by Alan Ereira
The Wilton Diptych portrays Richard with hands open ready to receive the flag of England from the hands of the baby Jesus . . . in other words the country is a sacred trust and not a milch cow.
So what happened to Richard’s reputation?
HENRY IV’S PROPAGANDA MACHINE
It’s the old story. Henry Bolingbroke was an illegal usurper who treacherously went against all his vows of loyalty as a chivalric knight, stole the throne from his cousin and then had him murdered. The usurper needed to assuage not only his guilty conscience but also the considerable body of contemporary public opinion that regarded him as the traitor that he was.
Despite the assertions of the chroniclers of Henry IV’s reign, it is clear that Bolingbroke’s return to England was not greeted with popular relief or a sense of liberation. He had trouble even finding a safe place to land, ‘taking his ships back and forth along the coastline, approaching different parts of the kingdom in turn’. He finally chose to land as far north as Yorkshire. The mayor and aldermen of London did not desert Richard until he had been taken prisoner, and even then they probably drove a hard bargain. But that is not the way the story gets told. Bolingbroke took good care of that.
As soon as he had seized power he sent letters to all the abbeys and major churches ‘instructing the heads of these religious houses to make available for examination all of their chronicles which touched upon the state and governance of the kingdom of England from the time of William the Conqueror up until the present day . . .’ The erasures and revisions still visible in these manuscripts, the removal of criticisms of Bolingbroke and his father, and the addition of anti-Richard material show that monks understood perfectly well what that meant. The records of the City of London were simply attacked with a knife; two and a half folios covering the period of the usurpation have been cut out.
We can also see the signs of pressure being put on other writers to conform to the new political correctness. John Gower, ten years Chaucer’s senior and perhaps already going blind, painfully pulls into line with the current political orthodoxy as many manuscripts as he can of his poem Confessio Amantis. He had originally dedicated the poem to Richard; but in the climate of fear and paranoia that accompanied the usurpation he rededicated it to Henry. John Gower even goes to great lengths to pretend that he made such changes long before the usurpation.
Henry’s heavy hand must have been leaning on the poet’s shoulder as he wrote every word.
Richard II saw the basis of his power not in overwhelming military force or political intrigue, but in the special authority of sovereignty. His court was a fount not of military authority but of magical power, in which the majesty of royal justice was tempered by the mercy of queenly intercession; it was a court of manners and of ceremony.
None of which enriched the barons or increased their influence and power. They needed war. The chronicler of the Vita Ricardi Secundi complained that Richard was ‘timid and unsuccessful in foreign war’. Instead of wars he offered tournaments, accompanied by music, and dancing with the ladies of the court. Walsingham made a hostile assessment of Richard’s courtiers:
These fellows, who are in close association with the King, care nothing for what a knight ought to know – I am speaking not only about the use of arms but also about those matters with which a noble king should be concerned in times of peace, such as hunting and hawking and the like – activities that serve to enhance the honour of a king.
Historia Anglicana
The fact is that Richard had created a new vision of royalty in England, in which the king was a majestic figure in a court that was as concerned with the arts of peace as those of war. The function of majesty was to create a focus of authority that would be as effective in times of peace as of war. Henry IV and each succeeding sovereign would, in fact, attempt to build on what Richard had done.
The third and final King Richard was no exception to this, but once again the propaganda of his detractors has nobbled him.
BAD KING
Of course we all do know that there was a king called Richard III, but the character we know about is a completely different man from the one that sat on the throne. The real man has disappeared, and in his place we have a cardboard cut-out villain, to be booed and hissed whenever he appeared on stage – this is Shakespeare’s character, the magnificent, deformed monster king, which was directly based on the extremely biased sources available to him. Laurence Olivier’s magnificent screen performance does complete justice to Shakespeare’s creation, a reptilian, insinuating smile on the face of a man who understands his own psychotic character, driven by his hunger for revenge on the world for his hunched and twisted spine.
I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
Since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous
Of course, England never had a king like that and Richard did not even have a hunchback. There is a portrait of him in the Royal Collection, probably dating from the reign of his usurper, which, some experts claim, has ben altered to show him with a hunched back. Whether this claim is justified or not, it is clear that the amount of work that went into creating the story that Richard plotted to seize the throne of England and then ruled as a brutal tyrant is really quite extraordinary.
Medieval kings ruled by consent, no other way was possible. For virtually every king of England, this essentially meant the consent of the nobility of southern and central England, with the earls in the north being steadily marginalized. That had eventually led to civil war, the Wars of the Roses, which had ended with Edward IV defeating the northern nobility.
