So much for the historical Richard. To what extent is this picture that of “the real Richard”? Is there really such a creature? Maybe we have a multiplicity of Richards from which to pick and choose. We will explore some of the possibilities. In many ways, the reign of Richard III conforms to what Thomas Hobbes, the great political philosopher of the seventeenth century, said about life in primitive society: it was nasty, brutal, and short. What in this short if bloody tale helps explain the fascination, tinged with a good measure of horror and repulsion, that surrounds Richard III and that has done so almost from the start? How and why has he become the archvillain of all English history? In a world of men (and women) of blood, he hardly stood out among his contemporaries; even a historian not inclined to argue in his favor has spoken well of his policy “of shedding no unnecessary blood.” If we look at those who suffered directly from his ambition, we find that they were few in number and they come mostly from those upper ranks of society in which the risks of life and death were part and parcel of status and privilege.
To sum up the reasons for the dark legend that continues to surround Richard, we can mark some major way-stations along the road. The first is that it was very much in the interest of the Tudors to make Richard into the total villain, the evil man from whose grasp they had rescued the realm. Now, and only now, could the ghost, or the curse, of the deposition of 1399 be laid to rest. After this we can point to the mystery of the princes. Though the evidence against Richard as their murderer is only circumstantial, the tale of the two boys is both tragic and mysterious, two themes well crafted to catch and hold public interest. Lastly, and probably doing more to preserve the legend than anything else, there is Shakespeare. Whatever his intentions or motives, he gave canonical status and bold coloring to the Tudor myth when, in 1597, he offered Richard III to the London stage. This powerful melodrama has always been a great favorite of actors and audiences: it contains murder, violence and death, sex, long speeches of denunciation and malediction, ghosts, double-crosses, shrieking hags, and then a cathartic ending. Its depiction of Richard as the English Machiavelli does much to belie the old adage that bad publicity is better than no publicity.
By what strands was the Tudor myth woven? After Henry VII’s accession, two of the major texts that laid the groundwork were Thomas More’s The History of King Richard the Third and Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia. More was a great humanist (who ironically would fall martyr to Henry Vlll’s despotism and his break with Rome—see his chapter), though he got his information on Richard from Cardinal Morton, his patron and a strong opponent of Richard from early on. Though More does talk of Richard’s good points, the overall picture is so one-sided that it has been labeled a satirical drama. Vergil was an Italian humanist, brought to England by Henry VII to encourage the “new learning.” His goal was not so much to smear Richard as an individual as to construct the sin-and-retribution view of English history—which meant boosting Henry VII as the full and final expiation of 1399. Given the weakness of the Tudor dynastic claim and the lingering support for the House of York, any tactic that made 1485 a moral as well as a political milestone was to be encouraged (and subsidized).
This interpretation of fifteenth-century English history—admittedly a pretty messy affair in any case—was conveyed to a wider English public through such popular works as Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York (1548). Hall’s history, along with others like the Continuation of Hardyng’s Chronicle (1543) and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1578) offered the kind of material that Shakespeare drew upon for his English history plays, that series of plays that runs from Richard II in the 1390s through Henry VII’s promise of peace and concord as he is crowned on Bosworth field. From Richard Rouse, a fifteenth-century antiquarian who went from an admirer to a detractor of Richard, came the tales of physical deformity: hunchbacked with a withered arm, two years in his mother’s womb, born with teeth and hair. Richard’s moral depravity was indicated by his physical deformity, and vice versa, and the contrast with the tall and handsome (if immoral) Edward IV sharpened the edge of these calumnies. There is no reliable evidence about physical deformity or disability; Richard’s military experience indicated that he was at least not seriously handicapped, and some early portraits that hint at deformity look to have been doctored to show a twisted upper body and awkward arm.
Shakespeare wrote for an audience whose knowledge of the dark legend, as well as the ins and outs of the aristocracy, could be assumed. This let him cut right to the chase, and the play opens with a soliloquy in which Richard spells out his agenda, virtually all without historical foundation:
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up. . .
I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King In deadly hate the one against the other.
Having thus established character and malevolent motivation (with its potential for murder, soon to be realized), we move on to sex. Richard intercepts the cortege bearing Henry VI’s body on its way to burial and he accosts Anne Neville, now mourning her late father-in-law. He courts her and, in a scene of chilling insight into the fascination and sex appeal of evil, she accepts his wooing. Some ladylike resistance—she first spits on him, then contemplates running him through with the sword he offers her—but she concludes by agreeing to become his bride. After she has left the stage Richard reassures us that he has not been turned into an old softie by matters of the heart:
Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.
What? I that killed her husband and his father. . . .
Hath she forgot already that brave prince,
Edward, her lord, whom I, some three months since,
Stabbed in my angry mood at Tewkesbury?
