Richard III

I am a Richard III apologist. I don't mean that in the Christian apologetics way; I mean that I apologise for and defend Richard III. I don't think he was a particularly great king, but I also think he didn't get the chance to be great (or not), and I don't think he killed his nephews.

The discovery of Richard III's body has brought a lot of the story back into the news, and it brings up two very different debates. First, what does this discovery teach us, and second, how do we think of Richard III?

I'll take the first one first before I get into my Richard III rant. What does the discovery of Richard III's body teach us? Oh so many things. The most important thing for me is its corroboration of (or invalidating of) contemporary sources. The skeleton showed signs of scoliosis (although not genetic scoliosis - he'd developed it but hadn't been born with it) so, yes, Richard had a crooked back. It showed no signs of a "withered arm". And it obviously hadn't been desecrated and thrown into the river, given that it was right where it had been buried in 1485.

What else does it tell us? It tells us the same things that other skeletons tell us: general standards of health and nutrition, battle customs, and burial customs. It tells us that a defeated king, who was very quickly considered a traitor and a murderer, was given a consecrated burial, but that even in death his hands were tied. It tells us that he'd been thrown over the pommel of a saddle after his death, even if it can't tell us by whom. It tells us all sorts of details of what it was like in Leicestershire during the days after Bosworth.

Is any of this important? Perhaps not these details in themselves. But put them together, and they can fill in the story. Put them together, and they can paint a clearer picture of a very murky time. Put them together, and they can point the way to future discoveries, and a better understanding of the past.

Going on to the second point: how do we think of Richard III? I don't think this discovery is going to greatly affect how people view Richard III. If you have an opinion, you have a strong opinion, and there's nothing with the skeleton that is going to affect someone's opinion of him.

My opinion is that he didn't kill his nephews, and my reasoning is very simple (although almost entirely lifted from The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey). He didn't really have a reason to, and more importantly, he didn't have a reason for them to disappear. If they had died, it would have been much better for him to show their bodies, as proof. Since they disappeared, all there could be was devastating rumour, which didn't do him any favours.

I'm not saying he didn't have means, and I'm not saying he didn't have opportunity. I'm saying that he didn't have motive. He'd already had them declared illegitimate, so there wasn't any imminent legal dispute over his right to the crown. There weren't any impending rebellions to put them back on the throne, except by the Woodvilles who didn't have a ton of support themselves. And while he was ruthless (having executed his own brother [Duke of Clarence]), he wasn't callous or reckless. By many accounts, he agonised over killing his brother George, and only did so after treason against Edward had been proven. 

And even if he did have motive to kill them, he had no motive to cover up their deaths. This is the one that really gets me - their disappearance, as opposed to their death, does not help Richard at all. If they had died, it would have been in his interests to announce their death. Spin a story if he must, but the princes' death only helps him if people know they are dead, and no longer claimants to the throne. If they merely disappear, then there's always the wondering, always the knowledge that Edward's sons might be out there. How does that help him?

I'm willing to believe that they died in Richard III's reign - the last recorded sighting of them was in 1484, before Henry Tudor started playing a part (according to Alison Weir, at least). But I simply don't believe that a man who was incredibly loyal to his brother, a man who had promised to protect his nephews, a man who had gone through the legal step of declaring them illegitimate instead of going on the attack, and a man who was incredibly careful with his actions would have rashly murdered two young teenagers in his care and then not reaped the benefits of their deaths. If they did die in 1484, I am more likely to believe that it was a Henry-II, "who will rid me of this troublesome priest" situation, and not any sort of conscious order of Richard's. (Although even then, if he knew about it, why didn't he tell anyone? He could have gotten major points by shaming the man who actually killed them - gotten them out of the way with no real blame attached to him.)

Or I think it would have been someone with Lancastrian sympathies. I know it had been 13+ years since the last real battle in the Wars of the Roses, but the Lancastrians were moving again. It had to have been someone who wanted to both eliminate and discredit the Yorkist line. I don't know whether they would have had Henry Tudor in mind as the next "rightful" king, but to me it's the logical explanation. The princes' disappearance gets the boys out of the way for whoever's next, and casts doubt on Richard's right to rule.

But, of course, none of this can be gleaned from the skeleton.

My life so far

I have spent far too much time at work lately. I am on a project with a team that "needs a lot of hand-holding." Everything is urgent for this team, but they're reticent about giving us information.  And our internal team can be a bit frustrating as well (myself included sometimes). Yesterday I was at work until 7, chasing a solution to a problem (that should have been a simple fix, adding an email address to a database) and waiting for confirmation that it had been done. Today I woke up and checked to make sure it had been done right - on a Saturday! - and it didn't look like it had been done. Good times.

And yesterday wasn't the first day that I've been at work late for this particular team, either; I have feel like I've barely seen my boyfriend for two weeks, much less any of my other friends.

But I did manage to get to the doctor last week to renew my no-crying prescription, which I've dropped down a step. Yay for that! 

And there's been interesting things happening in the news and whatnot, and lots of things that I've thought, "oh, I should blog about that," but at the moment all I can think of is Final Fantasy 6, the prospect of imminent snow, and the Jane Austen analysis (What Matters to Jane Austen?) that I'm two chapters away from finishing. And the Malory biography that I want to get back to, after listening to In Our Time about the Morte d'Arthur. And work.