Dirty Dick or Good King Richard?

Eric Christiansen

The Year of the Three Kings: 1483 Giles St Aubyn (Collins £11.95)

The year approaches when we celebrate the downfall of Richard III and the "rising of Henry Tudor. Five hundred Years ago

. this July, Richard was crowned,

and In August, according to Sir Thomas More, he gave orders for the murder of his Young nephew, the deposed Edward V. If anyone still feels like writing a really terrible book about the last Plantagenet king his loves, his crimes, his rise, his fall — it is not too late to begin. It has often been done before, and it will often be done again. There seems to be no limit to what the Public will tolerate on this subject. Blacken 11.1M, whiten him, uglify him, beautify him; it doesn' in- vestment matter. Richard is always what analysts call sexy. It is a strange obsession. It is understand- able that Shakespeare should have been in- terested in the man, since he died almost Within living

already Written memory, and More had

dY written a remarkable book about h.1111. The story he heard was cast in the form of a best-seller: crooked man, crook- ed career, multiple murder, hollow triumph, God's revenge. They loved it with Richard, and they came back for more with 1,A?acheth. However, since then, gangs of historians have put up road-works and diversion signs all over the plot, and the case of Richard has become much less sim- ple and enjoyable than the film. To those who are interested in, but not obsessed by, the historical Richard, I ven- ture to recommend The Year of the Three 4les by that fine all-rounder, Giles St Aubyn. Not because it is a work of original because it doesn't pretend to be. Nor yet • of the 'cool, civilised and witty Style' which the publishers attribute to the author: unless they refer to the quotations Of Grand Poethry with which he gems his narrative, rather as Edward VII had his bot- tles of champagne hidden in trees along the t,iine of his shooting parties at Sandringham. Nor because of his grasp of mediaeval history, which seems less firm than his grasp on the post-codpiece era. Not because of these things: but because the book is full thof common-sense, and easy to follow. If at could be said of every Ricardian study, Mr St Aubyn's would not stand out; but it can't.

So, for the latest news about Richard, this Will do. It shows that the hunchback has been corrected, and that the early murders have been removed from the file. The Duke of Gloucester has been reduced to one among several edgy potentates at the court of Edward IV, distinguished less by his ambition than by his farily conscien- tious, if brief, administration of the North. The king, his brother, died. The new king, young Edward, was a minor. Several of his relations hoped to do well out of this crisis, but Gloucester did best, and was made Pro- tector. However, Edward V was not quite young enough for his own safety. At 12, he was within a year or two of not needing a Protector. Haunted by the spectre of redun- dancy, Richard decided to become king, a job with uncertain prospects but no official retiring age.

He made a terrible hash of deposing his nephew, but he got away with it because his thuggish Yorkshire friends saw him as a kind of Boycott, and the Wykehamist bishops of the day had already worked out the famous alternative motto of the college: This Pass For Sale. We cannot be sure that he murdered his nephews, but we can be sure that he chose a very odd way of not murdering them. He kept them under lock and key, and they were never seen by any articulate witness after the summer of 1483. Nothing we know about Richard's career or character suggests that he should be given the benefit of the doubt. And, after all, he was not much of a king. After two years, he failed the elementary test of not being killed in a pitched battle by a Welshman on the make.

However, all that is beside the point. Historians may have demoted the man from arch-fiend to just another king, but the public remain unconvinced. It wants more.

Instead of diverting its attention to such salubrious topics as the development of humanism in English universities or the political theories of Sir John Fortescue, it turns again and again to Dirty Dick, alias Good King Richard. Why should this be?

I don't blame the Richard III society and its quarterly journal, The Ricardian. These

are merely symptoms of the national habit of forming associations on almost any pretext at all. I do blame Josephine Tey,

who wrote The Daughter of Time in 1951,

and fascinated thousands by treating this episode as detective fiction. In her view, Richard was no villain, but the victim of a frame-up. He was deliberately fitted up by Henry Tudor, his tame propagandists, and

Sir Thomas More, and made to appear guilty of crimes he never committed. A worried, honourable man, doing his best for the country, had been terribly wronged by history. Now the truth could be told. It was a good idea, in so far as it meant delivering a swift kick in the pants to the 'verdict of history'. As Sir Lewis Namier once remarked to me, after a rather tense game of snooker: 'Historical judgments mark the point at which the historian has ceased to do his research. Their content is of little value in itself. If there had been more than fifteen reds on the table, it is conceivable that you might not have lost.' (Happy days they were, now, alas, long gone, in the club-rooms of the Central Manchester Conservative Association!) No conclusions about anything that happened 500 years ago are quite unshakeable, and The Daughter of Time was at least a jolly good shake.

However, Miss Tey overdid it. Not con- tent with casting doubt on the case against Richard, she put an even less convincing case for Richard in its place — the old whitewash job concocted by the Victorian fan-club and Clements Markham. Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Father Brown would have let a suspect off so easily, even for the sake of controverting received opinion. Because it is impossible to prove Richard guilty of infanticide, it is not impermissible to conclude that he was guilty. By declaring him innocent on these grounds, Miss Tey committed what Poe called 'one of an in- finite series of mistakes which arise in the path of Reason through her propensity for seeking truth in detail.'

So do we all, from time to time, and The Daughter of Time does not pretend to be history, but a novel about a historical in- vestigation. Its success has 'only one really disquieting feature. Do all those thousands of Ricardians believe that all history is bunk, or merely that the history of Richard III is bunk and that the rest is reliable, fair, and factual? If the former, well and good. At least they are consistent. If the latter, then they really ought to meet a few historians I know. For a start, there is Dr — but this has been a very hot summer, and it would be foolish to make it any hotter.