Posted on 03/27/2015 8:49:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
IT'S REMARKABLE what five centuries can do for a guy's reputation.
When Richard III, the last Plantaganet king of England, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, his corpse was stripped and hauled in disgrace through the streets of Leicester, "all besprinkled with mire and blood … a miserable spectacle," as Holinshed's Chronicle recounted.
Then it was stuffed into a crude grave, naked and coffinless, while "few lamented and many rejoiced."
This week, the medieval king, whose bones were found under a parking lot in 2012, will be reburied in Leicester Cathedral with full reverence and honor. For generations Richard was vilified as a cold-blooded usurper who had his young nephews, rivals to the throne, murdered in the Tower of London — a reputation cemented by Shakespeare's venomous depiction of the king as "that bottled spider, that foul bunchback'd toad." But the remains of the long-lost monarch, whose death marked the end of the Wars of the Roses, have been welcomed back with extraordinary dignity and emotion, befitting a ruler now extolled by many as an enlightened reformer who reigned with courage and integrity.
It may have taken 530 years, but history's verdict on Richard III turned out to be very different from the malignant reputation ascribed to him by the Tudor loyalists of his era. There is a lesson in that, and not only for medievalists.
It is a mistake to imagine that the judgments of history are inevitable and predictable, or to assume that today's adamant consensus will win tomorrow's approval. "History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes," ruefully conceded the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., after the collapse of the Soviet Union — a Cold War denouement that academic elites had dismissed as a pipe dream. Time and again, those certitudes fall by the wayside. Yet the appetite for making such pronouncements with categorical certainty never seems to go out of fashion.
In the closing passage of his 2010 memoir, Decision Points, former President George W. Bush writes that he believes that some of the choices he made were right and that others were wrong. But, he admits, "it's too early to say how most of my decisions will turn out." Bush points to President Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon — "once regarded as one of the worst mistakes in presidential history, [but] now viewed as a selfless act of leadership." The realization that scholars are still debating George Washington's presidency, Bush has remarked more than once, made it easier for him to tune out opinion polls and headlines.
Avidly read history, and you're constantly being amazed at how frequently informed opinion turns out to be dead wrong. At the start of the Civil War, notes David Herbert Donald in his best-selling biography of Abraham Lincoln, the smart money said it would be over and done with in a matter of weeks. Secretary of State William Seward thought the rebellion could be suppressed in 90 days; the New York Times predicted victory within a month. It consumed four years, and 750,000 American lives.
On a rug in the Oval Office is woven a quote favored by President Obama: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Only it isn't always clear which way the arc is bending, or what history will make of it all. When Whittaker Chambers broke with the Communist Party and became one of its most implacable foes, he assumed that he was moving from the winning side to the losing side, but thought he owed it to his children to at least make the effort.
In politics and economics, in statecraft and social activism, it is never a foregone conclusion that history will endorse our choices. That isn't an argument against doing the right thing, as best we can judge the right. It is a caution against forgetting that the future has a way of embarrassing the present, and that a pinch of self-doubt is never more needful than at just the moment when any doubt is deemed heretical. To err is human, to be human is to err. Don't be too sure that history, or the moral arc of the universe, will approve of your preferences and convictions. Richard III lost his throne and his life and his reputation. But history's verdict wasn't final, and the Tudors didn't get the last word. We won't either.
Thanks wagglebee!
How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
They’re claiming he probably had a Catholic burial at Greyfriar’s Abbey. Catholic prayers and blessings were offered by Catholic clergy at his lying-in-state, and reinterment.
Ping, bro.
Be sure to read posts 18 & 18.
Looks like they're back in the U.S. now preparing to do the same for Queen Hillary.
Leni
Oops!
16 & 18
Here are three of the Ricardian Societies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_(Richard_III)
I routinely get into it with a New York City FReeper who even has a tagline defending Richard the Usurper's claim that he murdered his opposition, including little children, because of his "duty."
Their "research" into his "innocence" consists almost entirely of a 65 year old historical crime novel called The Daughter of Time. It gets a number of important facts wrong. Most seriously, it claims that all of the rumors of the Princes [his nephews] murdered by Richard were started by the Tudors as propaganda to cover their own crimes. This is preposterously false. There were contemporaneous rumors of Richard's murder of his nephews years before the Tudor propagandists started on Richard. All Richard need ever have done to dispel them was produce the children alive. He never did, because he had already had them murdered.
But hey, it's all they've got.
This claim is 100% false, and has been repeatedly demolished by serious histories [which The Daughter of Time is NOT.]
There were rebellions against Richard during his usurpation, so there were enough people who believed him a villain to raise armies against him. Not a small number.
There were also contemporaneous accounts of the widespread rumors of Richard's murder of his nephews, which Ricardians like to ignore. Unfortunately, you can't. Nobody induced Mancini to write his diary, and it existed while Richard was still alive. All Richard The Usurper needed to do to prove his innocence was to produce his nephews alive. The reason he never did so is the obvious one.
