Richard The Chird (67 page)

What possible motive impelled the Queen Dowager to aid a conspiracy which, if successful, would dethrone her own daughter, eradicate her proud position as the ancestress of kings, and give the diadem to the son of Clarence, the man whose death she had sought, or to the Earl of Lincoln, the heir of her enemy Richard? What reason had Henry for thinking that the Marquess Dorset, a sybarite, might risk his newly recovered luxury of station and his life to support a rebellion inspired by men hostile to his family? The author of The Earlier Tudors, in a style that represents the usual handling of this problem, considers that the enigma is sufficiently resolved by characterizing the Queen Dowager as "a flighty woman." This, as Jeffrey wrote, with less cause, of Wordsworth's Excursion, this will never do!

"Flighty woman" is the very nadir of understatement. To posit even the flightiest flightiness will not explain this conduct, so wildly contrary to what would appear to be the obvious dictates of self-interest—and on the part of a woman who had long shown herself sensitive to these dictates. The Queen's behavior remains an annoyingly important enigma, unless it can be accounted for by some powerful motive. The supposition that Buckingham murdered her sons supplies the motive, as it supplies the motive for her having yielded her daughters to Richard. Persuaded by Buckingham and the agents of Henry Tudor that Richard had killed the Princes, she then learns that the cause she has in consequence been led to adopt is the very cause in which her sons were sacrificed. In a woman of such passions as she harbored, this revelation would, it seems, be amply sufficient to drive her—at any cost—to revenge herself upon the man who had duped her into helping him tread upon the bodies of her sons as steppingstones to the throne.

The supposition of Buckingham's guilt likewise offers an explanation of Henry Tudor's mysterious refusal, in spite of strong motivation, to proclaim Richard's infamy or even the mere fact of the Princes' demise. He could not declare the former without giving some solid evidence of the latter—which would, in turn, contradict the declaration. Only after the passage of years, when TyrelTs involvement with Suffolk gave him a likely opportunity, did he venture to propagate by assertion what could otherwise not be propagated at aU. Hence his use of insinuation in Richard's attainder and his failure, even in letters drumming up partisans for his invasion, to stir hearts to his cause by accusing Richard of murdering his nephews; "homicide" and "tyrant" are the standard epithets he uses in the missives that have survived.

As this pattern falls into place, it becomes apparent that all the "evidence" for Richard's guilt, save the Tyrell story, is, in fact, equally applicable to Buckingham. This "evidence," as we have seen, is the tissue of rumor, and the rumors appear to have been spun from mere suspicion arising from the disappearance of the Princes. It may have been Buckingham rather than Richard who brought about the disappearance; the rumors assume— doubtless

APPENDIX I

with encouragement from Tudor adherents—the responsibility of Richard, but all they actually attest is the probability of the deed. It must, in addition, be remembered that, according to More and Bacon, Henry VII appears to have been as much, or almost as much, plagued by whispers that the sons of Edward were still alive as Richard was by gossip that they were dead.

The evidence of character provides no more than an exercise in opinion; yet it is probably safe at least to remark that the rash, vain, ambitious, shallow Buckingham was not likely to be deterred by principles from performing a deed which might open up a glorious destiny and cast obloquy upon the wearer of the purple who had kindled his jealousy and his emulation.

An objection of some force, however, can be raised against this supposition of Buckingham's guilt. Why did not Richard attempt to still the attacks upon his fame by proclaiming that the crime was Buckingham's and publishing the story of what had actually happened?

If he learned of the deed only in parting from Buckingham at Gloucester or somewhat later on his progress, Richard had little time to meditate on the problem or penetrate the Duke's motive before he was suddenly confronted with the outbreak of Buckingham's rebellion. Then to accuse Buckingham would be to create a fire of speculation where none existed—save among the conspirators—and to risk being thought to have foisted his own crime on Buckingham in order to blacken an opponent of his crown. The same reasoning applies even more strongly after Buckingham's execution. His object must be to make the realm forget about, acquiesce in, the disappearance of the Princes. To announce their deaths would be to remind his subjects of the dark consequence of his having seized the throne and would doubtless arouse as much suspicion against himself as conviction of the Duke's guilt, whatever evidence he advanced. It may well be, too, that in his uneasy mind he held himself ultimately responsible for the deed since Buckingham had been his greatest officer and since he was enjoying the benefits of the act, even though the Duke had otherwise intended.

