Good King Richard? Book

“History is not made by great men and women, nor by social and economic forces. It is made by historians.” These first two sentences reveal the purpose of this book: not to provide the reader with a biography of Richard III from this author’s viewpoint but to survey what others have written about him over the centuries: historians, amateurs, a playwright, and a saint. The author announces at the beginning that he is not impartial (he was at the time Chariman of the Richard III Society), but he gives a clear-eyed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments of both the traditionalists (those who adhere to the belief that Richard was a deformed, wicked king who murdered his nephews) and the revisionists who believe he was an enlightened king and a moral man.

The traditionalist image of Richard began with the rumors and the untrustworthy chroniclers of the time, and became myth with Thomas More’s History of King Richard III. As the author points out, this work was not a history but a literary exercise in the representation of villainy. It incorporates the ridiculous canard about Richard’s monstrous birth, and at least one historian has suggested that More was famous as an intellectual joker and that this work was meant as an ironical parody of history. Even though More never sought to publish it in his lifetime, it has been accepted as truth telling because More, was after all, a saint. More’s vision became firmly entrenched as fact in the public consciousness through the work of the world’s greatest playwright, William Shakespeare’s Richard III.

After the Tudor dynasty ended, the revisionist movement began with questions raised by Sir George Buck and later by Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts. But one of the greatest philosopher’s of his time David Hume rejected Walpole’s conclusions. Even though a rationalist and skeptic himself, Hume seems to have based his stance on absolute faith that More’s “singular magnanimity, probity and judgment make him an evidence beyond all exception . . .his authority is irresistible and sufficient to overbalance a hundred little doubts and scruples and objections.”

The battle between the traditionalists and revisionists has continued ever since: Gairdner vs. Markham; Kendall vs. Ross. The author believes that Ross has retreated somewhat from the extreme position of the traditionalists. And while some traditionalists acknowledge the enlightened reforms of Richard’s parliament, they cannot bring themselves to give him credit, asserting either that he had nothing to do with the acts of parliament or, if he did, it was only a desperate bid for popularity. The author has given us a thorough and cogent summary of the debate that has raged over the centuries about this last Plantagenet king.