The Last Plantagenets (66 page)

Now Sir Robert Brackenbury was an honorable man. Nothing has been said or written against him, not a hint of criticism is found in the records of the day, not a jot of malice, nor a tittle of complaint. It has been made clear that even the
History
absolved him of all blame.

When the word reached London that the crucial battle was impending between the army of the king and the invading forces of Henry of Richmond, Sir Robert Brackenbury gathered a few horsemen about him and set out for the scene of action. It was a long and hard ride from London to the bogs on the borders of Leicestershire and Warwickshire where the battle would be fought, more than one hundred miles as the crow flies. It is difficult to estimate what the actual distance was over the twisting, shifting, treacherous, unpaved roads of that day. Sir Robert and his men had to “flog their horses all the way from London” to cover the ground in time. The impatience of this brave knight can be understood, hasting to strike a blow against the infamous uncle who had commanded the murder of his nephews, riding madly through the Midlands, galloping through gaping lanes of watchers in the towns, forgetting the need for sleep and food!

But hold! When Sir Robert reached Sutton Cheney, he turned off the road to Dickon’s Nook where King Richard was said to be. When he saw
the royal standard flapping in a light breeze above the tents, he pulled up. With a sigh of relief, he slipped out of his saddle. He was in time, after all!

Sir Robert had made that furious ride in order to lend his sword to the cause of the king and not to Henry of Richmond. What is more, he fought the next day both boldly and well and gave up his life in the final stages, a short few moments before Richard made his magnificent last effort by charging almost singlehanded into the ranks of the Lancastrians.

It was a sad thing, for Sir Robert was a brave and honorable knight and he deserved to live longer. And it was an unfortunate thing for history that his tongue and hand were stilled.

But can more than one meaning be read into what he did? The princes had not been killed when he led his horsemen out through the Ald Gate and turned in the direction of the Great North Road.

F
OR reasons which will soon be apparent it is necessary at this point to adopt a personal approach.

The time to begin the reading of history is when you are young. I do not mean by this the hasty study of textbooks and the memorizing of a few dates. I mean the reading of history for pleasure as well as information. To begin in later years is to lose much of the eager delight, the tendency to become emotionally involved, a tendency which is increased because so much history is written in two colors, black and white.

As I was born in Canada, my early and insatiable appetite for the subject was fed, first, on the colorful sequence which stretched from Jacques Cartier to Wolfe and Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. Then I took up English and I found myself emotionally involved from first to last. I remember distinctly that there were tears in my eyes when I came to the last sentence of Charles Dickens’ description of the Battle of Hastings. “—And the Warrior, worked in gold thread and precious stones, lay low, all torn and soiled with blood—and the three Norman Lions kept watch over the field.” How much I had wanted Harold the Saxon to win!

It is on the question of battles that the feelings of readers can become most deeply engaged. I indulged in long periods of speculation as to what would have happened to England if the Saxons had won at Hastings. I was so eager a partisan of the Scots during the wars in the reign of Edward I that I was quite broken up when my hero, William Wallace, was beaten at Falkirk. If only the haughty (it seemed that the word haughty was used more often in those days than any other adjective) members of the Scottish aristocracy had not been too proud to serve under the great but relatively lowborn Wallace!

When I came to the Battle of Bosworth Field, that was a different matter. Here the hunchbacked monster of a wicked uncle, who had ordered the murder of his nephews, was punished with defeat and death, seemingly by the direct intervention of God. It never occurred to me then to ponder what might have happened if Richard had won. It was not until I heard of Horace Walpole and his
Historic Doubts
that I began to follow along the trail which led back to Bosworth. It seemed possible then that a great injustice had been done; and I began to feel the first faint quiver of the old emotional absorption.

