Richard The Chird (69 page)

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days!

If it is the Tudor chroniclers rather than Shakespeare who have led subsequent historians to make up their minds about Richard, it is Shakespeare who has led everyone else to make up his imagination about Richard.

Created by More and Vergil, put into final form by Hall, and given irresistible expression in Shakespeare's Richard the Third, the Tudor myth— as Tillyard calls it— has, by and large, maintained its sway over scholars as well as the public until well into the twentieth century- Though those portions of it which have proved vulnerable to attack have been pruned or softened or

RICHARD THE THIRD

swathed in qualifications, and it has here and there been stretched to admit certain incontrovertible facts, the tradition has retained its hypnotic hold — in part, at least, because the inroads made upon it have been strong enough to prick historians to its defense but not strong enough to force them to abandon it outright. It is significant that none of the heavy attacks has been made by a professional historian. With the notable exception of present-day scholars, the successive generations of historical writers since the Age of Elizabeth have been rather like a company of Roman legionaries who shake off indifferently the sporadic sallies of ill-armed barbarians or by the exercise of their martial disciplines mount a counterattack which, in their estimation, completely disposes of the enemy. Yet it must be noticed that even before the middle of the nineteenth century there had been established a "moderate" position between the hard-shelled traditionalists and the zealous revisionists.

Not long after the death of Elizabeth, the tradition was dared by The Encomium of Richard HI, "an oppressed and defamed King"; this slight work — a folio of eight leaves — was dedicated by its author, one William Cornwaleys, to no less a personage than "his worthy friend Mr. John Donne." 7

The first substantial assault was delivered about the same time by Sir George Buc (died 1623), Master of the Revels to James I and a man of considerable learning and industry, one of whose ancestors had fought for Richard at Bosworth Field. His History of the Life and Reign of Richard 111, in five books, first published in 1646 and then included in White Kennett's Complete History of England, 1710, is so desultory in organization as to make for grim reading; it is blundering and uncritical and as prejudiced in its direction as the tradition it attacks. Yet it is Buc who first made use of the manuscript of the Croyland Chronicle to point out some of the inaccuracies of Vergil and More, who sought sources more nearly contemporary with Richard than the Tudor writers, and who thus was the first to reveal that the tradition was not inviolable.

The next important challenge was delivered in the middle of the eighteenth century by a far more redoubtable controversialist,

Horace Walpole. Employing fresh bits of material—not always wisely—and, in the style of his day, subjecting the Tudor myth to the scrutiny of "enlightened reason," Walpole in his Historic Doubts, 1768, acquitted Richard of the principal crimes with which he had been laden, from the stabbing of Henry VI's son Prince Edward to the dispatching of the Little Princes. This refutation he based partly on an appeal to fifteenth-century sources, partly on the argument of inherent improbability. He made his best case in revealing a number of the inaccuracies and incongruities in More's tale of the murder of the Princes. Walpole's work suffers, however, from two great handicaps: he was not a scholar and he lacked source materials. Thus he was forced to attempt to break down the tradition from within, but he had nothing to put in the place of what he rejected. Furthermore, in his willingness to accept Perkin Warbeck as the veritable younger son of Edward IV and in his tendency to dismiss traditional views simply by labeling them "incredible," Walpole left obvious openings for subsequent rejoinders by the traditionalists. Still, he demonstrated the manifest bias of the Tudor tradition, shook the credibility of some of More's testimony, and cast doubts upon the series of crimes attaching to Richard before he became King.

The nineteenth century witnessed a sharpening tempo of attack and defense. It opened with a fierce reaffirmation of every article of the tradition by the Roman Catholic ecclesiastic John Lingard, the first three volumes of whose History of England (down to the death of Henry VII) appeared in 1819. Lingard may be called the last of the "strict constructionists."

