Introduction
‘It is therefore convenient somewhat to show you ere we further go, what manner of man this was that could find in his heart so much mischief to conceive.’
Sir Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third
‘There is a kind of literary superstition, which men are apt to contract from habit, and which makes them look on any attempt towards shaking their belief in any established characters, no matter whether good or bad, as a sort of profanation.’
Horace Walpole, Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III
‘Richard casts a strange spell. To fascinate Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare, Horace Walpole and G.K. Chesterton, is no mean feat. The Life and Death of King Richard the Third is arguably its author’s greatest historical play (although Dr Johnson differed), while More’s biography of him was admitted to be ‘a very beautiful one’ even by Walpole: the latter’s elegant Historic Doubts about Richard’s villainy were admired by Edward Gibbon. In modern times the King has attracted a remarkable assortment of writers. He is the object of a romantic cult that has recently been given new life by the discovery of his skeleton.1
Last of the old Plantagenet dynasty, Richard was not just the last Englishman but the sole Northcountryman – if by adoption – to reign over England. We have had English Kings, French Kings, Welsh Kings, Scots Kings and German Kings, but only once a Northcountry King. His reign was the one reign when the southern English had cause to resent an influx of Northerners into positions of power and influence. At the same time he possessed the qualities of an Italian tyrant. He was the most terrifying man ever to occupy the English throne, not excepting his great-nephew Henry VIII. His short life was filled by intrigue and slaughter, and he was the only King of England – other than Harold – to be defeated and killed in battle.2 Above all, he still remains a mystery.
Richard has left two popular legends. The earlier is Shakespeare’s crookback, whose element of caricature has been heightened by a theatrical tradition stretching from Colley Cibber to Laurence Olivier (though Shakespeare was nearer the truth than some of the King’s latter-day defenders). The second, later, legend is of a folk hero manqué, a gallant young ruler, the supreme victim of political vilification in English history. Supporters of this ‘white’ legend have produced some very entertaining literature in portraying Richard as a martyr to Tudor propaganda. Horace Walpole is at his most polished in questioning the ‘black’ legend, while Sir Clements Markham shows inspired ingenuity in attributing the murder of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ to Henry VII, but the writings of Walpole and Markham belong no less to fiction than does Josephine Tey’s delightful novel, The Daughter of Time, in which she too questions the case against Richard.
On the whole modern historians take the view that he was more like the white legend, though admitting he was responsible for the deaths of Edward V and his brother. They acquit him of other crimes and have developed a ‘grey’ legend. They cannot accept that any Englishman could have been so much of a Renaissance tyrant. The case for the black legend is in danger of being lost by default – because nowadays it is so seldom heard. Yet, amended in the light of modern research, it offers much the most convincing portrait of Richard.
There are two short contemporary accounts of his reign – the résumé in the Croyland Chronicle (the chronicle of the monks of Croyland Abbey) and Mancini’s eyewitness description of the usurpation of 1483. Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia, which deals comparatively briefly with Richard, was finished by 1513. Vergil (who came to England in 1502) had spoken to many survivors from the King’s time. Probably he also had access to material unknown to Thomas More, though the latter, a personal friend, may have read his work in draft. More is unquestionably the most influential of Richard’s early historians; but for him the King would be a shadowy figure. Clearly he was writing an epic as well as history and strove for dramatic effects, yet as a man famous for plain dealing and love of truth – he paid for it with his life – it is impossible to dismiss his account. When hisHistory of King Richard the Third first appeared in the 1540s, incorporated into popular chronicles, it is surely significant that it was at once accepted at face value. Further, a meticulous analysis of the evidence together with skilful textual criticism have established beyond question that during the King’s short reign many people believed that he had murdered his nephews and others too. (By September 1483 at latest, it was certainly obvious to the highest in the land – including the boys’ mother – that the ‘Princes in the Tower’ were dead.) Early in 1485 he actually had to assure publicly a specially summoned assembly of London citizens that he had not poisoned his wife.
