Synopses & Reviews
Richard Plantagenet ruled England for a mere twenty-six months. His reign is one of the shortest in English history, yet few English monarchs have exercised so compulsive a fascination for the English-speaking peoples. It has been estimated that something has been written about him in every single generation since his death almost 500 years ago.
Rciahrd III has been the most persistently vilified of all English kings. In the century after his death, no one of note had any great interest in defending his name, or could risk doing so. Henry VII and Henry VIII meted out a brutal fate to each potential claimant to the Yorkist throne and this was sufficient deterrent to any prudent person to keep silent about the king the Tudors most loved to hate.
Here, Professor Ross has not written a conventional biography, if such were possible. His approach is thematic, in an effort to see Richard in the context of those aspects of his life and reign which mattered most to Richard himself and his contemporaries and to explain the paradox between the man apparently guilty of ruthless political violence, indeed infanticide, on the one hand, and a seemingly beneficent, concerned and well-intentioned monarch on the other.
There is an emphatic concentration on how to gain and how to keep power in late-medieval England, for Richard should not be viewed in isolation from the conditions in which he lived. At the age of eight, his father, Richard duke of York, was killed in battle and his brother Edmund brtually murdered afterwards. Richard himself twice suffered exile because of civil war and most of the men he had known in his youth were either killed in battle or judicially murdered for alleged treason. To put him in the context of his own violent age does not make him morally better, but at least it helps us to understand him, and in the climate of the politics of his own day, his mistakes may be seen as errors of judgement rather than moral failures.
When, and why, did Richard decide to seek the throne for himself? His usurpation was made possible not only by his own forceful character but by the deep divisions which existed among those who had held power at the court of Edward IV, and the situation was exacerbated by the estrangement from high politics of the rank-and-file nobility, partly as a consequence of the Wars of the Roses and partly because of Edward IV's own policies.
Quantities of ink and passion have already been expended on the fate of the princes in the Tower, but Ross here argues that it was the apparent belief of Richard's contemporaries that he was guilty of their murder which is of consequence, whether he did the dreadful deed or not.
Richard's connections with the north of England are unique, and he used his extensive powers of patronage to promote northern loyalists to positions of power, but he never managed to gain the loyalty of the southern gentry, who formed the core of the rebellion in 1483. Although the revolt was unsuccessful, and it is hard to fault Richard's conduct of government once king, a foreign-supported invasion led to the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485 and the death of the Yorkist dynasty with Richard himself.
Professor Ross has produced a thorough, exhaustive, unbiased study of Richard III, expounded with careful, fair, and well-balanced discussion of controverisal questions. It is a masterly work.