About the same time Sharon Turner, with the publication of his History of England during the Middle Ages, created what might be called the "moderate" position. He is the first professional historian to take his stand outside the Tudor tradition and to make use of its evidence in a detached and critical spirit, as he is the first historian to view Richard's career in terms of its times. In fact, he is the first writer after the close of the fifteenth century to deal with Richard as if he had actually been a human being and to attempt some estimate of the characters and motives of the principal men who affected his life. If he supports the posi-

tion that Richard was innocent of the earlier crimes attributed to him, he nonetheless holds him guilty of the murder of the Princes and is at pains to emphasize some of the weaknesses, as he sees them, of Richard's policy. Despite some errors of fact and an occasionally discursive style, Sharon Turner's history (vols. Ill and IV) offers a more measured and convincing view of Richard than is to be found in any subsequent full-length work.

Next come two briefs for the revisionists, neither of which has left very much impact upon the controversy, though both of them are earnest and lengthy: Caroline Halsted's Life of Richard HI y 2 vols., 1844; and Alfred CX Legge's The Unpopular King, 2 vols., 1885. Though Miss Halsted did some valuable digging in Harleian MS. 433, the registry of King Richard's grants and writs, and printed a number of the principal entries as well as other important source materials, her work is conceived rather in the vein of the Victorian gift-book, and to this rude age is almost unreadable. Richard is not far removed from one of the nobler figures in the Idylls of the King and the death of the Princes remains a mystery. Romantically enough, Miss Halsted married the rector of the church of Middleham, which had once been Richard's collegiate establishment. Legge's work is less impenetrable but it adds little to what Walpole had already said; it offers the suggestion that Buckingham, Catesby, and Ratcliffe made away with the Princes without Richard's knowledge.

In 1892 appeared Sir James Ramsay's Lancaster and York, 2 vols., which, like Hall's work and Shakespeare's two tetralogies of English historical plays, covers the period from the usurpation of Henry IV to the triumph of Henry VII. Ramsay made use of all the sources at his command, printing much valuable information concerning finances, and his work as a whole occupies the moderate position; but in his account of the life and character of King Richard he remains, essentially, within the Tudor tradition.

In the meantime, the nineteenth-century phase of the conflict had come to its climax; in 1891 attack and defense collided head on in the pages of the English Historical Review (vol. VI). Sir Clements R. Markham's "Richard III: A Doubtful Verdict Re-

viewed," an ardent revisionist tract which saddled Henry Tudor with the killing of the sons of Edward IV, was answered by James Gairdner, the most eminent of fifteenth-century scholars, in "Did Henry VII Murder the Princes?"; Markham issued a rejoinder, "Richard III and Henry VII," to which Gairdner made a brief final reply. The attitudes of these two men can be most clearly perceived in the full-length work which each devoted to Richard.

Sir Clements Markham's Richard III: His Life and Character, 1906, has very little to do with either: it consists almost entirely of argument devoted to clearing Richard of all crimes and fastening the guilt for the death of the Princes on Henry VII It must be confessed that it is difficult to take this work as seriously as it is intended. Markham's white and black are as intense as those of the Tudor tradition, only reversed. The Lancastrians are a pack of rascals; John Morton, who, Markham insists, wrote More's work, is "a treble-dyed traitor and falsifier of history," and Richard, a sterling symbol of "English pluck." Richard is mantled in the airs which blow upon the playing fields of Eton and the glorious reaches of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Morton, Fabyan, and Henry VII are pictured as gleefully falsifying dates, and Morton dashes about with unflagging vigor to plant a rumor or start a tale. The most interesting part of Mark-ham's work, the case he builds against Henry VII as the murderer of the Princes, became outmoded with the exhumation of the skeletons in the Abbey in 1933.

But Markham has had his followers. In 1933 Philip Lindsay published a popular work, King Richard HI, which is largely an emphatic restatement of Markham's arguments; recently Josephine Tey created an ingenious detective novel, The Daughter of Time, that likewise unravels the mystery of the Princes' deaths in Mark-ham's terms; and the more popular elements of the press still occasionally print articles "revealing" the possibility of Henry VIFs villainy.

