ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
XVII.—RICHARD
THE life of Edward V. was so brief and his reign so entirely nominal, that it would be absurd to give any estimate of his character as a King of England. We see him for a moment as a child, a mere puppet in the hands of others, and then he disappears from our sight for ever, and neither contemporary curiosity nor modern research has been able to penetrate the mystery which surrounds his fate. With his uncle, who supplanted him on the throne, the case is very different, and yet we seem to know with certainty nearly as little of Richard III. as of his unfortunate nephew. The writers of the succeeding period have left us a portrait which is of a monster rather than a man, and even the genius of a great dramatist, assuming their narratives as the basis for his creation, has hardly been able to rise above the presentment of an unmitigated stage villain. And when we endeavour to ascertain the truth or falsehood of this representation, which, not- withstanding occasional scepticism on the part of a few clever writers, has been generally received as true, we find ourselves re- duced almost entirely to a choice between the statements of un- friendly writers and the inferences as to character which we may think ourselves justified in drawing from a few ascertained facts, generally isolated, and some of which are not incapable of more than one interpretation. Under such circumstances, an estimate of Richard must be necessarily imperfect, and on some points open to doubt, but we think that some leading features in his character may be ascertained with tolerable certainty. If the popular judgment has been so violently unfavourable to Richard, it is, on the other hand, almost impossible for any candid and impartial student of history not to feel disposed to take up the defence of a man whose memory has been exposed to such un- friendly criticism. Whether Richard was the villain he is said to be or not, it is quite certain that his traditional character is drawn by those who were either violently prejudiced against him, or interested in blackening his fame,—the partizans or flatterers of the prince who bad dethroned and slain him. Denun- ciations proceeding from such a source cannot fail to rouse a suspicion that something might have been said on the other side, if Richard had been as fortunate in his biographers as some of his predecessors, and we seem to be making ourselves accessories to an act of injustice in adopting without hesitation evidence so palpably one-sided. This feeling is confirmed when we find that in one instance at least, the change of kings operated in a very suspicious manner on the tone adopted by an historical authority- One of the most violent denouncers of King Richard is John Rous, the antiquary and historian, who wrote his history under the House of Tudor. But fortunately for us, and unfortunately for his reputation, we possess a Roll of the Earls of Warwick, drawn up by him in the reign of Richard, one copy of which has escaped the politic alterations of the author. In this we find him de- scribing Richard as "in his realm [ruling] full commendably, punishing offenders of his laws, especially extortioners, and oppressors of his Commons, and cherishing those that were virtuous ; by the which discreet guiding he gat great thanks of God, and love of all his subjects, rich and poor, and great laud of the people of all other lands about him." Of course, an historical
student will do well to distrust this panegyric as much as the subsequent denunciation, but the case may serve as a warning against receiving blindly the statements of the Tudor historians.
On the other hand, we must not be misled by the fact of ex- ceptional injustice having probably been done to the memory of Richard by these historians into the idea that be was in reality in no respect such a man as they have depicted him, and that their portrait is a pure invention, rather than an exaggeration and caricature of the real man. As far as our present materials enable us to judge, it seems to us that, quite independently of their representations, the character of Richard is not one which is deserving of much admiration, or even of high intellectual respect.
He was not, indeed, the exceptionally bad man among his con- temporaries that his Tudor biographers have made him ; be was probably a better man than several of those whose reputations have been whitewashed by them, but he certainly was neither a good man nor a very wise or great Sovereign. Indeed, it seems to us, that in depicting a successful villain these writers have un- consciously given him credit for an undue amount of intellectual capacity.
