History booksReviewA monster, or misunderstood? Thomas Penn on a parti pris, emotional account of the controversial kingMore than two centuries ago, the historian William Hutton noted Richard III's posthumous ability to divide opinion. For some, Richard possessed "angelic excellence"; others painted him in "the blackest dye". Hutton acknowledged that "Richard's character, like every man's, had two sides" before concluding wryly, "though most writers display but one". The public response to the spectacular discovery of his skeleton in a Leicester car park last year shows that little has changed. His bones are now as contested as his reputation, with distant descendants of the last Yorkist king claiming he should be reinterred in York rather than Leicester. There is, still, something about Richard.
Interweaving two stories whose chapters dovetail throughout the book, The King's Grave claims to show Richard in a new light. Philippa Langley, the driving force behind the "Looking for Richard" project, gives a blow-by-blow account of the search, from fundraising to dig; historian Michael Jones, meanwhile, explores Richard's usurpation, reign and death at Bosworth, seeking to contextualise his grabbing of power and the disappearance, on his watch, of the princes in the Tower. Both authors, in their different ways, see the discovery of his grave as an opportunity to put the record straight, to "put a stop to the stigmatising and vilification" of Richard, and to "allow for complexity" in considering his personality and reign.
In the century after Richard's death, a sequence of Tudor commentators, culminating with Shakespeare and his enduring study in evil, portrayed the king as a child-murdering monster. For Thomas More, his moral failings were given physical form: he was "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right … malicious, wrathful, envious". Yet as early as the 1580s, a revisionist historical tradition had started to emerge, and was by the 18th century – as Hutton's words show – in full swing, demonstrating the improbability of the crimes attributed to Richard and describing his appearance not as ill favoured but positively "handsome". In 1924 the Richard III Society was formed, and stated its preference for history "based on ascertained facts rather than on intuition, propaganda and spin". So successful has its work been that, as Jones acknowledges, nobody with a passing interest in late medieval history would now seriously accept the Tudor view of Richard.
Yet it is only with the discovery of his grave, Langley asserts, that a "wind of change is blowing, one that will now seek out the truth about Richard III". The unearthing of Richard's skeleton is undeniably a major event, but rather than being, as Langley suggests, "a historic moment when the history books will be rewritten", it reinforces what we already know of his death and burial in 1485. His bones, for instance, offer vivid and gruesome confirmation of what contemporary sources tell us: he was battered to death in a frenzied assault, and in the aftermath of battle his mutilated corpse was stabbed in the buttocks, probably as it was slung over a horse for transportation to Leicester.
Langley "shed quiet tears of despair" at the news that Richard's skeleton did indeed have a curved spine. Her turmoil, she explains, was because "the hunchback stigma", if confirmed, will allow modern historians "with their reputations tied to Tudor propaganda to claim that their chosen sources have been validated. Any hope of revealing the man behind the myth will be lost and the cardboard cut-out caricature held up as incontestable." Yet the idea that there is a cabal of historians trying to foist some Tudor caricature of Richard on an unsuspecting public is baffling, and seems to owe more to Langley's vision of a Manichean struggle for the king's reputation than it does to the work of generations of scholars, much of which has been published under the aegis of the Richard III Society. What's more, she goes on to judge his appearance by the standards of the Tudor commentators she denigrates, at pains to stress that his scoliosis is a "condition" not a "disability". Why the distinction matters is unclear.
Langley's relationship with Richard, then, is a self-confessedly emotional one, and, as she candidly explains, her search for his final resting place was guided by her feelings and intuitions. An early visit to the car park gives her goose bumps: "Slightly to my left, on the tarmac, there was something new – a white, hand-painted letter 'R', denoting a 'reserved' parking spot, but it told me all I needed to know."
Langley's Richard can do little wrong. He was a man whose humanity was constrained by "the limitations of his time" and was innocent of the deaths of Edward IV's sons, largely because his involvement in them would have been "out of character". Indeed, Richard was a man who, she concludes, quoting Winston Churchill, "never failed to display courage". (Churchill was convinced of Richard's guilt, noting that it would take "many ingenious books to raise this issue to the dignity of a historical controversy".) Jones, on the other hand, accepts the view of most historians that, on the balance of probabilities, Richard was responsible for killing the princes. Jones's cogent and nuanced narrative provides the historical ballast to Langley's search, seeing Richard as a man whose hand was forced.
Richard, Jones asserts, was "always intelligent" and clear-headed. He displayed exceptional justice and piety, while his fatal charge at Bosworth, informed by his strict adherence to the chivalric code, was a "heroic way to fight". Henry Tudor emerges as something of a stage villain. His evasion of extradition while in exile – "undignified" and "darkly comic" – is contrasted with Richard's bravery during the civil wars; at Bosworth, Henry lurks out of harm's way at the rear of the battlefield, later "cowering on the ground" behind a phalanx of French mercenaries in the face of Richard's glorious cavalry charge. One might be forgiven for asking where it all went so right for Richard, and whether, a la Blackadder, he actually won the battle of Bosworth only to be murdered by mistake.
Yet of course, Bosworth was a military catastrophe for him. In the end, he was the only failed English usurper of the middle ages, and The King's Grave doesn't quite explain why this was the case. Among other issues, it fails to explain how his deposition of the young Edward V was morally and logically suspect, how his emphasis on justice was contradicted by his own actions and those of his supporters, and how his claim to act for the good of the whole country was undermined by his association with a political clique. Furthermore, it glosses over the issues of why, despite claiming to represent stability, he failed to deliver it, and why he could be usurped by Henry Tudor, a man with a very weak claim to the throne who, before his invasion, had only set foot in England once, for two weeks, when he was 13 years old.
Thomas Penn's The Winter King is published by Penguin.
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