The real Richard III (Was: Assasinations and attitudes towards them)

[justcarol67]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Caius Marcius"
<coriolan at w...> wrote:


Kathryn wrote: <snip> 
> one hand the number of monarchs that I can remember who have been
killed. Going back from the present day the first one I can think of
is Charles I (and that was a judicial execution), Richard III, Princes
in the Tower, Edward II (death arranged by his wife through judicial
application of a red hot poker somewhere unpleasent), Harold ...
Seriously going all the way back to 1066 that's all that spring to
mind - who have I missed, anyone? I think I'm missing one of the
Henrys, am I?
> > 
> 
CMC responded:
> You may thinking of Henry VI, who was murdered in the Tower of
London on May 21 1471 (some years after being deposed), by none other
than  the Duke of Gloucester, the future King Richard III. Shakespeare
has Richard commit the crime himself; more likely, Richard "merely" 
> supervised the execution. <snip>

Carol responds:
As a member of the Richard III Society, I feel compelled to point out
that Shakespeare's Richard III is a far cry from the real Richard,
either as Duke of Gloucester or King of England. (Note that
Shakespeare has Richard and his older brother George fighting in a
battle that occurred when they were eight and eleven, respectively,
and known to have been sent for safety to Burgundy.)

The real Richard Duke of Gloucester was a boy of eighteen (who had
just proven himself a capable battlefield general) when Henry VI was
murdered. Even the most fiercely anti-Ricardian historians blame
Richard's older brother, Edward IV, for this judicial murder. Richard
was a staunch supporter of his brother (his motto, "Loyaultie me
Lie"--Loyalty Binds Me--reflects this conviction) and both his brother
George (the Duke of Clarence) and Edward's daughters stood between
Richard and the throne if he'd had any interest in usurping it from
the powerful and not always scrupulous Edward. Richard may have been
sent by Edward to supervise the execution as part of his duty as
Constable of England, or more likely to give the order to Lord Dudley,
Constable of the Tower, to do so, but not even the most fiercely
anti-Ricardian historian suggests that the eighteen-year-old Richard
actually killed Henry himself. Nor was it in character for him to do
so. Edward later had *George* executed on suspicion of treason, but he
trusted Richard and rewarded him for his faithful service with more
and more administrative responsibilities. 

Note also that Edward had allowed the deposed and intermittently
insane Henry VI to languish in the Tower, but when Henry's heir,
Edward of Lancaster (one year younger than Richard almost to the day)
was killed in battle, Edward had no reason to keep the deposed madman
alive. Cold-blooded practicality on Edward's part, no question, but
his intention was to snuff out Lancastrian rebellions--which worked
remarkably well until his premature death at forty-one (from
complications of gout) threw the succession into a turmoil. I won't go
into the details, but there were good reasons why Edward IV's son
Edward V, age 12, was never crowned and why he and his brother were
declared illegitimate by Parliament and the crown given to Richard,
known through the kingdom as a just and highly competent
administrator. The former princes, stripped of their titles and claims
by Parliament, were indeed put in the Tower of London, but that
doesn't mean they were in prison. The Tower contained royal apartments
where Richard himself stayed with his queen before their joint
crowning and where queens, including Edward IV's wife, Elizabeth Grey,
gave birth to their children.

As king, Richard III passed beneficial laws (among other things, he
established the right to bail, he removed tariffs from books to
benefit the new printing trade, and he founded the College of Arms to
insure accurate genealogical records for royalty and nobility). He
refused to imprison or execute the two women who plotted against him
(his brother Edward IV's widow, Elizabeth, and Henry Tudor's mother,
Katherine Beaufort). It's very unlikely that he murdered his nephews
since they had been declared illegitimate and he was already king.
Their disappearance could only hurt him (as indeed it did) not help
him. There is no proof that they died (the skeletons in the Tower
could have been girls from Roman times for all we know; the inspection
of the bones in the 1930s took for granted the identity of the
skeletons and the manner of their deaths). If indeed they were
murdered, the two people with motives were Henry Tudor (his shaky
Lancastrian claim would have been invalidated by their existence) and
the Duke of Buckingham, who as warden of the Tower had access to them
and later rebelled against Richard. (My own belief is that Buckingham
did it. He was the only person with both opportunity and motive.) The
learned cleric Thomas Langton wrote of Richard, "God hath sent him for
the weal (well-being) of us all" and William Caxton dedicated his book
"The Order of Chivalry" to him in the hope that his knightly spirit
would be an example to "other young lords knights and gentlemen of
this royaume." (Richard was only thirty when he became king and not
quite thirty-three when he died.)

After Richard's death in battle (the result of a daring downhill
attack on Henry Tudor that would have succeeded if William Stanley's
men hadn't suddenly come to the aid of "the Tydder"), the people of
York, where he had governed as Lord of the North before becoming king,
 expressed their grief that "King Richard, late mercifully reigning
upon us, was. . . piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness
of this city." It would be remarkable indeed if the man for whom this
epitaph was written were a heartless murderer and tyrant.

Carol