Richard III - An Assessment by Horace Walpole

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> > 
> > The link didn't go through completely. I'm copying it, hoping that
it will link this time. If not, cut and paste the part that doesn't
link into the address box.
> 
> Potioncat:
> Instead, look to the left side of this page and click on "files".
Scroll down to Walpole and click on it. That will take  you to the  site.
> > 
Carol responds:
Of course! Considering that I'm the moderator of another Yahoo group
(on Ted Levine, if anybody cares), I should have known that. Of
course, when I upload a file I always check the  box that
automatically announces the new file to the groupm and since
goddlefrood didn't do it that way, i wasn't thinking of it as a file
in the Files. Does that make sense? No? I didn't thinks so.

Also, I wasn't thinking of it as an OT topic for an HPfGu group. It
certainly qualifies as OT! Anyway, thanks for the suggestion,
Potioncat. Now I can find it any time I like, and I trust that Jayne
found it, too.


> Carol:
> > 
> > http://www.richardiii.net/images/richard_middlehamstatue.jpg
> > 
> > Better no statue at all than that one, IMO!
> 
> Potioncat:
> As usual, I can't see it on my screen. 

Carol? You can't? Why not? If I give you the URL for the actual site
will you be able to see it, or won't your computer show images at all?
Maybe you just need a better video card?

Potioncat:
On a slightly different note, 
> I like the little in-joke in Sunne in Splendour. Richard's broken 
shoulder never quite heals and he has his armor ajusted for a better
fit. One shoulder is slightly higher than the other although  the
difference isn't apparant to others. 

Carol responds:
It's funny, though, how no one, even the most virulent anti-Richards,
believes that he was deformed, the withered arm and hunchback being
Sir Thomas More's invention and the limp Shakespeare's, but even
Ricardians like Penman cling to the raised shoulder. (I read somewhere
that Sir Thomas himself had one shoulder higher than the other--wish I
soulc recall where.) Besides, Richard's raised shoulder (admittedly a
minor disfiguration and no handicap in battle, if it was real) is
first mentioned by the timeserver Rous, along with the likely story
that he was two years in his mother's womb and born with teeth and
hair streaming to his shoulders. Naturally, the monstrous child must
have had some deformity, so Rous adds the raised shoulder that no one
mentioned during Richard's lifetime. (Oddly, giving that lengthy and
unprecedented pregnancy, not to mention a very dangerous childbirth
that would have killed a lesser woman, Richard's mother managed to
survive to outlive all her sons and most of her daughters, dying in
Henry VII's reign at age eighty.)

Anyway, I think that the raised shoulder is as much as part of the
myth as all the rest, but it could also have been the foundation on
which the myth was built. I doubt it, though. Deformity was supposed
to indicate evil in those days. (I don't think More intended his
account to be believed, though. I think it was a humanist's idea of a
joke to be shared with Erasmus and maybe Polydore Vergil, who as the
official historian had to add his share to the infamies and
deformities. I don't have time to explore that thesis, but Alison
Hanham, of all people, has apparently suggested something of the sort.)

Anyway, Mad-eye Moody would have been hanged on the spot (once he'd
AK'd a few people and proved himself guilty of sorcery) if he'd dared
to enter fifteenth- or sixteenth-century England. Actually, I'm not
sure what form of death he'd have suffered under the Yorkists or the
Tudors. I rather think the Lancastrians would have burned him, as they
did Joan of Arc. Anybody know the penalty for sorcery in that era?

Carol, deciding to add a touch of HP-related material for those who
don't care about Richard Plantagenet