Much has
been written
about Richard III and readers are familiar with Shakespeare's portrayal
of him as England's most reviled and villainous monarch. What is not as
widely known is that Richard III gave us a body of laws* that forms the
foundation of modern Western society. His legacy includes bail, the
presumption of innocence, the protections in the jury system against
bribery and tainted verdicts, and 'Blind Justice' -the concept that all
men should be seen as equal in the eyes of the law.
Such ideas were revolutionary in the fifteenth century. They alienated
many in the nobility and the Church and played no small part in
Richard's ultimate fate. Two hundred years later, when it was safe to
do so, men questioned the traditional view of Richard bequeathed to
them by the Tudors and found themselves unable to reconcile the
justician with the villain, the man with the myth. In the early
twentieth century, such men came together to form the Richard III
Society.
Two of Richard's most well known contemporary critics, Alison Weir and
Desmond Seward, subscribe to Shakespeare's depiction of him as a
hunchbacked serial killer. In his book Royal Blood: The Mystery of the
Princes In the Tower, Bertram Fields, a prominent U.S. attorney and
author, examines the school of thought represented by Weir and exposes
the inconsistencies and deficiencies of the traditional view.
Richard III caught my imagination when I first saw his portrait in the
National Portrait Gallery, London. Then I read Josephine Tey's The
Daughter of Time. This compelling mystery inspired me to consume
whatever I could find on Richard and to make several research trips to
England in search of the true Richard. It was in Paul Murray Kendall's
RICHARD THE THIRD that I finally found him. Kendall, a Shakespearean
scholar and professor of English Literature, provides a most convincing
and illuminating portrayal of Richard and his times, and it is his
interpretation of events that is reflected in this book.
While Shakespeare was a great dramatist, he never claimed to be a
historian. In an age of torture and beheadings, he wrote to please the
Tudors. The authority Shakespeare drew on was Sir Thomas More's History
of King Richard III, a derisive account of the last Plantagenet king
which More never finished. One of history's enduring mysteries is why
More broke off in mid-sentence and mid-dialogue to hide his manuscript.
Fifteen years after his death, it was found by his nephew, translated
from the Latin, and published. Had Sir Thomas More discovered the
dangerous truth that the true villain was not Richard III, but the
first of the Tudors, Henry VII?
The question remains, and the debate continues.
* Article on
Richard III's Laws