The first point which requires notice with respect to Richard of Gloucester is the shortness of his life. The popular mind cherishes the idea of an elderly villain, but the fact is that Richard was killed before he had completed his thirty-third year. The actions of his life are, therefore, those of a young man, and should be judged in a corresponding light. The next point is, that the epoch at which he becomes a responsible agent in the political events of that age must be placed much later than is popularly imagined, and that consequently the time of his supposed political machinations must be limited to a comparatively few years. There was an interval in age of ten years between him and his brother Edward, and on the first accession of the latter to the throne Richard was only between eight and nine years old. He was only just eighteen when he took refuge with Edward in Flanders, during the temporary restoration of Henry VI., and he had not completed his nineteenth year when he distinguished himself by his valour in the decisive battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and when Henry died in the Tower. He was little more than twenty-six when his brother George of Clarence died in the same fatal fortress, and he had not completed his thirty-first year at the date usually assigned as that of the murder of his two nephews. Even his undoubtedly premature appearance on the stage of public life and the natural precocity of his character can only modify to a certain extent this consideration of his compara- tive youth. His political life can hardly have commenced in any true sense of the term until after his brother's restoration in 1471, and twelve years only are therefore left for the conception and consummation of all that villainy which is supposed to have cul- minated in the murder of the young princes; and in estimating the nature of these machinations, we must recollect we are speaking of a life between the ages of nineteen and thirty-one.
Richard, the eleventh of the twelve children of Richard, Duke of York, was born on the 2nd of October, 1452, during the short interval of tranquillity which followed the first armed struggle between the houses of York and Beaufort,—a contest in a later stage of which he himself perished. And here we are at once encountered by the calumnies of later historians, who attribute to him a forbidding personal deformity. The truth seems to be that Richard, unlike his brothers Edward and George, was puny in growth and sickly in constitution. His person was short and slight, and though the limbs were compactly knit, he was not muscularly strong. His face, if we may judge from contemporary descriptions and existing portraits, was very peculiar. It was rather short than long, but the contrast between the broad fore- head and prominent cheek-bones and the sunken cheeks gave an appearance of elongation to the whole face. The upper part of the forehead was not at all full, but there was a marked protuberance immediately above the eyebrows. The nose was well formed, and slightly aquiline, seeming to indicate sense and fair sagacity. The eyes—the interval between which was very small—seem in the portraits dreamy and self-centred, and the brow is contracted into a look of painful and anxious thought, approaching in one portrait to something almost sinister. The chin is particularly well formed, firm, but prepossessing ; the lips are very thin, and closely compressed almost into a single line. The auburn hair falls in thick straight masses on each side of his face, after the fashion of his brother Edward, and indeed of that age generally. The impression left by the face is that of deep and anxious brood- ing, and of an intensely nervous, but highly-strung organization.
It is certainly not a face which inspires confidence, though it excites an uncomfortable interest. It is certainly, however, not
the face of a vulgar hypocrite and assassin, any more than it is that of a man of noble and frank nature. The deformity ex- aggerated by his maligners probably really consisted in one shoulder being rather higher than the other ; he was certainly not a hunchback in the sense which the word usually implies. He was active in his habits, and courageous and enterprising in his spirit in a more than ordinary degree. His manners, on the other hand, seem to have been quiet and reserved ; his eyes, as the portraits also testify, are said to have been habitually mild in expression, but became fierce and threaten- ing when his passion was once thoroughly roused. He was cour- teous and pleasing in his address, and he appears to have exercised when he chose an extraordinary fascination over those with whom he came in contact. But with one or two exceptions the power he thus obtained over the minds of others was transient in its character, and, as a rule, he seems to have been unable to retain the confidence which he so strangely gained. Francis, Lord Lovell, indeed, —" Lovell our dog "—who appears to have been a ward of the great Earl of War- wick at the same time that Richard was himself under the care of the King-Maker, and about whose ultimate fate such a mystery hangs, clung to Richard to the last with a fidelity worthy of the animal which gave him his sobriquet. John and Thomas Howard—the " jockey of Norfolk," and his gallant son, Surrey, were also true in the hour of danger, but they had certainly a strong personal interest in the maintenance of the power of Richard. Most, however, of the men whom he seemed to have gained for the time, forsook or betrayed him. The two infamous Stanleys would probably have betrayed anyone, if such a course seemed to open a path to their aggrandize- ment. But Hastings, whom he is said to have at one time loved better than any man, and who stood by him stoutly in the first crisis of his struggle with the Woodvilles, shook off his friendship immediately afterwards, and sought his destruction. Percy, the restored Earl of Northumberland, whom he honoured and trusted, and who seemed bound to his interests, betrayed him on the very field of Bosworth. Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who had seemed his alter ego, deceived him grossly, though he did not escape a just reward for his dissimulation and treachery. On the other hand, Richard won over Queen Elizabeth Woodville, and all but won her son the Marquis of Dorset, even after he was publicly credited with the murder of the Princes ; and the young Elizabeth of York would have been willing, it seems, to accept the hand of Richard's son, even if the story is false that she would gladly have become the wife of Richard himself. These, again, all failed him in the hour of need. In fact, men appeared to be won and lost again by him in an equally sudden and incompre- hensible manner. It would almost seem as if Richard, while he possessed the power of discovering and appealing successfully to some strong feeling or desire in the mind of another, was not capable of grasping a character as a whole, and through this imperfect apprehension lost the hold he had at first gained. Much of his ill-judged violence, and equally ill-judged confidence, may be traced to this cause. He destroyed Hastings, whose interests, by a little judicious moderation and management, might have been identified with his own ; and he alienated Buck- ingham by his disregard of some strong wish of the latter, after he had made him only too powerful by his lavish generosity. The extravagant confidence he placed in the Stanleys is notorious, and is alone sufficient to discredit his penetration into character. If Richard was a hypocrite and a dissembler, he certainly was a very poor proficient in his art, for it is an impetuous rashness and imprudence of conduct, and an impatience of difficulties, which made him always cut the Gordian knot, instead of attempt- ing to unloose it, that appear to be his characteristics. Under this influence he was always either too violent or too generous. It seemed as if he restrained his nervous excitability, and con- cealed it under a smiling face just long enough to give the uncom- fortable impression of a deep and designing nature, and then gave vent to it on some momentary occasion, with the excess and aban- don of a man who took no thought before he acted. It seemed as if his judgment were not well-balanced enough to see any medium between blind confidence and blind violence. His brother Edward's mind, even when seemingly palsied by sen- sual indulgence, was always clear, healthy, and active ; that of Richard was perplexed, morbid, and restless. He gave an impression of violence and irregularity far beyond the natural import of his actions. There was scarcely a public man then alive who might not (as far as his moral character is concerned) have committed most of the acts of cruelty attributed to Richard ; but by his mode of action he gave to them a character of excep- tional atrocity which goes far beyond the actual fact. And so men came to attribute a natural and systematic cruelty that was
really alien to Richard's nature, which was quite as much addicted to an excess of compassion and generosity as to anything in the opposite direction. He was accordingly credited with nearly all the suspicious deaths of the period, of several of which he was certainly innocent.
'The young Edward, Henry VI.'s son, appears to have been killed in battle, calling out to his brother-in-law, Clarence, whom he saw in the opposite ranks, to save him ; and Richard had nothing whatever to do with the event. Henry VI. himself died, not improbably, though not certainly, from violence ; but the mere *mention of the presence of Richard (a lad of eighteen) in the Tower about the supposed time of the death, is the only piece of evidence to connect him with the deed, and as the Queen and family of Edward were also resident in the Tower at the same time, this comes to very little. Clarence's destruction appears, from the in- dictment against him, to have been the work of the Queen's family. The execution of Hastings and of Rivers and the other members -of the Woodville family have all the appearance of acts committed at the instigation of some sudden feeling of resentment and alarm. The Woodvilles were only committed to safe custody as long as it seemed that Hastings was their enemy ; they were executed after the seizure and execution of Hastings had probably led to the -disclosure of some more of the facts of their recent plotting with that nobleman. The death of Hastings was evidently an act of resentment and alarm on the discovery of the hostile position he had suddenly assumed. Of the death of the young Princes it is not easy to speak, since we really know nothing as to their fate. But the probability seems to be that something like the common story actually happened ; and, at any rate, Richard must be held responsible for their disappearance, since he never produced them, 'when it became his manifest interest thus to refute the accusa- tions against him. That he certainly gave special rewards to the men to whom common opinion afterwards attributed the deed is a fact of comparatively little weight, since the most trusted of his confidential agents would be just those to whom the public would be likely to assign the