THE RICHARD III SOCIETY

A  HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen.

The Richard III Society may on first acquaintance appear to be an extraordinary and rather odd phenomenon - a society dedicated to reclaiming the reputation of a king of England who died over 500 years ago and who reigned for little more than two years.

Our late chairman, Jeremy Potter, once wrote: ‘that the most remarkable thing about the Richard III Society is the fact that should exist at all’.

This statement provokes a number of questions:

Ø      What were the origins of the Richard III Society?

Ø      Why was it formed?

Ø      What has it achieved?

Ø      And why does it matter?

Over the next twenty-five minutes or so I shall attempt some answers.

For the first question I rather think we look back to 22 August 1485 when King Richard lost his life and crown at the battle of Bosworth. But more specifically perhaps we should look to the Council Chambers of the City of York, when on 23 August 1485, the city authorities, on hearing the result of the previous day’s battle,  recorded these heartfelt words:

That King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was piteously slain and murdered to the great heaviness of this city.

And they were brave words in those early days of regime change, written on behalf of people who had known Richard well for many years. By referring to the ‘murder’ of Richard III they were challenging the legality of Henry VII’s victory and firing the first volley in the long battle over King Richard’s posthumous reputation.

It is true and inevitable that the victors have the distinct advantage of being able to write the subsequent history. And what followed under the new Tudor regime was of course the tsunami wave of character denigration and the re-writing of history –  Richard III suffered from what we might today call the full tabloid treatment.

And unfortunately it stuck, helped in no small measure by the brilliant caricature of William Shakespeare’s Richard III, who was determined to prove a villain and could smile, and murder whilst he smiled

However facts, if accessible, cannot be airbrushed out of history. And enough remain today to throw considerable doubt on the traditional story of the nephew-murdering serial killer: a medieval Saddam Hussein.

And the facts give us this eyewitness account of Richard as king from a private letter written in 1483 from someone who knew Richard personally, Thomas Langton, Bishop of St David’s  He wrote the following

‘He contents the people wherever he goes … I have never seen a prince as good as he … surely God has sent him for the benefit of us all.’

This is a reaction to both Richard’s actions and personality. It is not the eyewitness account of a villain, and if there were smiles they were genuine ones.

In reality of course Richard III was no worse, but in all probability a good deal better, than most of his contemporaries. And he deserves better from history. And that in part is why the Richard III Society exists today

Following the death of Elizabeth I, the last monarch of the House of Tudor, and the subsequent accession of the Stuarts, it became easier in political terms to question the traditional account of Richard III. And over the centuries many did:  Sir George Buck in the early 17th century, Horace Walpole in the 18th and many historians during the 19th, including Caroline Halstead and Sir Clement Markham.

However, even into the twentieth century the traditional view, pretty much as stated by the Tudor historians, still held sway as the established and popular view of King Richard.

In the summer of 1924 Dr Saxon Barton and a group of friends formed The Fellowship of the White Boar. They were all interested in history, particularly the late fifteenth century and were motivated by the feeling that more should be done to challenge the established view of King Richard and promote the alternative more positive view of the king.

The Fellowship had no doubts that they could only pursue their aims by basing their case on sound historical evidence and scholarship. Saxon Barton and another founding member, Dr Phil Nelson, were both enthusiastic and gifted amateur historians. Indeed many members of the Fellowship were eminent in their own scholarly fields: Dr Nelson was a recognised authority on medieval stained glass and another member, the writer Aymer Vallance, the friend and biographer of William Morris, was an expert on medieval church architecture.

Saxon Barton himself wrote that ‘in my view historical belief must be founded on facts where possible and on honest conviction’

The Fellowship was never more than a small group of dedicated individuals; they did not achieve and probably did not aim for a wider membership base. They did however notch up a number of achievements during the years up until the Second World War. They bravely tried to counter the rather premature conclusions about Richard’s guilt reached in 1933 when the urn in Westminster Abbey said to contain the remains of the two Princes in the Tower was opened and its contents subjected to inconclusive scientific analysis. In 1934 they raised funds for a memorial window to Richard and his family at St Alkelda’s church in Middleham, Yorkshire, near to the site of the king’s favourite residence.  

With advent of the war in 1939 activities inevitably faded and whilst the Fellowship had their triumphs and disappointments they did at least establish the viability of an organisation dedicated to seeking historical justice for King Richard III.

