rallying the troops

Since it's gone quiet, here's a thought for the day.

The idea that Richard became Warwick's ward at Middleham just after he
turned nine seems to be based on a misreading of the records by Kendall.
However, the Calendar of Patent Rolls 1461-67, p. 66, shows Richard, George,
cousin Warwick and Warwick's brother John Neville "appointed to call out the
levies of Yorkshire, Westmoreland, Northumberland and Cumberland for defence
againstthe Lancastrians and the Scots" on 13/11/1461, six weeks after
Richard turned nine.

This doesn't sound like a ceremonial post - it's not something which comes
with a fancy hat. Somebody (either Ishita or mcjohn I think) suggested it
might be a purely administrative job but, well, when my great-uncle was
raising levies it was definitely something you did on the spot, by personal
persuasion. Admittedly that was in Burma in the 1940s but, well, even if it
was just paperwork, why would you give a job like that to a nine-year-old,
however able and loyal? I know Richard marched an army round the country
when he was twelve, and George was indeed twelve at this point, but there's
usully a big difference in competence between twelve and just-turned-nine.

If it was just a matter of some clerk doing the paperwork and then somebody
else appending an impressive royal signature, why didn't Edward sign it
himself?

So, I suspect that Edward was doing a variant on the
politician-kissing-cute-baby publicity stunt and sending his little brothers
round the north on a recruiting drive, so people would go "Ah, look at the
sweet widdle boys!" and feel moved to sign up. Two adults, two children -
they probably split up and went round in pairs, and since Richard would
later join Warwick's household, and John Neville would join a conspiracy to
put George on the throne (? or was he already dead by that point?) I reckon
they probably split up that way, Richard with Warwick, and George with John
Neville. So Richard probably did at least visit Middleham when he was
nine/ten, as a home-base while travelling around with Warwick to rally the
troops.

I was looking at Kendall again - I'd forgotten how much his biography,
however well-meant, is more of a historical novel. Pace Paul it reminded me
of why I never found his assumptions about Richard convincing. The bit I'm
looking at calls him a usurper, "obscurely fractured", labouring to atone
for having taken the throne, feverish and driven, and "What his brothers
could command with a smile, he could win only by effort". This is a guy so
popular that somebody carved a pledge of allegiance to him into a guardroom
wall the way people spray-paint the name of their favourite band, and of
whom somebody in York commented sourly that Gloucester was always smiling
and smiling and making promises, but didn't always follow through.

I just can't see Kendall's dour, tormented, guilt-ridden usurper - I just
see a decent, good-hearted boy with a strong social conscience and a chronic
inability to delegate, doggy-paddling frantically to keep up with the role
fate had suddenly dumped on him from a great height, and doing a reasonable
job even when his private world was collapsing around his ears. And I see
some analogy with Nelson, who was idolised like a rock star and died in part
because he insisted on going into battle wearing his medals.

Your points about Kendall are so interesting, Claire. Coincidentally, I just re-read Kendall a few weeks ago after many, many years. It was the book that first brought me to Richard (I read Tey afterward) and when I first read it, I took it all as gospel. Now there have been new discoveries that Kendall couldn't know about, so no blame on him there, but during this recent reading I was so struck by how much I had come to hold completely different beliefs about Richard's character, personality and motives. He paints a portrait of a depressed, despairing man with much to atone for, so rigid and inflexible he repelled others, so burdened by guilt at having dispossessed his brother's sons he could barely function. I don't agree with any of that. And every time I read a footnote citing More, I cringed. I don't want to seem to be disparaging Kendall or to be discounting his very real contribution. We owe him a great deal, and his is still, in my opinion, the best biography of Richard there is. But we know he gets things wrong and I don't at all agree with his conclusions about who Richard really was. As Carol said, we desperately need a new biography.
Pamela Garrett

--- In , "Claire M Jordan" <whitehound@...> wrote:
>
> Since it's gone quiet, here's a thought for the day.
>
> The idea that Richard became Warwick's ward at Middleham just after he
> turned nine seems to be based on a misreading of the records by Kendall.
> However, the Calendar of Patent Rolls 1461-67, p. 66, shows Richard, George,
> cousin Warwick and Warwick's brother John Neville "appointed to call out the
> levies of Yorkshire, Westmoreland, Northumberland and Cumberland for defence
> againstthe Lancastrians and the Scots" on 13/11/1461, six weeks after
> Richard turned nine.
>
> This doesn't sound like a ceremonial post - it's not something which comes
> with a fancy hat. Somebody (either Ishita or mcjohn I think) suggested it
> might be a purely administrative job but, well, when my great-uncle was
> raising levies it was definitely something you did on the spot, by personal
> persuasion. Admittedly that was in Burma in the 1940s but, well, even if it
> was just paperwork, why would you give a job like that to a nine-year-old,
> however able and loyal? I know Richard marched an army round the country
> when he was twelve, and George was indeed twelve at this point, but there's
> usully a big difference in competence between twelve and just-turned-nine.
>
> If it was just a matter of some clerk doing the paperwork and then somebody
> else appending an impressive royal signature, why didn't Edward sign it
> himself?
>
> So, I suspect that Edward was doing a variant on the
> politician-kissing-cute-baby publicity stunt and sending his little brothers
> round the north on a recruiting drive, so people would go "Ah, look at the
> sweet widdle boys!" and feel moved to sign up. Two adults, two children -
> they probably split up and went round in pairs, and since Richard would
> later join Warwick's household, and John Neville would join a conspiracy to
> put George on the throne (? or was he already dead by that point?) I reckon
> they probably split up that way, Richard with Warwick, and George with John
> Neville. So Richard probably did at least visit Middleham when he was
> nine/ten, as a home-base while travelling around with Warwick to rally the
> troops.
>
> I was looking at Kendall again - I'd forgotten how much his biography,
> however well-meant, is more of a historical novel. Pace Paul it reminded me
> of why I never found his assumptions about Richard convincing. The bit I'm
> looking at calls him a usurper, "obscurely fractured", labouring to atone
> for having taken the throne, feverish and driven, and "What his brothers
> could command with a smile, he could win only by effort". This is a guy so
> popular that somebody carved a pledge of allegiance to him into a guardroom
> wall the way people spray-paint the name of their favourite band, and of
> whom somebody in York commented sourly that Gloucester was always smiling
> and smiling and making promises, but didn't always follow through.
>
> I just can't see Kendall's dour, tormented, guilt-ridden usurper - I just
> see a decent, good-hearted boy with a strong social conscience and a chronic
> inability to delegate, doggy-paddling frantically to keep up with the role
> fate had suddenly dumped on him from a great height, and doing a reasonable
> job even when his private world was collapsing around his ears. And I see
> some analogy with Nelson, who was idolised like a rock star and died in part
> because he insisted on going into battle wearing his medals.
>

> "I just can't see Kendall's dour, tormented, guilt-ridden usurper - I just
> see a decent, good-hearted boy with a strong social conscience and a chronic
> inability to delegate, doggy-paddling frantically to keep up with the role
> fate had suddenly dumped on him from a great height, and doing a reasonable
> job even when his private world was collapsing around his ears."
>
Love the sum up!
I have question about the promises and not keeping them, why would he do that if he knew he could not deliver? Doesn't sound like the " old Dick", does he?

Ishita Bandyo
Sent from my iPad

On Mar 21, 2013, at 7:28 PM, "Claire M Jordan" <whitehound@...> wrote:

> Since it's gone quiet, here's a thought for the day.
>
> The idea that Richard became Warwick's ward at Middleham just after he
> turned nine seems to be based on a misreading of the records by Kendall.
> However, the Calendar of Patent Rolls 1461-67, p. 66, shows Richard, George,
> cousin Warwick and Warwick's brother John Neville "appointed to call out the
> levies of Yorkshire, Westmoreland, Northumberland and Cumberland for defence
> againstthe Lancastrians and the Scots" on 13/11/1461, six weeks after
> Richard turned nine.
>
> This doesn't sound like a ceremonial post - it's not something which comes
> with a fancy hat. Somebody (either Ishita or mcjohn I think) suggested it
> might be a purely administrative job but, well, when my great-uncle was
> raising levies it was definitely something you did on the spot, by personal
> persuasion. Admittedly that was in Burma in the 1940s but, well, even if it
> was just paperwork, why would you give a job like that to a nine-year-old,
> however able and loyal? I know Richard marched an army round the country
> when he was twelve, and George was indeed twelve at this point, but there's
> usully a big difference in competence between twelve and just-turned-nine.
>
> If it was just a matter of some clerk doing the paperwork and then somebody
> else appending an impressive royal signature, why didn't Edward sign it
> himself?
>
> So, I suspect that Edward was doing a variant on the
> politician-kissing-cute-baby publicity stunt and sending his little brothers
> round the north on a recruiting drive, so people would go "Ah, look at the
> sweet widdle boys!" and feel moved to sign up. Two adults, two children -
> they probably split up and went round in pairs, and since Richard would
> later join Warwick's household, and John Neville would join a conspiracy to
> put George on the throne (? or was he already dead by that point?) I reckon
> they probably split up that way, Richard with Warwick, and George with John
> Neville. So Richard probably did at least visit Middleham when he was
> nine/ten, as a home-base while travelling around with Warwick to rally the
> troops.
>
> I was looking at Kendall again - I'd forgotten how much his biography,
> however well-meant, is more of a historical novel. Pace Paul it reminded me
> of why I never found his assumptions about Richard convincing. The bit I'm
> looking at calls him a usurper, "obscurely fractured", labouring to atone
> for having taken the throne, feverish and driven, and "What his brothers
> could command with a smile, he could win only by effort". This is a guy so
> popular that somebody carved a pledge of allegiance to him into a guardroom
> wall the way people spray-paint the name of their favourite band, and of
> whom somebody in York commented sourly that Gloucester was always smiling
> and smiling and making promises, but didn't always follow through.
>
> I just can't see Kendall's dour, tormented, guilt-ridden usurper - I just
> see a decent, good-hearted boy with a strong social conscience and a chronic
> inability to delegate, doggy-paddling frantically to keep up with the role
> fate had suddenly dumped on him from a great height, and doing a reasonable
> job even when his private world was collapsing around his ears. And I see
> some analogy with Nelson, who was idolised like a rock star and died in part
> because he insisted on going into battle wearing his medals.
>
>

From: Ishita Bandyo
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 12:45 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> I have question about the promises and not keeping them, why would he do
> that if he knew he could not deliver?

I'm assuming he *didn't* know he couldn't deliver - that he was
overestimating his capacity to get something done - or even that his
note-keeping wasn't very good. I don't rememebr where I found the original
quote so I can't check it, but iirc it wasn't referring to any huge thing, I
think it was something to do with fishing permissions, and there must have
been such a *lot* of those sorts of small-to-medium requests for his
attention when he was duke and he really wanted to do well for the ordinary
people, so I just see him saying "Yes, yes, of course I'll look into that
and get it sorted for you", sincerely meaning to, and then overlooking some
of them in the general mass of paperwork.

> Doesn't sound like the " old Dick", does he?

We don't know for sure that "Old Dick" referred to Richard - William Stanley
wrote it in a September, year unknown, at a house which didn't officially
become his until December 1484 so either he was there before the house was
officially signed over to him, or he was writing after Richard's death. It
may refer to paperwork of Richard's being sorted out after his death. But
even if it refers to Richard, in life, it just suggests that he had all his
officers ploughing through even more paperwork.

And he might have seemed a bit dour to Londoners just because he had
Yorkshire manners - he might well have been both dry and blunt. But the few
glimpses we catch of him, in e.g. his own letters and in von Popellau's
account, suggest a sparky, engaging little bloke, and one who was very aware
of his own emotions and could publicly admit to grief for his wife, sorrow
for fallen soldiers, a desire to work off his frustrations in battle etc..

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> [snip] The idea that Richard became Warwick's ward at Middleham just after he turned nine seems to be based on a misreading of the records by Kendall. [snip] Two adults, two children - they probably split up and went round in pairs, and since Richard would later join Warwick's household, and John Neville would join a conspiracy to put George on the throne (? or was he already dead by that point?) [snip]

Carol responds:

Just two points here since I don't have time to research Richard's whereabouts at the time in question. Richard, unlike Francis Lovell, was never Warwick's ward, only his pupil. Richard's guardian (the person in charge of his marriage, lands, and everything else till he was old enough to manage them himself) was Edward.

Also, John Neville was loyal to Edward much longer than his brother was. He finally joined his brothers (Archbishop George was also involved) right before Richard's eighteenth birthday. It was the threat of an attack by him that forced Edward, Richard, and several hundred followers into exile in Burgundy. John Neville, ex-Earl of Northumberland and now Marques of Montagu, was killed along with his brother Warwick at Barnet.

I agree with your assessment of Kendall's Richard (though in general, I like Kendall's biography--it's the only modern pro-Ricardian one we have!). I don't think that Richard was ever dour (except maybe at Bosworth), and he certainly didn't regard himself as a usurper.

Carol

Carol

You are right in that. The glimpses we get from his letters specially shows him to be sprightly.
" Old Dick" might be Stanley grumbling about Richard putting him to real work , which I guess the nobles were unused to under Ed4.

Ishita Bandyo
Sent from my iPad

On Mar 21, 2013, at 9:17 PM, "Claire M Jordan" <whitehound@...> wrote:

> From: Ishita Bandyo
> To:
> Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 12:45 AM
> Subject: Re: rallying the troops
>
> > I have question about the promises and not keeping them, why would he do
> > that if he knew he could not deliver?
>
> I'm assuming he *didn't* know he couldn't deliver - that he was
> overestimating his capacity to get something done - or even that his
> note-keeping wasn't very good. I don't rememebr where I found the original
> quote so I can't check it, but iirc it wasn't referring to any huge thing, I
> think it was something to do with fishing permissions, and there must have
> been such a *lot* of those sorts of small-to-medium requests for his
> attention when he was duke and he really wanted to do well for the ordinary
> people, so I just see him saying "Yes, yes, of course I'll look into that
> and get it sorted for you", sincerely meaning to, and then overlooking some
> of them in the general mass of paperwork.
>
> > Doesn't sound like the " old Dick", does he?
>
> We don't know for sure that "Old Dick" referred to Richard - William Stanley
> wrote it in a September, year unknown, at a house which didn't officially
> become his until December 1484 so either he was there before the house was
> officially signed over to him, or he was writing after Richard's death. It
> may refer to paperwork of Richard's being sorted out after his death. But
> even if it refers to Richard, in life, it just suggests that he had all his
> officers ploughing through even more paperwork.
>
> And he might have seemed a bit dour to Londoners just because he had
> Yorkshire manners - he might well have been both dry and blunt. But the few
> glimpses we catch of him, in e.g. his own letters and in von Popellau's
> account, suggest a sparky, engaging little bloke, and one who was very aware
> of his own emotions and could publicly admit to grief for his wife, sorrow
> for fallen soldiers, a desire to work off his frustrations in battle etc..
>
>

From: Ishita Bandyo
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 1:50 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> You are right in that. The glimpses we get from his letters specially
> shows him to be sprightly.
" Old Dick" might be Stanley grumbling about Richard putting him to real
work , which I guess the nobles were unused to under Ed4.

And people just get these nicknames. I get called Auntie Claire even by
people only two years younger than me - it's better than being called
Fishface or Buggerlugs or other similarly inexplicable Britishisms.

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 1:46 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> and he certainly didn't regard himself as a usurper.

It would be natural for him to feel bad and a bit guilty about having had to
depose them, I think, because of the likely psychological effect on them,
but if Titulus Regius was as genuine as the evidence suggests then he would
also know that he was a victim of circumstance as much as they were, and
that the situation wasn't of his making.

Why would he feel guilty? God had put him there to do a job. He would not have taken the throne had he not believed that he was in the right. He would have seen himself damned for all eternity had he knowingly done such wrong. 



________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 3:00
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 1:46 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

> and he certainly didn't regard himself as a usurper.

It would be natural for him to feel bad and a bit guilty about having had to
depose them, I think, because of the likely psychological effect on them,
but if Titulus Regius was as genuine as the evidence suggests then he would
also know that he was a victim of circumstance as much as they were, and
that the situation wasn't of his making.

I think we, as amateurs, have to be very careful when we criticise acknowledged scholars in this area. Kendall, I agree, was not a trained historian, but he was an academic. Some of Richard's most avid supporters today, such as JAH, are not historians by training but I don't doubt their ability to research or interpret primary information. When there are serious potential flaws, which we can prove, I think perhaps of Weir, then we can draw attention to them out and leave others to draw their own conclusions. Some historians' interpretations of the known facts will be different from that of this Society, scholarship was ever so and keeps us on our toes; but we cannot say they are poor historians, only again point to the flaws in their arguments. You can do this with almost every book. Jones writes excellently on Bosworth but says Richard probably murdered the princes, Hipshon starts well then gets cold feet, Baldwin is a bit bland, Ross is excellent
on sources but comes down against Richard etc, etc. To say that our interpretation of primary sources is better than theirs smacks of an unwarranted arrogance to which few of us would wish to lay claim.
 
Add to that the fact that Kendall was writing over half a century ago with a typewriter, no internet and without the resources these newer writers have at their fingertips and I think it paltry indeed to criticise the bits of his work we don't necessarily agree with. Yes, his work is poetic, makes assumptions, attempts to fill gaps, but he, like Tey, is probably the reason why a large proportion of our membership is here today. We should be lauding Kendall, not taking him to bits. Just my opinion.  H 


________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Thursday, 21 March 2013, 23:28
Subject: rallying the troops

 

Since it's gone quiet, here's a thought for the day.

The idea that Richard became Warwick's ward at Middleham just after he
turned nine seems to be based on a misreading of the records by Kendall.
However, the Calendar of Patent Rolls 1461-67, p. 66, shows Richard, George,
cousin Warwick and Warwick's brother John Neville "appointed to call out the
levies of Yorkshire, Westmoreland, Northumberland and Cumberland for defence
againstthe Lancastrians and the Scots" on 13/11/1461, six weeks after
Richard turned nine.

This doesn't sound like a ceremonial post - it's not something which comes
with a fancy hat. Somebody (either Ishita or mcjohn I think) suggested it
might be a purely administrative job but, well, when my great-uncle was
raising levies it was definitely something you did on the spot, by personal
persuasion. Admittedly that was in Burma in the 1940s but, well, even if it
was just paperwork, why would you give a job like that to a nine-year-old,
however able and loyal? I know Richard marched an army round the country
when he was twelve, and George was indeed twelve at this point, but there's
usully a big difference in competence between twelve and just-turned-nine.

If it was just a matter of some clerk doing the paperwork and then somebody
else appending an impressive royal signature, why didn't Edward sign it
himself?

So, I suspect that Edward was doing a variant on the
politician-kissing-cute-baby publicity stunt and sending his little brothers
round the north on a recruiting drive, so people would go "Ah, look at the
sweet widdle boys!" and feel moved to sign up. Two adults, two children -
they probably split up and went round in pairs, and since Richard would
later join Warwick's household, and John Neville would join a conspiracy to
put George on the throne (? or was he already dead by that point?) I reckon
they probably split up that way, Richard with Warwick, and George with John
Neville. So Richard probably did at least visit Middleham when he was
nine/ten, as a home-base while travelling around with Warwick to rally the
troops.

I was looking at Kendall again - I'd forgotten how much his biography,
however well-meant, is more of a historical novel. Pace Paul it reminded me
of why I never found his assumptions about Richard convincing. The bit I'm
looking at calls him a usurper, "obscurely fractured", labouring to atone
for having taken the throne, feverish and driven, and "What his brothers
could command with a smile, he could win only by effort". This is a guy so
popular that somebody carved a pledge of allegiance to him into a guardroom
wall the way people spray-paint the name of their favourite band, and of
whom somebody in York commented sourly that Gloucester was always smiling
and smiling and making promises, but didn't always follow through.

I just can't see Kendall's dour, tormented, guilt-ridden usurper - I just
see a decent, good-hearted boy with a strong social conscience and a chronic
inability to delegate, doggy-paddling frantically to keep up with the role
fate had suddenly dumped on him from a great height, and doing a reasonable
job even when his private world was collapsing around his ears. And I see
some analogy with Nelson, who was idolised like a rock star and died in part
because he insisted on going into battle wearing his medals.

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 10:26 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> Why would he feel guilty? God had put him there to do a job. He would not
> have taken the throne had he not believed that he was in the right. He
> would have seen himself damned for all eternity had he knowingly done such
> wrong.

Emotionally I think it would be like finding out that your rich auntie had
died and left everything to you, disinheriting her own children in the
process. You know it's entirely not your fault but you'd still feel bad for
your cousins, and probably slightly as if it *was* your fault, even if you
knew intellectually that it wasn't.

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 10:55 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> I think we, as amateurs, have to be very careful when we criticise
> acknowledged scholars in this area. Kendall, I agree, was not a trained
> historian, but he was an academic.

I'm sure many of us on the forum are also academics, and much of the book
isn't scholarship, it's a historical novel masquerading as scholarship.
This is part of my problem with Kendall - that (rather like Weir) he blends
imagined scenes in with the research-supported ones without making it clear
which is which, making it hard to tell which bits should be trusted and
which are imagination. The story he tells about Proud Cis and her two
little sons standing at Ludlow Cross and confronting Margaret of Anjou
during the Rape of Ludlow is pure fiction, for example, but tends to get
treated as a real scene, and almost the whole basis for his portrayal of
Richard's personality - as opposed to the actual details of who did what
when - seems also to spring from how he imagined him, without any basis
except some pretty strange ideas about anyone from Yorkshire necessarily
being some sort of Noble Savage.

It's an important collection of information and he did a lot of hard work
etc etc, but as far as being a pro-Ricardian biography goes, I think a book
which portrays Richard as an emotionally crippled usurper who did Good Works
only to assuage his guilt is something of an own goal.

As for "amateurs must know their place and not presume to criticise
experts", many of the greatest experts in British history (and I don't just
mean "in the field of history" but also in sciences and arts of all kinds)
have been self-taught amateurs. And if we all have to be meek and pull our
forelocks and go yes'm, no'm when the great gods of prefessionalism ride by,
why are we presuming to criticise the decisions made by Leicester
University?

Carol earlier:

> > and he certainly didn't regard himself as a usurper.

Claire responded:
> It would be natural for him to feel bad and a bit guilty about having had to depose them, I think, because of the likely psychological effect on them, but if Titulus Regius was as genuine as the evidence suggests then he would also know that he was a victim of circumstance as much as they were, and that the situation wasn't of his making.
>
Carol responds:

With his attitude toward illegitimacy, I think he would have regarded himself as the rightful king (as he was, in my view). Still, he would know that others would hold a different view. It must have been a difficult decision, but once Stillington presented his evidence, it was inevitable that Edward V would be set aside and Richard would become king. On the one hand, Richard might be relieved that there would be no Woodville regime, no civil war between rival factions trying to control the young king, and no danger to himself and his family once Edward V was crowned or started ruling in his own right. Being king would give Richard a chance to undo some of the wrongs that Edward had perpetrated and restore justice. On the other hand, he could never return to his home in Middleham (it's interesting to see his reference to it as "my city" in the charter for the chapel), and he would always face opposition by those who viewed him as a usurper. I don't think he felt bad for depriving Edward V of a kingship that was not rightfully his, but he was certainly concerned not only that his nephews might be "rescued" and used against him but, more important, that they might be captured and killed. Keeping them out of Tudor's hands would have been his main concern, not guilt for making what he must have thought was the right, if not the only possible choice, in my opinion.

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 3:08 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> I don't think he felt bad for depriving Edward V of a kingship that was
> not rightfully his, but he was certainly concerned not only that his
> nephews might be "rescued" and used against him but, more important, that
> they might be captured and killed. Keeping them out of Tudor's hands would
> have been his main concern, not guilt for making what he must have thought
> was the right, if not the only possible choice, in my opinion.

But people are more complex than that, and if doing what is clearly the
right thing nevertheless results in hurting someone for whom you are at
least partly responsible, especially one who is an entirely innocent victim
of someone else's bad behaviour, one would still feel pretty bad about it I
think - if one had a conscience at all. Doing the Right Thing doesn't
always, or often, mean that everything in the garden is lovely and morally
unambiguous and everyone is happy - it just means it's the least worst of
the available choices.

About a million years' ago we talked about the medieaval mindset. God had chosen Richard as King through a set of circumstances in which he had had no hand - the pre-contract. As Carol says, putting aside nephews was but a side issue in this, unless they fell into the hands of someone who could use them against the Crown. To ignore God's will would have been worse. There would have been no need for Richard to have a conscience, he had provided for the boys, their mother and their sisters, even though he was under no obligation to do so. He'd provided for Clarence's children as well, to his credit. It wasn't the worst choice, it was the one God had asked him to make. 


________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 15:33
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 3:08 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

> I don't think he felt bad for depriving Edward V of a kingship that was
> not rightfully his, but he was certainly concerned not only that his
> nephews might be "rescued" and used against him but, more important, that
> they might be captured and killed. Keeping them out of Tudor's hands would
> have been his main concern, not guilt for making what he must have thought
> was the right, if not the only possible choice, in my opinion.

But people are more complex than that, and if doing what is clearly the
right thing nevertheless results in hurting someone for whom you are at
least partly responsible, especially one who is an entirely innocent victim
of someone else's bad behaviour, one would still feel pretty bad about it I
think - if one had a conscience at all. Doing the Right Thing doesn't
always, or often, mean that everything in the garden is lovely and morally
unambiguous and everyone is happy - it just means it's the least worst of
the available choices.

But this was 1483 not 2013 - they did things differently then. 



________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 11:52
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 10:26 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

> Why would he feel guilty? God had put him there to do a job. He would not
> have taken the throne had he not believed that he was in the right. He
> would have seen himself damned for all eternity had he knowingly done such
> wrong.

Emotionally I think it would be like finding out that your rich auntie had
died and left everything to you, disinheriting her own children in the
process. You know it's entirely not your fault but you'd still feel bad for
your cousins, and probably slightly as if it *was* your fault, even if you
knew intellectually that it wasn't.

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> It wasn't the worst choice, it was the one God had asked him to make.

It was clearly the *best* choice, but that doesn't necessarily mean it
wouldn't still make him uncomfortable.

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> I'm sure many of us on the forum are also academics, and much of the book isn't scholarship, it's a historical novel masquerading as scholarship. This is part of my problem with Kendall - that (rather like Weir) he blends imagined scenes in with the research-supported ones without making it clear which is which, making it hard to tell which bits should be trusted and which are imagination. The story he tells about Proud Cis and her two little sons standing at Ludlow Cross and confronting Margaret of Anjou during the Rape of Ludlow is pure fiction, for example, but tends to get treated as a real scene, and almost the whole basis for his portrayal of Richard's personality - as opposed to the actual details of who did what when - seems also to spring from how he imagined him, without any basis except some pretty strange ideas about anyone from Yorkshire necessarily being some sort of Noble Savage. [snip]

Carol responds:

My view of Kendall's very important though necessarily imperfect biography is somewhere between yours and Hilary's. Yes, he does blend imagination with fact, but it's supremely unfair to compare him to Weir, who does not cite sources and relies heavily on More. Kendall's notes are excellent, and his decision to put the matter of the "princes" in the appendix rather than making it the main focus of the biography is inspired. I agree with you that he is probably mistaken in his assessment of Richard as a dour, guilt-ridden (and, as you didn't mention, puritanical) man but with Hilary that his biography is the best we have at this time since Ross assumes that Richard killed his nephews (based in part on Elizabeth Woodville's seeming to back Henry Tudor as king).

Regarding the supposed incident at Ludlow, he states in a note that Cecily's stand at the market cross is conjecture. However, his source, Hearne's fragment in "Chronicles of the White Rose of York," states definitively that Cicely and her two boys were found in the village and captured on October 13, 1459, so the market cross (where the soldiers would not have dared to harm them) is as least a reasonable conjecture. (Where their sister Margaret was is never mentioned.) He cross-references Cora Scofield, "The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth," vol. I, p. 37 and note 2, which I don't have and can't consult. I don't have Hearne's fragment, either. (Anyone have these sources? If so, can you quote the relevant portions?)

It's certainly true, however, that this conjecture has become "fact" and shows up, for example, in Penman's "Sunne in Splendour." The alternative would be to have them captured in Ludlow castle, where they would have had no guarantee of safety. That Cicely feared harm to her sons from Margaret's men is clear from her later sending them to Burgundy for protection.

At any rate, for all its faults, Kendall's biography is the best we currently have. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. I guess I don't need to repeat my view that we urgently need a new one incorporating the best of Kendall, the best of Ross, the new findings of Carson, J A-H, and others, but most of all, making better use of primary sources and as little as possible of More and Vergil, but I'm doing it, anyway.

Carol

So you have spent how many years studying the primary and secondary sources Claire? Methinks far less than a few on here. Yet you proclaim that one of the greatest pro-Ricardian biographies portrays Richard as 'an emotionally crippled usurper who did Good Works only to assuage his guilt'? Freedom of speech of course gives anyone the right to criticise anything, but I'd suggest they had a bit more background knowledge before putting their head above the parapet, be they amateur or professional. It's interesting that your opinion flies in the face of most criticisms of Kendall, which is that he is too pro-Richard by far. I do wonder where you're coming from and what you hope to achieve by this discussion.  H

________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 12:17
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 10:55 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

> I think we, as amateurs, have to be very careful when we criticise
> acknowledged scholars in this area. Kendall, I agree, was not a trained
> historian, but he was an academic.

I'm sure many of us on the forum are also academics, and much of the book
isn't scholarship, it's a historical novel masquerading as scholarship.
This is part of my problem with Kendall - that (rather like Weir) he blends
imagined scenes in with the research-supported ones without making it clear
which is which, making it hard to tell which bits should be trusted and
which are imagination. The story he tells about Proud Cis and her two
little sons standing at Ludlow Cross and confronting Margaret of Anjou
during the Rape of Ludlow is pure fiction, for example, but tends to get
treated as a real scene, and almost the whole basis for his portrayal of
Richard's personality - as opposed to the actual details of who did what
when - seems also to spring from how he imagined him, without any basis
except some pretty strange ideas about anyone from Yorkshire necessarily
being some sort of Noble Savage.

It's an important collection of information and he did a lot of hard work
etc etc, but as far as being a pro-Ricardian biography goes, I think a book
which portrays Richard as an emotionally crippled usurper who did Good Works
only to assuage his guilt is something of an own goal.

As for "amateurs must know their place and not presume to criticise
experts", many of the greatest experts in British history (and I don't just
mean "in the field of history" but also in sciences and arts of all kinds)
have been self-taught amateurs. And if we all have to be meek and pull our
forelocks and go yes'm, no'm when the great gods of prefessionalism ride by,
why are we presuming to criticise the decisions made by Leicester
University?

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 3:52 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> but it's supremely unfair to compare him to Weir,

I only mean, insofar as he doesn't draw a clear distinction between which
bits are research and which novelisation.

> Regarding the supposed incident at Ludlow, he states in a note that
> Cecily's stand at the market cross is conjecture. However, his source,
> Hearne's fragment in "Chronicles of the White Rose of York," states
> definitively that Cicely and her two boys were found in the village and
> captured on October 13, 1459, so the market cross (where the soldiers
> would not have dared to harm them) is as least a reasonable conjecture.

I think that's overstating it, because if they *were* at the market cross
that would be a sufficiently striking image that you'd expect there to have
been gossip about it, and therefore that the chronicle would mention it. It
sounds more as if they were inside a building. And the personal appearance
by Margaret of Anjou is unsupported as far as I know.

> That Cicely feared harm to her sons from Margaret's men is clear from her
> later sending them to Burgundy for protection.

Yes.

> At any rate, for all its faults, Kendall's biography is the best we
> currently have. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. I guess
> I don't need to repeat my view that we urgently need a new one
> incorporating the best of Kendall, the best of Ross, the new findings of
> Carson, J A-H, and others, but most of all, making better use of primary
> sources and as little as possible of More and Vergil, but I'm doing it,
> anyway.

If my biography of my grandmother is well received, maybe I'll write one!
It couldn't be worse than explaining how my gran managed to bollix the
politics of Sikkim.

Hi Carol, I wasn't actually putting Kendall with Weir (heaven forfend) I was just saying that's it's easier to find obvious flaws in some, like Weir, than others where it rests on interpretation of sources, rather than misquoting the sources themselves, like Weir. Hope this makes sense.



________________________________
From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 15:52
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> I'm sure many of us on the forum are also academics, and much of the book isn't scholarship, it's a historical novel masquerading as scholarship. This is part of my problem with Kendall - that (rather like Weir) he blends imagined scenes in with the research-supported ones without making it clear which is which, making it hard to tell which bits should be trusted and which are imagination. The story he tells about Proud Cis and her two little sons standing at Ludlow Cross and confronting Margaret of Anjou during the Rape of Ludlow is pure fiction, for example, but tends to get treated as a real scene, and almost the whole basis for his portrayal of Richard's personality - as opposed to the actual details of who did what when - seems also to spring from how he imagined him, without any basis except some pretty strange ideas about anyone from Yorkshire necessarily being some sort of Noble Savage. [snip]

Carol responds:

My view of Kendall's very important though necessarily imperfect biography is somewhere between yours and Hilary's. Yes, he does blend imagination with fact, but it's supremely unfair to compare him to Weir, who does not cite sources and relies heavily on More. Kendall's notes are excellent, and his decision to put the matter of the "princes" in the appendix rather than making it the main focus of the biography is inspired. I agree with you that he is probably mistaken in his assessment of Richard as a dour, guilt-ridden (and, as you didn't mention, puritanical) man but with Hilary that his biography is the best we have at this time since Ross assumes that Richard killed his nephews (based in part on Elizabeth Woodville's seeming to back Henry Tudor as king).

Regarding the supposed incident at Ludlow, he states in a note that Cecily's stand at the market cross is conjecture. However, his source, Hearne's fragment in "Chronicles of the White Rose of York," states definitively that Cicely and her two boys were found in the village and captured on October 13, 1459, so the market cross (where the soldiers would not have dared to harm them) is as least a reasonable conjecture. (Where their sister Margaret was is never mentioned.) He cross-references Cora Scofield, "The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth," vol. I, p. 37 and note 2, which I don't have and can't consult. I don't have Hearne's fragment, either. (Anyone have these sources? If so, can you quote the relevant portions?)

It's certainly true, however, that this conjecture has become "fact" and shows up, for example, in Penman's "Sunne in Splendour." The alternative would be to have them captured in Ludlow castle, where they would have had no guarantee of safety. That Cicely feared harm to her sons from Margaret's men is clear from her later sending them to Burgundy for protection.

At any rate, for all its faults, Kendall's biography is the best we currently have. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. I guess I don't need to repeat my view that we urgently need a new one incorporating the best of Kendall, the best of Ross, the new findings of Carson, J A-H, and others, but most of all, making better use of primary sources and as little as possible of More and Vergil, but I'm doing it, anyway.

Carol

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 3:57 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> So you have spent how many years studying the primary and secondary
sources Claire?

Off and on, 42 years, although of course not in nearly as much detail as
some of the members.

> Yet you proclaim that one of the greatest pro-Ricardian biographies
> portrays Richard as 'an emotionally crippled usurper who did Good Works
> only to assuage his guilt'?

That's what he actually says - it's pages 322-323 in the edition I have. I
can't be arsed to type it out in full right now, but that's the gist of it.
He doesn't say he performed good works *only* out of guilt but that it was
guilt which drove the level of good works he performed as king.

> I do wonder where you're coming from and what you hope to achieve by this
> discussion. H

Just making the point that if even the most pro-Ricardian biography calls
him a usurper and portrays him as emotionally contorted, it's not surprising
that that's how most people see him.

It looks as if Hearne's fragment is included in this book --

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=zAUHAAAAQAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=hearne+%22chronicles+of+the+white+rose+of+york%22&ots=LyNWdrFrm5&sig=lKZqCeWLpyJEl7EvCaDVPJzuzJw#v=onepage&q=hearne%20%22chronicles%20of%20the%20white%20rose%20of%20york%22&f=false

Or if the link is too long, try searching Google Scholar (& maybe Books)
for Hearne +"Chonicles of the White Rose of York"

A J

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 10:52 AM, justcarol67 <justcarol67@...> wrote:

> **
>
>
> "Claire M Jordan" wrote:
>
> > I'm sure many of us on the forum are also academics, and much of the
> book isn't scholarship, it's a historical novel masquerading as
> scholarship. This is part of my problem with Kendall - that (rather like
> Weir) he blends imagined scenes in with the research-supported ones without
> making it clear which is which, making it hard to tell which bits should be
> trusted and which are imagination. The story he tells about Proud Cis and
> her two little sons standing at Ludlow Cross and confronting Margaret of
> Anjou during the Rape of Ludlow is pure fiction, for example, but tends to
> get treated as a real scene, and almost the whole basis for his portrayal
> of Richard's personality - as opposed to the actual details of who did what
> when - seems also to spring from how he imagined him, without any basis
> except some pretty strange ideas about anyone from Yorkshire necessarily
> being some sort of Noble Savage. [snip]
>
> Carol responds:
>
> My view of Kendall's very important though necessarily imperfect biography
> is somewhere between yours and Hilary's. Yes, he does blend imagination
> with fact, but it's supremely unfair to compare him to Weir, who does not
> cite sources and relies heavily on More. Kendall's notes are excellent, and
> his decision to put the matter of the "princes" in the appendix rather than
> making it the main focus of the biography is inspired. I agree with you
> that he is probably mistaken in his assessment of Richard as a dour,
> guilt-ridden (and, as you didn't mention, puritanical) man but with Hilary
> that his biography is the best we have at this time since Ross assumes that
> Richard killed his nephews (based in part on Elizabeth Woodville's seeming
> to back Henry Tudor as king).
>
> Regarding the supposed incident at Ludlow, he states in a note that
> Cecily's stand at the market cross is conjecture. However, his source,
> Hearne's fragment in "Chronicles of the White Rose of York," states
> definitively that Cicely and her two boys were found in the village and
> captured on October 13, 1459, so the market cross (where the soldiers would
> not have dared to harm them) is as least a reasonable conjecture. (Where
> their sister Margaret was is never mentioned.) He cross-references Cora
> Scofield, "The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth," vol. I, p. 37 and note
> 2, which I don't have and can't consult. I don't have Hearne's fragment,
> either. (Anyone have these sources? If so, can you quote the relevant
> portions?)
>
> It's certainly true, however, that this conjecture has become "fact" and
> shows up, for example, in Penman's "Sunne in Splendour." The alternative
> would be to have them captured in Ludlow castle, where they would have had
> no guarantee of safety. That Cicely feared harm to her sons from Margaret's
> men is clear from her later sending them to Burgundy for protection.
>
> At any rate, for all its faults, Kendall's biography is the best we
> currently have. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. I guess I
> don't need to repeat my view that we urgently need a new one incorporating
> the best of Kendall, the best of Ross, the new findings of Carson, J A-H,
> and others, but most of all, making better use of primary sources and as
> little as possible of More and Vergil, but I'm doing it, anyway.
>
> Carol
>
>
>

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> [snip] I think that's overstating it, because if they *were* at the market cross that would be a sufficiently striking image that you'd expect there to have been gossip about it, and therefore that the chronicle would mention it. It sounds more as if they were inside a building. And the personal appearance by Margaret of Anjou is unsupported as far as I know. [snip]

Carol responds:

You might want to recheck Kendall, who says nothing about the personal appearance of Margaret of Anjou at Ludlow. Possibly you're thinking of Sharon Kay Penman?

Carol

Well, of course, it would help to spell things correctly in any searches -
but y'all are smart enough to figure that out!

A J

Hearne +"Chronicles of the White Rose of York"

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 11:28 AM, A J Hibbard <ajhibbard@...> wrote:

> It looks as if Hearne's fragment is included in this book --
>
>
> http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=zAUHAAAAQAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=hearne+%22chronicles+of+the+white+rose+of+york%22&ots=LyNWdrFrm5&sig=lKZqCeWLpyJEl7EvCaDVPJzuzJw#v=onepage&q=hearne%20%22chronicles%20of%20the%20white%20rose%20of%20york%22&f=false
>
> Or if the link is too long, try searching Google Scholar (& maybe Books)
> for Hearne +"Chonicles of the White Rose of York"
>
> A J
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 10:52 AM, justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>wrote:
>
>> **
>>
>>
>> "Claire M Jordan" wrote:
>>
>> > I'm sure many of us on the forum are also academics, and much of the
>> book isn't scholarship, it's a historical novel masquerading as
>> scholarship. This is part of my problem with Kendall - that (rather like
>> Weir) he blends imagined scenes in with the research-supported ones without
>> making it clear which is which, making it hard to tell which bits should be
>> trusted and which are imagination. The story he tells about Proud Cis and
>> her two little sons standing at Ludlow Cross and confronting Margaret of
>> Anjou during the Rape of Ludlow is pure fiction, for example, but tends to
>> get treated as a real scene, and almost the whole basis for his portrayal
>> of Richard's personality - as opposed to the actual details of who did what
>> when - seems also to spring from how he imagined him, without any basis
>> except some pretty strange ideas about anyone from Yorkshire necessarily
>> being some sort of Noble Savage. [snip]
>>
>> Carol responds:
>>
>> My view of Kendall's very important though necessarily imperfect
>> biography is somewhere between yours and Hilary's. Yes, he does blend
>> imagination with fact, but it's supremely unfair to compare him to Weir,
>> who does not cite sources and relies heavily on More. Kendall's notes are
>> excellent, and his decision to put the matter of the "princes" in the
>> appendix rather than making it the main focus of the biography is inspired.
>> I agree with you that he is probably mistaken in his assessment of Richard
>> as a dour, guilt-ridden (and, as you didn't mention, puritanical) man but
>> with Hilary that his biography is the best we have at this time since Ross
>> assumes that Richard killed his nephews (based in part on Elizabeth
>> Woodville's seeming to back Henry Tudor as king).
>>
>> Regarding the supposed incident at Ludlow, he states in a note that
>> Cecily's stand at the market cross is conjecture. However, his source,
>> Hearne's fragment in "Chronicles of the White Rose of York," states
>> definitively that Cicely and her two boys were found in the village and
>> captured on October 13, 1459, so the market cross (where the soldiers would
>> not have dared to harm them) is as least a reasonable conjecture. (Where
>> their sister Margaret was is never mentioned.) He cross-references Cora
>> Scofield, "The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth," vol. I, p. 37 and note
>> 2, which I don't have and can't consult. I don't have Hearne's fragment,
>> either. (Anyone have these sources? If so, can you quote the relevant
>> portions?)
>>
>> It's certainly true, however, that this conjecture has become "fact" and
>> shows up, for example, in Penman's "Sunne in Splendour." The alternative
>> would be to have them captured in Ludlow castle, where they would have had
>> no guarantee of safety. That Cicely feared harm to her sons from Margaret's
>> men is clear from her later sending them to Burgundy for protection.
>>
>> At any rate, for all its faults, Kendall's biography is the best we
>> currently have. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. I guess I
>> don't need to repeat my view that we urgently need a new one incorporating
>> the best of Kendall, the best of Ross, the new findings of Carson, J A-H,
>> and others, but most of all, making better use of primary sources and as
>> little as possible of More and Vergil, but I'm doing it, anyway.
>>
>> Carol
>>
>>
>>
>
>

Hilary Jones wrote:
>
> Hi Carol, I wasn't actually putting Kendall with Weir (heaven forfend) I was just saying that's it's easier to find obvious flaws in some, like Weir, than others where it rests on interpretation of sources, rather than misquoting the sources themselves, like Weir. Hope this makes sense.

Carol responds:

It's okay, Hilary. I was actually responding to Claire's remark, "part of my problem with Kendall - that (rather like Weir) he blends imagined scenes in with the research-supported ones without making it clear which is which, making it hard to tell which bits should be trusted and which are imagination." She has already clarified her position. I know that, like me, you like Kendall and dislike Weir, who is no more a historian than my nonexistent cat.

Carol

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:
Hilary wrote:
> > Yet you proclaim that one of the greatest pro-Ricardian biographies portrays Richard as 'an emotionally crippled usurper who did Good Works only to assuage his guilt'?

Claire responds:

> That's what he actually says - it's pages 322-323 in the edition I have. I can't be arsed to type it out in full right now, but that's the gist of it. [snip]

Carol responds:

Can you provide a chapter number and approximate location? In my edition, 322-23 falls between two chapters.

I just did a search for "usurper" in the online edition, and Kendall does not use that word to describe Richard. He says only that "To marry her [EoY] himself would be tacitly to acknowledge that the precontract was an invention and he, a usurper" (a view that I think most or all of us on this forum share) and "His [Henry Tudor's] letter to Meredith is headed "By the King"; Richard is branded as a usurper of his right; and Meredith is sharply commanded to appear with all available forces 'as ye will avoid our grievous displeasure and answer it at your peril,'" which shows Tudor behaving like a tyrant and slandering Richard while he's still nothing but a pretender. I think you've misrepresented Kendall's position to some degree. He makes clear that Richard *may* have killed his nephews and regretted it, but he ultimately opts for Buckingham as the most likely murderer (p. 494 of my edition). He strongly objects to modern writers stating flatly that Richard murdered his nephews and citing "as fact the outworn tale of More" (p. 495). I suspect that the only reason Kendall doesn't argue for the possibility that *no one* murdered the "princes" is that he believes Tanner and Wright's conclusion that the bones in the urn belong to Richard's nephews.

Carol

I would ask whether you and I are reading the same book? Is there another edition I haven't got? This emotionally contorted usurper is described as follows on p323. 'yet though his will was edged with iron and his mind was rigid, he was delicately aware  of the feelings of others and sought unwaveringly to work for the welfare of those he governed. The harmony he never achieved with himself he did not cease to desire for his fellows.' And the harmony Kendall is talking about is not to do with usurpation, it's to do with the desire, for chivalry, for knightly perfection, which perhaps belong to an earlier age and which is touched on in later books by Jones and Hipshon.
 
I would also ask why, as Ricardians, we are tearing Kendall to pieces; it's like joining the RC Church and letting into the Saints? Yes his book reads like a novel (nothing wrong with that if it makes it accessible to others), yes some of the research has now been overtaken, yes there isn't a book in existance with which we agree 100%. But to be having this debate on the R Society forum is like tearing ourselves and our beliefs to pieces. Who are we going to start on next? Halsted - she was even more out of date?  H


________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 16:23
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 3:57 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

> So you have spent how many years studying the primary and secondary
sources Claire?

Off and on, 42 years, although of course not in nearly as much detail as
some of the members.

> Yet you proclaim that one of the greatest pro-Ricardian biographies
> portrays Richard as 'an emotionally crippled usurper who did Good Works
> only to assuage his guilt'?

That's what he actually says - it's pages 322-323 in the edition I have. I
can't be arsed to type it out in full right now, but that's the gist of it.
He doesn't say he performed good works *only* out of guilt but that it was
guilt which drove the level of good works he performed as king.

> I do wonder where you're coming from and what you hope to achieve by this
> discussion. H

Just making the point that if even the most pro-Ricardian biography calls
him a usurper and portrays him as emotionally contorted, it's not surprising
that that's how most people see him.