So much for the revisionists.

James Gairdner published in 1878 his History of the Life and Reign of Richard HI; in 1898 he issued a revised edition which takes into account some of the arguments set forth by Markham

in their exchange in the English Historical Review. Gairdner's book is not only the "standard" work upon King Richard—"the chief modern authority on the reign," as Lawrence E. Tanner phrases it 8 —but, with the exception of the revisionist volumes referred to above, it is the last full-length study of Richard that has appeared.

Quite apart from its importance as history, Gairdner's Richard 111 offers a psychological revelation, of which its author was unaware. It reveals a historian of great eminence, integrity, and industry desperately wrestling in public to reconcile the opposing forces of his scholarly conscientiousness and his emotional predispositions. Gairdner attempts to make use of all the new fifteenth-century source material opened up by the researches of the nineteenth century and still to maintain the essential validity of the Tudor myth. It is a rather painful spectacle—a great historian beginning with a closed tradition instead of with an open mind. He is even driven to declare, in the preface to his revised edition (p. xi), that "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." What is astounding about this statement is not so much that Gairdner supposes the sensational protagonist of the melodramatic Richard the Third to be a portrait of the real Richard but that he supposes it to be, in any way, the portrait of a human being. This grotesque position Gairdner is led to adopt by his dependence upon tradition. Disregarding the obvious truth that, for the purposes of historical writing, traditions vary widely in worth and that any single tradition can be only as good as its proximity to truth, Gairdner insists upon the absolute value of tradition itself. This emotional, a priori approach involves him in endless difficulties as he reluctantly abandons those elements of the tradition which can no longer be defended, but clings unhappily to the dominant tone and the remaining elements, which he strains to accommodate to the fresh evidence he has uncovered.

He finds it necessary to explain elaborately, for example, why Shakespeare's picture of Richard's plotting against George of

Clarence cannot be accepted. Yet in flogging this dead horse, he is compelled by his devotion to the Tudor myth to find something vaguely sinister in the fact that after Clarence's death Richard founded two collegiate establishments; and because Clarence's execution was private, he cannot resist the inaccurate comment that it was an assassination. Similarly, though he must acknowledge the obvious incongruities in More's tale of the murder of the Princes, and the suspicious origins of this story, he cannot give up the tale itself, remarking, almost wistfully, that "it is not necessary to suppose More's narrative correct in all its details," and hopefully suggesting that Tyrell made a voluntary confession of guilt to ease his conscience! Again, whenever Gairdner is required to note beneficent qualities in Richard or his government, he follows the Tudor "line" by automatically ascribing evil motives, adding passages of Victorian moralizing that are something less than enlightening. Finally, Gairdner is so immersed in his own intestine struggle that he pays scant attention to Richard's life up to the death of Edward IV, and in the marching and countermarching of his arguments Richard's character is reduced to a mere arbitrary counter, "black" or "not-so-black" as the case may be.

Yet Gairdner's work makes clear that by the end of the nineteenth century sufficient contemporary source materials were available to reveal the inaccuracies, the distortions, and the bias of the Tudor tradition and to make possible the creation of a life of Richard or a history of the fifteenth century which did not depend upon the tradition as a primary source.

The last notable accession to these materials occurred in 1936 with the publication of Dominic Mancini's Usurpation of Richard IIL Superbly edited and translated by C. A. J. Armstrong, this work is of first importance for our knowledge of events in England between the death of Edward IV and the coronation of Richard, since Mancini reported what he himself saw and heard, and set down his account in December of 1483. It must regretfully be pointed out, however, that though Mancini confirms or disposes of a number of doubtful issues and supplies some very valuable details of action and characterization, he is himself guilty of

errors so considerable as to be baffling . . . until it is recalled that fifteenth-century standards of scrupulous reporting and scholarly accuracy were far removed from those of our own age, dominated as it is by "science," "efficiency," and the pursuit of "facts." His work, then, is not quite the final answer to the problem of Richard's protectorship which might have been hoped for. Armstrong's notes admirably represent the moderate position of most present-day scholars of this period, who take their stand upon contemporary sources and make use only of those details of the Tudor tradition for which some independent confirmation can be adduced.