Edward then gave his brother Richard the job of winning hearts and minds in the north. While the king ruled from London, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was sent to York to be a sort of vice-regent. He arrived in 1476, backed up by 5000 men. But according to the York records, he had not come to impose himself by force: ‘After greetings were exchanged, the duke addressed the civic officials within Bootham Bar, saying that he was sent by the king to support the rule of law and peace.’
In fact, Richard devoted himself to the minutiae of government and justice, and the pleas put to him indicate that he became fully immersed in the life of the region.
Right and mighty prince and our full tender and especial good lord, we your humble servants, havyng a singler confidence in your high and noble lordship afore any other, besecheth your highnesse . . . concerning the reformation of certan fishtraps.
In 1482 the City of York presented him with gifts, ‘for the great labour, good and benevolent lordship that the right, high and might prince have at all tymes done for the well of the city’. Out of the council goody bag came fish – ‘6 pike, 6 tenches, 6 breme, 6 eels and 1 barrel of sturgeon’, a local speciality of spiced bread, and fourteen gallons of wine to wash it all down.
At the dark heart of the legend of evil King Richard lie the bodies of two children, the sons of Edward IV – the princes in the Tower. When Edward approached his death in 1483 he named his 12-year-old son Edward as his successor. Richard was to be lord protector until the boy grew up. But when the king died on 9 April Richard was in the north of England and the prince was in the hands of his mother’s family, the Woodvilles.
They tried to hurry the child to London before Richard knew about the death, and crown him on 4 May – a coup that would have given them control of the king and the country. Richard managed to inter
cept them and escorted the boy to London, placing him in the royal apartment in the Tower and rescheduling the coronation for 22 June. On the thirteenth, evidence came to light of an extensive plot against Richard, and young Edward’s brother (little Richard) was also installed in the Tower. Edward’s coronation was deferred until November.
On 22 June Dr Edward Shaa, brother of the mayor of London, conveniently declared to the citizens of London that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, which had taken place in secret, had been illegal because the king had a precontract of marriage with Lady Eleanor Butler. Richard had been a dutiful and loyal assistant to his brother Edward IV, and had spent most of his life in the north of England. He was popular, widely trusted, knew everyone and was a capable administrator. Now the legitimacy of the succession had been undermined and the country was on the edge of plunging back into the terrible civil wars from which it had so recently emerged. Taking the bull by the horns, Richard announced that if Edward IV’s children were illegitimate, then he himself, brother of the dead king, must be his successor. He was acclaimed king on 26 June and crowned on 6 July. The princes vanished, and the official Tudor view was that Richard had them killed.
When historians debate King Louis the First and Last, they generally observe that he should not be counted as one of the kings of England as he did not have a coronation. However, the child Edward is counted as Edward V, despite the fact that not only was he never crowned, but he never ruled at all. The reason for this is that Henry Tudor, who had no meaningful claim to the throne, seized the crown in 1485 and found it very helpful to have Richard designated as a regicide – so the boy was recognized as a king.
In fact, if anyone had an interest in killing the boys it was Henry Tudor.
The bones of two children are still on show at the Tower, proof of Richard’s wicked deed. They were discovered in the seventeenth century, and examined in 1933, when they were said to be the vital evidence of the crime. But no-one knows when they date from.
All the evidence from Richard’s own lifetime shows that he was not a tyrant. Almost the first thing he did on becoming king was to pay off £200 he owed to York wine merchants. Now there’s a tyrant for you! And then he brought the whole court north to the city, to stage a second coronation – his secretary advised its corporation to put on a heck of a show. It was also a great opportunity to show off Yorkshire wool:
Hang the streets thorough which the king’s grace shall come with clothes of arras, tapestry work and other, for there commen many southern lords and men of worship with them.
The city did put on an incredible spectacle, and many citizens contributed handsomely to it. The mayor and aldermen, all dressed in scarlet, rode with the king and queen through a city made of cloth, stopping for elaborate shows and displays as they went. They turned the place into a woollen Disneyland.
To many southern lords, it looked as though the Wars of the Roses had been referred back to the referee, and the north had won after all, especially when Richard filled his court with friends from the region. They were not at all happy, so they backed Henry Tudor to take over. Richard III became the last king of England to die in battle. But when news of his death at the Battle of Bosworth reached the York council chamber, the councillors did not declare their joy that England had been liberated from a tyrant:
King Richard late mercifully reigning upon us was through great treason of the Duke of Northfolk and many othres that turned ayenst him, with many othre lordes and nobles of these north parts, pitiously slain and murdred to the great heavinesse of this city.
That was a very dangerous thing to write in the city records; and it must have been deeply heartfelt. So why have we ended up with a picture of Richard the cruel and twisted tyrant?