Well, but, still and all, he \has\ to have known that this was going to be rough on his nephews. He was so loyal to Edward-the-sloppily-wed-fratricide (even though it must have been difficult to sustain at times), and that would logically have extended to Edward's sons--we know Richard was fanatically compassionate to Edward's daughters. It might not be guilt, exactly, but it was probably some emotion of regret and sadness when he considered the position Edward's shenanigans had left his heirs to.

--- In , Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
> Why would he feel guilty? God had put him there to do a job. He would not have taken the throne had he not believed that he was in the right. He would have seen himself damned for all eternity had he knowingly done such wrong. 
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
> To:
> Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 3:00
> Subject: Re: rallying the troops
>
>  
>
> From: justcarol67
> To:
> Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 1:46 AM
> Subject: Re: rallying the troops
>
> > and he certainly didn't regard himself as a usurper.
>
> It would be natural for him to feel bad and a bit guilty about having had to
> depose them, I think, because of the likely psychological effect on them,
> but if Titulus Regius was as genuine as the evidence suggests then he would
> also know that he was a victim of circumstance as much as they were, and
> that the situation wasn't of his making.
>
>
>
>
>
>

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 4:56 PM
Subject: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)


> Can you provide a chapter number and approximate location? In my edition,
> 322-23 falls between two chapters.

This is an edition published in 1973 - iirc it was a birthday or Christmas
present from one of my cousins when I was about 16. The relevant passage is
two pages from the end of ch. IX of the "Richard, by Grace of God" section.
He says:

"It appears that few in his own day understood or were intimate with
Richard, and he eludes us too-a blurred figure, dark . . . Not an obscurity
deriving only from the paucity of records; there is a darkness within as
well as upon him.

"The passionately loyal brother who was Constable of England and commander
in his 'teens, who indefatigably bolstered Edward's throne and won the
devotion of the North, may readily be traced in the King earnestly seeking
to dispense justice to his subjects and exerting a prodigious vitality to
deal with the problems of his government. But between these lives stands
the Protector who usurped the throne, the brother who thus doomed, if he did
not murder, the boy King who was Edward's son. The dislocation of this
middle moment can be divined, it is true, in the progressive corrosion
worked upon Richard's relation with his brother by the direction of Edward's
later life; and its consequences plainly show themselves in the King's
labour to atone for his rupture of the succession, in his compulsive
reliance on loyalty rather than force, and the haunted and feverish pursuit
of welldoing that wore out his heart. Yet it is a fractured life, and the
man who lived it must also have been, obscurely, fractured."

Even in my teens, although I had the patience to read straight through two
very long, dull and nearly identical biographies of Black Tom Fairfax I
didn't have the patience to do more than skim through Kendall, so I didn't
actually come on this passage until yesterday - and it surprised the hell
out of me. But what can one think except that he is calling Richard dark,
emotionally fractured, a usurper who felt driven to atone for having
"ruptured the succession" and whose refusal to rule by fear and dedication
to doing well by his people were not signs of amiability but "haunted and
feverish" and the symptoms of guilt or other emotional problems?

A J Hibbard wrote:
>
> It looks as if Hearne's fragment is included in this book --
>[snip]

Carol responds:

Thanks, AJ. It looks as if the fragment was written some time after the events depicted since the ages of the two boys are way off the mark. Here's what Hearne says:

"After the which departing {of the Duke of York, Warwick, et al.}, King Harry rode into Ludlow, and spoiled the Town and Castle, where-at he found the Duchess of York with her two young sons, (then) children, the one of thirteen years old, the other of ten years old; the which duchess King Harry sent to her sister the duchess of Buckingham.

According to the editor, Hearne's chronicle

"was probably written by a member of the Howard family. The little information which could be obtained respecting it's [sic] author, is given at p. 3, in the short notice prefixed to the Chronicle itself. The writer was evidently a person of consideration, and a staunch Yorkist. The date of it''s [sic] compilation must have been between the years 1500 and 1522, as Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, to whom he refers as Lord Treasurer, held that office during that period."

A staunch Yorkist writing ca. 1500-1522? That's interesting! (I suspect that the chronicle was written before 1513 when the execution of Edmund de la Pole more or less ended the Yorkist hopes.) The person, whoever he was, clearly misremembers some details, notably the boys' ages, but the duchess's being sent to her Lancastrian sister is confirmed, IIRC, by the Paston letters, which also make clear that the three children (including Margaret) were with her.

There's also an editorial note citing "Documents connected with Ludlow," which confirms that the Duke of York was forced to flee into Wales, leaving the town and castle a prey to pillagers. According to this source, the duchess was residing in the castle and all her furniture was spoiled, but there's no mention of a capture or of her children.

So, yes, Ludlow (town and castle) was pillaged; yes, Cecily and her children (including the seldom-mentioned Margaret) were there. Yes, they were captured and given into the duchess of Buckingham's custody. But the idea that they sought the protection of the market cross is just speculation. Whether the idea is Kendall's own or Scofield's, I don't know.

Carol

 I have that edition (1972). You're right if you take that paragraph out of context - which is how many things get into the news these days. But he then goes on to analyse Richard's life and the paragraph I quote is indeed just down the bottom of page 323. I don't take it that he's catagorically claiming that Richard did these things, in fact as Carol says he's in the Buckingham camp; he's asking how you square what the king is purported to have done with what his actions show us. And he comes up with the conclusion I quoted. A man indeed weighed down by duty and a dream of chivalry in an age when it was dead. And a good man who cared.   
________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 17:48
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

 

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 4:56 PM
Subject: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

> Can you provide a chapter number and approximate location? In my edition,
> 322-23 falls between two chapters.

This is an edition published in 1973 - iirc it was a birthday or Christmas
present from one of my cousins when I was about 16. The relevant passage is
two pages from the end of ch. IX of the "Richard, by Grace of God" section.
He says:

"It appears that few in his own day understood or were intimate with
Richard, and he eludes us too-a blurred figure, dark . . . Not an obscurity
deriving only from the paucity of records; there is a darkness within as
well as upon him.

"The passionately loyal brother who was Constable of England and commander
in his 'teens, who indefatigably bolstered Edward's throne and won the
devotion of the North, may readily be traced in the King earnestly seeking
to dispense justice to his subjects and exerting a prodigious vitality to
deal with the problems of his government. But between these lives stands
the Protector who usurped the throne, the brother who thus doomed, if he did
not murder, the boy King who was Edward's son. The dislocation of this
middle moment can be divined, it is true, in the progressive corrosion
worked upon Richard's relation with his brother by the direction of Edward's
later life; and its consequences plainly show themselves in the King's
labour to atone for his rupture of the succession, in his compulsive
reliance on loyalty rather than force, and the haunted and feverish pursuit
of welldoing that wore out his heart. Yet it is a fractured life, and the
man who lived it must also have been, obscurely, fractured."

Even in my teens, although I had the patience to read straight through two
very long, dull and nearly identical biographies of Black Tom Fairfax I
didn't have the patience to do more than skim through Kendall, so I didn't
actually come on this passage until yesterday - and it surprised the hell
out of me. But what can one think except that he is calling Richard dark,
emotionally fractured, a usurper who felt driven to atone for having
"ruptured the succession" and whose refusal to rule by fear and dedication
to doing well by his people were not signs of amiability but "haunted and
feverish" and the symptoms of guilt or other emotional problems?

Yes you are Carol, and you are one of many on the forum who meticulously document every thing you post. I hope this translates to other people who just might become interested in the York Dynasty, just because he was found.
Dr. Appleby, made mistakes all along the way, and her "hunchback" remark was wildly inappropriate, as well as unprofessional. Unfortunately, the water under that bridge cannot be recalled. I just hope that the "experts" who continue to write and research discount her sloppy approach and her remarks.
It would be lovely if someone wrote a wonderful book, or many books. But, at the moment we do have some good ones. We will have to hope more Sharon Kay Penman's come along to blow the Weir contention out of the publishing waters!


