Rous, the "intolerable little priest"

This article should make us all feel better (though the author needs to correct a few typos that make him seem less well informed than he is). The title of the article. "An Intolerable Little Priest," sums up his view of Rous quite neatly. The source for his quotations is Alison Hanham's "Richard III and His Tudor Historians" (worth reading for its interesting view of More despite her faith in Mancini's trustworthiness):

http://www.lostincastles.com/lost-in-time/2013/2/21/an-intolerable-little-priest.html

Carol

Thanks for that Carol - just as an aside for information.
Lost in Castles/Time - the Foxes are the people who have made the superb
computer reconstruction of Middleham & who provided the images of the
Tomb - there are some beautiful close up details in earlier articles.
Apols if everyone already knew!!

Jac


In message <kgg6uk+vfct@...>, justcarol67
<justcarol67@...> writes
>This article should make us all feel better (though the author needs to
>correct a few typos that make him seem less well informed than he is).
>The title of the article. "An Intolerable Little Priest," sums up his
>view of Rous quite neatly. The source for his quotations is Alison
>Hanham's "Richard III and His Tudor Historians" (worth reading for its
>interesting view of More despite her faith in Mancini's trustworthiness):
>
>http://www.lostincastles.com/lost-in-time/2013/2/21/an-intolerable-littl
>e-priest.html
>
>Carol
>
>
>
>------------------------------------
>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>

--

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2013 5:27 PM
Subject: Rous, the "intolerable little priest"


> This article should make us all feel better (though the author needs to
> correct a few typos that make him seem less well informed than he is). The
> title of the article. "An Intolerable Little Priest," sums up his view of
> Rous quite neatly. The source for his quotations is Alison Hanham's
> "Richard III and His Tudor Historians" (worth reading for its interesting
> view of More despite her faith in Mancini's trustworthiness):

You know, if we think More's falsely-accurate-but-wildly-wrong age for
Edward might be a sign that this is satire rather than history, might not
the same be true of Rous? Perhaps having Richard two years in the womb and
reigning for three years was Rous's way of signalling "I'm only writing this
nonsense because I've been ordered to." He was in his 70s, after all - he
probably didn't feel up to any more active rebellion.

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:
>
> You know, if we think More's falsely-accurate-but-wildly-wrong age for Edward might be a sign that this is satire rather than history, might not the same be true of Rous? Perhaps having Richard two years in the womb and reigning for three years was Rous's way of signalling "I'm only writing this nonsense because I've been ordered to." He was in his 70s, after all - he probably didn't feel up to any more active rebellion.

Carol responds:

That's certainly an interesting and as far as I know original idea, but Rous was a very different sort of man from More. For one thing, he was born around 1411, making him about sixty-seven years older than More, who was born in 1478--a very different generation from the new humanists who were just beginning to find their voices in early Tudor England. (They would, of course, have found them under Richard had he won Bosworth, and what a different history in every sense we would have had then!) Rous was a cleric interested primarily, as far as I can tell from his writings, in genealogy, and he seems to have had a very strong emotional connection to the Neville family. His observations of Richard while he was alive are almost entirely favorable favorable (I can't recall whether his complaint that Richard supposedly intended the young Earl of Warwick to be his heir, actually a questionable proposition, and substituted another nephew, John, Earl of Lincoln, occurs there or in his Historia Regum Angliae). His switch from praise of Richard (never intended for Richard's eyes and more or less accurate observations of events in the North such as Richard's progress) to the venom and absurdities of the Historia (scorpion imagery, two years in his mother's womb, etc.) has never been adequately explained.

Marie has suggested that he may have hoped to help the Countess of Warwick get her lands back by blackening Richard's name (if that was his motive, he failed abysmally). He has also been called a hypocritical time-server. I'm not sure when the Historia was published, but as he died in 1491 or -92, it could not have been many years after Bosworth, and he may have cobbled it together in a hurry.

