Descrying Richmond, he put spurs to his horse, and with lance in rest rushed towards him, when, in the nick of time, Sir William Stanley, "with three thousand tall men," closed in and Richard fell overpowered, with wounds enough to have let out a hundred lives, and murmuring with his last breath, "Treason! Treason! Treason!" The royal army was but a rope of sand, and when the shout went up that Richard King of England had bitten the turf his troops, three-fourths of whom were ready to side with the strongest, rushed in inglorious retreat, the victors following in hot pursuit The fight lasted but two short hours, yet on the morrow many a whimpled dame mourned the loss of her belted lord, and many a sobbing Joan and village Winifred grieved for husband and lover slain at Bosworth Field. When the fight was ended, Lord Stanley, ever the faithful adherent of the party of good luck, led the descendant of Cadwallader to the slope of the hill at Stoke Golding, ever after called Crown Hill. A knight handed him the battered circlet of gold which adorned the chapeau of estate Richard had worn upon his salade or head piece, and, commanding the attendants to kneel, he placed it on the brow of the victorious Earl and proclaimed him "Conqueror and King." Meanwhile the stripped and mutilated corpse of him who at the morning's rise led a gallant army to assured victory, "trussed like a calf and naked as he came into the world," was flung across a horse and carried in triumph behind a pursuivant at arms to Leicester, where, after being exposed to the gaze of the scornful mob for two hot summer days, it was buried without ceremony in the church of the Gray Friars. Henry of Richmond came out of the field of Bosworth a victor to ascend the throne of a nation bleeding at every pore, and the leading nobles of which had been swept away. He was not ungrateful. One of his first acts was to seize the estates of the adherents of the fallen Richard. With them he was able to reward his faithful followers, and the originally great possessions of the Stanleys became swollen by enormous grants out of the Yorkists' confiscated lands. The Leghs of Lyme fared but indifferently in comparison; at all events, there is no evidence of Sir Peter having come out of that struggle with any addition to his territorial possessions. On the 14th of January following the houses of York and Lancaster were united by the marriage of the King with Elizabeth of York, and on the 20th of September, with almost undue punctuality, the popular wish was realised in the birth of a Prince--a bud from the peaceful grafting of the White Rose upon the Red--for whom Lord Stanley, or rather Lord Derby, for he had then been elevated to the earldom, was one of the two sponsors.