Richard’s earlier defenders: their motives and methods
by Dr Lesley Boatwright

The Tudor writers saw to it that the prevailing view of Richard III in their time was of a man and king deformed both physically and morally, who met a very proper end. Historical truth counted for nothing; the moral lesson of crime and punishment was much more satisfying, especially to those who created it. 

The man in the street was not quite so sure. In 1525 the mayor and aldermen of London protested to Wolsey about his demand for a benevolence – something Richard’s statutes had forbidden.  ‘I marvel that you speak of Richard III,’ said Wolsey, ‘which was a usurper and a murderer of his own nephews.’  The mayor and aldermen stuck to their point, saying ‘Although he did evil, yet in his time were many good Acts made.’

Sir William Cornwallis

No defence of Richard appeared in print in Tudor times, but at least one appears to have been circulating privately in the 1590s. It was a rather ambiguous defence, which could even be regarded as an attack: The Encomium of Richard III, by Sir William Cornwallis the younger. Jeremy Potter regarded it as dubious.[1] ‘Its real effect is to denigrate Richard,’ said Alison Hanham, reviewing its modern edition (by J.A. Ramsden and A.N. Kincaid, 1977) in The Ricardian in 1978.[2]

The Cornwallis family were Roman Catholics, who had been too active in the reign of Mary to do well under Elizabeth. People were expected to attend Sunday services in the Church of England at least once a month, and were fined for non-attendance.  At first these fines were small, a shilling or so, but in 1580 Pope Gregory XIII issued his fatwa saying that to kill Elizabeth would not be a mortal sin, and the next year the fines jumped to an astronomical level, hitting recusant families very hard: they either had to pay up or go to Protestant services. William Cornwallis was therefore probably no admirer of Elizabeth Tudor. Nevertheless, he was not unpatriotic.  Part of his justification for Richard’s killing of Hastings is that Hastings (who could not be innocent because he was ‘a Pentioner of the ffrench king Lewis the 11th ... he of all others that moste affected Tirranie, and was naturally the mortall and most vndermininge enimie of this kingdom’) had been bribed to dissuade Edward IV from assisting Mary of Burgundy against Louis, so that she had to seek help elsewhere, which led ultimately to the Spanish domination of the Netherlands.

Cornwallis, like many prominent Elizabethans, liked to write.  He wrote paradoxes.  This is a literary form in which rhetorical skills are used to defend something which everyone believes clearly indefensible; the motivation is not so much to prove to people that they have been wrong, but to prove how clever you are at manipulating words. It seems that Cornwallis also wrote a paradox in defence of the French pox, an interesting thought. Paradoxes did not often find their way into print: they were circulated among friends, who might add to them and pass them on to others. The earliest extant ms., which forms the basis of the 1977 edition, contains a dedication by Cornwallis to John Donne.

The Encomium (Praise) is a paradox of an unusual form, according to its editors.  Rosalie L. Colie, who wrote a study of paradoxes, says it fails because it does not ‘surprise or dazzle by its incongruities’ and strikes the reader as an all-but-serious defence, ‘sincere but lame’.[3] It seems to be written in answer to an attack on Richard in a chronicle.  Cornwallis speaks of that chronicle’s author as ‘thow Recorder of vntruthes’, ‘thy malitious spirit’, ‘our corupte chronicler’, and of  ‘the partiall writinges of an vndiscreete Cronicler, a fauorer of the Lancastrian familye’.  Naturally, this has led some people to postulate that a work by John Morton, or Thomas More’s account, is meant.  Alison Hanham in her review thought it must refer to Hall’s chronicle, or its revisions by Grafton or Holinshed.  Ramsden and Kincaid  agree that there is a bitterness in Cornwallis’s work, a sense of personal involvement, but think it might have come from a ‘purely intellectual stimulus’.[4]

Cornwallis told John Donne that he had lately been reading the life of Richard, and could not suffer ‘soe maney vertues (wherwith his Enemies coulde not denye him to be adorned) to be dusked, and drowned by vices ...’  He begins his defence with the comment: ‘That historians are Corupted, that they rather confirme, then Conuince errours, noe man neede doubte, since knowinge the affaires of our owne time, and readinge theire Relations therof will make anie discreete man knowe theire partiallity ...’

With Cornwallis as advocate, we may think, who needs a prosecution?  Richard was born with teeth – that was his good luck, because nursemaids tell us that teething is painful.  Richard had a crooked body – but that was Nature’s generosity, because she put a straight mind in him, and anyway it didn’t stop him doing ‘actions most perfectly valiant’.  That he killed Prince Edward at Tewkesbury and Henry VI in the Tower simply confirmed his love for his brother Edward.  He executed the Woodvilles to save himself.  Hastings could not have been innocent because Commines tells us he was a pensioner of Louis XI.  By killing the Princes, Richard may have offended God, but as their deaths freed the people from sedition – ‘the least Color of right provokes Innovatinge humors to stirre uppe sedition’ – this showed his love for his people: ‘he adventured his soul for their quiet’.

As to the manner of Richard’s claiming the throne, Cornwallis has an answer to everything.  First, concerning Shaa’s sermon, he says that no-one will think ‘this prince soe indiscreet as to have wittnesse that he comanded that Sermon ... it is rather like that Shawe being more ambitious than his callinge required ... was boulde to publish his fancies in hope of preferment’, but Shaw’s hopes vanished ‘in to smoake’, and he languished and died.  On the other hand, if Richard did command the sermon, to charge Cecily with adultery was ‘a matter of noe sutch greate moment, since it is noe wonder in that sexe’.  Anyway, ‘he had more reason to aduenture her fame, then his kingdom, because of two euells we must allwayes choose the leaste.’

For a man who can approve such cavalier treatment of women, Cornwallis is surprisingly tender towards Richard’s relationship with Anne.  ‘It is Constantly affirmed (saieth our Corupte Cronicler) that he firste noised after deuised the death of his wife’, and Anne heard the rumours.  ‘This reporte made a greate impression in the Queene deeminge (as weomen are euer fearefull) this propheticall relation to be the forerunner of her end, which bewailinge to her Husbande he sought with all kindnesse to remoue that malancholick fantasy.’

In fact, interspersed among these wayward justifications, there are passages in which Cornwallis firmly points out Richard’s good qualities.  ‘His edictes are extant, what can be founde in them not becominge a Kinge, what not befittinge the Religious worshipp of god, and the seruice of his Countrye ... He was noe taxer of the people, noe opressor of the Commons ... noe Suppressor of his Subiectes ...’  and ‘his humilitye they terme pride, his liberality prodigallity, his vallour crueltye, and bloodthirstines’.  He also puts his finger on one of the reasons for Richard’s downfall: ‘had not his mercye exceeded his Crueltye, his saffety had bene more assured and his name (peraduenture) not soe mutch subiect to obloquy’ – in that Richard cut off the head of ‘a mighty Conspirator, yet he suffred the Conspiracye to take soe deepe Roote’ by not punishing the Countess of Richmond, but simply ‘comittinge her to the Custodye of her husbande’.

Cornwallis signs off ‘as a Charitable wellwisher to an opressed & defamed kinge’, but he never revealed himself as this to a wider public. Circulated among his friends, the Encomium was not published until 1616, after his death. 

Tudor Tail-piece

No-one would include William Shakespeare among Richard III’s defenders, but his Richard III (1592) does include a very interesting passage about hearsay evidence – which is often cut out when the play is produced.  It comes in Act II, Scene 4.  Cecily, duchess of York, is talking to her little grandson Richard (the current duke of York) in the presence of the Archbishop and Queen Elizabeth Woodville.

Is this an indication that Shakespeare himself was perfectly well aware that at least some reports about Richard circulating in his own day were fabrications?  In the 1590s Shakespeare was, after all, in the orbit of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton.[5]  Ramsay and Kincaid suggest that Southampton was the ‘Hen.W.’ who procured a copy of Cornwallis’s ms., adapted it – awkwardly – as ‘a tract for his own times’ (i.e. the earl of Essex’s rebellion in 1600) and dedicated it to Sir Henry Neville.[6]  Did Shakespeare ever talk to Southampton about Richard III?

