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.
Good grief... let it go.
I’m sure Henry 7 had a good and valid reason for deleting those e-mails from his server.
RIII was a child-killing murdering despot.
Spot on....as the Brits say.
It was probably the Duke of Buckingham that killed the Princes. The last time they were seen (playing on the tower green) Richard was near the Welsh Marches..
That helped many democrats win election in 1974. Ford should have left Nixon to his fate to minimize the damage.
"it's too early to say how most of my decisions will turn out."
Not really, Mr. President. The turd in the Oval Office now is how they turned out.
Right. Richard couldn’t possibly have given an order to have the chief rallying points against his rule killed.
It likely would’ve been far worse to have had Nixon on trial and prolonged ugly divisions in the country. It was bad enough Nixon was paying for the sins of his two predecessors. Ford did the statesmanlike thing. He might very well have survived the 1976 election had he been more on offense and not made a goof during the debates. As it was, he was already closing the gap by election day.
The only downside to a Ford win is that the Dems surely would’ve won in 1980. It took Carter to deliver us Reagan.
Obama: “ White House Turd”
The assorted ceremonies included a mass and an address by the top Catholic clergyman in England.
Ah...the winners write the history, but the losers write the songs! IOW - The best films, dramas, theatre productions and music is Confederate, Ricardian and Jacobite!
I think the bottom line is that Richard III (and indeed Henry Tudor) were products of their time. They lived in a hard and brutal world where “might made right”, in a country scarred by two decades of vicious civil warring, with all the break up of social cohesion that goes along with that. Its hard for us to judge that - by our modern standards they were both monsters. Were the princes murdered? Almost certainly. Who did it? We’ll probably never know - but logically it must have been on the orders of either Richard III or Henry Tudor.
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.
However, much of Henry Tudor's quite precarious claim to the throne and, more importantly, his SOLE BASIS for declaring Richard to be a usurper was predicated on Titulus Regius being invalid. One of his first acts as king was to have Parliament declare the act invalid and to have all known copies destroyed.
So, IF (and I will acknowledge that it is only an if) the Princes were alive after Bosworth, Tudor would have been forced to acknowledge that they were the rightful heirs to the throne and not him or his wife.
As you mention in other posts, Mancini's writings (not a diary, but a report written for the French court) are important; however, they were not without bias. Mancini spent much of his time being told by Lancastrian supporters what was going on. It is uncertain how much English he actually understood. More importantly, it is not known WHEN he actually left England.
You are absolutely correct that Tudor used RUMORS of the Princes being murdered as the basis for securing French assistance to equip an army. But that doesn't negate the fact that HIS claim to the throne was completely invalid if the Princes were alive.
The bottom line is that we will never know for certain what the true fate of the Princes was or who was responsible. They neither the first nor the last Royals to be eliminated for personal gain, but they are among the most talked about because their fate (regardless of the perpetrator) culminated in major transformation of England. One thing we DO know is that neither Richard nor Henry had any qualms about eliminating anyone they perceived to be a threat (it was, unfortunately, the accepted practice of the era) and cases can be made for either one being responsible for the fate of the Princes.
It is said that history is written by the victors and the Tudors certainly benefited from this. More and Shakespeare both owed much to Tudor patronage, so it is hardly surprising that they would treat Richard as an evil villain even if untrue.
I think one of the best things to come from the discovery of Richard's remains and his subsequent internment is that, in today's society where so many are ignorant about history, people are actually taking the time to figure out what all the fuss was about. Many people had HEARD of the War of the Roses, Bosworth Field and the Princes in the Tower, but, just as with the Jacobites, they have never really understood what it was really about and this has prompted many to find out.
Richard III was the legitimate monarch, as far as the legitimacy of monarchy can go. Why do the supporters of the usurper and murderer Henry VII claim otherwise?
His brother’s children were illegitimate, and that was known at the time. Why do the supporters of the usurper and murderer Henry VII claim otherwise?