Admittedly some distinguished scholars reject the black legend. The late E. F. Jacob in The Fifteenth Century (1961), considers Richard ‘very far from being the active monster of tradition’, while Professor Myers quotes in ‘The Character of Richard III’ (1954) with approval a Tudor opinion – ‘Although he did evill, yet in his tyme wer many good actes made.’3 Perhaps, though, when he reigned the evil outweighed any good he might have done in the eyes of most Englishmen. And Myers omits to point out that ‘actes’ refers to Acts of Parliament.
Remarkable ingenuity is shown in trying to explain away More’s testimony in particular. The late Professor Kendall, the author of Richard the Third (1955), which has been for many years the most detailed and popular modern life of the King (even if Dr Alison Hanham in her Richard III and his Early Historians (1975) dismisses it to ‘the realm of fiction’) suggests that More wanted ‘not primarily to blacken Richard’s character for the gratification of the Tudors, but to make the malign figure given him even more malign in the good cause of humanist education’, and that the book was meant ‘in part at least, as an attack, by horrible example, on the realpolitik, the new power politics of the age’.4
Professor Charles Ross expresses this argument more subtly in The Wars of the Roses (1976) by stating simply that Sir Thomas’s book is ‘very much a treatise on tyranny’, which does not alter the fact that Richard was very much a tyrant. Myers is of the same opinion as Kendall and Ross, considering it ‘questionable whether More regarded himself as writing history; his story is much more like a drama, unfolded in magnificent prose, for which fidelity to historical fact is scarcely relevant’. Even Dr Hanham accepts this view, carrying it to extremes. She believes that Sir Thomas was determined to shape his story into a satisfyingly epic form, that he used models from Roman history as to how wicked men should behave, that he treated his sources with scant respect, altering and embroidering the historical record, and that his imagination was excessively dramatic. Above all, she dismisses the History as a ‘satirical drama’ and ‘a joke against historians’.5
But More is not our only source of information about Richard III. Kendall is hardly convincing in his attempts to justify the grey legend. He cites ‘general agreement’ among modern scholars. ‘Discarding once and for all the Tudor tradition, and basing their researches on fifteenth-century sources, they [the scholars] have worked to illuminate the complex character and the strangely flawed career of the man who was successively a loyal brother, usurping uncle and able King.’ The truth is that nothing of importance in Richard’s defence has been found for a century. Even by 1898 the hostile Gairdner was already aware of the King’s popularity with the citizens of York. The few discoveries in recent times have all confirmed that he was violent and ruthless.6 Moreover, a surprising amount of evidence cited by proponents of the grey legend to acquit Richard of such lesser crimes as murdering Henry VI – or even Edward of Lancaster – will bear a precisely opposite interpretation.
There are, however, signs that academic opinion is at last turning from the grey to the black legend. In Government and Community: England 1450–1509 (1980) Professor Lander concedes that ‘Richard’s reputation had fallen extremely low in his own lifetime. There was not really much scope for it to be posthumously blackened by Tudor propaganda.’
The King’s first modern biographer was James Gairdner, who published his History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third in 1898. Gairdner was an extremely professional and knowledgeable nineteenth-century historian, the editor of the Paston Letters and of the Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII. He had no hesitation in accepting the black legend. He confesses to have been momentarily shaken in his youth by Walpole’s Doubts, but since then ‘a minute study of the facts of Richard’s life has tended more and more to convince me of the general fidelity of the portrait with which we have been made familiar by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More’. Admittedly Gairdner is old-fashioned, occasionally naïve, and much too unquestioning in his acceptance of Tudor tradition. Nevertheless, he had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of most of the sources and his instinct was often a sure one.
While Kendall may claim ‘general agreement’ among scholars, there have been some very distinguished historians in recent times who largely accept the black legend and much of More. They include the late Professor Pollard and Dr A. L. Rowse. In 1933 Pollard, in ‘The Making of Sir Thomas More’s Richard III’, demolished the argument that the material for More’s history was given to him as a credulous young man by Cardinal Morton, an enemy of Richard. Sir Thomas is unlikely to have begun the book before 1513, when he was thirty-five. (Dr Hanham has suggested that he may not have started it until 1519 and may still have been working on it in the 1530s.) Pollard shows that More – old enough to have seen King Richard, being seven at the time of Bosworth – was acquainted with many others besides Morton who remembered his reign. Sir John Cutts, Richard’s Receiver of Crown Lands and the King’s cousin by marriage, was More’s predecessor as Under-Treasurer while his kinsman William Roper was Richard’s Commissioner of Array for Kent. He also knew such influential and informed prelates as Archbishop Warham and Bishops Fox and Fitzjames – the latter had been Treasurer of St Paul’s during Richard’s reign. And as a successful London lawyer, even More’s father must have known the City gossip of the day.
