BOOKS.
RICHARD OF GLOUCESTER.*
No period in our history since the Norman Conquest has been so inadequately explored as the latter half of the fifteenth century. Not only are the contemporary records scanty and dubious, but the Wars of the Roses and their sequelae have failed to attract the undivided attention of any historian of the highest rank. Bishop Stubbs does, of course, reach the battle of Bosworth and the accession of "Henry Tydder," but the chapters which deal with the short-lived triumph of the house of York form the least satisfactory portion of the COltnilittfig•W2 History, and he leaves the impression of having accepted the traditional version of the Tudor annalists without much inquiry into its foundation.
Even before Horace Walpole wrote his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III. there were signs of reaction against the acceptance in its entirety of the popular portrait of the last Plantagenet ; and later authors, notably Miss Halstead, have proved conclusively that many of the charges heaped up during the Tudor reigns were pure fable. But Richard has never yet had a champion so whole-hearted and so thoroughgoing as Sir Clements Markham. He upholds the White Rose of York against all comers with a fervour and devotion that have hitherto been consecrated to quite another "dear White Rose." His zeal embraces the whole family of the Duke Richard, who claimed the throne of England, and was slain at Wakefield. If he cannot find in Edward IV. a model King, his virtues outweigh his deficiancies. Even Clarence, "false, fleeting, perjured Clarence," is tenderly handled. "The Rat, the Cat, and Lovel our dog" are high-minded and faithful servants, while "Dimon, their master," is a paragon of knightly virtue.
Sir Clements Markham is convinced that from the accession of Henry VII. down to the death of the last Tudor Sovereign there was an elaborate falsification of the events of the Yorkist reigns and a subsidised blackening of the character of the Yorkist Kings. To him Polydore Virgil is a malignant and unscrupulous foreigner who had no first-hand information, who wrote purely to order, and deliberately burnt all the manuscripts on which he could lay hand so that his own faults might go undiscovered. Fabyan is "a fulsome Tudor partisan, anxious to please the reigning powers and ready to record any story against the fallen King." Roue, the antiquary of Guy's Cliff, is "an unblushing time-server." Hall "is little more than a translation of Polydore Virgil served up with embellish- ments invented by himself." Eolinshed copied Hall, and Shakespeare dramatised Holinshed. But the worst villain of all, who inspired, if he did not write, the History of Richard IlL, usually attributed to Sir Thomas More, and who was himself the inventor and propagator of the worst slanders against that Monarch, was Cardinal Morton.
This is a very tall order, and we believe that Sir Clements is entirely mistaken about More and Morton; but, nevertheless, there is a solid substratum of truth as regards the bias of which the Tudor historians give proof on every page. Bishop Stubbs has pointed out that Richard III. owes the general condemnation with which his life and reign have been visited to the fact that he left none behind him whose duty or whose care it was to attempt his vindication. The hideous and grotesque figure which did duty for "the bloody Duke of Gloucester," the hunch-backed dwarf, green-eyed and bons with teeth, has long since disappeared. His severest critics admit that he was courageous, sagacious, clear-sighted, and
• Richard III. his Life and Clutrart.rr Reviewed in the Light of Recent Research. By Sir Clemente B. Markham, K.C.B. With a Portrait. London Smith, Elder, and Co. [10s. OS. wt.]
that where be was best known, as on the Scotch border and on those Yorkshire estates which were once the Kingmaker's, he was popular with gentle and simple alike. Some of the worst stories that found currency about him have been conclusively proved to be fables, and good reason has been shown for doubting ninny of the others.