A very tenuous inference can be drawn that the news of the

Princes' death at Buckingham's hands took Richard by surprise sometime during August of 1483. Though he had appointed his son Lieutenant of Ireland soon after he assumed the throne, he had had his wife and himself crowned and he had distributed the great offices of the realm without also elevating his heir to the dignity of Prince of Wales. Not until the boy joined his parents at Pontefract in late August was he made Prince; the hurried sending to London for ceremonial raiment shows that the investiture at York sprang from a sudden resolve. It is possible that, out of tortuous sentiment or superstition or the ramifications of conscience, Richard could not bring himself to assume the irrevocable position of announcing a dynastic establishment until the news of Buckingham's murdering the deposed Edward V led him to take the final step of creating his son Prince of Wales.

So run some answers that can be made to the objection; it must, however, be taken into account.

Empirically, Buckingham appears more likely than Richard to have been the murderer of the Princes. On the supposition of the Duke's guilt, several instances of human behavior, otherwise enigmatic and anomalous, become comprehensible; his guilt fits, if it is not required to explain, a complex pattern of actions which sprang from Richard's assumption of the crown.

It is, of course, quite possible that Buckingham, to further his own purposes, persuaded Richard to acquiesce in the killing of the Princes and himself accomplished the deed, probably while he tarried those few days in London in the middle of July. This final interrelationship between Richard and Buckingham would thus bring to a mordant climax the history of Richard's incapacity to resist the blandishments of men of florid personalities and eloquent tongues. His failure to penetrate to the bottom of Clarence's shallow nature embittered his association with Bang Edward and hardened his mind against Edward's court. His inability to judge Buckingham's character served to push him along the road to the execution of Hastings and Rivers, and precipitated a rebellion against himself by causing him to load his weak and faithless ally with powers and posts.

APPENDIX I

If indeed Richard consented to the death of the Princes because he succumbed to Buckingham's persuasions, he must have found, in the reaches of his moral sense, no mitigation for his guilt as the responsible agent. This killing was a grievous wrong — and grievously, whether or not he instigated or allowed it, did Richard pay for it.

Yet, it must be remembered that, in purely political terms, the dismissing of the King from his throne is but the first step in dismissing him from the world. A deposed monarch has nowhere to fall but into the grave, as, in English history alone, the usurpations of Mortimer and Isabella, of Henry IV, and of Henry VII, and the triumph of the Roundheads abundantly testify. Though it seems unlikely that Richard, in deciding to take the crown, realized or was willing to face this fact, his assumption of power contained the death of the Princes within it. Horrible as their fate was, it was not a gratuitous or even an additional deed of violence; the push from the dais was itself the mortal stroke. In this sense it can be said that Richard undoubtedly doomed the Princes. The dark behavior of Henry Tudor, the ambitions and the opportunity possessed by Buckingham, give us reason to doubt, however, that he actually murdered them.

The available evidence admits of no decisive solution. Richard may well have committed the crime, or have been ultimately responsible for its commission. The Duke of Buckingham may well have committed the crime, or have persuaded Richard to allow its commission. What is inaccurate, misleading, and merely tiresome is for modern writers to declare flatly that Richard is guilty or to retail as fact the outworn tale of Thomas More. The problem has more shades than are represented by the all-black or all-white which have hitherto usually been employed in attempts to solve it. This famous enigma eludes us, like Hamlet: we cannot pluck out the heart of its mystery. But at least we can do better than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who thought that there was no mystery at all.

APPENDIX II

Richard's Reputation*

Richard yet lives, heWs black intelligencer . . .

THE history of Richard's reputation is a drama; it exhibits a cumulative plot, a powerful central conflict, and scenes of passion, scorn, vituperation, and ridicule. It begins more than 450 years ago, and is not yet ended.

