Re-interment of King Richard III

Richard

My bones, scripted in light, upon cold soil,
a human braille. My skull, scarred by a crown,
emptied of history. Describe my soul
as incense, votive, vanishing; you own
the same. Grant me the carving of my name.

These relics, bless. Imagine you re-tie
a broken string and on it thread a cross,
the symbol severed from me when I died.
The end of time – an unknown, unfelt loss –
unless the Resurrection of the Dead …

or I once dreamed of this, your future breath
in prayer for me, lost long, forever found;
or sensed you from the backstage of my death,
as kings glimpse shadows on a battleground.

March 24, 2015
The Detective Novel That Convinced a Generation Richard III Wasn’t Evil
By Sara Polsky

On Thursday, March 26th, nearly five hundred and thirty years after his death, King Richard III will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral. The discovery of the monarch’s remains after half a millennium was an improbable archeological feat, sparked in part by a writer named Philippa Langley, who was researching a screenplay about him. Langley, by her own account, was walking through an empty parking lot, when she felt a chill and decided that she was standing on Richard’s grave. She then spent years persuading a University of Leicester team to do the dig and a group of Ricardians—people convinced that Richard’s reputation has been unfairly maligned for centuries—to fund it. In 2012, archaeologists excavated a skeleton with spinal curvature and battle wounds near that spot in the parking lot. They concluded, eventually, that it was indeed Richard III.

But the quest to discover Richard’s skeleton, and perhaps redeem his reputation, has earlier and equally unlikely roots. Though writers and historians have been arguing since the seventeenth century that Richard III wasn’t the villain whom Shakespeare described, it was a 1951 mystery novel that sparked mass interest in Richard’s redemption. The writer went by the name Josephine Tey, and the novel was called “The Daughter of Time.”

Tey, whose real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, is herself something of a mystery. A teacher from Inverness, Scotland, she began publishing novels in 1929 under the name Gordon Daviot, the first of her pseudonyms. Daviot also wrote historical plays—her “Richard of Bordeaux” starred John Gielgud as Richard II—and she seems to have researched Richard III’s life first for a play called “Dickon,” sometime in the nineteen-forties. The subject offered her rich material: the debate about whether Richard had murdered his brother’s two sons, the famous Princes in the Tower (the Tower of London, that is, where the boys were living when they were last seen) had been ongoing for centuries. Tudor-era historians and writers insisted that Richard—named the boys’ regent after the death of their father, King Edward IV—had killed the princes in order to assume the throne. As new documents came to light, writers began to take Richard’s side, arguing that evidence against him was slim and that his motive for murder was unclear. “Dickon” was Tey’s first foray into the debate.

As an attempt to sway the public, though, the play was a failure: it was neither performed nor published during Tey’s lifetime. But even if it had been produced “Dickon” probably would not have drawn audiences to the Ricardian cause—it’s too confusing. Jennifer Morag Henderson, whose biography of Tey will be published this November, says, “If you didn’t know the controversy about the Princes in the Tower, it would be quite difficult to understand.”

But, with “The Daughter of Time,” Tey found an approach to the story that would make more sense to the uninitiated: she gave the mystery of Richard to a detective. The Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant first appeared in her 1929 novel, “The Man in the Queue,” and is the protagonist of five of Tey’s books. When “The Daughter of Time,” the fourth of these, begins, Grant is out of work with a broken leg—the result of “the absolute in humiliation,” a fall through a trap door during a chase. His active mind has exhausted the entertainment value of his hospital room by mapping the cracks on the ceiling and profiling his nurses, whom he dubs the Midget and the Amazon. He has no patience for the formulaic novels that people have sent him. To quiet his “prickles of boredom,” an actress friend brings him a collection of portraits attached to historical controversies: Grant, after years in the police force, has a fascination with faces. His eye catches on a portrait of Richard III, who has the reputation of a monster but the face, Grant thinks, of a judge. “Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist.”

For Grant, the question of whether a man with such a responsible face could be a murderer is irresistible. Without any training as a historian, he begins his investigation with a child’s history book borrowed from a nurse. He takes in the usual story of Richard III as nephew-killing villain. He then advances to denser secondary sources about Richard, his family, and the Princes in the Tower, learning about the secret marriage agreement the princes’ father had made, which, when discovered after the father’s death, rendered the sons illegitimate. (Richard, next in line for the throne after the princes, became king by an act of Parliament.) Finally, Grant works with a young researcher named Brent Carradine to read chronicles from Richard’s time and the Tudor era. He judges the tone of these chronicles, and the attitudes of the chroniclers, in a way—and to a degree—that a historian might not. “An aroma of back-stair gossip and servants’ spying came off the page,” Grant thinks while reading a history written by Sir Thomas More. “So that one’s sympathy tilted before one was aware of it.”

