Magnet #588 - Richard III (r. 1483-1485)When I started this blog, I worried about being able to do justice to this set of the Kings and Queens of England. Especially for a monarch as pivotal as Richard III.
When I started inviting guest bloggers, I realized I knew only one person who could do the job - my friend, Gloriana.
Enjoy! And thanks, glor!
- joy
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Meet Richard.
Or at least meet what we think Richard III might have looked like. Though this is the "official" portrait hanging in National Portrait Gallery and the one that adorns countless book covers (and magnets), no one's entirely sure that it's actually right.
The only surviving portraits of Richard III were painted long after his death, and subsequently altered by later generations. X-rays show us that his shoulders have been thrown off-kilter to suggest a hunchback, his eyes have been narrowed, his mouth made thinner. It's the Tudor version of evil Photoshop.
We're all told that history is written by the winners, and the changes to Richard's portrait would seem to be the perfect example. In the years after Lord Stanley changed sides to crown Henry Tudor at Bosworth (damn Stanley!), the Tudors executed a smear campaign, paying off historians and painting over portraits to systematically craft an image of a dead rival deformed both in body and character. Thanks to William Shakespeare - backed by the sainted Thomas More - Richard seemed doomed to be remembered forever as the ultimate wicked uncle, a deranged, murdering hunchback screaming for a horse. Winter of discontent, indeed.
And yet, from beyond the grave, Richard struck back. Fueled in part by Josephine Tey's 1951 detective novel, The Daughter of Time, the Fellowship of White Boar has grown by leaps and bounds over the last century. The Richard III Society now claims more than three thousand members in more than twenty countries. (General meeting of the U.S. branch scheduled for October 10th in Las Vegas, and, yes, I do have an invitation.)
That's more than three thousand people worldwide devoted to clearing a man's name 500 years after the fact. As the current Duke of Gloucester, the Society's patron, explains, "The purpose and indeed the strength of the Richard III Society derive from the belief that the truth is more powerful than lies - a faith that even after all these centuries the truth is important."
Today the battle for Richard's reputation rages on. Depending on the current historical vogue and your historian of choice, Richard may be depicted as the perfect Plantagenet prince cut down tragically in battle (damn Stanley!), an able yet ruthlessly ambitious man of his time, or the embodiment of all evil. Posthumously, Richard's been put on trial for the murder of his nephews, the fabled Princes in the Tower, multiple times in multiple settings. He's been acquitted by no less a personage than the Chief Justice of the United States. Twice.
Despite these victories, the truth of Richard remains much like his portrait. Five hundred years, some expertly coordinated mud slinging, and many fervent Ricardians later, we can never really be sure what Richard even looked like, let alone the kind of man he was. The available historical sources tend to be hopelessly biased and somewhat less than credible. (Would you choose to believe a guy who thinks women can be pregnant for two years?) It's a little like someone in 2509 trying to reconstruct today's events using nothing but TMZ's twitter and three or four blogs with widely divergent viewpoints.
Hopeless, in other words.
Which means that it becomes up to the individual to decide who Richard is to them. What kind of man do you see staring out from his portrait? And how far do you think he would go for power?
For my own part, I'll say only this: Damn Stanley.
