster, it may have been slightly larger than Bosworth, with much heavier casualties, possibly because of the terrain which forced the two sides into close, attritional combat.

Henry VII of England held the throne for the new royal line (the House of Tudor), and had tried to gain the acceptance of the Yorkist faction by his marriage to their senior heiress, Elizabeth of York, but his hold on power was not entirely secure.

The chief male-line claimant of the York dynasty was the queen's first cousin, Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of George, Duke of Clarence.

[8] Lincoln then outmanoeuvred King Henry's northern army, under the command of the Earl of Northumberland, by ordering a force under John, Lord Scrope, to mount a diversionary attack on Bootham Bar, York, on 12 June.

However, the fighting had slowed down the Yorkist advance sufficiently to allow King Henry to receive substantial reinforcements under the command of Lord Strange by the time he joined Scales at Nottingham on 14 June.

Around nine in the morning of 16 June, King Henry's forward troops, commanded by the Earl of Oxford, encountered the Yorkist army assembled in a single block, on a brow of Rampire Hill surrounded on three sides by the River Trent at the village of East Stoke.

Henry's army was divided into three battles, of which Oxford led the vanguard, he may have had as many as 6,000 infantry under his command, flanked by two wings of mounted troops under Baron Scales and Sir John Savage (both veterans of Bosworth).

[11] Before the fight began some unusual lights in the sky were interpreted as ill-portents by Lancastrian soldiers, leading to some desertions, but Oxford and other nobles were able to restore morale, and soon the army was in "good array and in a fair battle".

Suffering from the missiles, they chose to surrender the high ground by immediately going on to the attack in the hope of breaking the Lancastrian line and rolling up the enemy army.

The battle was bitterly contested for over three hours, but eventually sheer attrition told against the Yorkists after they failed to break the Lancastrian position early on.

Henry chose not to commit his other "battles", leaving the struggle to the vanguard,[12] which was probably repeatedly reinforced as Lancastrian contingents came up, directed by Jasper Tudor.

Though the German mercenaries were equipped with the latest handguns, the presence of large numbers of traditional archers in the Lancastrian army proved decisive.

[18] Later in Henry's reign, in the 1490s, another pretender to the throne emerged, in the person of Perkin Warbeck; this time the matter was resolved without having to fight a battle, in the Second Cornish uprising of 1497.