There exists one more important narrative source for a life of Richard: the "Second Continuation" of the Croyland Chronicle, first published in 1684. This is particularly valuable for the last half of the reign of Edward IV, Richard's protectorship, and the first part of his rule. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the materials, if not the actual writing, of most of this narrative, which appears to have been created at Croyland Abbey in the spring of 1486, were the work of John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, one of Edward's intimate advisers and Richard's Chancellor. Unfortunately Russell, it seems, lacked either the time or the inclination to complete his account of Richard's reign; for there is reason to believe that his monkish "editor,"—perhaps the Prior of the abbey—who inserted in their appropriate chronological places the annals of the monastery itself and can be shown to have intruded a number of his own naive comments, likewise supplied the inaccurate and distorted account of Richard's last months which is in startling contrast to the authenticity of the preceding narrative. 9 Thus, though it is true that the medieval tradition of historical writing petered out about 1470, and such chronicles as exist throw almost no light upon Richard's earlier years, the "Second Continuation" and Mancini's Usurpation provide information of unusual authenticity for the most significant parts of Richard's life. For the period of Richard's youth, Cora L. Scofield has uncovered a number of important facts in digging deep into the public archives for her Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth, 2 vols., 1923; and her work has enlarged our under-

APPENDIX II

standing of the milieu in which Richard passed the critical years of childhood and adolescence.

For the rest, the researches of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars and successive publications by the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the Public Record Office have made available an impressive array—emphatically belying the old assertion that fifteenth-century sources are hopelessly meager—of letters, wills, household regulations, financial records, and documents of state. And Harleian MS. 433, of which only the most important items have been published, provides an intimate picture of the day-to-day workings of Richard's government. In addition, there have appeared in our century illuminating scholarly interpretations and special studies bearing upon Richard's life. C. H. Williams' essay "England: The Yorkist Kings," chapter 12 in the last volume of the Cambridge Medieval History (vol. VIII)—in which, incidentally, the Tudor tradition is once for all relegated to its role as supplementary material—and Alec R. Myers 7 England in the Late Middle Ages, 1952,* are good examples of the learned, judicious, and impartial attitude which modern English scholars bring to a consideration of that inflammable subject, King Richard the Third.

And yet the Tudor myth is still flourishing. Not only is it found in school textbooks and upon the lips of the present-day Beefeaters in the Tower of London, but it continues to leave its mark upon the general histories, which by most people are regarded as the authoritative custodians of historical knowledge. 10 It even persists in certain works of scholarship. Lawrence Tanner, for example, in his scrupulously careful article in Archaeologia on the exhumation of the Princes' bones, cannot resist retailing apparently as the authentic account of the murder, the outworn yarn of Thomas More. While science is called in to examine the skeletons, myth continues to rattle them. Another example of the hypnotic hold the tradition somehow retains, occurs in Angelo

* See also his "The Character of Richard III," History Today, August, 1954, which appeared too late for me to consult in the writing of this biography. This article offers, in my opinion, the best concise discussion of the sources available for an estimate of Richard's career and the essential qualities of his character.

Raine's introduction to the series of York Civic Records. Writing with much of the animus of More himself—and becoming so incensed as to fall into error—Raine argues that the city of York was not really devoted to Richard; whereas the records themselves, which Raine so admirably edits, eloquently testify to the eccentricity of this contention. 11 *

The forceful moral pattern of Vergil, the vividness of More, the fervor of Hall, and the dramatic exuberance of Shakespeare have endowed the Tudor myth with a vitality that is one of the wonders of the world. What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history.

