The king felt himself safe; the consent of the queen-mother to his contemplated marriage with her daughter Elizabeth appeared to secure him against any danger from the discontented Yorkists; and Henry, alone and in exile, seemed a small danger.

Henry however had no sooner landed at Milford Haven than a wide conspiracy revealed itself.

Lord Stanley had as yet stood foremost among Richard's adherents; he had supported him in the rising of 1483 and had been rewarded with Buckingham's post of Constable.
His brother too stood high in the king's confidence.

But Margaret Beaufort, again left a widow, wedded Lord Stanley; and turned her third marriage, as she had turned her second, to the profit of her boy.

A pledge of support from her husband explains the haste with which Henry pressed forward to his encounter with the king.