The investigation doubles as a research tutorial. Grant’s reading list, Henderson told me, probably mirrored Tey’s own research for the book, which she would have done at the British Library on trips from her home in Inverness. Tey’s sympathies were clearly with Richard: Grant cannot build a case for Richard’s guilt in the matter of the princes, and he has little patience for historians who have tried to do so. “They have no talent for the likeliness of any situation,” Grant tells his friend Marta Hallard, the actress who brought him Richard III’s portrait. “They see history like a peepshow, with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.” By the end of the novel, Grant and Carradine are convinced that it was Henry VII, Richard’s successor, who was responsible for the deaths of the two boys.

Carradine is dejected when, at the end of “The Daughter of Time,” he discovers that writers have been proclaiming Richard’s innocence for hundreds of years. He fears that there will be no room on the shelves for his addition. “It won’t be a great discovery!” he shouts, and Tey notes that he “said it in capitals. A Great Discovery.” Even so, “The Daughter of Time” accomplished what previous literary efforts on Richard III’s behalf had not: it made research seem romantic, even noble, and made the quest to clear a man’s name seem possible for anyone with a library card or willing friends. Grant, after all, spends the entire book in bed.

The novel was immediately popular when it first appeared, in 1951, and as its reach grew so did the pool of potential Ricardians. Tey’s dissection of received history prompted readers to question, as Grant does, everything they had been taught. This could feel like an awakening, as George Awdry describes in “The Richard III Society: The First Fifty Years,” an insider’s history of Ricardian efforts in the early-to-mid twentieth century. “It begins in the haphazard sort of way each of us can probably recognize as like his own experience,” Awdry writes. “Vague dissatisfaction with the official version, curiosity, kindling of intense interest, realization that one is convinced.” (This was my own experience as a thirteen-year-old—after devouring “The Daughter of Time,” I followed Grant’s route into biographies and chronicles, and then into an ever-broadening swath of history.)

At the end of the novel, Grant assures Carradine that he need not worry about a Great Discovery. “If you can’t be a pioneer what’s wrong with leading a crusade?” he says, adding, “There’s that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone.” Tey’s title, drawn from the saying that “truth is the daughter of time,” is a nod to this same idea—and her book did get the water flowing. It was the first in a wave of novels, plays, and biographies sympathetic to Richard that appeared in the fifties and sixties. (One of these, Paul Murray Kendall’s 1955 biography of the King, was the book through which Philippa Langley first encountered Richard III.) “The Daughter of Time” became a radio broadcast in 1952, and a subsequent series of letters about Richard’s reputation, published in the Radio Times, introduced one “Daughter of Time” reader, Isolde Wigram, to a group of Ricardians who had formed their own organization in 1929. Wigram helped to reëstablish the group, now the Richard III Society, in its mission “to encourage and promote a more balanced view” of the King’s life and reputation. The group sponsored research that could reveal new details of Richard’s life. Half a century later, the members of the society were the Ricardians Langley called on to fund the Leicester excavation.

After archaeologists recovered Richard’s skeleton and extracted evidence for DNA analysis, they sent the skull to an anthropologist and an artist who could use it to reconstruct Richard III’s face. The result looked much like the surviving portraits of Richard III, the same ones that so compelled Grant in “The Daughter of Time.” He spends much of the novel staring at Richard’s portrait from his bed, asking every visitor’s opinion on it, ruminating on his research and what it tells him about that conscientious, worry-heavy face. I imagine he and Carradine doing the same with the 3-D reconstruction we have now, marvelling at the latest Great Discovery.

Especially if your father was executed on trumped-up charges because he knew the king wasn't legally married?

Clarence had actively supported his elder brother's claim to the throne, but when his father-in-law the Earl of Warwick (known as "the Kingmaker") deserted Edward IV to ally with Margaret of Anjou, consort of the deposed King Henry, Clarence joined him in France, taking his pregnant wife. She gave birth to their first child, a girl, on 16 April 1470, in a ship off Calais. The child died shortly afterwards. Henry VI rewarded Clarence by making him next in line to the throne after Edward of Westminster, justifying the exclusion of Edward IV either by attainder for his treason against Henry VI or on the grounds of his alleged illegitimacy.