Notes

PROLOGUE

THIS sketch of England in the first half of the fifteenth century I have developed from a variety of sources. Since it would be tedious and probably of little profit to the reader for me to acknowledge my indebtedness in detail, I have chosen to list the primary and secondary sources which I have found most useful. Only those statements have been noted which appear to require support or repay identification. Most of these materials I have likewise used extensively for my account of Richard's life between 1452 and 1471 (the eight chapters of "Richard, Duke of Gloucester").

PRIMARY SOURCES

Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1452-1461.

Chronicles of London, ed. by C. L. Kingsford, Oxford, 1905.

Croyland Chronicle: "Historiae Croylandensis," Renim Anglicarum Scrip-torum, vol. I, ed. by W. Fulman, Oxford, 1684. There is an English translation: IngulpWs Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, trans, and ed. by Henry T. Riley, Bonn's Antiquarian Library, London, 1854. All page references to the Croy. Chron. are to this translation, unless otherwise noted.

An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, ed. by J. S. Davies, Camden Society, 1856.

Excerpta Historic^ London, 1831.

Gregory's Chronicle: The Historical Collections of a. Citizen of London, ed. by James Gairdner, Camden Society, 1876.

Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign of Henry the Sixth, 2 vols., ed. by J. Stevenson, Rolls Series, 1864 (especially William Worcester's Annales Rerum AngUcarum, in vol. II, pp. 743-93).

Letters of Queen Margaret of Anjou, ed. by Cecil Munro, Camden Society, 1863.

Original Letters, ed. by Henry Ellis, 3 series, London, 1825, 1827,1846; vol. I in each of the series.

The Paston Letters, 4 vols., ed. by James Gairdner, Library Edition, London, 1910.

Rotuli Parliamentorwn (Rolls of Parliament), vols. V and VI.

Six Town Chronicles of England, ed. by R. Flenley, Oxford, 1911.

Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles, ed. by James Gairdner, Camden Society, 1880.

Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia, third ed., London, 1555. A sixteenth-century translation of those books of the Historia which relate to the fifteenth century is Polydore Vergil, History, ed. by Henry Ellis, Camden Society, 1844.

Jehan de Waurin, Anchiennes Cronicques d'Engleterre, vols. II and HI, ed. by Mile. Dupont, Paris, 1858-63.

John Whethamstede, Registrum Abbcttiae Johannis Whethamstede, ^ vols., ed. by Henry T. Riley, Rolls Series, 1872-73.

SECONDARY SOURCES

J. J. Bagley, Margaret of Anjou, London, 1948.

Mabel E. Christie, Henry VI, London, 1922.

Charles L. Kingsford, Prejudice and Pro?nise in Fifteenth Century England, Oxford, 1925,

A. Lecoy de la Marche, Le Roi Rene, 2 vols., Paris, 1875.

K. B. McFarlane, "Bastard Feudalism," Bull. Inst. Hist. Research, XX, pp. 161-80.

C. Oman, The History of England from the Accession of Richard II to the Death of Richard HI, London, 1906 (vol. IV of the "Political History of England" series, in 12 vols.).

C. Oman, Warwick the Kingmaker, London, 1893.

E. Power and M. M. Postan, Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century, London, 1933.

James H. Ramsay, Lancaster and York, 2 vols., Oxford, 1892.

Cora L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth, ^ vols., London, 1923.

K. H. Vickers, England in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1926.

1 Suffolk, it seems, wrote verses to the Queen; see H. W. MacCracken, "An English Friend of Charles of Orleans," PMLA, XXVI (1911), pp. 159, 168-69.

2 Paston Letters, I, p. 378.

T 3 It seems probable that he was murdered or treated so harshly that he succumbed to apoplexy.