Sir Thomas More, far from being an aging and possibly ailing (or impoverished?) cleric, was a youngish lawyer of about thirty-six when he began his "Historie" and was already well known for his keen intellect and sharp wit. (You can see his ironic sense of humor quite clearly in the scene where he has the secret page inform Richard that a stranger named Sr James Tyrrell is looking for a job while the king is sitting on the privy.) I'm pretty sure that the descriptions of Richard as being "deformed" because he had one shoulder higher than the other are also ironic because, according to Erasmus, More also had one shoulder higher than the other! But even scholars specializing in More somehow read More's "History" as somewhere between a true account and a humanist moral tract with admittedly imaginary dialogue.

At any rate, this "revisionist" view of More is not popular among academics, who tend to hold a more traditional view of both him and Richard, with even non-Catholic scholars somehow clinging to the idea that a saint would not lie. I personally think that Sir Thomas More would laugh at the idea that he had been sainted--a martyr to the Tudor king that he once hoped would save England from his father's despotism. It's as if they still hold Gairdner's view that the skeptical spirit is fatal to history.

My point, I suppose, is that Rous and More were two very different men, and it's unlikely that a heretofore straightforward chronicler and cleric like Rous would suddenly develop an ironic sense of humor. It's even possible that his attempt to vilify Richard (so inept that he had to resort to two years in his mother's womb and got Richard's birthday wrong) was as bad as it was because he wasn't used to writing lies or propaganda. Unfortunately, for their different reasons, both Vergil and More repeated and expanded on Rous's monster born, leading to the unforgettable characterization (or caricature) in Shakespeare.

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:02 AM
Subject: Re: Rous, the "intolerable little
priest"


> (They would, of course, have found them under Richard had he won Bosworth,
> and what a different history in every sense we would have had then!)

Yes. It depends on what heirs he would have had, but Richard's tolerance
and his possession of a Wycliffe Bible suggest that if his line had
continued we might have ended up with something like the Church of England,
with its inclusion of both high and low churches, without all the bloodshed
it took to get there under Fat Harry. [I actually have a lot of time for
Henry VII, but not for his son - although he was a good musician, if he
really did write Greensleeves.]

> Rous was a cleric interested primarily, as far as I can tell from his
> writings, in genealogy, and he seems to have had a very strong emotional
> connection to the Neville family.

Yes, exactly. It's that which makes me think his blackening of Richard
might have been intentionally unrealistic - because Richard was as much a
Neville as Ann was, albeit on the distaff side. If Rous was devoted to the
entire family, then that suggests he was devoted to Richard too, and calling
him Ann's "unhappy husband" sounds like he's calling him a victim of
misfortune and sorrow, rather than a monster she shouldn't have married.

Although I supposed if he believed Richard to be a usurper and/or a murderer
he might have seen him as a traitor to the family.

> to the venom and absurdities of the Historia (scorpion imagery, two years
> in his mother's womb, etc.) has never been adequately explained.

It's the obvious absurdities which make me wonder - although of course, he
was an old man, and might have been going senile. In some patients dementia
leads to paranoia and aggression.

> Sir Thomas More, far from being an aging and possibly ailing (or
> impoverished?) cleric, was a youngish lawyer of about thirty-six when he
> began his "Historie" and was already well known for his keen intellect and
> sharp wit.

Also known for his hatred of heretics, though, wasn't he? I have wondered
whether he knew Richard had a Wycliffe Bible, and took agin' him for that
reason.

> At any rate, this "revisionist" view of More is not popular among
> academics, who tend to hold a more traditional view of both him and
> Richard, with even non-Catholic scholars somehow clinging to the idea that
> a saint would not lie.

He seems to have been an honest man, if not a very pleasant one - but if his
history of Richard is deliberately untrue in the way you suggest then it's
not a lie, it's an alternate-history SF novel. And we know he wrote at
least one other work of SF.

OTOH, it could be that he *was* dishonest and that he put the false age for
Edward in in order to sound authoritative, but couldn't be arsed to find out
his real age. But that seems unlikely in a a lawyer - you'd expect him to
worry about getitng caught out.

> My point, I suppose, is that Rous and More were two very different men,
> and it's unlikely that a heretofore straightforward chronicler and cleric
> like Rous would suddenly develop an ironic sense of humor.