By the time we finally get to the death of the princes in the Tower, the die is firmly cast. While their actual murder is not enacted on stage, it is at their uncle’s command that they are dispatched. Richard’s dialogue with the assassin runs as follows:
Richard: Dar’st thou resolve to kill a friend of mine? Tyrrel: Please you;
But I had rather kill two enemies.
Richard: Why, there thou hast it! Two deep enemies,
Foes to my rest and my sweet sleep’s disturbers,
Are they that I would have thee deal upon.
Tyrrel, I mean those bastards in the Tower.
Tyrrel: Let me have open means to come to them,
And soon I’ll rid you from the fear of them.
Richard: Thou sing’st sweet music.
Cold-blooded indeed, and no remorse is ever expressed (or even felt). But while Richard is not supposed to repent—nor does he—at least his many victims get their say. The night before Bosworth their ghosts parade by to disturb his sleep and to curse his prospects on the morrow. In a scene made famous by a painting of David Garrick writhing on the stage, Richard has to suffer the curses of many whom he dispatched (according to the play): Henry VI and his son Prince Edward, his brother Clarence, those Woodvilles and their associates whom he had executed at Northampton, Buckingham, Hastings, his wife Anne, and the two princes (who act in unison to deepen the pathos). They heap their curses upon him:
Let us be lead within thy bosom, Richard,
And weigh thee down to ruin, shame, and death!
Thy nephews’ souls bid thee despair, and die!
To this we can add Anne’s “Tomorrow in the battle think on me, And fall thy edgeless sword; despair, and die!” while Buckingham adds that Richard should “die in terror of thy guiltiness!” Richmond’s star is clearly in the ascendant: “Awake, and win the day!” and “Live, and flourish!” and—again from Buckingham, once second only to Richard in evil—“God and good angels fight on Richmond’s side.” As seems appropriate in a play about kings and kingship, Richmond—rather irregularly crowned on the spot as Henry VII— has the final word: “Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again;/That she may long live here, God say amen!”
Shakespeare was a hard act to follow, let alone to contradict. Most who wrote on Richard III and related topics were, for many years, content to follow this interpretation regarding the evil deeds and deformed presence of Richard duke of Gloucester. Villainy sells books and theater tickets, and eventually movie tickets, and the play’s tremendous popularity has guaranteed that the Shakespearean image was well known and eagerly accepted. The play, the longest in the Shakespearean repertoire after Hamlet, is filled with melodramatic speeches and lots of action, its leading role a very long one. No wonder so many actors have been eager to have their turn. Even in parody, as in the movie The Goodbye Girl, the Ricardian image is one to juggle with.
It was not really until the mid-twentieth century that the pro-Ricardians began to have something approaching a fair slice of the historiographical and literary pie. Authoritative historians like James Gairdner, writing in 1878 from a vast knowledge of the fifteenth century, still found Richard an unattractive figure, weighed down by the crimes and sins that followed from an unnatural and inordinate craving for power, unchecked by moral restraint. Gairdner said that the more he examined the sources, the more he endorsed the views of Thomas More and Shakespeare. While we wonder if Gairdner came to his inquiries with an open mind, he was his era’s leading authority on the period and he brought an extensive knowledge of its literature.
There have always been some dissenting voices, arguing that the case against Richard (for the princes’ murder) was not proved, and that others were probably (or surely) responsible for many of the fell deeds so casually laid at his door. Furthermore, his many good points and private virtues, acknowledged by foes as well as friends, should be added to the balance of a serious historical assessment. Though such voices never carried the day, they were heard from time to time and, collectively, they can be strung together as a sort of historical fan club, never able to alter the accepted view but with sufficient volume and knowledge to keep alive a reminder that the case against Richard was both circumstantial and based on a great deal of unreliable reporting. Francis Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622) can be considered as an early (if cautious) work along these lines, and we can add such vindications of Richard as those offered by George Buck in The History of the Life and Reigne of Richard the Third (1646) or by Horace Walpole, whose Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768) makes fun of Thomas More’s presentation of Richard. J. H. Jesse’s Memoirs of King Richard the Third (1862) and Sir Clements Markham’s Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) did their best, though they were still swimming against the current.
Recent works that offer a cleansed and attractive Richard really begin with Paul Murray Kendall’s Richard III (1955). The basic scholarly biography of recent years, that of Charles Ross (1981, following his Edward IV of 1974) is sympathetic but mixed in its bottom-line assessment of Richard, regarding both his supposed crimes and his success as a political figure and a king. More recent work seems to be reasonably divided, though an examination of Richard’s government, as well as his earlier career, at least strengthen the case for him as a normal political figure who might have been driven by the peculiar circumstances of 1483 to take the extreme measures for which he has been stigmatized over the centuries.
World History
