Are Ricardians Deluded?
The critics say we can't face facts
----and A.L.Rowse called us
"crackpots."
You know, as a person who tries hard to be fair and just -- or at least I like to think that I do -- I am beginning to get a bit fed up of all these literary critics of Richard's who, down through the ages, have consistently accused Richard's defenders in general and Ricardians in particular of being naive, well-meaning people who just can't face facts concerning Richard's true nature, which of course they perceive to be that of an unnatural homicide, infanticide and tyrant.
We've had to endure first Gairdner, then the wretched A.L.Rowse, and many others in grim and monotonous succession. The opinionated Rowse once said of Richard's defenders,"...there are crackpots about....people who do not qualify to hold an opinion, much less express one".(1). Doubtless he was unaware that those of us with high measured IQ's and who are adequately in possession of the facts are far more useful and capable than those "professional" historians with more ordinary intelligence levels who have only attained their present position by simply going along,in their ordinariness, and signing up for every history course going. Furthermore, history is of course an arts subject and naturally attracts those kinds of people, whereas by contrast the sharp, focussed, penetrating, logical and analytical minds tend to gravitate towards our own mathematics and science side of the academic spectrum. Now how on earth are these historians supposed to break new ground in the way that we can?? What would they use for "RAM"? (2).
Rowse, in his "professionality”, describes Horace Walpole, a defender of Richard's, as "juvenile and silly"(1a), and then goes on to say, "No reputable historian has ever thought Richard other than guilty: to suppose otherwise is contrary not merely to completely consistent tradition, but to all the evidence that exists and to common sense".(1b).
Now this is an interesting quotation and is worth looking at in a little more detail. I have already drawn your attention to the value-limitations of the term "reputable historian", and for "tradition" we should of course read "gossip". Regarding the evidence which exists in relation to the Princes' fate, I would point out that the evidence of the bones in Westminster Abbey is far from conclusive and the bones may well not even be those of the Princes, and that the evidence of the Sheriff Hutton wardrobe accounts, which appear to be talking about Edward V only 5 months before Bosworth, is something which Rowse completely shies away from. Regarding his mention of common sense....read on.
Ok...let's face facts. Let's face the fact that Richard never harmed Elizabeth of York, who although illegitimate on paper had enough practical, real-world clout to preserve even a no-hoper like Henry Tudor on the throne. Let's face the fact that he never harmed any of Edward IV's other daughters. Let's face the fact that young Warwick (3), despite occupying a senior position to Richard on the family tree and was only held back by an attainder which could easily be reversed, was not only preserved by his uncle but also cared for by him. Let's face the fact that Warwick's sister Margaret of Salisbury (4) was also and likewise nurtured by Richard. Let's face the fact that the "Lord Bastard" spoken of in the Sheriff Hutton wardrobe accounts only five months before Bosworth could have been Edward V, especially given the strict properness of the times in the way in which people were addressed. (5).
How many of Richard's critics have you ever seen fairly and openly facing any of these facts? To me, they just seem to casually and amateurishly shrug them off, -- if indeed they address them at all-- and then jump to the conclusion that Richard was a murdering usurper-- without a single shred of hard evidence.
Nor is it particularly difficult to detect here the psychology which is going down: whenever these critics accuse us of being incapable of facing facts, all they are really doing in my opinion is just subconsciously drifting to a "commonsense" conclusion that Richard must have murdered the Princes,-- and then scorning us for being careful enough not to follow them there. (6)
Frankly, I am seeing this rather crude psychology in at least 90 per cent of the anti-Ricardian literature I am reading. But this is just not professional; it is not competent. It is most certainly not the work of a sharp, logistical, rationalising mind. There is no room for assumption, in the world of the true professional, however commonsensical such assumption may appear.
Of course, no doubt these critics of Richard's don't see themselves in that way. But doesn't that in turn verify that it is they, and not us, who simply cannot face facts-- not even about themselves?
-- Michael Alan Marshall
(1) "Bosworth
Field and the Wars of the Roses",1966, Page 194-5. (1a) Ibid, p.293. (1b)
Ibid.p.294.
(2) Computer term
for "logical brain power".
(3) Henry VII, by
sharp contrast, murdered him.
(4) Despite her
being in her eighties, Henry VIII murdered her.
(5) In fact, under the
strictest rules of address, Edward V was the only "Lord Bastard" then
living.
(6) Regrettably I
have seen this mentality before-- in modern courts of law in which miscarriages
of Justice of a most alarming and damaging nature have taken place. Time and
time again this irresponsible, casual and lax attitude has been allowed to
prevail during trials, with disastrous results which have not then come to
light for years. If lawyers and jurors alike had been as careful as we are,
then these calamities would never have occurred in the first place.
Another example of
the care we must take in not following these people to their
"commonsense" conclusions, whilst at the same time retaining our own
firm grip on down-to-earth reality, is that in the specific case of Richard and
the Princes, the Duke of Buckingham, who allowing for illegitimacies and
attainders had a prior claim to Henry Tudor's on the Lancastrian side of Edward
III's family, knew that part of what he had to do to win the crown for himself
was to destroy the Princes. As his powers as Constable of England would lapse
upon his rebellion against Richard, it would certainly have occurred to him to
use the last of those powers to dispatch the boys, while Richard may have been
still procrastinating on the matter and was yet to decide upon a course of
action, if any. Here is a very blunt, realistic and down-to-earth scenario---in
which Richard does not murder the Princes. (See The Princes: A Personal
View). Further in the matter of A.L.Rowse: his
failure to acknowledge a scenario in which Richard does not murder the Princes,
which scenario is every bit as down-to-earth as the scenario in which he does
murder them, may be fairly cited as proof of this historian's bias and unprofessionality.