Richard had been made king by act of Parliament
and then go on to write:
The princes were the rightful heirs of Edward IV .
Titulus Regius the "act" enacted by Parliament under threat of arms by Richard the Usurper invalidated the Prince's claim to the throne. Thus, both of your statements cannot be true.
None of the history I read about the circumstances made Richard III seem guilty of murder-he didn’t have any reason to fear kids from a marriage that had been declared invalid. If he did want Kate and Edward’s sons to go away for whatever reason, he could have simply bundled them up and sent them to a distant relative or royal friend far away-Spain, France, etc, and called it furthering their education or fostering-he was the king, after all-no need for murder. Maybe that is what he did, and no one thought anything of it at the time.
If they were murdered-I’m more inclined to think Henry Tudor engineered it-he had a fragile claim to the throne-through marriage rather than direct inheritance.
He regarded the English Church as a Catholic Church -- and not a Protestant one -- simply in schism, just as the Eastern Church had already been for 500 years. The Church of England, as distinct from the Church of Rome became a church which regarded Rome as apostate -- as Protestants did [and do] -- after agents of the Roman Church attempted to murder Elizabeth.
She herself saw no real difference between the various denominations of Christianity.
Well, you need to read more, then. Because pretty nuch every serious history does.
he didn’t have any reason to fear kids from a marriage that had been declared invalid.
He himself forced Parliament to pass the act declaring his nephews illegitimate precisely because he feared them.
Maybe that is what he did, and no one thought anything of it at the time.
Nonsense. There were widespread rumors during his reign that he murdered his nephews. Why do Ricardians continue to pretend there were not? Very simply because the fact that the children disappeared long before the Battle of Bosworth Field puts a complete lie to the claptrap that the children disappeared during Henry VII's reign. They didn't. They were never seen again after the summer of 1483.
Buckingham's Rebellion put the cause of Prince Edward forward, so clearly the rebels knew that a phony act of Parliament disinheriting Edward could be repealed just as easily. Richard knew it, too. He also knew that Titulus Regius was complete baloney [it relied, for example, on a claim that even if there was no precontract, the Woodville claim was still invalidated because Elizabeth Woodville had employed "witchcraft" to obtain her marriage to Edward the IV.]
Make NO mistake: as long as Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury lived, they were a rallying point for rebellion and a threat to Richard the Usurper's throne.
We know he didn't send them away because court documents in both France and Spain during Richard's reign refer to the curious nature of their disappearance. The French, who had a boy king of their own in need of protection, used the fate of the Princes in the Tower for propaganda purposes.
All Richard need ever have done to dispel the rumors and rehabilitate his reputation was produce the princes alive.
Why didn't he?
being a prescient soul....... I’ll go with w for the long haul
He did what few have done. He is the conquorer of Baghdad
Like they say, “When you get to be a parent you’ll want to wall your kids up in a tower dungeon sometimes too.”
BTTT
I’m not a rabid believer one way or another, but I am aware of the power that kings and other members of the nobility had 500 years ago-and it was pretty much absolute-not something I would have liked to see.
They most definitely could send someone out of the country, and have them held there in conditions as cushy or as wretched as the noble sender/abductor was willing to send payment for. There are even a few documented cases of noble kids and adults whose relatives paid to have them abducted and sequestered in the American and other British colonies as late as the mid 17th century. It took decades before they were seen or heard from again, and some of them didn’t survive the experience-which I’m pretty sure was the intent...
There is no proof one way or the other of who killed the sons of Edward, or if that is what happened, just clues, innuendo and bits of evidence on both sides for both opinions. I simply don’t think killing the kids made sense when they could be made to disappear for as long as he wanted while among the living, especially when Richard had so many other problems.
The problem is when they disappeared. For hundreds of years, the Ricardians falsely claimed that they didn't disappear until Henry VII became king. When Mancini's diary came to light in the late 1930's, the self-serving claims of Ricardians that the date of their disappearance was never firmly established during Richard's reign were demolished once and for all.
Contemporaneous accounts of their disappearance -- and much more importantly, the public knowledge of the fact of their disappearance -- lead to only one conclusion: they disappeared when Richard was King. The countryside was against Richard, and not just the Tudors, as Ricardians like to claim. The disappearance was one of Richard's problems among his countrymen. He could easily have made that problem go away... but only if his nephews were still alive.
I never thought they disappeared when Henry was King, since the wealth of evidence is for an earlier disappearance-and I haven’t read that book some people are referring to.
I don’t think if I had all of Richard’s problems-one of them was the disappearance of my brother’s two kids, and I had paid to have a friend somewhere on the continent abduct and keep them there and out of my way-obviously I’ve committed a crime. No way in hell would I produce the kids, or say oh well, I sent them to the French Pyrenees to be kept incognito by Comte de Whatever so they don’t get used to take me down, sorry about that. That would almost certainly have gotten him into his last battle a lot faster than it happened.
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