On one point, however, the defence has always hitherto broken down; there is no getting over the murder of the little Princes in the Tower, and an uncle who could perpetrate so brutal a crime is capable de font; he may have stabbed young Edward of Lancaster in the field of Tewkesbury, he may have dirked the
Meek Usurper in the Tower, or committed any other atrocity. With this- difficulty Sir Clements grapples boldly, and he will, we should imagine, be content to stand or fall by the measure of success he achieves in the endeavour. Edward V. and his little brother disappear from authentic history on June 25th, 1483. That they were murdered in the Tower of London is now universally admitted, and there seems no reason to doubt that theirs were the two skeletons discovered at the foot of a staircase in the White Tower in the reign of Charles II. Yet, strangely enough, no public announcement of their disappear- ance was made, nor does any inquiry as to their fate appear to have been prosecuted when Henry VII. ascended the throne, though one would have thought that he would have hastened to place the coping-stone upon his predecessor's iniquities. It was not till some years later, after Yorkist conspiracies had been set on foot to effect their liberation, and after Lambert Simnel and then Perkin Warbeck had arisen to personate the young Duke Richard, that the story of the assassination was first made public. In the year 1502 a certain Sir James Tyrrel, who had incurred the displeasure of Henry VII., WES beheaded on Tower Hill While lying under sentence of death be is said to have made confession, confirmed by his accomplice Dighton, that, acting under Richard's orders, he had murdered the children of Edward in the way with which chroniclers, poets, and painters have made us familiar. The confession, if it was ever made, has disappeared, and Sir Clements Markham maintains that it never existed. But such, at any rate, was the story which Henry promulgated after Tyrrel's execution, and if the confession was never made, where did the King get his facts? Did he or Morton or some other romancist born out of due time invent them? Sir Clements is ready with his answer. There was no need for invention, because Henry had known the story for sixteen years it was be himself who bad ordered the crime, which was perpetrated on some date between the middle of June and the middle of July, 1486. Tyrrel had done the deed with the accomplices and in the circumstances detailed in the alleged confession. The King had only followed the common form of a fraudulent alibi he had transferred real events to a false date.
The objections to this ingenious theory seem to us insuper- able. We cannot follow the author into his psychological reasoning that of the two Kings Henry was the more likely to have been it priori the murderer ; it rests largely on an estimate of Richard's character which begs all the questions at issue. Nor can we fling all surviving contemporary history and tradition to the winds, even if it is tainted by Lancastrian origin. Sir Clements Markham denies the existence of any general rumour of the murder during Richard's lifetime, or that he incurred unpopularity for that or for any other reason; but he admits that the chronicler of Croyland Abbey records the report in the summer of 1483, and that in January, 1484, the murder of the Princes was alleged as a fact by the Chancellor of France in a speech to the States-General at Tours. His attempt to trace these two statements to Morton is a piece of pure conjecture, and Sir Clements's case must fail unless he can produce something in the shape of solid evidence to show that the boys were alive on the date of Henry's succession, which, to our mind, he completely fails to do. In an order in King Richard's household regulations dated after the death of his own son in April, 1484, children are mentioned of such high rank that they were to be served before all other Lords. And in a warrant printed in Rymer, dated March 9th, 1485, provision is made for the wardrobe of "the Lord Bastard." This is all—save an argument drawn from the behaviour of the mother and sisters of the Princes—which Sir Clements Markham can adduce, and we submit that it is wholly unconvincing and insufficient. He is following the most hopeful track, however, in ransacking the old mammas, which even now are imperfectly calendared, and should he find material there to establish his contention, we will be among the first to congratulate him. The whole episode is enveloped in mystery; the details of the Tyrrel confession are highly suspicious, but the towers of Julius, we fancy, will keep their secret to the end. Sir Clements Markham possesses the temperament of an explorer rather than of a judge; we cannot allow history to be reconstructed in such slapdash fashion, or suffer an English King to be saddled with the foulest crime in English history on mere hypothesis.
But though we judge him to have failed in his main con- tention, the author has painted a vivid picture of the epoch between the battles of Northampton and Bosworth ; he has bestowed the skill of a trained geographer in elucidating the topography of Towton, and Wakefield, and Barnet; and he has swept into limbo a mass of crude absurdity. He shows good ground for believing that Edward of Lancaster was not stabbed in cold blood by the Royal brothers, but fell fighting in the melee at Tewkesbury. He contends that if Henry VI. was murdered at all, which he denies, Richard could not have been the culprit. The King died in the Tower on some date in May, 1470. It is capable of the clearest proof that the 21st was the only day in that month on which the Duke of Gloucester was in London. So the 21st has been fixed upon by the chroniclers with great circumstantiality of detail, and the following day was kept up to the Reformation as the obit of Healy VI. The whole story rests on nothing more than rumour, and Sir Clements Markham propounds an ingenious theory falling far short of proof that Remy died on the 24th.
Brave, resolute, far-seeing, a most skilful captain, an admir- able administrator, and gifted with a personal fascination which never failed him when he chose to exercise it, the last scion of the great house of Anjou was a Plantagenet to the backbone. He was a strange blend of the first and third Edwards with the ruthless Pules and handsome Geoff rys. He lived in a hard and cruel age; he was inured to bloodshed from his boyhood ; like Tiptoft, the Earl of Worcester, he was a scholar and the friend of Caxton, and his career shows more than a trace of Florentine statecraft. In the words of Bishop Stubbs, be might have reigned well if he could have rid himself of the entanglements under which he began his reign.
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