Gosh, there were cranks back then who claimed he’d done this and that — and the Wars of the Roses meant there were lots of factions, and lots of rumors. Why do the supporters of the usurper and murderer Henry VII claim otherwise?
Henry VII had no legitimate claim to the throne, and had to marry the sister. Why do the supporters of the usurper and murderer Henry VII claim otherwise?
Re-legitimizing her meant re-legitimizing her brothers, so they had to be done away with. Why do the supporters of the usurper and murderer Henry VII claim otherwise?
If the princes were a threat, obviously the princess was as well — yet Richard III didn’t get rid of her. He also didn’t get rid of the princes. Why do the supporters of the usurper and murderer Henry VII claim otherwise?
What surprises me is how vivid hatred toward a murdered monarch (he was murdered on the field by hired traitors, paid by Henry VII. Why do the supporters of the usurper and murderer Henry VII claim otherwise?) has persisted across the centuries. For that matter, it’s surprising how the vociferous defense of his successor, the usurper Henry VII, considering A) the passage of time and B) the fact that monarchy is, at the very least, a bit passe’.
People tend to forget that Tudor's ONLY real claim to the throne came through the Beaufort line of John of Gaunt and that its legitimacy has always been questioned.
If the princes were a threat, obviously the princess was as well — yet Richard III didn’t get rid of her.
Precisely! Richard would have had no reason to kill the Princes and allow their sisters to live. Henry Tudor's pledge to marry Elizabeth of York would have been a death sentence for her if Richard was the type of person who would murder his brother's children purely for convenience. However, Henry Tudor had every reason to murder the Princes and allow the Princesses to live.
Then why did he take a vow to protect them until Edward became King? Answer: your claims are nonsense. He was a traitor, a murderer, and a betrayer of his own brother, who got what he deserved at Bosworth Field.
The sister was never a rallying point for rebellion.
Male primogeniture was taken so overwhelmingly seriously that she meant nothing.
Why do you insist that you’re right, when you’re merely pulling things either out of your ass, or out of the ass-licking fake historians loyal to the Tudors?
Tudor's very public pledge to marry her would suggest otherwise.
Male primogeniture was taken so overwhelmingly seriously that she meant nothing.
Male primogeniture was taken so overwhelmingly seriously that she meant nothing.
This is true, but it does nothing to bolster any of your claims.
Neither Elizabeth of York nor Elizabeth Woodville EVER suggested that the Princes were dead, nor did they suggest that the rightful claim to the throne would pass through Elizabeth.
Had Richard been the villain who murdered the princes wouldn't it have made sense to kill Elizabeth (and her sisters) so that any sons she had wouldn't have a claim to the throne? Keep in mind that Tudor's incredibly tenuous claim to the throne derived from his MOTHER'S semi-legitimate line.
Had Henry continued to murder Reformed Christians, had Henry allowed his little pet Chancellor [a "saint" who tortured Christians under his own roof] or if just his daughter Mary had been allowed to continue to burn Apostates of the heretical Roman "church," you Romanists would be -- your inspired and scholarly choice of words -- licking Tudor asses from now until Kingdom come.
I have little doubt that you believe the laughable claims that Elizabeth Woodville "bewitched" Edward, as the nullified Titulus Regius claims. But those who actually know history, as opposed to falsify it behalf of the Pope, knew at the time that an "act" of Parliament passed under threat of murder by the occupying army of a usurper was hogwash.
But what I don't understand is why defend this despicably vile traitor just because he was a Papist? After all, the Tudor claims are simply invalid because of the Donation of Constantine.
Bwahahahahahaha!
[In case you're unaware of the joke, The Donation of Constantine is a Romanist lie as well.]
Rome lost England because the declining fortunes of the Plantagenet dynasty led the Pope to believe his continental alliances were more important than anything else. He was wrong. In two generations, the Tudors restored England as a great power and destroyed the stooges of the Inquisition.
You lost.
Get over it.
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