Sir George Buck

Sir George Buck was born in 1560 into a family which, he claimed, had served the Yorkist kings and then the Howard dukes of Norfolk. He said that his great-great-grandfather John had been killed fighting for York at St Albans in 1455, and his great-grandfather John had served both Edward IV and Richard III as Gentleman of the Privy Chamber; and also Richard III as Controller of the Household (though he later retracted this last claim, and it is manifestly wrong).  The Johns are not mentioned in the Patent Rolls, or in BL Harleian ms. 433, and it has been surmised that Sir George was presenting himself with ancestors more prominent than those he actually had.  He also said that the second John had been taken prisoner at Bosworth, and executed two days later, and there certainly was a John Buck who was attainted after the battle.

He and his more immediate forebears served the Howards.  His grandfather Robert was at Flodden Field with the second duke in 1513, and his father Robert had fought (under the duke of Somerset) at Musselburgh in 1547.  Sir George himself served under the Lord Admiral Charles Howard, his patron, on the Cadiz expedition of 1596. 

He was educated at Cambridge and the Inns of Court, and was a man of many parts: scholar, diplomat, translator, poet and antiquarian.  He was MP (for Gatton in Surrey) in 1593 and 1597, esquire of the body to Elizabeth I in 1599, and appointed Master of the Revels to James I in 1607. This sounds swashbuckling, but was not the same as a Lord of Misrule.  In fact one of his tasks was to license plays for performance, and he seems to have been somewhat prudish, removing some references to lust and cutting out passages denigrating women.[7]

He had an interesting circle of friends.  After the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, manuscripts as well as monks emerged from the cloisters into the world at large.  A number of Tudor gentlemen delighted in collecting these manuscripts, and in 1596 founded the Society of Antiquaries.  Among its members were William Camden, whose antiquarian excursions round England led to the publication of his Britannia in 1586, John Stow, a London merchant who wrote the Annals of England and A Survey of London, and Sir Robert Cotton, the great collector of manuscripts, who had a copy of the Crowland Chronicle.  Members lent each other books and manuscripts, researched topics, and gave papers on them at meetings.  We don’t know if Sir George Buck was a member or not, but it seems very likely.  He certainly knew many members and had access to their collections. By his day, the eye-witnesses to the fifteenth century were all dead, but documents of the period were becoming available. 

Buck wrote his History of King Richard the Third in 1619, three years before his death, but it was not published until 1646, in the dying stages of the Civil War. The manuscript, heavily revised, had been almost ready, but not quite.  It was his great-nephew, another George Buck (but ‘esquire’, not ‘Sir’) who took it over and revised it further.  Some of his revision was good, simplifying Sir George’s rather turgid style, and cutting out some philosophising digressions, but he also cut out some of the personal references and toned down some of Sir George’s plain speaking. ‘Discussions of Morton are very drastically cut, since the original had very little good to speak of Morton ... [Henry VII’s] responsibility for destroying the Yorkist heirs and the emphasis on the Yorkists’ right are minimized as far as possible ... Henry becomes confident, pure, and manly ... and [there is an] adherence to Henry VII’s own device of backdating his reign to make Richard appear to have been the traitor against the true king at Bosworth.’[8]  The 1646 version of the History was all that was in print until as late as 1979, when A.N. Kincaid edited it and rescued Sir George’s original account.  This fact invalidates a lot of the criticism levelled at the work through the centuries by writers who did not bother to check the original ms. to see what Sir George had actually written.

The History is in five books.  The first two deal with Richard’s life.  Book III refutes various accusations made against him, including his deformities, and puts the case for Perkin Warbeck’s being Richard, duke of York.  Book IV deals with the bastardy of Edward IV’s children, and the mooted marriage between Richard and Elizabeth of York.  Book V discusses Richard’s virtues and good works – and the fate of the remaining Plantagenets.

The importance of Buck’s work cannot be over-estimated.  He was a man who did not just accept what he read – he did extensive research to see if it was acceptable. He points out that the case against Richard is merely based on suspicion, and that ‘suspicion is in law no more guilt or culpableness than imagination’. He says he will ‘clear and redeem him from those improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals, ... and make truth ... present herself to the light ... And Morton and More and their apes shall be delineated and painted in their true colours.’

Kincaid’s assessment is that Buck ‘... deals with Richard’s reputation by shrewd analysis rather than emotional harangue.  Upon dispassionate examination, one finds not a heated emotional defence of a hero but a surprisingly cool examination.  Buck’s passion appears to be rather for accuracy than for Richard III. He shows the same regard for minor historical inaccuracies as for Richard’s reputation. ... His final assessment of Richard is balanced and judicious. “Although this prince was not so superlative as to assume the name of holy or best, you see him a wise, magnificent and a valiant man,  and a just, bountiful and temperate; and an eloquent and magnanimous and pious prince; and a benefactor to the holy church and to the realm.  Yet for all this it hath been his fortune to be aspersed and fouled and to fall into this malice of those who have been ill-affected towards him ...”.’[9]

Buck not only made use of documentary sources, he cited them so that others could evaluate their validity. He was the first to use the evidence of the Crowland Chronicle, and of Titulus Regius, a very different approach from the ‘men say that ...’ gossip which peppers the moralising fabrications of the Tudors.  From Crowland and Titulus Regius he discovered that it had been Lady Eleanor Butler (née Talbot) whom Bishop Stillington said he had married to Edward IV, not the lower-born Elizabeth Lucy of More’s account.  This put a totally different slant on the story of the pre-contract.  As Buck says, when the Duchess of York exhorted and urged her son to acknowledge his first wife and not marry Elizabeth [Woodville], Lady Grey, she was not speaking of ‘the daughter of one Wayte, of Southampton, a mean gentleman, if he were one’ but ‘the daughter of a great peer of this realm, a man of most noble and illustrious family’, ‘a fair and virtuous lady’.  It was altogether more plausible that Lady Eleanor had insisted on a contract of marriage than that the king’s ‘witty concubine’ had done so.

Buck is the sole source for the existence of the letter from Elizabeth of York concerning the death of Queen Anne.  He saw it himself; it was in the possession of the earl of Arundel, then head of the Howard family.  ‘He keepeth that princely letter in his rich and magnificent cabinet, among precious jewels and rare monuments’.  But because later ages thought that it cast vile aspersions on English womanhood, writers said, in a parade of mounting absurdity, that it was a forgery, that Buck had misread it – or made it up. He explained it (somewhat ingenuously) as written because Richard obtained Elizabeth’s goodwill to divert her affection from the Earl of Richmond ‘to whom Morton and the seditious barons had promised her’, but he also repeated Crowland’s story of how Richard summoned all the notables to the Great Hall of St John’s near Smithfield and flatly denied the story.  The modern suggestion of Portuguese spouses for both Richard and Elizabeth, discussed in recent Bulletins, provides a much better explanation for this letter, and would certainly have interested Sir George.[10]

We may imagine Buck and his circle of friends discussing Richard at their meetings.  He tells us, ‘I like the plain and honest dealing of John Stow ... who affirmeth confidently that those greatest crimes, as namely the slaughter of his nephews, etc., were never proved against him, neither by witness and lawful evidence nor so much as by the oaths of the knights of the post’. Stow also declared that Richard was not deformed. Camden, although stating that Richard murdered his nephews and usurped the throne, added that ‘in the opinion of the wise, he is to be reckon’d in the number of bad men, but of good Princes’.

Alas, Buck’s defence did not prevail, nor generate a passionate debate.  In 1655 Bishop Fuller was regarding it as a whitewash.  He asserts as fact that Richard was deformed (additionally presenting him with ‘a prominent gobbertooth’) ... ‘yet a modern author, in a book by him lately set forth, eveneth his shoulders, smootheth his back, planeth his teeth ... [and] ... proceeding from his naturals to his morals, maketh him as virtuous as handsome’.[11]  Yet Buck did have his followers, including William Winstanley in 1684: ‘this worthy Prince’s fame [hath] been blasted by malicious traducers.’[12]

Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole was born in 1717, the youngest child of Sir Robert Walpole, England’s first real Prime Minister.  He was small and frail, but intellectually energetic, interested in all the pursuits of the thinking aristocrat of the Enlightenment: literature, painting, history, architecture.  Like Cornwallis, he was an MP (for Callington in Cornwall), but devoted his time to writing.  He lived at Strawberry Hill, beside the Thames at Twickenham, in a house he had rebuilt in his own version of the Gothick style, with his own printing press, cultivating the arts of conversation and letter-writing, and ultimately died as the fourth earl of Orford in 1797.

Walpole was not just a cultured aristocrat; he was also a man who hated injustice wherever it was to be found.  He lobbied unsuccessfully to save Admiral Byng from the firing squad after the loss of Minorca in 1756.  Jeremy Potter says, ‘Many recognised that he was a scapegoat for the incompetence of the government, but it was the dilettante Walpole who took action.’[13]  Being an MP, he was able to get an emergency debate on the matter in the House of Commons, but he could not save Byng, who was court-martialled for negligence. The guilty verdict carried a mandatory death sentence and Byng was shot at Portsmouth, on the quarter-deck of the Monarque, in March 1757.[14]

In 1768, Walpole published his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third.  He thought that Richard’s name had been blackened so that Henry VII, ‘a mean and unfeeling tyrant’, should appear in a better light.  He was less scholarly in his approach than Buck, but he too spent time castigating historians – and Sir Thomas More. Paul Murray Kendall found him ‘a far more redoubtable controversialist’ than Buck, ‘in the style of his day, subjecting the Tudor myth to the scrutiny of “enlightened reason”; but his work suffers ‘from two great handicaps: he was not a scholar and he lacked source materials.  Thus he was forced to attempt to break down the tradition from within.’[15]  That is, he had to argue that the accusations contained within themselves the seeds of their own refutation. Keith Dockray calls Walpole’s line of argument ‘superficially plausible’ – ‘he concluded that many of the crimes attributed to the king were not only improbable but contrary to his own interests and clearly at odds with what can definitely be deduced about his character’.[16]  He might well have been very interested in the modern techniques used in the catching of criminals, where profiles are created of the sort of person who might be likely to commit a particular crime.

It is sad that Walpole, who was (naturally) a member of the Society of Antiquaries (whose early members had pioneered the rehabilitation of Richard III), resigned his membership because the Society had attacked his Historic Doubts ‘with old Women’s logic’.  He wrote that he was ‘leaving them in peace’ to discuss such things as ‘Whittington and his Cat’.[17]  It is even sadder that Walpole later had Doubts about his Doubts.  In 1793, after the outbreak of the French Revolution, he wrote ‘I must now believe that any atrocity may have been attempted or practised by an ambitious prince of the blood aiming at the crown in the fifteenth century.’[18]

Sharon Turner

Sharon Turner was a Yorkshireman, a professional historian who in 1830 published his History of England in the Middle Ages.  Kendall judges that he created the ‘moderate’ position: ‘he is the first professional historian to take his stand outside the Tudor tradition and to make use of its evidence in a detached and critical spirit as he is the first historian to view Richard’s career in terms of its times.’[19]  This last is important.  Richard’s times were violent, and Turner insists on this, saying ‘[he] did not live in an age of modern moral sensibility’. He used BL Harleian ms. 433, that important source for Richard’s reign, and claimed that this enabled him to see Richard ‘more in the real shape and features than has yet been done’.  He believed that Richard had taken the crown ‘with the approbation of most of the great men, both of the church and the state, then in London’ – but also that he had murdered the Princes to clear his way to do so.

Turner had a strange, almost perverse take on Richard’s character, seeing him as ‘an intellectual coward’ who preferred to prevent danger by committing crime, killing the Princes because he lacked moral courage.  The cowardice did not, of course, extend to the battlefield, where he was ‘brave to the utmost edge of peril’, but not even Richard’s worst enemies denied him that type of courage.  Fifteen years after the publication of his History, Turner added to it a 274-page poem on Richard III in iambic pentameters, in which Richard loses his moral struggle and succumbs to ambition. This dismal production obviously added nothing to Richard’s defence.

Caroline A. Halsted

In 1844 the first woman to defend Richard published a two-volume biography, Richard III as Duke of Gloucester and King of England.  Caroline A. Halsted, being a pioneer female scholar, is inevitably described as a blue-stocking, but this epithet cannot invalidate her scholarship.  She used many original sources, including BL Harleian ms. 433, and printed many of those sources as appendices.  Her avowed aim is justice; and justice can only be achieved ‘by taking the unerring voice of truth as a guide’ and judging by ‘well-attested and indisputable facts ... derived from contemporary authority, and the unbiassed testimony of eye-witnesses’.  She wishes to rescue Richard’s memory from ‘unfounded aspersions’.

Kendall[20] and Dockray[21] find her prose style virtually unreadable; Jeremy Potter, on the other hand, calls it clear and crisp, and readable.[22]  Here is a sample. One of the most famous passages in her work is that in which she discusses Richard’s behaviour in seeking out the widowed Anne Neville, whom, according to the Crowland chronicler, Clarence had ‘caused to be concealed’:

      ‘What, however, was the part pursued by Richard of Gloucester – that prince who for three
generations has been held up to scorn and contempt for every base, unmanly, treacherous, and
vindictive feeling?  Let his conduct be once more contrasted with that of Clarence, who had
betrayed and perfidiously deceived every near relative and connection, and who was indebted to
the very brother whom he was now injuring for his reconciliation with the king, and for his
restoration to his own forfeited honours and possessions.  Gloucester, says the Croyland
narrator, “discovered the maiden in the attire of a kitchen girl in London;” instead of conveying
her secretly from her concealment, instead of compelling her by force or by stratagem to become
his wife, instead of outraging her already wounded feelings and taking advantage of her power-
less situation, he removes her immediately from the degrading garb under which Clarence had
concealed her, and with the respect due to his mother’s niece and to his own near kinswoman “caused her to be placed in the sanctuary of St. Martin,” while he openly and honourably seeks
from the king his assent to their marriage.’

There is more in the same vein.  Undeniably, Miss Halsted is long-winded, but her rhetorical devices are not too obtrusive and her narrative moves forward.  Other faults have been found in her: Dockray (152) says, ‘she became a victim of her own determined revisionism and her characterisation of Richard III borders on hagiography’.[23]  Kendall is reminded of ‘one of the nobler figures in the Idylls of the King’.[24]  Yet she did not approve of the usurpation: Richard ‘in an evil hour, yielded to the worldliness of a corrupt age and a pernicious education’.  He forgot his moral and religious duty, so could not be held up as an example of ‘rigid virtue and self-denial’.

When she wrote the dedication of the work (to the memory of Viscount Sidmouth, gratefully remembered because the work had ‘excited in him a warm feeling of interest’) she was living in Lymington.  Later, she married the Rev. William Atthill, Canon and Sub-dean of Middleham, in Yorkshire, whose work on the Collegiate Church of Middleham, founded by Richard III, was published by the Camden Society in 1847.[25]  In this volume he thanks ‘the talented and zealous’ Miss Halsted for her help: ‘[she] has adduced a host of authorities, apparently proving that [Gloucester’s] personal deformity existed but in the libels of an opposing faction ... her researches seem to throw such light over the darker shades in his chequered career, as to induce the strongest presumption that he was not guilty of, or accessory to, those startling crimes which have been charged to his account.’[26]  A pity about the ‘apparently’ and the ‘seem to’; otherwise, one might say, here was a marriage of true minds.

Sir Clements Markham

Another Yorkshireman, Clements Markham was born at Stillingfleet in 1830 into a family whose traditions were academic and ecclesiastical. He personified the restless, adventurous, rebellious side of the nineteenth century, leaving Westminster School at the age of 14 to join the Royal Navy and see the world. Markham never did anything by halves: he became passionately devoted to the study of geography, and exploration, and raced round the world; he went to Tahiti, where he championed the people in their opposition to French rule; on the expedition to Baffin Bay which failed to find Sir John Franklin; to Peru to collect cinchona plants in the teeth of opposition from the locals; to southern India to oversee the replanting of the cinchona so that quinine should be readily available.  He was appointed Honorary Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society.  He went as geographer with the Indian Army on the Abyssinian war.  He was knighted, and given honorary degrees by Cambridge and Leeds. He was enthusiastic about the Arctic expedition of 1875, and the Antarctic in 1901.  He was instrumental in raising the funds with which the Discovery was built, and choosing Captain R.F. Scott as expedition leader.  He stood godfather to Scott’s son, Peter Markham Scott, of Slimbridge fame.

Like Walpole, Markham hated injustice.  He took up the cause of a young sailor who had struck a superior officer and been sentenced to five years’ penal servitude for it, and he kept up a determined campaign – he wrote to the Admiralty, the Home Secretary, every MP, and the press, and he organised a petition to the Prime Minister.  He won. The sailor was released from jail.

And he wrote books. He seems to have started with a family history in 1854.  This was followed, amongst others, by histories of the Incas, Persia and Peru, and Lives of Lord Halifax, John Davis the Navigator, Christopher Columbus – and Richard III.

Markham put as much energy into researching and writing about Richard as he did into every other project he undertook.  ‘He left no stone unturned in his efforts to arrive at the true state of affairs ... He probed and sifted every incident connected with the king.  He would write and rewrite chapters already completed in order to make them as faithful as possible ... He consulted the most eminent historians in England, most of whom were inclined to agree with him ...’[27] 

Probably many an eminent historian took the line of least resistance when confronted with so much passion and energy, even if they had private reservations.  One who did not was James Gairdner, whose war of opinions with Markham, fought with the fearsome weapon of learned publication, enlivened fifteenth-century studies at the end of the nineteenth century.  Markham first published his conclusions in a long article in the English Historical Review in 1891.  Gairdner’s book Life and Reign of Richard III, had appeared in 1878, a very anti-Richard book indeed, which held sway until the 1950s: even Markham could not demolish it, but merely dented it.

He published his book Richard III: His Life & Character Reviewed in the Light of Recent Resarch, in 1906, ‘the most fervent and thorough vindication of the king ever to appear in print’.[28]  The first part recounts Richard’s life and times, and the second part tackles the accusations made against him.  These stories were ‘an outrage on common sense’.  His main theses were that Henry VII had had the Princes killed, and that Archbishop Morton wrote the account now attributed to Sir Thomas More.  Although Josephine Tey in The Daughter of Time used these ideas as the framework of her story, neither is generally accepted today.

Gairdner said that ‘to whitewash Richard III is an utterly hopeless task’.  Markham said that he was simply removing Tudor mud from the portrait.  Jeremy Potter commented, ‘both distinguished gentlemen were overstating their case’.[29]  Kendall thought it difficult to take Markham’s work as seriously as it was intended, and remarked, ‘Richard is mantled in the airs which blow upon the playing fields of Eton and the glorious reaches of the nineteenth century British Empire’.[30]

This, then, was the state of Ricardian studies in the earlier part of the twentieth century.  Common sense, intellectual curiosity, passion and documentary research had led to the availability of decent evidence for an alternative reading of events and motives.  Antagonisms had been aroused and battles joined.  Yet the availability of evidence had not led to a widespread academic or public acceptance of the new research.  Scholars and public alike were, in general, content to allow the stereotype of Richard the Bad to continue.  Such is the dreadful power of the status quo.  A new Enlightment was needed.

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