After a short time, Clarence realized that his loyalty to his father-in-law was misplaced: Warwick had his younger daughter, Anne, marry Edward of Westminster, King Henry VI's heir in December 1470. Since it now seemed unlikely that Warwick would replace Edward IV with Clarence, Clarence changed sides.

Though most historians now believe Isabel's death was a result of either consumption or childbed fever, Clarence was convinced she had been poisoned by one of her ladies-in-waiting, Ankarette Twynyho, whom, as a consequence, he had judicially murdered in April of 1477, by summarily arresting her and bullying a jury at Warwick into convicting her of murder by poisoning. She was hanged immediately after trial with John Thursby, a fellow defendant. Clarence's mental state, never stable, deteriorated from that point and led to his involvement in yet another rebellion against his brother Edward.

The arrest and committal to the Tower of one of Clarence's retainers, an Oxford astronomer named Dr John Stacey, led to his confession under torture that he had 'imagined and compassed' the death of the King, and used the black arts to accomplish this. He implicated one Thomas Burdett, and one Thomas Blake, a chaplain at Stacey's college. All three were tried for treason, convicted, and condemned to be drawn to Tyburn and hanged. Blake was saved at the eleventh hour by a plea for his life from James Goldwell, Bishop of Norwich, but the other two were put to death as ordered. This was a clear warning to Clarence, which he chose to ignore. He appointed Dr John Goddard to burst into Parliament and regale the House with Burdett and Stacey's declarations of innocence that they had made before their deaths. Goddard was a very unwise choice, as he was an ex-Lancastrian who had expounded Henry VI's claim to the throne.

Edward summoned Clarence to Windsor, severely upbraided him, accused him of treason, and ordered his immediate arrest and confinement.

Clarence was imprisoned in the Tower of London and put on trial for treason against his brother Edward IV. Clarence was not present - Edward IV himself prosecuted his brother, and demanded that Parliament pass a Bill of Attainder against his brother, declaring that he was guilty of 'unnatural, loathly treasons' which were aggravated by the fact that Clarence was his brother, who, if anyone did, owed him loyalty and love. Following his conviction, he was "privately executed" at the Tower on 18 February 1478, by tradition in the Bowyer Tower, and soon after the event, the rumour gained ground that he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine.

Between 1512 and 1519, Thomas More worked on a History of King Richard III, which he never finished but which was published after his death. The History of King Richard III is a Renaissance history, remarkable more for its literary skill and adherence to classical precepts than for its historical accuracy. Some consider it an attack on royal tyranny, rather than on Richard III himself or the House of York.[citation needed] More and his contemporary Polydore Vergil both use a more dramatic writing style than most medieval chronicles; for example, the shadowy King Richard is an outstanding, archetypal tyrant more like the Romans portrayed by Sallust.

The History of King Richard III was written and published in both English and Latin, each written separately, and with information deleted from the Latin edition to suit a European readership.[citation needed] It greatly influenced William Shakespeare's play Richard III. Contemporary historians attribute the unflattering portraits of King Richard III in both works to both authors' allegiance to the reigning Tudor dynasty that wrested the throne from Richard III in the Wars of the Roses.[citation needed] More's version also barely mentions King Henry VII, the first Tudor king, perhaps for having persecuted his father, Sir John More.[citation needed] Clements Markham suggests that the actual author of the work was Archbishop Morton and that More was simply copying or perhaps translating the work.

And then there was an Italian cleric called Polydore Vergil.

Vergil, a native of Urbino, was an Italian cleric. He was sent to England in 1501 by Pope Alexander VI as a sub-collector of Peter’s Pence. He was commissioned by Henry VII to write an "official" history of England in 1505.

The first edition of his work was completed in 1534, the second in 1546 incorporating the dates of 1509 in his history. The third edition was published in 1555,the year that Vergil died and the history of his work was extended to 1538. Four other editions were later published, Basel in 1555, Ghent 1556-57, Basel 1570 and Leyden in 1651.

Sir Henry Ellis translated Vergil’s work in 1844 for the Camden Society. The translation is taken from the MSS version of the old Royal Library in the British Museum. Ellis cites that it was written in the latter part of Henry VIII’s reign but this is inaccurate.

Hall’s and the Continuation of the Hardyng Chronicles were taken from the first edition published in 1534 whereas Ellis’ translation is taken from the second edition.

The second translation is accurate accept for small and un-important exceptions. Quotations are done for the sake of convenience and reference is made back to the first edition.

The errors of Vergil’s account of the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III are numerous.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester is not mentioned as fighting at the Battle of Barnet.

Henry VI was put to death in the Tower of London and cites that Richard, Duke of Gloucester killed him with his sword so his brother, Edward IV, would be free from further hostility.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester is not accused of killing his brother, George, Duke of Clarence but states that Edward IV did out of fear of the prophecy that after his reign someone with the letter "G" would rule England.

Richard is given no credit for his outstanding leadership of the Scottish-Border campaign.

Edward IV died at the age of fifty rather than at the age of forty. (He was 41)

Upon hearing of the news of Edward IV’s death, Richard III began his campaign to seize the throne from his nephew, Edward V. When Richard meets Buckingham at Northampton, Vergil states it was at this time that Richard revealed his plan to take the throne. Anthony Woodville and Thomas Vaughan are mentioned as being arrested. Hastings, who originally sided with Richard, now called a council meeting in St. Paul’s Church that included friends of Edward V. Some members of the council urged that Edward V should be rescued from Richard while others urged that they wait until Richard arrived in London to explain his actions. Richard supposedly declares that he realizes any harm to his nephews would mean that it could rebound to the country and him.

The princes were conveyed to the Tower to await the coronation of Edward V. The council meeting of June does not mention that Richard appeared in a pleasant mood, left and then returned in an agitated mood. Vergil cites that Richard entered the council and stated that he was in great danger, that he has not been able to sleep, eat or drink. He continues by showing his arm is withered and that Elizabeth Woodville, used witchcraft on him. Hastings, who had supported him, responded that the queen should be punished. Richard repeats the story and Hastings’ response is the same. Richard then accuses Hastings of seeking Richard’s destruction. Richard’s men enter and Hastings was taken out and beheaded.

Shaw’s sermon, according to Vergil, denies the report that Shaw referred to the princes as bastards and has Richard present at the sermon. After Richard’s coronation, Richard traveled to Gloucester and there planned to kill his nephews. Brackenbury refuses to kill the princes and it is left to Tyrell to carry out the King’s will and murders the princes. Hall, Grafton and Shakespeare would later copy Vergil’s account of the Queen’s lament upon hearing the news that her sons were dead. Vergil cites the discord between Buckingham and Richard because Richard would not give Buckingham the Hereford lands. Buckingham retires to Brecknock informing the Bishop of Ely his intent to overthrow Richard. Ely approves of Buckingham’s intent employing Reginald Bray to act as a go-between for Buckingham and Margaret Beaufort. Before the disenchantment between Richard and Buckingham, Elizabeth Woodville and Margaret Beaufort had begun to make plans to place Henry Tudor on the throne provided he marries Elizabeth of York.

Richard learned of the conspiracy and when he discovers Buckingham is the chief instigator summons him to court. Buckingham responds that he is ill. Richard leads his army towards Salisbury. Buckingham’s soldiers desert him and scatter to Brittany or Flanders. Buckingham was then beheaded.

Vergil claims that Richard spread a rumor abroad that his wife, Anne Neville, was dying. Upon hearing of the news, she asked Richard why he was anticipating her death. It is presumed by Virgil that Richard reassures her with loving words and a few days later, she dies. Richard then focuses on his desire to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York. However, because of the counsel and her dislike for Richard, he decides to wait.

He created the account of Richard having a withered arm that proved his villainy causing his defeat at Bosworth and cites that all his men deserted him while he fought fighting alone. His statements refer to King Richard III, as spiteful practice, subtlety, sleight, malice, fraud, graceless, wicked, mischievous, frantic and mad.

Vergil is referred to as the "Father of English History". Vergil is accused of destroying documents that contradicted his point of view and his history is the first to accuse Richard of the murder of his nephews.

His work gave the Tudors what they wanted – an account depicting crimes, faults and unpopularity that were directed to defame King Richard III. Vergil’s work is the first to develop a saga against Richard III. With his so-called History of England, the stage is set against Richard III.

Morton was an important foe of the Yorkist regime of King Richard III and spent some time in captivity in Brecknock castle. After the dynastic change to the Tudors in 1485, Henry VII made him Archbishop of Canterbury on 6 October 1486, and appointed him Lord Chancellor of England in 1487.

Morton was a mentor of the young Sir Thomas More. More served as a page in Morton's house, acted in revels at Morton's court at Knole House, the archiepiscopal palace, and later mentioned him in his work Utopia. Although most scholars credit More with authoring the History of King Richard III, they debate the issue of the original authorship. Morton is believed by many to be the originator of the account that More rewrote. Modern-day enthusiasts of King Richard III thereby accuse Morton of inventing the account whereby Richard murdered Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York and committed other crimes attributed to him.