It was not until the early 1950s that moves were made to revive the organisation.   These moves were very much the indirect result of the publication of Josephine Tey’s now quite famous detective novel The Daughter of Time. The novel is the story of a fictional detective who during a long stay in hospital becomes interested in King Richard and investigates the alleged crimes, the result being a vindication of the king.  To re-inforce the point the novel’s title comes from the old proverb – ‘Truth is the Daughter of Time’.

And over time the novel has been responsible for many people developing an interest in the life and times of Richard III. One very early such person was our senior vice-President Isolde Wigram. After reading The Daughter of Time she became fascinated with the subject, read widely about it, found a reference to Saxon Barton and the Fellowship, made contact with him and the rest, as they say, is history.

And to cut a very long story short Isolde and Saxon Barton met and together took the steps to re-found the Fellowship which was formally reconstituted at its inaugural meeting in room 17 of Caxton Hall on 26 January 1956.  In 1959 the name Richard III Society was adopted.

And that is why this year we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the what we call the re-founding. And in celebrating that achievement we all pay tribute to Isolde Wigram for the crucial role she played in bringing it about.

But there were other events in the mid-fifties that, co-incidentally to the moves to re-found the Fellowship, gave the cause great impetus. Two events in 1955 raised considerably the public profile of Richard III – one was Laurence Olivier’s classic film of Shakespeare’s Richard III and the other was Paul Murray Kendall’s revisionist biography of King Richard, which remains to this day the most important biography of the king that seeks to portray him in a wholly positive light.

Josephine Tey’s novel, Olivier’s film and Kendall’s biography have over the years proved excellent recruiting sergeants for the Society.   

During the next five decades the Society grew at a steady rate, helped by events such as the 1973 National Portrait Gallery exhibition ‘The Age of Richard III’ and the 1983 to 1985 quincentenary celebrations of Richard III’s reign. As membership increased so did the range of the Society’s activities covering such diverse areas as research, publications, memorials and social activities. Too many to go into detail this evening, but a few highlights:    

We have sponsored memorials to Richard and the House of York in buildings, churches and places associated with them. Most notably the statue of Richard III and our long-standing involvement with Fotheringhay Church, where Richard’s parents are buried. And the work of the Ricardian Churches Restoration Fund has over the years helped many churches with the repair and upkeep of their historic fabric.

To keep the membership happy and occupied there are regular meetings at both national and branch level,  occasional medieval banquets, and a vibrant programme of visits to places of historic interest. We also have a well-established quarterly magazine for members which provides a forum for news, debate and articles of historical and Society interest.

But the jewel in the crown is our contribution to research. Since its founding in 1924 the Society has promoted its research initiatives through a variety of activities including: the publication of primary sources, such as the Harleian Manuscript 433; group projects, such as the transcription of the Logge wills, and the Wills Index; and the organisation of regular research weekends, seminars and conferences. And we also grant a number of bursaries to post-graduate students undertaking research into our period.

The Ricardian is our flagship annual journal, which contains scholarly articles and reviews, many based on original primary research, with contributors from both the Society and the wider academic world. It is now recognised as a respected contributor to late-fifteenth-century studies,  and indeed it is one of the  principal reasons why the Richard III Society is taken seriously.

In 1985 the Society established The Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, in order to ‘further education, learning, and research related to the history of late medieval England (and in particular the life and reign of King Richard III) and to disseminate the results of such education, learning and research’. Effectively the Trust took over the Society’s publishing programme of primary source material and under its auspices has published, amongst other titles, the Continuation of the Crowland Chronicles and more recently The Beauchamp Pageant.

I mentioned that the early Fellowship was firmly based on proper research and scholarship. And its successor Society has not wavered from that path. There is always a danger in an organisation focussed on a single individual or cause that they become fundamentalist in their attitudes and opinions. Fortunately the Richard III Society has always consciously avoided the dead end of fundamentalism and has always adopted an objective and balanced approach to the issues surrounding the posthumous reputation of King Richard.

The aims of the Society as agreed at the re-founding in 1956 remain the guiding principles for all our activities:

In the belief that many features of the traditional account of the character and career of Richard III are neither supported by sufficient evidence nor reasonably tenable, the Society aims to promote in every possible way research into the life and times of Richard III, and to secure a re-assessment of material relating to this period and role in English  history of this monarch.