In Dr Rowse’s view, in Bosworth Field and the Wars of the Roses (1966), ‘The traditional story, as it has come down to us, is perfectly plain and clear … everything that has come to light in our own time is completely consistent with it, bears it out, confirms it.’ As for Sir Thomas, ‘More has so much to tell us that comes from people concerned in those happenings.’ Like Pollard, Rowse considers that ‘There was no lack of people who knew what had happened; but it was too appalling and too dangerous to write it down.’ Rowse also agrees with Pollard in attributing many of More’s errors to reliance on oral tradition, though emphasizing how he is borne out again and again by contemporary writers of whose existence he was unaware.
Dr Hanham is another distinguished scholar who inclines to the black rather than the grey or white legends. Her study of Richard and his early historians is deeply impressive. Yet one questions her judgement that More was writing ‘primarily as a literary craftsman, not as the investigator of historical evidence’ – his instincts as a lawyer cannot be dismissed so cavalierly. There is no sign of contemporaries regarding his book as satirical, though they appreciated its irony and humour; Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, considered it a model of historical writing. On the other hand, Dr Hanham stresses that
In some ways, indeed, Richard’s contemporaries were severer critics than their sixteenth-century successors. Mancini’s informants were at pains to explain to him how rudely everyone had been deceived by the usurper; the Croyland chronicler (and whoever he was, he was not John Morton or any other of Henry’s fellow exiles of 1483–5) fails even to credit Richard with the remorse allowed him by Vergil and More.
Charles Ross, in what is still the best academic study of the King, emphasises that contemporaries believed he had murdered his nephews, that the Black Legend is of pre-Tudor origin and dates from Richard’s lifetime. He, too, regards the Croyland Chronicle as the most important source of all. But even he is too cautious in drawing the obvious conclusions from his own magisterial scholarship.
The whole controversy about Richard III hinges on the interpretation of a very brief part of his life, known from a very small corpus of material. The usurpation of April to July 1483 is the one time when we are reasonably well informed about him, the single period dealt with fully by Mancini and More, who are substantiated by the Croyland writer and Polydore Vergil. Almost every aspect of the King’s personality known to us derives from what they say of his behaviour during these vital days. Apart from certain incidents of his reign, described tersely by the Croyland chronicler and Vergil, the descriptions of his coup d’état provide almost the sole means of interpreting his career and his character.
Dominic Mancini’s account was written in December 1483, in France, and remained forgotten until his manuscript was discovered in 1934 at the municipal library of Lille. Although this scholarly Roman visitor to London gives us no description of Richard – no doubt simply because he had not seen him – he is plainly convinced that the King is a very bad man indeed. As he was a foreigner, it would have been hard to find a more unbiased observer.
Another foreign contemporary, to whose evidence perhaps insufficient importance has been attached, was the very well informed Philippe de Commynes, that shrewdest, most objective and most modern of fifteenth-century observers. He had actually seen Richard. In his memoirs he claims that he was ‘more filled with pride than any King of England these last hundred years’.7 He also tells us that Louis XI of France, who was not exactly squeamish, thought Richard ‘extremely cruel and evil’, and states categorically that he killed Henry VI – ‘or at least had him killed in his presence’ – as well as his nephews. Like Mancini, Commynes (who probably wrote between 1489 and 1491) had no particular reason to blacken the name of a foreign monarch.
