Shakespeare's Kings (115 page)

The
proponents
of
this
second
school
of
thought
may
not
be
quite in
the
league
of
More
and
Shakespeare;
but
they
include
a
number
of admirable
writers
beginning
with
Horace
Walpole
and
continuing
with historians
like
Paul
Murray
Kendall
and
even
novelists
like
Josephine Tey,
whose
brilliant
The Daughter
of
Time
has
probably
done
more
than any
other
single
work
in
the
past
half-century
to
reinstate
Richard
in the
ranks
of
the
blessed.
For
them,
the
arch-villain
is
of
course
King Henry
VII,
himself
every
bit
as
much
of
a
usurper
as
his
predecessor, and
with
far
less
reason.
Only
by
presenting
Richard
as
a
fiend,
they point
out,
could
Henry
have
hoped
to
justify
his
own
action
in
deposing him.
And
why,
having
deposed
him,
should
he
himself
not
have
killed the
two
princes?
He
would
have
had
just
as
strong
a
motive,
and
he was
certainly
never
to
shrink
from
other
executions
-
even,
in
1495, that
of
Sir
William
Stanley,
who
ten
years
before
had
saved
both
his life
and
his
cause
at
Bosworth.

The
trouble
about
this
second
legend
is
that
it
flies
in
the
face
of
our best
witness,
Sir
Thomas
More.
To
accept
it,
we
have
to
demolish
him as
thoroughly
as
he
demolishes
Richard;
and
this
is
not
easy
to
do.
First of
all,
More
was
not,
as
some
have
argued,
a
'later
historian'.
Born
in the
reign
of
Edward
IV,
he
was
seven
years
old
at
the
time
of
Bosworth; and
he
certainly
knew
many
of
Richard's
contemporaries,
including several
who
had
held
high
office
under
the
late
King.
Indeed
his immediate
predecessor
as
Under-Treasurer,
Sir
John
Cutts,
had
been Richard's
Receiver
of
Crown
Lands.
More's
own
father,
a
leading London
lawyer,
would
have
been
able
to
give
him
first-hand
evidence in
plenty
of
what
had
really
occurred
in
that
short
and
disastrous
reign. Was
he
then
simply
an
unscrupulous
propagandist
for
his
master,
Henry VII?
Surely
not:
nothing
that
we
know
of his
character
suggests
that
he would
have
sold
his
integrity
in
such
a
way,
or
have
deliberately
written what
he
knew
in
his
heart
to
be
untrue.
We
are
speaking,
after
all,
of a
formally
canonized
saint
who,
according
to
no
less
an
authority
than Erasmus,
possessed
the
finest
legal
brain
in
Europe.
And
again
and
again the
truth
of
what
he
writes
is
confirmed
by
contemporary
writers
whose work
has
come
to
light
only
many
years
after
his
death.
Dominic Mancini,
Philippe
de
Commynes,
the
author
of
the
Continuation
of the
Croyland
Chronicle
-
who
was
almost
certainly
John
Russell, Bishop
of
Lincoln
and
Chancellor
of
Oxford
University
—
all,
though they
may
differ
on
points
of
detail,
substantially
agree
with
More.
The same
applies
to
Polydore
Vergil
who,
though
he
arrived
in
England only
in
1502,
tells
us
that
he
personally
interviewed
'every
elderly
man pointed
out
to
me
as
having
once
held
an
important
position
in
public life'.
All
these
sources,
and
much
other
evidence
besides,
leave
no
doubt that
Richard's
reputation
had
already
reached
its
nadir
during
his lifetime;
no
subsequent
blackening
of
it
was
possible.
¹

Shakespeare,
as
we
know,
always
had
a
cavalier
approach
to
chronology; and
there
can
be
no
more
revealing
illustration
of
it
than
in
the
opening of
King Richard III.
In
Act
I
scene
i,
the
famous
soliloquy
('Now
is
the winter
of
our
discontent')
leads
dire
ctly
to
the
arrest
of
Clarence
and his
committal
to
the
Tower;
this
places
the
action
firmly
in
the
early summer
of
1477.
The
next
scene,
however
-
Richard's
wooing
of
Lady Anne
-
is
set
against
the
funeral
of
Henry
VI,
six
years
before,
and
here too
the
timing
is
distin
ctly
awry.
Henry
died
on
21
May
1471;
his funeral
can
have
been
held
only
a
day
or
two
later.
Yet
in
line
245 Richard
specifically
refers
to
his
own
stabbing
of
the
Prince
of
Wales, which
must
have
occurred
immediately
after
Tewkesbury,
as
being

1. A more detailed discussion of the two legends will be found in the Introduction to
Richard III,
by Desmond Seward - perhaps the best, and certainly the most readable, of recent biographies.

'some
three
months
since'
-
which
would
make
the
date
of
this
scene some
time
around
the
beginning
of
August.
It
is
of
course
far
from certain
that
Richard
was
involved
in
the
Prince's
death;
and
it
is
perhaps worth
repeating,
too,
that
while
Anne
had
been
betrothed
to
the
young man
in
1470,
he
was
never
her
husband.