Richard III of England - Reputation

Reputation

There are numerous contemporary, or near-contemporary, sources of information about the reign of Richard III. These include the Croyland Chronicle, Commines' Mémoires, the report of Dominic Mancini, the Paston Letters, the Chronicles of Robert Fabyan and numerous court and official records. However, the debate about Richard's true character and motives continues, both because of the subjectivity of many of the written sources, reflecting the generally partisan nature of writers of this period, and because of the fact that none were written by men with an intimate knowledge of Richard, even if they had met him in person.

During Richard's reign, the historian John Rous praised him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons", adding that he had "a great heart". After his death, Richard's image was tarnished by propaganda fostered by his Tudor successors, culminating in the famous portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed machiavellian villain who cheerfully commits numerous murders in order to claw his way to power. Rous himself, in his History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other. Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife.

Polydore Vergil and Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage." Vergil also says he was "deformed of body ... one shoulder higher than the right". Both emphasise that Richard was devious and flattering, while planning the downfall of both his enemies and supposed friends. Richard's good qualities were his cleverness and bravery. All these characteristics are repeated by Shakespeare, who also adds to Richard's deformity to include a hunch, a limp and a withered arm.

Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however. William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, made good laws". Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people." The first attempt to defend Richard completely was made by George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, whose life of Richard was completed in 1619. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including the alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the Titulus Regius, and claimed to have seen a love letter written to Richard by Elizabeth of York. The book was published in 1646.

Despite Buck, the image of Richard as a ruthless power-grabber remained dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. David Hume described him as a man who used dissimulation to conceal "his fierce and savage nature" and who had "abandoned all principles of honour and humanity". Hume acknowledges that some historians have argued "that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown", but he dismisses this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability. The most important late 19th-century biographer of the king was James Gairdner, who also wrote the entry on Richard in the Dictionary of National Biography. Gairdner stated that he had begun to study Richard with a neutral viewpoint, but became convinced that Shakespeare and More were essentially correct in their view of the king, despite some exaggerations.

Richard was not without his defenders, the most significant of whom was Horace Walpole. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer Clements Markham, whose Richard III: His Life and Character (1905) replied to the work of Gardiner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that evidence of other 'crimes' was nothing more than rumour and propaganda. A relatively balanced view was provided by Alfred Legge in The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others.

Twentieth century historians were less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several groups dedicated to improving his reputation.