It was at an early stage of my interest in matters historical that I fell under the spell of the Plantagenets. It began with the story of
the Fair Rosamond in the maze at Woodstock and grew into a passion with the mighty deeds of Richard of the Lion-Heart. Even after I realized that the wicked Queen Eleanor was actually a very wise and discerning woman and that Rosamond Clifford died in a convent of natural causes, even after I discovered to my horror that the great Richard had heels of clay, even then my interest in these fascinating people continued unabated. As I read deeper into the sources, I saw how many of the Plantagenets had been great kings—Henry II, Edward I, Edward III, Henry V, and, finally, what a fine king-in-the-making Richard III had been. The weaknesses they displayed were of a kind to add to their fascination. They were story-book kings, with their yellow hair and blazing blue eyes; and the wives they brought over to England were fairy-story queens, beautiful always and often wicked, sometimes very wicked. And back of these spectacular qualities, they relied on Parliament and, with some exceptions, they showed a proper regard for constitutional forms. In which latter respect they were far better kings than those who followed after them.

But to get back to the last of the Richards. In reading history it should be borne in mind that, in spite of the general belief to the contrary human nature does change with the years. The stouthearted Englishmen who loved and hated, who quarreled and laughed and sang, and who lived and died through the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses were actuated by instincts and habits which we do not share today, save, perhaps, in a latent form. We cannot judge the leading figures of centuries ago by our own modern standards. Even if Richard had ordered the deaths of the two princes (which so many fanatically disbelieve), it has to be considered that such things had been going on almost from the beginning of time. Although not a parallel in any sense, the Black Prince, considered the greatest of the knights of chivalry, slaughtered all of the innocent inhabitants of Limoges, and thousands of boys and girls died in the course of a few hours. Is this terrible day remembered still?

From the welter of contrived history, of book throwing, of efforts to explain away discrepancies of fact by theorizing, there still emerges from the gloom of this particular span of years the figure of a Man. The more I found to read about Richard, the last of the Plantagenets, the harder it became for me to think of him as the murderer of his nephews. I found so many glimpses of him as a warm and understandable human being. There was the delicate boy, thin and quiet but not allowing himself to be warped by jealousy because all his brothers and sisters were tall and fair; the youth who took over in his late teens the command of the Yorkist horse and led the thundering cavalry charges which helped so much to win the decisive battles; the honorable younger
brother who scorned the French king’s bribes and refused to set foot on the covered wooden bridge at Picquigny; the shrewd adviser on whom the lordly and successful Edward depended so much; the administrator of firm hand who ruled the turbulent north; the king who applied himself so earnestly to the ruling of England and to introducing common sense into some of the legal statutes; the saddened man who lost his son and his wife within a few months; the king, betrayed on the field of battle, who charged almost singlehanded against the enemy, slashing, cutting, shouting his scorn and defiance before going down.

The outcome of the Battle of Bosworth became, therefore, the one issue in English history in which my feelings were most deeply engaged. In addition to the sidelights which I found in the course of my reading, I studied the measured reasoning of Horace Walpole and the ardent advocacy of those who followed him, ending with the original and convincing approach employed by Josephine Tey in her
Daughter of Time
. And so it has been impossible for me to agree with what seems to have been a somewhat hasty verdict in the matter of the bones. There is too much proof on the other side.

Is it necessary to recapitulate all the evidence in Richard’s favor in order to believe that the verdict of history should be changed, to the extent at least of admitting that the mystery of the princes has not been solved? Is it not time to concede that there are many good reasons for believing Richard innocent?

Unfortunately it now seems impossible to reach any definite verdict. But if Richard cannot be declared innocent, should it not be made clear that he cannot in all honesty be accounted guilty? Should not the history taught in schools be changed to an impartial basis in accordance with what is now known? Must schoolrooms and reference books go on indefinitely with the old version, stubbornly grinding the Tudor ax? It once had a very sharp edge, but that is of no consequence now.

Ah, if Richard had conducted the battle with more strategic caution and perhaps with less pride! By living, he might have allowed himself a long span of years in which to employ his great administrative gifts as king and to put into the form of laws the changes he had in his mind.

This might have made possible a more satisfying end to the chronicles of a great dynasty. It could then perhaps have been possible to present Richard, not as the last and the blackest of that fantastic family whose achievements and adventures have engaged our attention through these long volumes. It might even have been possible to show him as one of the most constructive, perhaps as one of the greatest, of the kingly Plantagenets.