camp on Hanging Hill, between Bosworth and Shenton, some distance from both the main bodies (Hutton, App. p. 245; cf. Hall, p. 414). Yet he can hardly have hoped to recover Richard's favour had the day gone against Henry, and it was when the king's desperate charge seemed to make this likely that Stanley brought his three thousand men into action and so decided the battle (ib. pp. 418–19). If his real object was to place Henry more clearly and deeply in his debt, it was certainly attained. He became lord chamber- lain and knight of the Garter, and was confirmed in possession of his Welsh estates.
Stanley's fall ten years after came no doubt as a surprise to most people, but Henry long before entertained suspicions of the man who had in turn betrayed Lancaster and York (Brewer, Letters and Papers, iii. 490). It is a curious coincidence, if no more, that the informer who denounced him at the end of 1494 as an accomplice of Perkin Warbeck should have been Sir Robert Clifford, uncle of the young lord whose property at Skipton he had for a time usurped (Dugdale, i. 342). How deeply he involved himself with Warbeck we do not know; he must surely have done more than declare that ‘if he knew certainly that the young man [Warbeck] was the undoubted heir of King Edward IV, he would never fight or bear armour against him.’ On 6 Feb. 1495 he was ‘found guilty of treason by a quest of divers knights and worshipful gentlemen,’ and on the 16th beheaded on Tower Hill (Cott. MS. Vitellius, A. xvi. 152–3; Fabyan, p. 685; Polydore Vergil; Hall, p. 469; Busch, p. 95). The more cruel part of an execution for treason was dispensed with. Henry defrayed the cost of his burial at Sion (Excerpta Historica, pp. 101–2). It was afterwards believed that forty thousand marks in ready money, plate, and jewels were found in Holt Castle, and Bacon, in his ‘Life of Henry VII,’ estimates Stanley's income at three thousand a year.
Stanley was at least twice married. In 1465 he married Joan, daughter of the first Viscount Beaumont, and widow of John, lord Lovel (Rot. Parl. v. 582; Complete Peerage, v. 165). He subsequently (after 1470) married Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Hopton of Hopton, Shropshire, who had already survived two husbands, Sir Roger Corbet of Moreton-Corbet, Shropshire, and John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester [q. v.] (ib. vii. 402). The pedigrees following Sir Peter Leycester are in error respecting his marriage (cf. Baines, Hist. of Lancashire, iv. 10; Ormerod, i. 442). Stanley left three children—a son and two daughters. The son, Sir William Stanley, married Joan, heiress of the Masseys of Tatton in Cheshire, and died in or about 1498; one daughter, Joan, married Sir John Warburton of Arley, and the other, Catherine, Thomas Cocat of Holt.
A three-quarter-length portrait of Stanley in richly ornamented armour is preserved at Wentworth House, Yorkshire, and was engraved in Baines's ‘Lancashire’ (iv. 19). He is represented with a thinnish face and short beard.