Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the
Fiddle....
Rightly or wrongly, history has ascribed this rhyme to
Richard's career
--But it this correct?
A large number of our traditional nursery rhymes, though they may sound innocent enough, actually conceal some very dark historical secrets.
Ring-a-Ring of Roses, for example, is about the Great Plague which struck London in 1665 and in just a few months killed hundreds of thousands of people. The "ring of roses" was the characteristic rash which appeared on the doomed sufferers, the "pocketful of posies" the scented flowers which Londoners would carry for the appalling stench of the open sores, and "tishoo! tishoo!--all fall down" a reflection of the sneezing and of the ultimate death of the sufferers.
Humpty Dumpty was the nickname of a large cannon owned by the King's (Royalist) forces and which was installed upon the battlements of the defensive walls of Berwick during the English Civil War. The trouble with these battlements was of course that there was only a castellated barrier wall on the outside, while on the inside there was no barrier at all and one could easily walk straight off the wall and into space.
Well Humpty was fired, recoiled, and backed himself straight off the wall. After his great fall, he lay at the foot of the wall in fragments where the King's Cavalry and the King's Infantry vainly attempted to repair him.
Eeny,Meeny, Meiny, Mo ("you are it!") is Celtic for "One, two, three, four" and is thought to come down to us over 4,000 years of time from the Megalithic period when Stonehenge was still in use and people were singled out for sacrifice.
Some of these rhymes, however, have always evaded the attempts of researchers to unravel their hidden meanings and they still remain shrouded in mystery. One of these is Hey Diddle Diddle.
Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
According to a number of sources this rhyme actually speaks of Richard III's career against the general backdrop of the Wars of the Roses. But just how likely is this to be true? On this page I will endeavour to break this rhyme down, and compare its various elements with the history of Richard's brief career.
Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle....
First, it is possible of course that the cat in the rhyme could refer to Catesby, Richard's able lieutenant who also of course features as the cat in the famous piece of doggerel which the traitor William Collingbourne penned during Richard's reign:
The cat, the rat, and Lovell our dog,
Ruleth all England, under a hog,
the rat of course being Ratcliff, another of Richard's lieutenants, and the hog Richard himself, after his personal emblem of a white boar.
It is difficult in this context however to assign an explanation to the fiddle-- unless of course it was none other than the word used to describe Richard's usurpation itself. We must remember that the rhyme is written in the past tense, and therefore that if it does refer to Richard then it may have been first written in Tudor times when the biases of the day would have required Richards accession to have been viewed as a "fiddle". Further, "diddle diddle" would presumably refer to the act of perpetrating, spinning or working the deception.
But there are other interpretations of the cat and the fiddle. For example Catherine of Aragon was known on the continent as Catherine the Faithful ("Cat la Fidele") who remained loyal to the Catholic cause through all the trials and tribulations of her husband Henry VIII's Protestant reforms, which were certainly regarded in Catholic Europe as diddling. Elizabeth I was also called The Cat, after the way in which she fiddled with her courtiers as though they were mice. However there is no mention of any mice by way of implication in the rhyme, which mention one might perhaps expect if the name "cat" was being used in that context.
The cow jumped over
the moon....
It is quite possible that this may refer to the Percys, whose coat of arms features a crescent moon, being supplanted during the Wars of the Roses by the Nevilles whose arms featured a silver bull. However there is another explanation.
In astronomy there is a very well known, --and very visible-- phenomenon which involves the monthly passage of the moon through the zodiacal constellation of Taurus the Bull. Over an 18 year cycle, however, the moon's path around the sky changes slightly so that for a period of 4 or 5 years it passes to the south of the main stars of Taurus, so that each month, on just the correct night, as the moon passes that way, the bull, as it rises, wheels upwards, then crosses the sky, before falling downwards again, and seems to jump over the moon as the moon passes slowly underneath in its proper orbital motion around the earth.
Upon long winter nights I have watched this spectacle myself. It is very clear, but of course it takes several hours to unfold, hence the need for our rather lengthy winter nights in order to see it transpire in full.
However this event is so frequent against a historical timescale that further research will be needed to calculate the precise dates upon which this happened and then search for any historical happenings on those dates. So far, though, I have at least been able to ascertain that the battle of Bosworth was not attended by such an event, (although strangely there was a lunar eclipse only 72 hours afterwards).
The little dog
laughed to see such sport....
We believe that for many of their childhood and adolescent years Richard, Percy and Lovell were all together under one roof at Middleham, where they received their education and their knightly training under the auspices of Warwick the Kingmaker. We also know that Francis Lovell, called the Dog in the infamous Collingbourne doggerel, became friends with Richard at an early age and subsequently remained loyally and steadfastly at his side until the very day of Bosworth itself. However if we look at the hierarchy which surrounded Lovell during these early days, we see that Neville power was absolutely in the ascendancy. The Kingmaker, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, was the greatest landowning magnate in the realm, Neville estates were spread all over the North, and Richard and his brother Clarence, themselves Nevilles on their mother's side, were to marry their Neville cousins, the sisters Isabella and Anne, daughters of the Kingmaker himself.
It is interesting to speculate on just what the personal intrigues might have been at that time, within the triangle comprising of Richard, Lovell, and poor Percy who must have been keeping his head down somewhat throughout these Northern power changes. What might the little dog have thought, to see his friend Richard's family of the silver bull riding so high over the Percy moon?
This is of course a fairly compelling point in favour of the rhyme indeed being about Richard, although of course that does not prove that it actually is about him.
And the dish ran
away with the spoon.
It is possible that this rather strange sentence was actually a medieval figure of speech which referred to the onset of a famine. Just as love proverbially flew out of the window when poverty came in through the door, so the "dish ran away with the spoon" when there was no food. However if this is so, then we must necessarily look upon it as evidence against the rhyme's being about Richard as there exists no record of any such calamity affecting England during that period, despite the fact that famine can of course follow so closely upon the heels of war, as crops are either burned, or never sown in the first place as the farmers march off to war instead, in armies which then plunder more crops elsewhere in order to feed themselves.
We do have another explanation of this sentence though, which dates from the following century. In Tudor times, "dish" was a nickname for a female servant, and "spoon" was a slang name for a male food-taster, those individuals who used to taste their masters' food in order to find out if it was poisoned. Perhaps, then, the rhyme refers not to Richard at all but to some domestic happening in one of the great houses of Tudor England?
Yet another, albeit more tenuous explanation is that the status changes among Edward IV's children upon Richard's accession had rendered Elizabeth of York but a "dish" in comparison with her former standing, and of course in comparison to what he aspired to, Henry Tudor had always been merely a "spoon" (both in the above sense).
Finally, one last explanation of this curious sentence is somewhat more literal, and is based upon the fact that there is some evidence that Richard III had a fetish for appropriating and collecting kitchen ware (notably, --of all things--frying pans). Although it is of course possible, I myself believe this tradition to be untrue and that it has instead arisen from certain historical misconceptions.
In the above analysis, then, we have seen that in the case of Richard's career there have been places where the rhyme fits very well indeed---but also places where the fit is not so compelling. But of course, in order to finally solve the mystery once and for all, it will be necessary to find a unifying explanation which satisfies every part of the rhyme---which clearly has not yet been done. Perhaps, one day, more research will, one way or the other, reveal to us the hidden story behind this suspiciously odd-sounding fragment of the past.
----Michael Alan Marshall