Dragging Richard through the mud

I read a chapter on Richard III from Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.  Near the beginning, Churchill dutifully discounts fellow historian Sir Thomas More for being so passionately biased against Richard III.

His book was based of course on information given him under the new and strongly established regime.  His object seems to have been less to compose a factual narrative than a moralistic drama.  In it Richard is evil incarnate, and Henry Tudor, the deliverer of the kingdom, all sweetness and light.  The opposite view would have been treason.  Not only is every possible crime attributed by More to Richard, and some impossible ones, but he is presented as a physical monster, crookbacked and withered of arm.  No one in his lifetime seems to have remarked on these deformities, but they are now very familiar to us through Shakespeare’s play.  Needless to say, as soon as the Tudor dynasty was laid to rest, defenders of Richard fell to work, and they have been increasingly busy ever since.

Duty done, Churchill then proceeds to give Richard III his own passionately biased drag through the mud.  You might expect Churchill to be a little more objective and patient with his subjects, especially after the above excerpt and especially since you as a reader are putting forth a good deal of patience in even daring to crack open a four-volume history.  But then, you might be wrong.  With almost a wink of his eye and a shrug of his shoulders, Churchill delivers what has been famously nicknamed, “things in history that interested me.”

He relates the facts, to be sure.  He won’t so callously disappoint the conscientious reader of histories.  But he also weaves in his own strong opinions, as when he describes the young king’s reaction to his uncle Richard’s atrocities:  “On this declaration Edward V took the only positive action recorded of his reign.  He wept.  Well he might.”  If such spirited narration does not betray Churchill’s bias, then the chapter’s form does.  The overall effect makes Richard look like a disruption, a double-crosser, a snake in the grass.

Richard interrupts alliteration:

…son still sheltered in sanctuary.  Richard…

In poetry, he is the turn:

The Catte, the Ratte, and Lovell our dogge

Rulyth all Englande under a Hogge.

Catesby, Ratcliffe, Viscount Lovell, and Richard, whose badge was a boar, saw themselves affronted.

And where he is made to sound reliable with the use of parallelism, his good behavior turns out to be a mere mask for ill intent:

Richard hires a guy to suffocate his nephews.

The next morning Duke Richard presented himself again to Edward.  He embraced him as an uncle; he bowed to him as a subject.  He announced himself as Protector.  He dismissed the two thousand horseman to their homes; their services would not be needed.  To London then!  To the coronation!  Thus this melancholy procession set out.

The Queen, who was already in London, had no illusion.

In fact, the only reliable thing about Richard seems to be his taste for executions, described with the following metaphor:

The usual crop of executions followed.

Compare all that to Jane Austin’s description of Richard III in The History of England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian, which she wrote when she was only sixteen years old.  (I happened upon this little gem at The Jane Austin Centre in Bath.  I only went to the Centre to humor my travel buddy Rachel.  I hope I don’t regret saying so on a literature blog, but I was totally bored by Pride and Prejudice.  I do, however, have to give Jane Austin some credit after reading her awesome History.)

Richard III: The Character of this Prince has been in general very severely treated by Historians, but as he was York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man.  It has indeed been confidently asserted that he killed his two Nephews and his Wife, but it has also been declared that he did not kill his two Nephews, which I am inclined to believe true; and if this is the case, it may also be affirmed that he did not kill his Wife, for if Perkin Warbeck was really the Duke of York, why might not Lambert Simmel be the Widow of Richard?  Whether innocent or guilty, he did not reign long in peace for Henry Tudor E. of Richmond, as great a Villain as ever lived, made a great fuss about getting the Crown and having killed the King at the battle of Bosworth, he succeeded to it.

So both Jane and Churchill have their personal biases.  The difference is that you expect it in Jane Austin’s book.  You don’t start out reading to get a sound education.  You read to learn something about Jane Austin.  Churchill, on the other hand comes as a surprise.  He’s also a little more subtle, if not any less partial, because his content is very analytical.  Readers of Churchill need to be on their toes, so as not to accept his bias as fact.