I'm not thinking of it as humour exactly - just "If you want me to write
against this good son of the Nevilles I'll make it so ridiculous that people
will see that it's ridiculous." I don't know if you know what happened to
PG Wodehouse, the author of the Jeeves stories. He found homself stuck in
Nazi-occupied France and the Nazis wanted him to do propaganda radio
broadcasts for them. Fearing for his safety he agreed to do it but then
made his broadcasts deliberately flippant and implausible, in the hope that
people at home in the UK would know that he was being coerced and that what
he was saying was untrue. Unfortunately he wasn't heavy-handed enough with
the satire and some people thought his broadcasts were genuine and that he
was a traitor - as with Rous, if my theory is correct.

Claire wrote: [snip]
> Yes, exactly. It's that which makes me think his blackening of Richard might have been intentionally unrealistic - because Richard was as much a Neville as Ann was, albeit on the distaff side. If Rous was devoted to the entire family, then that suggests he was devoted to Richard too, and calling him Ann's "unhappy husband" sounds like he's calling him a victim of misfortune and sorrow, rather than a monster she shouldn't have married.
>
> Although I supposed if he believed Richard to be a usurper and/or a murderer he might have seen him as a traitor to the family.

[snip my comment]
>
> It's the obvious absurdities which make me wonder - although of course, he was an old man, and might have been going senile. In some patients dementia leads to paranoia and aggression.

Carol responds:

That last is an interesting theory and could explain the extreme difference between his altered Latin Rous Roll (to which we fortunately can compare the unaltered English version), which merely erased or cut out the praise of Richard and, as you say, substituted "infelix maritus" ("unhappy husband") with the viciousness of the Historia (which, nevertheless, is our source for Richard's burial place).

I'm pretty sure that if he believed Richard to have murdered his nephews, he would have said so, but I tend to believe that he would have been perfectly happy if Richard had remained king as long as he made little Warwick his heir (not logical, but Rous wasn't operating on logic) after his own son died. Both boys, like Richard and George, were "Nevilles on the distaff side" (with a Neville grandmother on their father's side), so Rous would have been perfectly happy to see either of those boys inherit the throne. (When one Edward died, he transferred his hopes to the other.) Edward IV, as far as I know, is not even depicted in the Rous Roll despite having a Neville mother since he married Elizabeth Woodville/Dame Elizabeth Grey. (Rous might not have known about the Eleanor Butler precontract, but if he did, it would be one more reason to focus his interest on the legitimate Neville sons.)

Which might be one more reason he behaved so abjectly to Henry and so badly to the dead Richard. Edward of Warwick was a prisoner in the Tower when he wrote his Anglia Historia Regum. Maybe he hoped (in vain again) that by blackening Richard's name and praising Henry's, he could persuade Henry to release young Warwick. If so, he obviously misjudged his man.

Claire:
[snip]
> I'm not thinking of it as humour exactly - just "If you want me to write against this good son of the Nevilles I'll make it so ridiculous that people will see that it's ridiculous." [snip] Unfortunately he [Wodehouse] wasn't heavy-handed enough with
> the satire and some people thought his broadcasts were genuine and that he was a traitor - as with Rous, if my theory is correct.

Carol responds:

I don't think so, for the reasons I've given. An aging cleric, especially if he was still trying to help the countess and her grandson Warwick, would not be attempting to create a heavy-handed satire that no one would take seriously. (Certainly, people did take it at face value, but More in his ironic way points out the improbability of the two-years-in-the-womb part.) I think your Wodehouse comparison is actually more applicable to More (though, of course, his satire didn't get him in trouble because no one knew about it), And it isn't even subtle, really, just so full of details from his fertile imagination to give it verisimilitude that people believe it, especially those inclined to admire More for standing up to Henry VIII and losing his head for it or inclined already to see Richard as evil. After all, it's what they were taught in school, so it must be true. (Maybe the more skeptical younger generation will think differently.)

Anyway, it's amazing what people in those days would believe, and I don't think that Rous expected his allusions to Richard's supposed rising sign (mistaken by modern historians as a sun sign) to be questioned even though it's highly doubtful that he really had access to Richard's horoscope or knew the hour of his birth. He just needed for the sake of his propaganda to associate him with Scorpio and obviously his Libra sun sign had exactly the wrong connotations. And even the two years in his mother's womb, so obviously invented from our modern perspective, would not be impossible if Richard were the anti-Christ Rous is depicting him as being.

