See Sarah Bryson’s review of this biography here .
Or, if you would prefer to judge it by our criteria for a post-Kendall biography of Richard, read here. Lewis is already the author of a volume on the “Princes” but approaches the pre-contract and Portuguese marriage negotiations well, thereby scoring highly on the three most important points.
21 September 1327 is the traditional date of death for Edward II at Berkeley Castle and various myths about it and his life have passed through these 690 years almost unquestioned. They are repeated by quite a few notable people without real evidence as well. If this sounds familiar, it is because certain individuals have made statements about Richard III over the ye
ars that either wasn’t based on any reliable source or contradicts the evidence that has gradually come to light thanks to the likes of Barrie Williams and John Ashdown-Hill. For some years, they have been referred to as “Cairo (or even Alexandria) dwellers”, because they are so far up the Nile.
Edward II has evidently attracted similar such posthumous adversaries – of which Channel Four’s series “Monarchy” referred to the most grisly myth of all. That this was presented by David Starkey demonstrates that both kings, and possibly several others, attract the same drastically over-simplifying detractors, whose followers appear to have closed
their minds at the age of about seven.
Here Kathryn Warner, who has gone some way towards showing Edward may well have survived his visit to Berkeley and died later elsewhere, demonstrates that a forty year-old footnote referred to a fictional part of a mis-dated document and was cited to fuel a new myth by someone either monumentally stupid OR … worse.
Similarly, here, Jacqueline Reiter shows that a book supposedly owned by John 2nd Earl of Chatham could not have been written until after his death.
The facts of the proposed marriages of Richard III to Joana of Portugal and of Manoel of Beja to Elizabeth of York had, of course, been known in Portugal for a long time, before being published by Domingos Mauricio Gomes dos Santos in 1963.
Arthur Kincaid picked up on this and mentioned the marriages in his 1979 publication of his edition of Buck. Barrie Williams then wrote about the matter at length in the Ricardian in the 1980s and Jeremy Potter mentioned the marriages also in his 1983 book Good King Richard? And it was Williams, of course, who inspired Annette Carson to look into the matter more deeply, and write at length about it in The Maligned King.
Yet, there has been no evidence that earlier Ricardians (ie before 1963) knew anything about the matter. Paul Murray Kendall did not know about the marriages, and bemoaned the “fact” that Richard had made no effort to marry off his nieces to get them out of Henry Tudor’s reach (he did not know about Cecily and Ralph Scrope, either). It does not feature in The Daughter of Time; nor in Philip Lindsay’s glowing biography in 1933, nor in Sir Clements Markham’s 1906 book, nor any of the earlier authors, such as Halsted and Buck. Yet, at least one near-contemporary of Markham did know, and mentioned it in one of his books. Unfortunately, he was not a Ricardian…..
Henry (H) Morse Stephens was born in 1857 in Edinburgh and attended Balliol College, Oxford where he obtained a BA in 1880 and an MA in 1892. He was a staff lecturer there until 1894. He also lectured at Cambridge University on Indian history, while writing articles for a number of magazines and papers.
Stephens also wrote a number of books including works about Sir Robert Peel, the French revolution, Indian history … and a history of Portugal, which appears to have been written in the early 1890s. In discussing the reign of Joana’s brother, King (Dom) João II (still popular in Portugal today, by the way, with at least one Algarve hotel named after him!), Stephens talks about João’s relationship with Edward IV and Richard III, in particular relating to the renewals of the Treaty of Windsor by both Kings. He then has this to say:
“In 1485 the King of Portugal proposed in a Cortes held at Alcobaça, that his only sister, Joanna (sic), should be given in marriage to Richard III, but the princess, who … wished to become a nun … refused the alliance”.
Interestingly, it was at that Cortes that the Portuguese discovered, to their dismay, that Richard was exploring the possibility of marrying Isabel of Aragon if Joana would not have him. This, of course, pretty much ensured a favourable reply from the Portuguese, and led to Annette Carson’s interesting and very plausible interpretation of Buck’s Elizabeth of York letter: that she was asking Norfolk to speak to Richard to ensue he pursued the Portuguese marriage (which offered marriage with Manoel of Beja), rather than the Spanish one, which offered her nothing.
So…… there were indeed people before the 20th Century in this country, and not just in Portugal, who knew perfectly well that Richard was not trying to marry his niece and yet none of the people who would have benefited from the information – like Markham – knew anything about it. In the case of Stephens’s book, it was a specialised subject that a Ricardian author would have no reason to read, unless he also happened, by chance, to be interested in Portugal. Another problem in this particular case was that Stephens emigrated to America in 1894, becoming Professor of History at Berkeley, in California. Following the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, he spent the rest of his life (he died in 1919) collecting as much information as possible about that tragedy.
