By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
Richard III: The Maligned King, by Annette Carson; The History Press, paperback, 336 pages. Available at amazon.com.
Annette Carson has written a very informative, and indeed “revisionist,” book on Richard III, who, more than 500 years after his death, still manages to evoke powerful emotions whether for or against. He was the King of England for only just over two years, and yet, according to Carson, he “made good laws which still protect ordinary people today.”
But until recently the view of most historians is the one which sees him as the villainous hunchback of Shakespeare’s play: “The wicked uncle who stole the throne and killed his nephews in the Tower of London.”
The author takes a fresh look at the reign of Richard III, focusing on the events of his reign in the light of reports from the original sources, rather than relying on the assumptions which, she claims, many historians have made as to the character and motivation of Richard.
This edition of the book dates from 2013, that is, after the discovery of Richard’s body under a car park in Leicester, not far from Bosworth Field where he died on August 22, 1485, a victim of the forces of Henry Tudor who duly became King Henry VII, and ultimately the father of Henry VIII.
As Carson states in her preface, this is not a biography of Richard III, but rather a “highly personal analysis of the more controversial events of that king’s reign.” She argues that most historians have placed negative interpretations on Richard’s actions, while “applauding the career of deceit and underhandedness that characterized his nemesis, Henry VII.”
The author deals with various topics relating to the life of Richard, and mentions the discovery of his skeleton early on, a discovery which indicated that he was about five feet, eight inches tall, and was strong and well-muscled; he did have a curvature of the spine (scoliosis) but it would not have been that noticeable. This, in her words, debunks “Shakespeare’s monstrous shambling creature with hunched back and withered arm.”
One of the most curious aspects of the whole story of Richard III, is that Shakespeare based his depiction of a villainous Richard on the writings of St. Thomas More, who spent time as a young man in the household of John Morton, who was bishop of Ely. Morton became Lord Chancellor under Henry VII and a fierce antagonist against the memory of the late Richard III after Bosworth. It is also probable that St. Thomas based his History of King Richard the Third on a biased manuscript written by Morton.
As Carson points out, St. Thomas’ book was probably not intended for publication, and it is the case that five different versions have come down to us. Crucially, the work lay unfinished for 15 to 20 years, suggesting that the author may well have come to have had second thoughts about aspects of the evidence he had amassed.
The supreme irony is, then, that the Tudors, who were able to use the writings of St. Thomas to blacken the reputation of Richard III, were also, in the person of Henry VIII, responsible for the death of St. Thomas himself.
Carson also deals at length with the disappearance of the princes in the Tower, still one of the great historical mysteries. She argues that rather than murdering the young princes, who had been declared illegitimate, Richard may well have sent them overseas to the Low Countries, to his sister, Margaret of York, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy.
Since the Tower of London is on the River Thames, it is plausible that they could have been spirited away in a boat and out to sea. But as Carson says, “Richard’s fatal mistake lay in failing to realize that their disappearance would be used by . . . [his opponents] as an opportunity to maneuver the unlikely Henry Tudor to center stage as a challenger for the throne.”
And in fact, the person who had most to gain from the murder of the princes was actually Henry Tudor, while Richard had nothing to gain by killing them and then keeping it a secret.
Carson concludes that we have no real way of knowing what actually happened to the princes, but that the story that they had been murdered by Richard was the account that was most assiduously promoted by the Tudors in later years.
As for Richard’s personal qualities, they lie uneasily with the notion that he was an unprincipled murderer. In Carson’s words, “He had a high reputation as a military campaigner, and a higher one as a fair and just administrator; indeed his concern for justice and law had been an overriding theme in his life.”
When he became king in June 1483, Richard delivered a lecture at Westminster to all his judges and legal officers, charging them to “justly and duly minster his law without delay and favor.” And, as Carson says, he also declared that “all men, of whatever degree, must be treated equally in the sight of the law.”
And it was not just a case of mere words; Richard actively sought to introduce laws that would protect the weak against the strong, a policy that was unpopular with some of the nobility, and which ultimately worked against him at Bosworth Field.
Carson quotes historian Paul Murray Kendall as follows: “In the course of a mere eighteen months, crowded with cares and problems, he laid down a coherent program of legal enactments, maintained an orderly society, and actively promoted the well-being of his subjects. A comparable period in the reigns of his predecessor and successor shows no such accomplishment.”
Carson also quotes the medieval historian, Professor A.R. Myers, who said, “What brought him to defeat and death at Bosworth Field was not the feeling of the nation at large but the desertion of a few great nobles and their forces.”
In fact, among the reasons for Richard losing the battle was his decision to engage the forces of the enemy before his army was at full strength, and his chivalric desire to engage Henry Tudor in single combat. But the deeper reason was the treachery of former supporters such as the Stanleys.
The country was certainly not the better for Henry Tudor’s victory; Paul Murray Kendall summarizes his reign as a story of disorder, misery, oppression, spying, hangings, and the miserly extortion of his subjects.
With hindsight, we can say that if Richard III had won the Battle of Bosworth, then it is quite possible that the Reformation in England would never have happened. Certainly it is difficult to imagine a worse example of kingship from the religious point of view than Henry VIII.
So Richard’s defeat has had tremendous repercussions down through history, since if England, the Dowry of Mary, had remained Catholic, it’s quite possible that the Reformation would have been confined to Northern Europe, and both North and South America would then have been Catholic.
Richard III: The Maligned King is a thought-provoking and well-argued book, which will certainly be of interest to anyone who seeks to know more about this crucial time in the history of England.
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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also a written a time-travel/adventure book for young people — details can be found at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk/.)
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