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.
bttt
bmp
The War Between the States SHOULD have been over in 90 days. The 1st Battle of Bull Run had all the earmarks of a smashing Union victory. Coupla things went wrong for the Yankees and the rest is history.
...’my kingdom for a horse’...
Yeah like how the Democrat's need for a star fundraiser outwitted the population's despise for Bill Clinton.
Shouldn’t Richard have been given a Catholic burial? He agreed to the authority of the pope.
A proper -- even respectful -- burial doesn't bury his crimes, which despite the forgetfulness of history, remain.
He swore an oath to be the Lord Protector of his realm and his king. He violated that oath, betrayed the trust of his brother and his country and became a traitor and a murderer of his own innocent blood.
I'm sure the usual members of the Ricardian Societies [and those who quote their preposterous defenses of this vile scumbag] will be showing up shortly.
The rehabilitation of Richard's image is proof of nothing except that if you keep lying long enough, morons will start to believe you. If Richard III can be salvaged, look for the Benedict Arnold Memorial on the National Mall someday.
The rehabilitation of Richard’s image is proof of nothing except that if you keep lying long enough, morons will start to believe you. If Richard III can be salvaged, look for the Benedict Arnold Memorial on the National Mall someday.
******************************8
.... and Obama on Rushmore.
I liked the solemn ceremony when they reburied King Richard.
The procession thru the streets then to the parking lot where he was found then the dumping of the body back into the hole and fresh asphalt paved over him..... : )
ping
The winners get to write the history. I guess when the other side wins centuries later it gets revised!
Thanks SteveH.
The human remains found a few centuries ago, during the digging of a foundation for renovations at the Tower of London were saddled on as those of the missing princes. Because of the 20th century autopsies done on the remains, it is clear that the remains are not those of the princes (at least one is definitely not), unless the princes were too old to have been done in at the time claimed, IOW couldn't have been killed by Richard III (and that's not surprising, since he didn't do it or have it done). Even an authoress who's a foaming at the mouth pro-Tudor nut rejected the remains as inauthentic, without stating the obvious reason -- that if they were authentic, Henry VII would have to be the killer (and he was). Search hits of possible interest.
Titulus Regius ("royal title" in Latin) is a statute of the Parliament of England, issued in 1484, by which the title of King of England was given to Richard III. It is an official declaration that describes why the Parliament had found, the year before, that the marriage of Edward IV of England to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid, and consequently their children, including Edward, Richard and Elizabeth, were illegitimate and, therefore, debarred from the throne. Thus Richard III was proclaimed the rightful king... After Richard was overthrown, the act was repealed by the first parliament of the new king, Henry VII. Henry also ordered his subjects to destroy all copies of it (and all related documents) without reading them. So well were his orders carried out that only one copy of the law has ever been found. This copy was transcribed by a monastic chronicler into the Croyland Chronicle, where it was discovered by Sir George Buck more than a century later during the reign of James I. [*]The usurper and murderer, Henry Tudor, had to legitimize his own rule; destruction of the Titulus Regius in effect relegitimized the sister, whom he then married, but the brothers would therefore be the lawful heirs, so he had them murdered, pinning the murders on the murdered king, Richard.
Thanks LL!
I remember reading "The Daughter of Time" by Josephine Tey in high school and it was excellent.
We will never know who killed the princes or even if they were killed.
What we do know is that all of the Richard III as villain stories began after his death.
And we also know that Henry Tudor had far more to gain from their deaths than Richard III. Richard had been made king by act of Parliament. Tudor's claim to the throne was through the illegitimate Beaufort line of the Lancasters. The princes were the rightful heirs of Edward IV and that made them a threat to the Tudor claims.
The irony of that is that Henry Tudor was a Catholic and Henry VIII was vocal proponent of papal authority until the pope refused to grant the annulment.
LOL! Does such a society even exist?
I'm with Hillary on this one. 'At this point, what difference does it make?'
At the end of the day, it matters not what man's history says about you, it matters what the LORD says about you at the end (all yearning to hear from His lips: "...well done, good and faithful servant...")
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