The Life and Times of Richard III (16 page)

Abruptly, Richard came to his decision. Less than a mile off on Redmore Plain his scouts had spotted the red dragon banner of his rival, screened by the small rearguard which Oxford had detached from his main force. If he could despatch Henry Tudor, the battle would be over. More than that, Henry’s death would settle for ever the bloody feud between Lancaster and York. The orders were quickly given. At the head of his household knights and squires of the body – Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Hugh and Thomas Stafford, Sir Robert Brackenbury, Sir Robert Percy, Sir Ralph Assheton and about eighty others – Richard rode forward, skirting the battle on his left, down the north-western slope of Ambien Hill, and thundered out across the plain. His route took him straight across the path of Sir William Stanley, whom he had proclaimed a traitor less than a week before. As Sir William’s men struggled into their saddles, Richard’s cavalry crashed into the enemy ranks. The impetus of the charge carried them straight through the protective screen of infantry. Making straight for his target the King slew the Earl of Richmond’s standard bearer, Sir William Brandon, with his own hand, and unhorsed the bulky figure of Sir John Cheyney who came to Brandon’s aid. For a moment it seemed as if the King’s desperate enterprise was about to be crowned with success.

But already Sir William Stanley’s horsemen were colliding with the rear of Richard’s little force. As the ring of steel closed in around him, Richard was overwhelmed and battered to the ground. John Rous, who had no cause to bless Richard’s memory, had this to say of his last moments: ‘If I may speak the truth to his honour, although small of body and weak in strength, he most valiantly defended himself as a noble knight to his last breath, often exclaiming as he was betrayed, and saying – Treason! Treason! Treason!’

After the battle Richard’s body was recovered from the corpses piled around Henry’s fallen banner and stripped of all its clothing. With a halter around the neck the naked corpse was strung across the back of a pack horse and taken off to Leicester. Here it lay exposed for two days, as proof of Henry’s triumph, before it was buried without ceremony in the chapel of the Grey Friars. The tomb to which Henry contributed the sum of
£
10–15, was destroyed at the dissolution of the monasteries, and Richard’s bones were thrown into the River Soar.

Although he reigned only two years and two months, Richard is assured of immortality. He was the last English king to die in battle, the last of the Plantagenet line of kings, and the date of his death is said to mark the close of that otherwise indefinable episode known as the Middle Ages. Above all, he is the chief suspect in the longest and most emotive murder trial in English history.

Oddly enough, it was the imaginative efforts of the Tudor historians to blacken his name which most effectively ensured lasting fame and the great debate which continues to this day. Henry VII and his son Henry VIII after him, were always naggingly conscious of the flaws in their hereditary claims to the Crown. The Tudors were therefore particularly susceptible to the flattery of the propagandists who portrayed Richard as an inhuman tyrant, hunch-backed, treacherous and cruel, and who contrasted the dark winter of the House of York with the spring sunshine of the first Tudors. The first man to contribute to this tradition – a Warwickshire priest with antiquarian interests named John Rous – is especially interesting because he wrote both before and after Bosworth. His best-known work is an illustrated history of the earls of Warwick, which survives in two copies, one in English and the other in Latin, both of which were completed before 1485. In the English version Richard is described as ‘a mighty prince and especial good lord... in his realm full commendably punishing offenders of the laws, especially oppressors of the Commons, and cherishing those that were virtuous, by the which discreet guiding he got great thanks and love of all his subjects great and poor’. In the Latin version, which was presumably still in the author’s possession in August 1485, this passage is edited out and Richard appears simply as ‘the unhappy husband’ of Anne Neville. Sometime before his death in 1491, Rous also compiled a
History of the Kings of England,
which he dedicated to Henry VII. The venomous flavour of this tract can be judged from the statement that Richard was born, after two years in his mother’s womb, with a complete set of teeth, and hair down to his shoulders. ‘At whose birth’, Rous continues, ‘Scorpio was in the ascendant, which sign is in the House of Mars; and as a scorpion mild in countenance, stinging in the tail, so he showed himself to all.’

Neither Rous’s monster nor the ‘serpent swollen with rage’ and ‘thirster after human blood’ depicted in
The Life of Henry VII
by Prince Arthur’s blind tutor, Bernard André, were sufficiently subtle or convincing for Henry’s taste. In the last years of his reign he decided to commission a history of England from an Italian scholar trained in the Classical traditions of Renaissance humanism. Polydore Vergil’s
History,
first published in 1534, was designed for the consumption of courts and scholars, and avoids the crude invective of his predecessors. The overall argument is that the Wars of the Roses were a divine punishment visited on the kingdom as a result of the original sin of Henry IV’s usurpation in 1399, culminating in the tyranny of Richard’s reign and eventually purged through Henry VII’s union of Lancaster with York. In order to lend substance to this theme Vergil deftly adds to the list of Richard’s villainies several new accusations, always safeguarding his integrity with the qualifications that he is reporting popular beliefs. Thus Gloucester is portrayed, along with Clarence, actually stabbing Henry VI’s son Edward to death after the battle of Tewkesbury. Of Henry VI’s death in the Tower he declares ‘the continual report is that Richard, Duke of Gloucester, killed him with a sword whereby his brother might be delivered of all hostility’.

But the most influential account of Richard to appear in the early sixteenth century was Sir Thomas More’s incomplete
History of King Richard III,
written in about 1513. Ironically, More’s book, which ends with Buckingham’s rebellion, was never intended for publication, nor was its primary aim to glorify the Tudor dynasty. More saw Richard as the antithesis of the humanist vision of a Good Prince, a symbol of evil rather than a person of flesh and blood, his crippled body a mirror image of his twisted soul: ‘Malicious, wrathful, envious’, ‘little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook backed’, ‘close and secret, a deep dissimuler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill’, ‘he slew with his own handes king Henry the Sixth’, and ‘lacked not in helping forth his brother Clarence to his death’. After doing away with the Princes in the Tower Richard ‘never had quiet in his mind’, ‘so was his restless heart continually tossed and tumbled with the tedious impression and stormy remembrance of his abominable deed’.

Vergil and More provided the inspiration for all the later Tudor versions, including the chronicles of Edward Hall (1548), Richard Grafton (1568) and Raphael Holinshed (1578), and culminating in the ‘poisonous hunchbacked toad’ of Shakespeare’s great melodrama.

Inevitably, such absurd exaggerations have provoked a flood of counter-claims in Richard’s favour. Not long after the last of the Tudors was in her grave, Sir George Buc, James I’s Master of the Revels, set to work on a five-volume biography, whose theme is that Richard’s ‘wisdom and courage had not then their nickname and calumny as now, but drew the eyes and acknowledgment of the whole kingdom towards him’. A more important milestone in Richard’s rehabilitation is Horace Walpole’s
Historic Doubts,
which argues most persuasively on the grounds of common sense that ‘many of the crimes imputed to Richard seemed impossible; and, what was stronger, contrary to his interest’. At the end of the nineteenth century, Sir Clements Markham ingeniously turned the tables on Richard’s conqueror by accusing Henry VII of the murder of the Princes. Markham’s theories, which have been generally discounted since the analysis of the skeletons from the Tower, underline an important point about almost everything that has been written on Richard’s life and reign: that the King’s guilt or innocence in the murder of the Princes is an acceptable yardstick whereby we can judge everything else that he did. Fuelled with moral outrage, the hostile critic sees in every act of justice a cynical attempt to cultivate popularity; in every grant a bribe; in every gesture of conciliation the stirrings of an uneasy conscience. As recently as 1966 the All Souls antiquarian A. L. Rowse declared that ‘anyone deriving his view of the whole story from Shakespeare would not be far out’; compared the execution of Lord Hastings with Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives; and with a logic worthy of his fifteenth-century namesake John Rous, cites Henry’s barbarous treatment of his rival’s corpse as proof of Richard’s villainy.

Even if we do succeed in peeling off the layers of prejudice, it is still not easy to arrive at a true assessment of Richard’s character. His life coincides with a particularly barren patch as far as contemporary historians go. Most of the major events in his reign have to be reconstructed from unreliable Lancastrian or Tudor sources whose bias is manifest. Even his physical appearance is elusive. His portraits show him with a rather careworn expression, thin pursed lips, brown eyes, a thrusting jaw and delicate tapering fingers. According to Sir Thomas More, who comments favourably on the good looks of Edward and Clarence, Richard was ‘little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right’. This disparity of the shoulders, which John Rous also mentions, appears to be the sole foundation for the later myth of the ugly, hunchbacked cripple. The Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow specifically discounts the myth on the evidence of ‘ancient men’ who testified that Richard was quite handsome, although a little below average height. Horace Walpole repeats an anecdote that the Countess of Desmond, after dancing with Richard, declared him to be the handsomest man in the room excepting his brother Edward. There is disagreement even about his height. The Scottish orator of 1484 made reference to Richard’s shortness in his speech of address: yet the German diplomat Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent more than a week with the King at Middleham in May 1484 recorded that Richard was ‘three fingers
taller
than himself, but a little slimmer, less thick set, and much more lean as well; he had delicate arms and legs, also a great heart’.

Nevertheless, there are sufficient grounds to rebuff or modify the outlines of the traditional Tudor villain. The most serious accusation – that he was consumed with ambition, ‘a deep dissimuler’ patiently waiting to snatch the reins of power from the fingers of his dead brother – has already been touched on in the preceding account of Richard’s usurpation. His loyalty to Edward IV during his brother’s lifetime is beyond dispute: as a devoted servant of the Crown Richard gains in stature from the contrast of Clarence’s continual mischief-making. Nor could anyone have foretold that Edward’s robust constitution would cave in at the age of forty. After Edward’s death the Woodvilles showed themselves the first aggressors in their attempt to exclude the Duke of Gloucester from the position that was his by right of birth, by dint of his proven abilities and by the specific instructions Edward left in his will.

Nevertheless, the fact that Queen Elizabeth felt it necessary to safeguard her interests by forestalling Richard’s protectorate shows that she had valid reasons to be afraid of him. The executions of Earl Rivers and Lord Richard Grey in late June 1483, bore out her misgivings. We know that Richard held her and her family responsible for Clarence’s death, just as she had held Clarence responsible for her father’s execution. But deeper motives were also at work. Mancini’s reference to ‘the good reputation’ of Richard’s private life supplies one clue. Richard’s moral code is very succinctly expressed in a document addressed to his bishops in March 1484:

Our principal intent and fervent desire is to see virtue and cleanness of living to be advanced... and vices... provoking the high indignation and fearful displeasure of God to be repressed and annulled; and this... put in execution by persons of lower degree to take thereof example... but also thereby the great and infinite goodness of God is made placable and graciously inclined to the exaudition of petitions and prayers.

This high moral tone – which Richard himself transgressed to the extent of fathering at least two bastards – reappears in a number of other State documents. The confirmation of his claim to the throne enacted by Parliament in 1484 speaks of ‘every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled’ during Edward’s reign. The inference is that Richard saw himself as the ‘person of high estate’ who would ‘put in execution’ the reign of virtue. The permissive atmosphere of Edward’s Court seems, in Richard’s eyes, to have been symptomatic of a deep-seated corruption stemming from his brother’s adulterous liaison with Elizabeth Woodville and abetted by his brother’s companions in vice, the Marquess of Dorset and Lord Hastings. Richard’s vision of the Woodvilles and of Hastings as a gang of moral degenerates unfit to wield any form of temporal authority, goes some way to explaining the vehemence of his retaliation. It also has ominous implications for Elizabeth’s two sons, the unfortunate Princes.

This unattractive quirk of Richard’s nature is well-attested by his treatment of Edward’s favourite mistress, Jane Shore. This lady, who receives a glowing testimonial from Sir Thomas More, seems to have been quite free of the rapacity normally imputed to royal mistresses. ‘The King would say that he had three concubines which in three divers properties diversely excelled: one the merriest, another the wiliest, the third the holiest harlot of his realm, as one whom no man could get out of the church lightly to any place, but it were to his bed.... But the merriest was this Shore’s wife, in whom the King therefore took special pleasure, for many he had, but her he loved.’