Classics Reissued: Richard III

Richard III: England's Black Legendby Desmond SewardPegasus Books, 2014The enterprising folks at Pegasus Books were certainly right to go rooting around in the gorgeous Wiltshire countryside in order to press Desmond Seward for a fresh Preface to his 1983 biography of England's King Richard III - after all, Richard's skeleton had been found intact under a parking lot in Leicester in 2012, which made the old boy news again, and Seward is by a wide margin his most readable modern biographer. The Pegasus people were less right to call this a new edition; it's the same old 1998 edition of Richard III: England's Black Legend, which was itself only nominally revised from the original 1983 debut of the book. But the small liberty hardly matters (nor does the almost insolently boring pea-green cover design of this new Pegagus reprint), especially if it serves to attract new readers to this delightfully spiteful work and its irrepressible hack of an author.Seward has written a slew of biographies in his long career, on such disparate figures as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Savonarola, and Napoleon Bonaparte (his short book on England's Henry V is particularly good), so when he turns his compositional machinery to the reign he calls "the unhappiest in English history," readers can settle in for that rarest of treats in nonfiction, a rattling good yarn (although those same readers may wonder at the designation! Surely the reign of Edward V, the young nephew Richard had executed, was more unhappy than his own? But then, maybe Seward is hanging his tag on the technicality of a coronation - which would as well exempt Edward VIII, whose time as king was likewise no barrel of monkeys). And like all veteran entertainers, Seward leaves his audience in no doubt about what kind of show they're about to see: he opens his book by calling it the most hostile Richard biography in living memory and apologizing with grinning insincerity to any Ricardians who might take offense.Once the apology is over, however, he gets right down to business. And that business - despite a good deal of research and a wide range of consulted sources, is pretty simple: to retail all the juiciest bits from Thomas More's posthumously-published History of King Richard III. Seward puts an absolutely giddy amount of trust in Saint Thomas, discounting the possibility that "someone of such integrity could stoop to character assassination" and, hilariously, referring to More as "not a man to tell lies," unperturbed by the fact that the actual historical record shows More engaging in both character assassination and lies with positively Swiftean gusto. It matters not: Seward has taken the measure of his man, and he's willing to assure his readers of whatever More feels like asserting, even on third-hand evidence:

The black legend had begun before the King even ascended the throne. For the rest of his short life he was to be a byword, inspiring more dread and terror than any monarch before or since, not excepting Henry VIII. More is not exaggerating when he says that Richard III ruled in an atmosphere of nightmarish insecurity. He 'never had quiet in his mind, he never thought himself sure. Where he went abroad, his eyes whirled about, his body secretly armoured, his hand ever on his dagger, his countenance and manner like one always ready to strike back. He took ill rest a-nights; lay long waking and musing, sore wearied with care and watch; rather slumbered than slept, troubled with fearful dreams - suddenly sometimes start up, leapt out of his bed and ran about his chamber.' Sir Thomas tells us he heard this 'by credible report of such as were secret with his bedchamber.'

Naturally, the meatiest and most energetic parts of Seward's book deal with the Princes in the Tower and the fate of Richard's nephews after he stole their throne and had them declared bastards. These sections show Seward at his best as a storyteller - the prose is supple and gripping, and the evidence is sifted with the hangman standing nearby. There's no doubt in Seward's mind that Richard is guilty, and he goes an excellent job of laying out the case for why there should be no doubt in anybody else's mind either. For him, Richard's guilt has been self-evident for centuries, although he's willing to take extenuating circumstances into account when weighing the impartial villainy involved:

The mental climate of his age may well have conspired to prevent Richard from seeing himself as a hypocrite. There was an all too seldom resolved conflict between emotion and action in fifteenth-century minds. The King's slightly older contemporary, Sir Thomas Malory, the author of the exquisitely noble Morte d' Arthur, was little better than a gangster and gaolbird, who stood accused of armed robbery, sacrilege, and rape on not just one but on several occasions.

And as for the occasion for revisiting all this good fun, that Leicester parking lot discovery in 2012? In his brief new Preface, Seward is I-told-you-so smug, declaring that although the dig was undertaken by Ricardian revisionists, their discoveries "resulted in their collectively shooting themselves in the foot":

Because everything revealed by the skeleton confirms the traditional view of Richard III. A nightmarishly-deformed spine established beyond any question that he was misshapen; previously, revisionists had insisted his "crookback" was a Tudor lie, a key part in the fiendish plot to smear his memory. The wounds on his skull, evidence of a frenzied hail of blows, point to the hatred he inspired among his opponents, as does his burial - naked, in a hole in the ground, instead of in a proper grave.

No book written (or reprinted) on Richard after that discovery can avoid mentioning it, which makes all the more ironic the fact that the discovery changes very little in the standard accounts of Richards's time and reign, since a man may be a hunchback and still be virtuous, just as he may be misunderstood and yet still hacked to death by his enemies in battle. All the questions surrounding Richard III retain their currency skeleton or no skeleton, and all the accounts of his life and times - and this is one of the best of a very, very large number - would be just as fascinating even if all that had been found in Leicester was one more Yorkist midden heap.