Are we making progress?  One historian noted recently that:

‘Richard’s advocates, the Ricardians, have grown in the past century from an insignificant minority into an influential and ultimately dominant majority.’

And it is true to say that the sway of the established traditional view of Richard III has since the war been challenged by a much more substantial alternative: to the extent that the alternative is now accepted as a valid position, not just the view of an unimportant minority. But the pendulum can swing back again and some more recent books about the king have started to veer back to the traditional  view. So we are still some way of making the alternative view the established view, but perhaps that is the big task for the future.

On the whole progress has been made at least in the academic world, but the traditional view of the king is still quite embedded in popular perceptions of history. This was brought home to me only yesterday when I was explaining to my manager why I need to take today off to come up to London. ‘Oh, Richard III,’ she said, ‘the one who drowned his nephews in a butt of Malmsey.’

Clearly a case both of ignorance and confusion. But it illustrates there is still much to do.

And, looking to the future, the Society has over the past few years been going through a period of reform and change. Even a society dedicated to a long dead fifteenth-century monarch has to keep up with the times. We have been reviewing our internal structures and financial management, the services we provide for members and the use we make of information technology and the internet. Members will now be familiar with and I hope appreciate the changes that have been made. And with our greatly enhanced website we can say with confidence that the cause of Richard III is now well represented in cyber-space.

Sometimes the question is asked, ‘what is the point of the Richard III Society?  Why be concerned about a long dead English king?’ It’s a valid question at time when we have so many other things to worry about, from global warming to England’s chances in the world cup.

Dr Lesley Boatwright in her excellent web-site page entitled Why do we need a Richard III Society?  writes that we exist because ‘we want to strip away the spin, the unfair innuendo, Tudor artistic shaping and the lazy acquiescence of later ages, and get at the truth.’

This is very true,  but there is another dimension to the question, one that appeals to our very English sense of fair play and sympathy for the underdog. In the context of the Society this has never been better expressed than on the occasion of the unveiling of the Richard III statue in Leicester’s Castle Gardens in 1980. And it is to be found amongst words spoken by HRH the late Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, when she unveiled the statue on behalf of our patron. And these words are as relevant today as when they were first spoken 26 years ago:

 ‘ … for the purpose and indeed the strength of the Richard III Society derives from a belief that the truth is more powerful than lies – a faith that even after all these centuries the truth is important. It is proof of our sense of civilised values that something as esoteric and as fragile as a reputation is worth campaigning for.’

And even if that reputation belongs to someone who lived centuries ago it is still relevant and important. Important because history and the study of history is vital to what is today and will be tomorrow. History is the cultural DNA.

The National Trust, together with English Heritage and other similar bodies,  have just launched a campaign called History – Matters, which seeks to raise the profile of history and its status in our national priorities, where so often it punches below its weight and true value.

The Richard III Society through its very existence and activities is making a real contribution to helping ensure that history does and will continue to matter.

And in particular we are doing our bit to ensure that medieval history, so easily overlooked between the Romans and the Tudors, does continue to be a part of the national curriculum. Utilising the skills and experience of members who are teachers we are producing an education pack of material relating to Richard III for use in secondary schools.

And tonight we are celebrating with the winners of our schools essay and poster competition. And I for one am confident that all the entrants have demonstrated that the debate over Richard’s posthumous reputation will be safe in the hands of the next  generation.

Today the Society is an international organisation with a strong and active membership approaching 3,500, with branches throughout the United Kingdom and in North America and Australasia. We have achieved much over the past fifty years and in this our anniversary year we can take great pride in that.

And of course for over half of those fifty years we have had the honour of receiving the Patronage of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Gloucester, and we are all grateful for the interest and support he has given over the years for the work that we undertake on behalf of his royal forebear and namesake.

And, building on our achievements, and helped by our reforms of recent years, we can face the next fifty years with confidence and enthusiasm.

It is interesting to ponder what our founder, Saxon Barton, would make of the Society today. Saxon died in 1957, but his widow Dorothy lived well into her nineties and not so many years ago wrote the following:

‘How delighted Saxon would be to know that the torch he lit so long ago is not only still burning but is so much strengthened. Long may it continue.’

Thank you.