At the heart of the drama stands the Tudor myth, or tradition, a collection of alleged facts and attitudes and beliefs concerning the course of history in fifteenth-century England, which was first propagated in the reign of Henry VIII and was given its final expression in the three plays of Henry the Sixth and the Richard the Third of William Shakespeare. The subsequent action of the drama is developed by the series of attacks made upon the validity of this tradition and by the spirited countersallies of its defenders.

Actually, the drama begins off stage, or before the curtain goes up, in the reign of Henry VII. At his court there existed among the men who had conspired against King Richard and brought about his overthrow a body of opinion, continually enlarged by tales and conjectures and anecdotal gossip, concerning the past which they had conquered. It was out of this amorphous mass of fact, reminiscence, and hearsay, growing ever more colorful and detailed with the passing years, that the authors of Henry VIIFs day fashioned the tradition. In the reign of Henry VII itself there were composed five works which contributed touches to the tradition and which therefore must be first noticed in this survey: John Rous' Historia Regum Angliae; Bernard Andre's Life of Henry VII; two works based upon the municipal records of London, Robert Fabyan's New Chronicles and the Great Chronicle; and the Memoires of Philippe de Commynes.

APPENDIX II

Rons' history, completed about 1490, was written for the eye of Henry VII, and its treatment of Richard is fashioned accordingly. During Richard's lifetime Rous, a chaplain at Guy's Cliffe, near Warwick, had written an account of the Earls of Warwick (the Rows Roll), which included a ringing tribute to King Richard. This he had promptly expunged upon Henry VIFs advent, but it remains in one copy of the Roll upon which, apparently, he was unable to lay his hands. His history actually contains very little about the House of York, being largely a tedious rigmarole of saints and miracles. Of Edward IV he says only that he was a great builder and captured Berwick. The few pages which he devoted to Richard exhibit details which seem authentic, and a number of stories of Richard's villainy then circulating at Henry's court he had never heard of; but his main purpose is to sketch for King Henry's gratification the picture of Richard as a "monster and tyrant, born under a hostile star and perishing like Antichrist." * It is Rous who begins the tale that Richard lay sullenly in his mother's womb for two years, and was born with teeth and with hair streaming to his shoulders.

Bernard Andre's Life of Henry VII adds little to the saga of Richard's evil deeds. It is, in fact, worth noting that Andre, who was Henry VIFs poet laureate, historiographer royal, and 'tutor to Prince Arthur, and who composed his work— mainly in the years 1500-03— directly at the King's wish, makes no mention of Queen Anne's death being due to poison, registers no suspicion that Richard had a hand in Clarence's execution, says that Henry VI's son Edward died in battle; and though in one passage he mentions the gossip that Richard killed Henry VI himself, in another he declares that it was Edward IV who determined Henry's death. Andre's principal contribution is a deepening of the diabolic lines of Richard's portrait Richard is a monster, delighting in deeds of blood from his babyhood. On the field of Bosworth, "swollen with rage like a serpent that has fed on noxious herbs, like a Hyrcanian tiger or a Marsian boar . . . [he] roars a wild command to his soldiers that he may slay Richmond [Henry Tudor] himself with new and un-

RICHARD THE THIRD

heard of tortures"! Henry, on the other hand, is as saintly as Richard is evil. In this violent antithesis lies the germ of the Tudor tradition. It is Andre who inaugurates the humanistic method of historical writing in England, endowing his chief characters with long (and often preposterous) speeches.

The two "city" chronicles, Fabyan's and the Great Chronicle, represent, on the other hand, a continuation of the medieval tradition. These are much alike and may be considered together, particularly since the editors of the Great Chronicle, which was finished in 1512 but not printed until 1938, make out a convincing case for Fabyan's authorship of it. Fabyan, a member of the Draper's Company and an Alderman of London, died in 1513. His New Chronicles of England and France, completed in 1504, was first published in 1516 in a version which ends with the death of Richard; the second edition, of 1533, printed by William Rastell, adds the reign of Henry VII. These works contribute very little, of either myth or fact, to our knowledge of Richard's life—a detail here and there, that is all. Even their time scheme is confused, both picturing Buckingham's rebellion, for example, as taking place in 1484.