The best-informed of those severely critical contemporaries of whom Dr Hanham speaks was of course the author of the original source of the ‘Second Continuation’ of the Croyland Chronicle.8 It is now virtually established that the continuation incorporates a lost text written by Richard’s Lord Chancellor – far from being the production of Markham’s ‘credulous old Croyland monks’. This was John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, who must have been present at most meetings of the King’s Council. Unfortunately, in keeping with his training as a professional bureaucrat, the ‘Croyland chronicler’ is often infuriatingly discreet. Even so, he had plainly been horrified by Richard.
Polydore Vergil, a professional Italian historian, came to England in 1502. If naturally disinclined to displease his patron Henry VII, and prone to poetic licence in wishing to write good literature, he was none the less objective and methodical. He tells us that when unable to find written records, ‘I went to every elderly man pointed out to me as having once held an important position in public life and obtained from them information about events before 1500.’ (We know that he questioned survivors from Edward IV’s court about the death of the Duke of Clarence.) Moreover, textual criticism has shown that he may well have had access to the text behind the Croyland Continuation, although Russell had died in 1494. Vergil makes slips in details and is ignorant of much which we now know about Richard, but on the whole he gives the impression that he is telling the truth as he sees it.
When all is said, however unreliable, Sir Thomas More remains the fullest source of information about Richard III. The white and grey schools both quote whole passages from him in support of their cases, rejecting only those which contradict them – just as they do with the Tudor chroniclers. Undeniably his history has many faults. There is no question that it dramatizes the principal characters’ speeches and much else besides. It is wrong about Edward IV’s age and Lord Hastings’s Christian name, it confuses Eleanor Butler with Elizabeth Lucy, and it portrays Queen Elizabeth Woodville as a spotless figure when in reality she was a grasping intriguer. But a good deal of this was due to absence of proper records, and to the fact that the historical methods of the early 1500s were not those of today. In any case the book was never finished and is only a draft. (I have modernized quotations from More to make them read more easily. However, in general I have used the Yale edition of his works (ed. R. S. Sylvester).)
Certainly Sir Thomas had strong moral convictions about public life, and he wanted to tell a good story. Yet it should never be forgotten that he was a brilliant and a very experienced lawyer – Erasmus thought he had the finest legal brain in Europe. No one could have been more sceptical of allegation or rumour, fairer in weighing evidence. Describing the murder of the Princes, he says he does so ‘not after every way that I have heard, but after that way that I have so heard, by such men and by such means as me thinketh it were hard but it should be true’. Indeed, his book can be seen as a remarkable piece of detective work.
The argument that More was writing ‘propaganda’ to curry favour with a new dynasty is sufficiently refuted by the circumstances of his death.9 If anything, he was incredibly tactless. He says that the father of his powerful friend, the Duke of Norfolk, had lured Lord Hastings to his death, besides plundering Mistress Shore of all she had and reducing her to beggary, and that his friend’s grandfather – the first Duke – had been one of those most closely involved in plotting and carrying out Richard’s usurpation. Nor did he have any need to blacken Richard, whose reputation was already quite black enough. For all his literary and moral conceits and his mistakes, Sir Thomas’s History contains valuable information. Probably some of it has not been properly assessed even now.
Kendall considers that More’s Richard cannot be ‘in any way the portrait of a human being’. On the contrary, Sir Thomas’s King Richard is all too human, far more of a real person than he is in most modern biographies. He was, as Gairdner says, ‘the natural outgrowth of monstrous and horrible times’ and a practitioner of the new Renaissance statecraft. When Shakespeare makes him claim to ‘set the murderous Machiavel to school’, there is a substantial element of truth. Richard was by no means an isolated phenomenon, let alone a freak. He belongs to the same ferociously ruthless company as Louis XI, Ferdinand of Aragon and Cesare Borgia – and Edward IV and Henry VII.
This book is an attempt to produce a new and truer likeness of Richard III. It tries to see him through the eyes of his contemporaries, while taking modern research into account. Among these contemporaries it numbers not only Mancini and the Croyland chronicler, but Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More – discounting his dramatic effects and didactic intentions – and also the earliest Tudor chroniclers. A new, yet entirely credible, Richard emerges; certainly not a monster; but a peculiarly grim young English precursor of Machiavelli’s Prince.