I must be married to my brother’s daughter,
Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass.
Murder her brothers, and then marry her!
The uncertain way of gain! But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin:
Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.
Richard III
The answer is the mighty power of Tudor propaganda. Henry VII – Henry Tudor – had seized the crown, and his dynasty rested on that shaky foundation. It was necessary to invent a Richard who had never existed, a bogeyman, to justify the usurpation.
While Richard was still alive, writer John Rous described him as ‘a mighty prince and especial good Lord.’ When the Tudors took power, Rous portrayed him as akin to the Antichrist: ‘Richard spent two whole years in his mother’s womb and came out with a full set of teeth.’ Shakespeare, writing a century later, was himself serving a Tudor monarch. His main sources were Tudor documents written by men in their sovereigns’ service.
Medieval kings were not all striving for tyranny; in many ways, they were less free than their subjects (though, of course, much richer).The Good King/Bad King stories are the propaganda of their successors. And even the question of who was and was not a king of England was decided after the men themselves were dead – by the chroniclers.
Propaganda, thy name is History.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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WEB RESOURCES
The best way of finding quality-controlled www resources is through a major medievalists’ website; two of the best are ORB, the On-Line Reference Book for Medieval Studies, at www.the-orb. net, which also refers to other sites on its ‘labyrinth’ – http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu/. Searching for books in other libraries, or checking references, can be done through the Cambridge University Library website at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/ (go to ‘Catalogues’ from the homepage).
GENERAL
Bolton, J. L., The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (Everyman, 1980)
Boureau,A., The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage, tr. Lydia G. Cochrane (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
Britnell, R., The Closing of the Middle Ages: England, 1471–1529 (Blackwell, 1997)
Campbell, J., The Anglo-Saxons (Cornell, 1982)
DeVries, K., Medieval Military Technology (Broadview, 1992)
Dyer, C., Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Gimpel, J., The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Holt, 1976)
Hanawalt, B., Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford University Press, 1993)
Horrox, R. E. (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Keen, M., English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–1500 (Penguin, 1990)
LeGoff,J., Medieval Civilization, 400–1500 (Blackwell, 1989)
LeGoff, J., Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Pollard, A. J., Late Medieval England, 1399–1509
Prestwich, M., Armies and Warfare in the Midle Ages: The English Experience (Yale University Press, 1996)
Rigby, S. H., English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Macmillan, 1995)
Stenton, E, William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans (Barnes & Noble, 1966)
Stock, B., Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)
Thomson, J. A. F, The Transformation of Medieval England 1370–1529 (Longman, 1983)
Tuck, A., Crown and Nobility (1272–1461) (Fontana, 1985)
Platt, C., Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 AD (Routledge, 1988)
PEASANT
Allison, K., Wharram Percy: Deserted Medieval Village (English Heritage Publications, 1999)
Beresford, M. & Hurst, J., Wharram Percy – Deserted Medieval Village (Batsford, 1990)
Coulton, G. G., The Medieval Village (Dover Publications, 1989)
Dobson, R. B. (ed.), The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Macmillan, 1983)
Dyer, A., Decline and Growth in Engl
ish Towns, 1400–1640 (Macmillan, 1991)
Hanawalt, B., The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 1986)
Hatcher, J., Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (Macmillan, 1977)
Henisch, B. A., Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (Penn State UP, 1976)
Herlihy, D., Medieval Housholds (Harvard University Press, 1985)
Hilton R. H. and Aston T. H. (eds.), The English Rising of 1381 (1984)
Jordan, W. C., The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1998)
Mollat, M., The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History (Yale University Press, 1986)
Newman, R., Cosmeston Mediaeval Village (Glamorgan–Gwent Archaeological Trust, 1988)
Platt, C., King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-medieval England (UCL, 1996)
Poos, L., A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525 (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Rösener,W., Peasants in the Middle Ages (University of Illinois, 1992)
Schmidt, A.V. C. (ed.), William Langland: The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text (Everyman Classics, 1987)
Schofield P. R., Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500 (Macmillan, 2002)
Spufford, P., Money and its use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Webber, R., Peasants’ Revolt: The Uprising in Kent, Essex, East Anglia and London During the Reign of King Richard II (T. Dalton, 1980)
MINSTREL
Aubrey, E., The Music of the Troubadours (Indiana University Press, 1996)
Coleman, J., Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Daniel, A., Pound’s Translations of Arnaut Daniel: A Variorum Edition with Commentary from Unpublished Letters (Garland Science, 1991)
Egan, M., The Vidas of the Troubadours (Taylor & Francis, 1984)