commission of the deed ; but the coincidence of the reward of these persons with the supposed time of the Princes' deaths is of slightly more importance. On the -other hand, the conduct of Henry VII. to the man who had the charge of the Tower at the time of the supposed murder, and to whom the arrangement of the deed was popularly attributed, is -very strange, on the supposition that that King believed the accu- sation against him to be true. The hypothesis that this alleged assassin, Sir James Tyrrell, revealed the fact of his complicity in the murder only on the eve of his subsequent execution for treason is purely gratuitous, and comes to nothing, as Henry could always have easily ascertained if Tyrrell had the custody of the "Tower at the time of the alleged murder. On the whole, we must rest satisfied with the leading facts that the Princes disappeared in the autumn of 1483, just in the crisis of an attempted insurrection in their behalf, and that Richard (as far as our present knowledge allows us to speak) never denied that they were dead, had him- self crowned again at York just about that time, and never .produced the boys when the partizans of Henry of Richmond proclaimed their murder, and when their re-appearance would have been a death-blow to the hopes of that pretender, and a matter of comparatively little risk to himself. It is probable, then, that Richard, without premeditating their deaths, had -them destroyed on a sudden access of nervous alarm, and thus gave another signal proof of his fatal impetuosity and want
• of judgment. There can be little doubt that the deposition of the young King Edward was not an unpopular act, and that Richard, if he had ruled with ordinary steadiness and moderation, might have defied all the efforts of the young King's partizans ; while his .existence was always an obstacle to the pretensions of Henry of Richmond, and of all other possible pretenders. But by destroying Lim thus hastily, Richard not only threw away his best card and *committed an unwise and unnecessary crime, but broke up the Yorkist party for ever, and gave a cry to all his adversaries of which they eagerly availed themselves. It is not at all impossible that Buckingham (whose pretensions to the Crown were notorious) made Richard his cat's-paw to remove one great obstacle in the .young Princes, and then tried to avail himself of the odium thus ,caused to destroy Richard himself. The subsequent attempts of Richard to conciliate Queen Elizabeth and the Woodvilles, and to unite their interests with his own, were a vain effort to escape from the consequences of this and other previous political blunders.
'The public policy and government of Richard were marked by the same general character of discontinuity, and excess in opposite directions, which marked his personal acts. He was .a.lways either the ardent reformer and rigid censor of morals, or the lavish patron and the ostentatious imitator of his brother's stately magnificence. He did many worthy things, and corrected abuses ; but his government was unsystematic, his policy change- able and inconsistent, and his good and evil acts alike intermittent and disproportionate to the occasion. Such an administration is even more hostile to a settled state of society than one of unmixed and consistent evil. The sense of personal insecurity and the nervous alarms to which he was himself subject, seemed to com- municate themselves to the kingdom over which he ruled, and without any definite causes of complaint against his government, and with a certain consciousness that he was in some respects an able, and, generally, not an ill-disposed ruler, the nation at large longed for a termination of his reign, and at length submitted quietly, though without any eagerness, to the succession of a man of whom they knew nothing, except that he belonged in some way to the Royal family of England, and had relieved them from a state of painful uncertainty and suspense.
That Richard was not sufficiently a bad man to be beyond the pangs of remorse has been deduced from the fact of the numerous chantries he erected in the places connected with some of his violent acts to pray for his own soul or those of his victims. But this act was probably as much one of superstition as of regret, for his nervous temperament seems to have rendered him particularly sensitive to superstitious feelings. But a feeling of remorse and a sense of retribution may have mingled with the bitter agony with which, according to a tolerably reliable chronicler, he was tortured almost to madness on receiving the news of the death of his only legitimate son, on the anniversary of the death of his brother Edward. Richard was a deeply-affectionate father and a devoted husband, and there is probably no calumny more baseless than that which attributes to him the gradual poisoning of his wife, soon after the sad event with which they had both been nearly distracted. Anne was of a consumptive family, and her death was probably precipitated by that of her son.
On the whole, as far as we can read his character, Richard was no deliberate villain, and not in natural disposition evil-minded or cruel. But his character and his acts were the result of a dis- ordered nervous temperament, and an impatient and unstable will. As the second man in the State, under a Sovereign (such as his brother Edward) whom he trusted and looked up to, he might have been an able and high-minded administrator. When left to him- self he had neither judgment nor self-confidence, and became a violent man and an unsatisfactory ruler.
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