Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (29 page)

This story was solemnly reiterated by historians as proof positive of Richard's incipient madness – until 1953, when a scholar pointed out that the Victorian editor of the particular chronicle had misplaced the sentence about the cape and shoes, and that it was actually the friar who had pretended to be mad on realizing that his false accusations were about to be exposed. Richard, in fact, listened to his counsel and, according to the chronicle, ‘wisely undertook to act . . . in conformity with their advice'.
*7

But the readiness with which this totally nonsensical story about Richard was believed tells us something about the historical attitudes to him.

RICHARD THE VINDICTIVE?

Warwick, Arundel and Gloucester had been a constant thorn in Richard's side since he inherited the throne in 1377. In 1387 they openly rebelled against him. They defeated the royal army and set about destroying Richard's circle of influence. They tortured and executed something like 18 of his closest friends and advisers.

In contrast, when Richard took the reins of power back into his hands in 1389, he didn't execute anyone. And when he did make his move, eight years later, he kept it to a surgical strike – he took no revenge on their hangers-on. He didn't torture anyone. He simply removed those three troublemakers who had betrayed him and worked against his interest throughout his reign.

Not exactly a vindictive nature, one would have thought.

RICHARD THE MEGALOMANIAC?

It is true that Richard seems to have cultivated the trappings of royal power to a greater degree than his English predecessors. But was it a sign of megalomania?

In fact, in adopting higher terms of address, such as ‘Your Majesty' and introducing courtesies such as bowing, Richard was doing no more than importing the fashions that had been current in the courts of Europe for most of the century.

In any case, a strong centralized monarchy was seen by the political thinkers of the fourteenth century not as tyranny but as a civilizing influence. The alternative was a continually warring baronage, disrupting the realm.

The idea of absolute power in the hands of the King was, in fact, seen as a protection for liberties, not a threat to them. When Wat Tyler, at the height of the 1381 revolt, proposed that the aristocracy should be done away with and the King should rule his people directly, he was not talking off the top of his head; he was voicing an idea that was current amongst the political thinkers of the day.

One of the few books that we know for certain that Richard owned was one that was presented to him by Philippe de Mézières, the ex-Chancellor of Cyprus. In it Philippe describes the ideal kingdom, and it may come as a shock for the modern reader to discover how monarchy and socialist are combined; with the abolition of private property and the distribution of wealth ‘to each according to his need'.

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 intercept 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: