Richard III
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.
York: Marry, they say my uncle grew so fast that he could gnaw a crust at two
hours old.
Duchess:
I pray thee, pretty York, who told thee this?
York: Grandam, his nurse.
Duchess:
His nurse! why, she was dead ere thou wert born.
York: If
‘twere not she, I cannot tell who told me.
Duchess:
A parlous boy: go to, you are too shrewd.
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
is wife, instead of outraging her already wounded feelings and taking
advantage of her powerless 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.