The cynic in me, though, does wonder whether others (ie those not well disposed towards Richard) might have known – and chosen to keep the information to themselves.
One final point about Markham, he visited Portugal at least once (and was actually staying in Estoril when he heard of the death of his friend Robert Scott (of the Antarctic)). If only he had known……
References:
Wikipedia – Henry Morse Stephens
Arthur Kincaid – edition of George Buck’s original work
Jeremy Potter – Good King Richard?
Annette Carson – The Maligned King
H Morse Stephens – The Story of Portugal (described in the Kindle version as a Short History of Portugal)
Our post on Thursday (https://murreyandblue.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/the-book-kendall-could-write-today-4-two-little-boys/) showed that Jehan de Wavrin’s comments on the relative sizes of George and Richard in 1461 are available to us because Wavrin’s “Recueil des croniques et anchiennes istories de la Grant Bretaigne” (p.357) was composed in Burgundy. It was, therefore, beyond the reach of the “Tudor” agent known as the Human Shredder, whether he was Polydore Vergil or Robert Morton.
Similarly Dr. Anne Sutton (in the June 1977 Ricardian) has rediscovered Richard’s 28 June 1483 letter to Lord Mountjoy in Calais, enclosed a copy of the Three Estates’ petition to Richard – and perhaps the evidence Stillington gave to them is available?. The record of Richard’s remarriage plan surfaced in Portugal, thanks to Barrie Williams. Evidence relating to the “Simnel” coronation remained in Ireland.
Is a pattern emerging here? I wonder what else the archives of the rest of Europe have to tell us that England’s own could but can no longer?
It seems as if those denialists, rather than give up and concede that the evidence*since Kendall is favourable to Richard, are descending into self-parody.
Apart from someone, with a name that is quite valuable at Scrabble, resurfacing after five years, we have had some new claims. The Calais garrison were suggested to have defected to “Tudor” when Edward IV’s bigamy revealed, except that we know that they were loyal throughout Richard’s reign as John of Gloucester was still their Captain at the end. Catherine de Valois apparently attended and addressed Parliament when her “wedding” to Owen Tudor was attested to, a considerable feat for a dead lady.
Still, these new falsehoods make a change from their old ones, disproven so often.
* Barrie Williams, Ashdown-Hill, Carson etc
Or, more correctly, the “previous contract of marriage”. This is the other topic that has really moved on over the past sixty years. From a situation in which Lady Eleanor’s very existence was denied as late as twenty years ago, anyone who understands the subject and lays the evidence, including that of the cover-up, in a straight line reaches the conclusion that her marriage to Edward IV is a matter of fact, recognised by a quasi-Parliament that knew Edward well and with more evidence than other “marriages” have. We mostly have Dr. Ashdown-Hill to thank for this.
Now it is time for some non-Cairo historian to write a new full biography of Richard III, to take account of Barrie Williams’ 1983 discovery in Portugal of the re-marriage plans, a new scientific interpretation of the random bones ten feet under the stairs, the ex-Princes’ survival evidence as well as JA-H’s revelations.
Only a few have the ability, time and inclination for such a project but the life of this significant King cannot be left to those who misunderstand the important points, whether by accident or design.
Paul Murray Kendall (1911-73) was a Professor of English, famous for writing three landmark historical biographies. Apart from “Warwick the Kingmaker” and “Louis XI”, his “Richard III” was published in 1955. Scientific and historical records are always developing and thus Kendall had the advantage of knowing things that Markham could not, just as Markham knew more than Halstead, Halstead more than Walpole, Walpole more than Buck and Buck more than Stow.
In nearly sixty years since Kendall’s first great tome arrived, things are even more clear. Were he writing towards a 2015 deadline instead, there are things he would know now.
Thanks to Barrie Williams in two issues of the 1983 Ricardian (http://www.r3.org/on-line-library-text-essays/back-to-basics-for-newcomers/elizabeth-of-york/), the Portuguese records have proven Richard’s plans, being negotiated by proxy just two weeks after his Queen’s death, to marry Juana of Portugal, whilst her cousin Manuel of Beja was to become the husband of Elizabeth of York – a plan only scotched by the French invasion. Kendall (pp.393-5), faced with the ridiculous myth that Richard wished to marry his own niece, had no evidence save his own logic – that the case he was combating, written by “Tudor”‘s paid liars, had no evidence shows the degree to which the Cairo dwellers themselves to have inverted the burden of proof. We can be quite sure that copies of these documents were available in Richard’s own records during spring and summer 1485, before the Human Shredder could lay his hands on them.
Not least among the Cairo dwellers on this point is Hicks, whose biographies of, inter alia, Richard (2000) and Anne (2006) repeat the discredited myth despite post-dating Williams by two decades, freely using terms like “incest” and “paedophilia” although contrary evidence is once again available.
The publication years of Hicks’ opi – almost all after 1983:
