Broadcasting
Off with his head!
Paul Johnson
Ifirst became aware of the enormous success of Channel 4's trial programme O m Richard III when I heard a group of rOugh-looking men arguing about it pas- sionately in a café. Richard III is one of those historical monsters, like Henry VIII, who arouse the strong interest of ordinary ni.en and women not usually concerned by Mstory at all. In a way, the programme's success recalled that of the original TV Production of Nineteen Eighty-Four which had place at a time before the middle class 'lad deigned to watch TV much, but struck Chord in the working-class breast, so that ,131g Brother Is Watching You' became a familiar phrase on building-sites and the fkaetory floor. Richard III is popularly seen u0th as a devil-figure and/or an underdog, 5 ()that the unanimous verdict of not-guilty In the TV programme caused popular satisfaction that he had 'got away with it'. fi..eif course such programmes have no- ,."1.Ing to do with history, even though mstorians participate in them. They have nike'thing much to do with justice either. If `t",e presumption of innocence is main- ta!ned (in Plantaganet and Tudor state trhials there was a presumption of guilt), ere is no possibility of convicting any murderer half a millennium after the event, for all the physical evidence is gone a,nd literary evidence would not be admiss- !°.le, being hearsay. So the jury, working the assumptions of 20th-century efln. glish law, were bound to acquit lehard. Such programmes are simply entertainment.
411 think this point comes across strongly
i!he excellent article written on the 'i.!IY.leet by Jeremy Potter in last week's Isiener. As he remarks, the lawyers might did know a fraction of what the historians
. 'but on the day the lawyers were
playing a home fixture to their own rules'. Exactly. Historians, both of the late Plan- tagenet and the Tudor period, have never had much doubt that Richard was a bad man who willed the death of the princes. It is true that the Duke of Buckingham, the alternative chief suspect, stood to gain, theoretically, from their death, but not so much as Richard. In any case, Richard sent them to the Tower of London, and it is inconceivable that anything could have happened to them there without his wish and approval. It was the chief fortress in the kingdom, and a palace as well as a prison: the monarch customarily spent the night there on the eve of his coronation in Westminster Abbey. Richard was a high- born gangster, always willing to murder to suit his purpose. He came at the end of a long period of degeneration in English public standards, which began with the dethronement of Richard II in 1399. It was the great merit of Henry VII, not a pleasant man in many ways, that he ended nearly a century of gang-warfare and pub- lic plundering, and restored stability to the throne and government. Contemporaries were in no doubt about this, and that is one reason Henry and his family were held in high esteem. The issue has been obscured by a curious piece of mythology concerning the role of Sir Thomas More. It is often said that the original vilification of Richard III was the work of More, who wrote 'a piece of Tudor propaganda' at the instigation of Henry VII. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a long and careful chapter on More's History of King Richard III in the latest biography of More by Richard Marius, one of the editors of the fine Yale edition of More's works. I reviewed this outstanding book recently for the New
York Times, but it has not yet, I think, been published here. No one should com- ment on the role of More without first reading what Marius has to say.
More wrote versions of his book in both Latin and English, but he did not finish either, and neither was published. So to say that he wrote the work as a piece of propaganda to please the Tudor state is nonsense. He wrote it for his own satisfac- tion and to teach a moral lesson about tyranny. He certainly did not write it to please Henry VII, whom he had strong reasons to dislike, and in any case Henry was dead at the time of its composition in 1514-15. It must have circulated in manu- script, because it was incorporated into Edward Hall's Chronicle in 1543. Hall in turn was copied by Holinshed in 1577, and it was chiefly from Holinshed that Shakespeare concocted his villain. In 1557, however, Rastell published the biography in his collected edition of More's English works. He used a holograph and his headnote telling us of this is, according to Marius, strong external evidence of More's authorship. It is a work of great innovatory brilliance, and I do not see how anyone except More could have written it, though it is unlike any of his other books.
It is also said that More got his informa- tion exclusively from Cardinal Morton, Henry VII's chief counsellor, another piece of the 'Tudor propaganda' theory. Indeed, in a remarkably silly article in last Saturday's Daily Telegraph, it was stated that Morton actually wrote it. In fact More had many sources besides Morton. His own father, for one, and, most important, Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk, who had been one of Richard's principal supporters. There were still many people who knew the facts of Richard's reign, and to whom More had access.
That indeed was the trouble, and ex- plains why More never published his book, or even finished it. Marius argues, follow- ing A. F. Pollard, that there were simply too many powerful people around in 1514- 15 who had been stained by the guilt of Richard's regime, to make publication safe. They included the ferocious and ambitious Howard clan; the third Duke of Buckingham, who would have objected strongly to what More wrote about his father; the second Duke's widow, Catherine Woodville, sister of Edward IV's queen, who had a whole range of connections near the centre of power; Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, who would have been infuriated by More's ridicule of his mother, Elizabeth Lucy. More must have realised, at some point in his composition of the work, that if he published it his chances of rising in the king's service would be ruined irreparably; so, discouraged, he gave up. Hall published the essential contents only after most of the people who might have been offended were in their graves. There are many mistakes and confusions in More's work, but in essentials the story he tells is true, and rings true, pace the Richard III Society.
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