4 Paston Letters, I, pp. Ix-lxi; York's protest to Henry VI also appears in Holinshed.

5 For York's protest, idem. e Idem.

7 Stow, Annales, p. 393; Paston Letters, I, p. Ixxii.

8 York's oath appears in Exchequer Miscellanea, 8/19, 8/20, 8/21 (Scofield, I, p. 17).

THE KING'S BROTHER

RICHARD, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER

'l\ i

1 iCing Henry's progress to Stamford and Peterborough in the early fall of 1452 is established by the dates of privy seals; see Paston Letters, I, p. Ixxxvi,

2 The information about the family of the Duke of York is drawn from the Annales of William Worcester, as annotated by Gairdner, who also quotes the contemporary rhyme (Gairdner, Richard III, pp. 5-5).

3 See H. K. Bonney, Historic Notices in Reference to Fotheringhay, Oundle, 1821. Only the mound on which stood the keep remains today, but the general scene has probably undergone little change.

[pages 29-37] NOTES

* That George was Margaret's favorite brother is indicated by the whole course of their relationship; see Scofield, I, p. 562. It seems safe to infer from George s character and career that he was spoiled as a child.

s McFarlane, "Bastard Feudalism"; for an illustration, see* Paston Letters I, pp. 350-52; Oman prints a typical indenture of this kind (Warwick DD' 36-37). ' W

e Paston Letters, I, pp. 106-08, 207-08; see also pp. xxx-xxxii and pp. Ixviii-Ixix. rr

7 Quoted from the modernized version in Bagley, Margaret of Anjou p 62; see John Hardyng, Chronicle, ed. by Henry Ellis, London 1812 '

* It appears that Richard, Duke of York, was neither aiming at the crown nor seeking more of a voice in the government than he was entitled to. He represented, to many Englishmen of the day, the only hope of rescue from the swamp of disorder and evil rule in which the realm was floundering See for example, the Paston Letters, I, pp. 152-54, 5*1-22; compare Oman, Warwick, pp. 41-44. Popular bitterness against the Queen's government fires many a song and ballad: see Political Poems, II, ed. by Wright- and Excer-bta Historica, p. 162. r

» Christie, Henry VI, p. 232 and note 3.

10 Cal. Milanese Papers, I, p. 58.

11 Rot. Parl, V. pp. 280-81. f r 12 Croy. Chron., p. 418.

13 There is no record of when Richard was moved from Fotheringhay to Ludlow or by what route. Since he was sickly and the time perilous, it seems likely that he remained at Fotheringhay till the spring of 1459. All that is definitely known of Richard's first years is that he was born at Fotheringhay on October 2, 1452, and captured at Ludlow on October 13, 1459.

14 For York's principal supporters, see Rot. ParL, V, p. 348.

1 5 Hearne's Fragment, in Chronicles of the White Rose, p. 5. It is reported that Cicely and her two boys were found in the village. Since she was a woman of spirit and was apparently trying to protect her villagers, I have conjectured that she took her stance at the market cross. See Scofield, I, p. 37 and note 2.

16 On the strength of Gairdner's interpretation of a reference in the Paston Letters, it seems to have been generally assumed (see, for example, Scofield, I, p. 37, note 2) that it was to one of Buckingham's manors in Kent that Cicely and her two boys were brought. The letter in question— Paston Letters, I, pp. 504-05—derisively mocks Lord Rivers by reporting that Rivers, his son, and others have won Calais "by a feeble assault made at Sandwich" by John Dynham (it was, in fact, Dynham who had captured Rivers; see text, p. 38). The letter continues, "But my lady Duchess is still again received in Kent." Gairdner, for no apparent reason, identifies "my lady Duchess" with Cicely, Duchess of York. Rivers' wife, however^ was the Dowager Duchess of Bedford. Since she was taken to Calais with her son and husband (see Scofield, I, p. 51) and since the sentence clearly continues the subject of their capture, the reference must be to Rivers 1 wife, not York's. That is, Rivers' wife had been permitted to return to Kent. On what estate Cicely and her two sons were kept in the custody of the Duchess of Buckingham is unknown.

17 An Eng. Chron., p. 83.

18 Whethamstede, I, pp. 367-68; Chronicle of London, ed. by E. Tyrell and Sir H. Nicolas, London, 1827, p. 140.