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2013 3:23 AM
Subject: Re: Rous, the "intolerable little
priest"


> Anyway, it's amazing what people in those days would believe, and I don't
> think that Rous expected his allusions to Richard's supposed rising sign
> (mistaken by modern historians as a sun sign) to be questioned even though
> it's highly doubtful that he really had access to Richard's horoscope or
> knew the hour of his birth. He just needed for the sake of his propaganda
> to associate him with Scorpio and obviously his Libra sun sign had exactly
> the wrong connotations. And even the two years in his mother's womb, so
> obviously invented from our modern perspective, would not be impossible if
> Richard were the anti-Christ Rous is depicting him as being.

But then, his getting the length of Richard's reign out by 50%, when he was
an adult at the time, is nearly as odd as - and even easier to verify than -
More giving a spurious age for Edward.

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> But then, his getting the length of Richard's reign out by 50%, when he was an adult at the time, is nearly as odd as - and even easier to verify than - More giving a spurious age for Edward.

Carol responds:

More's seemingly precise but entirely wrong age for Edward reads (to me) like a secret signal to his readers that the whole book is not to be taken seriously and is a dig at all those "wise men who deem" such and such but are really just relaying (and exaggerating) rumors. But Rous's "three years and a day" is a biblical allusion to the length of the reign of the anti-Christ to whom he is overtly comparing Richard. It's possible that he knew the actual length of Richard's reign, just as he must have known that he was nine months in his mother's womb like everyone else (give or take a few weeks). He may even have known that the Feast of the Eleven Virgins (October 21) was George's birthday, not Richard's. But he was not writing for people who would spot these errors and say, "Oh! This story can't be true because he has some details wrong." He was writing specifically for Henry, but in that superstitious age, many readers would have taken his combination of astronomical and biblical imagery literally. (Except, of course, the part about the scorpion's stinging tail, which is obviously figurative.} It certainly would have pleased Henry, who was simultaneously trying to link his own reign with Arthurian mythology.

Rous was writing just a few years after Pope Innocent VIII issued his papal bull Summus desiderates blaming freezing weather and starvation on witches and expresses a literal belief in devils (1484). Two years later, his inquisitors published their findings in Malleus Maleficarum (which admittedly didn't fit with the official Catholic position on demonology). Nevertheless, the end of Richard's reign and the beginning of Henry's witnessed a surge in the fear of demons and devils to which Rous could not have been oblivious.

What we twenty-first century readers see when we read Rous and what the readers of his time saw are not the same thing. For them (at least for those who never knew or saw Richard and heard only Tudor propaganda about him), that child born with teeth and flowing hair after two years in his mother's womb was a monster born whose fierceness reflected the evil constellation under which he had ostensibly been born (apologies to those of you who have Scorpio as a rising sign or birth sign!).

Interestingly, Vergil, who keeps the description of the raised shoulder and adds a "sowre cowntenance, which semyd to savor of mischief, and utter evydently craft and deceyt" (which makes you wonder how his Richard got away with all that wickedness!), says nothing whatever about Richard's birth, and More (who treats the two years in the womb with ironic skepticism) also omits the astronomical details. I can't find them in Hall/Holinshed or Shakespeare, either, though I don't have time to do a diligent search.

It's clear that Vergil did use Rous as a source (which is where he got the "short face" idea, which, ironically, pops up in modern translations of Rous(!), but he seems to have ignored the astronomical "evidence" of Richard's villainy along with (sadly), his "vultu blandiens" ("alluring countenance"--or at least, that's one translation; it could also mean "flattering countenance").

BTW, please forgive me if my posts seem incoherent. I think as I go and have to look up everything to make sure that I'm remembering correctly. In short, I really wanted to stop quoting everything, but I'm addicted to Ricardian research. Is there a twelve-step program that can help me? "My name is Carol, and I'm a Ricardoholic!"

Carol