Richard III
May. 22nd, 2011 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerJosephine Tey's Daughter of Time is a history treatise thinly disguised as a detective novel, wherein it is argued that a) Richard III did not in fact kill his nephews (the Princes in the Tower), b) was more generally not such a bad guy, and c) was in fact a far better fellow than that blackguard Henry Tudor, (later Henry VII), the Tudors being a rather rotten crowd altogether - and not just because they stained poor Richard's memory with one of the most effective smear campaigns in history. They got Shakespeare on board! Who can argue with Shakespeare?
I won't be able to read his plays the same way ever again.
Tey piles up quite a bit of evidence, but these seem to me to be the most important pieces:
1. There's no contemporary accusation of murder. No one seems to have noticed that the princes were missing until after Henry VII took over the Tower, where they were kept.
2. Moreover, Richard had nothing to gain from killing the princes. Not only were they disqualified for illegitimacy (it seems their father was a secret bigamist) - but there were half a dozen other possible heirs to the throne that Richard would have had to kill, too, if he meant to safeguard his claim.
3. Henry, on the other hand, had a lot to gain from killing the princes, just as he did from killing all the other Yorkist heirs - which, in the years after his coronation, he did, because he was a paranoid and ruthless man.
4. Moreover, even if (in a fit of uncharacteristic bloodthirstiness) Richard did have his nephews murdered, it would have done him no favors to keep their deaths secret. He would have done better to shout from the rooftops that it had been fever and plunge the whole family into deepest mourning - such a course being much less suspicious than being unable to produce the princes when they got a bit older and someone thought to ask about them.
5. But Henry had to kill them in secret. No one would believe that they neatly died of a coincidental fever right after they took the throne; no, his only hope was to quietly disappear them. But someone would still ask about them eventually - what would he say in answer to that?
6. And thus, he blamed it on Richard, who was too dead to defend himself - along with the lot of his followers, many of whom Henry executed by enacting, after the fact, a law that made it illegal to fight on Richard's side at Bosworth. He made it treason to have fought for the rightful king! Blackguard, like I said.
Tey tells the tale much better, of course, but I finished the book so burning with zeal on poor slandered Richard's behalf that I just had to proselytize.
I won't be able to read his plays the same way ever again.
Tey piles up quite a bit of evidence, but these seem to me to be the most important pieces:
1. There's no contemporary accusation of murder. No one seems to have noticed that the princes were missing until after Henry VII took over the Tower, where they were kept.
2. Moreover, Richard had nothing to gain from killing the princes. Not only were they disqualified for illegitimacy (it seems their father was a secret bigamist) - but there were half a dozen other possible heirs to the throne that Richard would have had to kill, too, if he meant to safeguard his claim.
3. Henry, on the other hand, had a lot to gain from killing the princes, just as he did from killing all the other Yorkist heirs - which, in the years after his coronation, he did, because he was a paranoid and ruthless man.
4. Moreover, even if (in a fit of uncharacteristic bloodthirstiness) Richard did have his nephews murdered, it would have done him no favors to keep their deaths secret. He would have done better to shout from the rooftops that it had been fever and plunge the whole family into deepest mourning - such a course being much less suspicious than being unable to produce the princes when they got a bit older and someone thought to ask about them.
5. But Henry had to kill them in secret. No one would believe that they neatly died of a coincidental fever right after they took the throne; no, his only hope was to quietly disappear them. But someone would still ask about them eventually - what would he say in answer to that?
6. And thus, he blamed it on Richard, who was too dead to defend himself - along with the lot of his followers, many of whom Henry executed by enacting, after the fact, a law that made it illegal to fight on Richard's side at Bosworth. He made it treason to have fought for the rightful king! Blackguard, like I said.
Tey tells the tale much better, of course, but I finished the book so burning with zeal on poor slandered Richard's behalf that I just had to proselytize.
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gotta use my Evil!Richard III icon anyway...
Date: 2011-05-23 12:59 am (UTC)Re: gotta use my Evil!Richard III icon anyway...
Date: 2011-05-23 03:47 am (UTC)And now I want to read that book. And also other Richard III books, provided they are written by people with properly enlightened views on the subject. There are too many books in this world!
no subject
Date: 2011-05-23 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-23 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-23 05:58 pm (UTC)Be a tiny bit wary of Tey, though - she's no more historian than Shakespeare (although, to be fair, far, far more accurate!). There were contemporary rumours about the princes' disappearance (there are no reports of their being seen publically from about late summerish in 1483), and accusations were made though, iirc, largely on the continent, where trouble in England was in their interest. While there is no reliable evidence about the boys being murdered during Richard's reign (Tyrell's "confession" being dodge no matter how you look at it), there's also no evidence about the them surviving Richard's reign. And while, yes, Henry VII is a far more promising villain, and yes, he would deffo have killed them (that much is plain from how the house of York fared under Henrys VII and VIII), there's no evidence for that either, and it does seem quite likely, given the trouble he had dealing with pretenders and the completely dodgy Tyrell confession so handily acquired, that he actually didn't know what happened to them.
It's all so terribly frustrating, because there just isn't enough evidence for anything. Like, the Richardians tend to claim that Richard's claim to the throne was perfectly valid and there was no usurpation because of Edward IV's supposed "pre-contract" to Eleanor Butler, but more traditional academics say that the pre-contact thing, even if true (and the evidence for that hasn't survived either, and one can't assume that, well, Parliament/the Council must have seen and approved it, because, let's face it, Richard must have been a damned sight more attractive as a potential king than a Woodville-influenced kid), wasn't that significant and wouldn't have invalidated his marriage to Elizabeth. Who knows which was really the case?
Heigh ho. Interesting times. One is tempted to suppose that, Richard III or no, those boys probably wouldn't have survived to adulthood. Anyway, yay history! For further reading, may I suggest the fictional but excellent The Sunne in Splendour (Sharon Penman)? VG, though very long. The Sprig of Broom is also good, though not very Richardy (though giant rec for the whole of Barbara Willard's Mantlemass series, of which that book is the second volume - it takes one household as a microcosm of English history for 300 years and it's ace!) Also, in the 80s they did a mock trial with the available evidence - it's on youtube if you look for Richard III trial etc.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 03:58 pm (UTC)Perhaps the most disturbing thing about all this is that no one, not even their mother, seems to have noticed their disappearance for ages and ages. They just disappear from the record, and no one in England seems bothered.
Maybe they got kidnapped by a time-traveler. There's as much evidence for that as anything.