On Mar 22, 2013, at 10:52 AM, "justcarol67" <justcarol67@...<mailto:justcarol67@...>> wrote:



"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> I'm sure many of us on the forum are also academics, and much of the book isn't scholarship, it's a historical novel masquerading as scholarship. This is part of my problem with Kendall - that (rather like Weir) he blends imagined scenes in with the research-supported ones without making it clear which is which, making it hard to tell which bits should be trusted and which are imagination. The story he tells about Proud Cis and her two little sons standing at Ludlow Cross and confronting Margaret of Anjou during the Rape of Ludlow is pure fiction, for example, but tends to get treated as a real scene, and almost the whole basis for his portrayal of Richard's personality - as opposed to the actual details of who did what when - seems also to spring from how he imagined him, without any basis except some pretty strange ideas about anyone from Yorkshire necessarily being some sort of Noble Savage. [snip]

Carol responds:

My view of Kendall's very important though necessarily imperfect biography is somewhere between yours and Hilary's. Yes, he does blend imagination with fact, but it's supremely unfair to compare him to Weir, who does not cite sources and relies heavily on More. Kendall's notes are excellent, and his decision to put the matter of the "princes" in the appendix rather than making it the main focus of the biography is inspired. I agree with you that he is probably mistaken in his assessment of Richard as a dour, guilt-ridden (and, as you didn't mention, puritanical) man but with Hilary that his biography is the best we have at this time since Ross assumes that Richard killed his nephews (based in part on Elizabeth Woodville's seeming to back Henry Tudor as king).

Regarding the supposed incident at Ludlow, he states in a note that Cecily's stand at the market cross is conjecture. However, his source, Hearne's fragment in "Chronicles of the White Rose of York," states definitively that Cicely and her two boys were found in the village and captured on October 13, 1459, so the market cross (where the soldiers would not have dared to harm them) is as least a reasonable conjecture. (Where their sister Margaret was is never mentioned.) He cross-references Cora Scofield, "The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth," vol. I, p. 37 and note 2, which I don't have and can't consult. I don't have Hearne's fragment, either. (Anyone have these sources? If so, can you quote the relevant portions?)

It's certainly true, however, that this conjecture has become "fact" and shows up, for example, in Penman's "Sunne in Splendour." The alternative would be to have them captured in Ludlow castle, where they would have had no guarantee of safety. That Cicely feared harm to her sons from Margaret's men is clear from her later sending them to Burgundy for protection.

At any rate, for all its faults, Kendall's biography is the best we currently have. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. I guess I don't need to repeat my view that we urgently need a new one incorporating the best of Kendall, the best of Ross, the new findings of Carson, J A-H, and others, but most of all, making better use of primary sources and as little as possible of More and Vergil, but I'm doing it, anyway.

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 4:33 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> You might want to recheck Kendall, who says nothing about the personal
> appearance of Margaret of Anjou at Ludlow. Possibly you're thinking of
> Sharon Kay Penman?

Ah, you're right - layer on layer of confusion. Only about two weeks ago I
read an article about this scene having been invented by Kendall and it
spoke as if the idea of Anjou being there (which apparently is definitely
untrue because she's known to have been elsewhere) was also part of
Kendall's invention. But the author must have conflated him with somebody
else, maybe as you say Penman. Accto this article the idea of Anjou
personally menacing Cis and the boys, as well as the town cross story
itself, is now widely accepted as fact (just like the ahem hunchback and the
"murder" of the boys).

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> [snip] The relevant passage is
> two pages from the end of ch. IX of the "Richard, by Grace of God" section. He says:
>
> "It appears that few in his own day understood or were intimate with Richard, and he eludes us too-a blurred figure, dark . . . Not an obscurity deriving only from the paucity of records; there is a darkness within as well as upon him.
>
> "The passionately loyal brother who was Constable of England and commander in his 'teens, who indefatigably bolstered Edward's throne and won the devotion of the North, may readily be traced in the King earnestly seeking to dispense justice to his subjects and exerting a prodigious vitality to deal with the problems of his government. But between these lives stands the Protector who usurped the throne, the brother who thus doomed, if he did not murder, the boy King who was Edward's son. The dislocation of this middle moment can be divined, it is true, in the progressive corrosion worked upon Richard's relation with his brother by the direction of Edward's later life; and its consequences plainly show themselves in the King's labour to atone for his rupture of the succession, in his compulsive reliance on loyalty rather than force, and the haunted and feverish pursuit of welldoing that wore out his heart. Yet it is a fractured life, and the man who lived it must also have been, obscurely, fractured."
>
> [snip] I didn't actually come on this passage until yesterday - and it surprised the hell out of me. But what can one think except that he is calling Richard dark, emotionally fractured, a usurper who felt driven to atone for having "ruptured the succession" and whose refusal to rule by fear and dedication to doing well by his people were not signs of amiability but "haunted and feverish" and the symptoms of guilt or other emotional problems?

Carol responds:

Thanks, Claire. I had forgotten about this passage, which didn't come up in my search for "usurper." My feeling is that Kendall, like so many other people interested in Richard III, doesn't know what to make of the Protectorate, which *seems* (because we have only the biased Croyland chronicler and the inadequately informed Mancini as our sources) to present the Lord Protector as a ruthless, insecure, and ambitious man who usurped the throne from the "rightful" heir, after which Richard slips back (almost) into his former character.

Kendall, believing that the bones in the urn are those of the "princes," struggles to make sense of a man who goes from loyalty to *seeming* disloyalty and ruthlessness to a series of good actions which can be read as atonement (better than the hypocrisy attributed to him by Tudor historians). He also assumes because of those bones that the boys died and therefore Richard was at least indirectly responsible. But if we consider the possibility that the boys survived and read the Protectorate differently (Richard really was or really believed he was threatened by conspirators, including Hastings; he really did try to serve as the loyal Protector of king and kingdom until the revelation that Edward V could not be king; Rivers, Grey, and Vaughn were tried by Northumberland and others, not judicially murdered; the petition by the Three Estates was an election, not a usurpation)--then the Protector is the same man as the loyal brother and the "welldoing" king. It is not so much Richard as Kendall's view of the "middle moment" that results in this "fractured" perspective.

I would not discard the whole book because of one passage in which Kendall is struggling and failing to understand Richard. As for the adjective "dark," I'm certain that he means it as "obscure." His Richard is certainly not evil, just "corrupted" by the executions he ordered during the Protectorate and haunted by guilt for the "usurpation" (Kendall does not use the term "usurp" in any of its variants in relation to Richard except in the passages I cited and the unavoidable citation of Armstrong's mistranslated title of Mancini's book).

I suspect that the misreading of the Protectorate, in particular the "murder" of Hastings, has persuaded many a person who might otherwise be sympathetic to Richard that Richard was a "ruthless" man of his times and therefore more likely than not to murder his nephews. At least, Kendall, unlike Pollard and Ross, is generally favorable to Richard in other respects.

Carol

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 6:01 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)


> I have that edition (1972). You're right if you take that paragraph out
> of context - which is how many things get into the news these days. But he
> then goes on to analyse Richard's life and the paragraph I quote is indeed
> just down the bottom of page 323.

Yes, it is.

> I don't take it that he's catagorically claiming that Richard did these
> things, in fact as Carol says he's in the Buckingham camp; he's asking how
> you square what the king is purported to have done with what his actions
> show us.

You mean, you think that he's saying that Richard *appears* at first sight
to have usurped the throne, rather than that he actually did so? Could be,
yes - I'd prefer to think you're right. But if so it's definitely open to a
darker interpretation and it's part of what I'm saying about him not
differentiating clearly between things which are strongly supported by
contemporary or near-contemporary evidence, and things which are really
speculation or novelisation.

It's Kendall who speaks of Richard spending a lot of the 1470s in the
saddle, patrolling the Scottish border, and I don't know if he can prove it
or whether it's speculation.

In re. Richard and George being appointed to raise levies I see he reckons
George stayed in London, which if true would udnermine my theory, but he
doesn't give dates. Since he thinks Richard actually moved to the north at
this point and stayed there for three years, he may just have evidence that
George was in London at some point during those three years - but my theory
only requires the boys to have gone north for a few months from November
1461, and I'd like to know whether there's evidence of where George was
during those few months or not.

And does anybody know whether the rather charming detail (which I now can't
find, but saw a few days ago) about Edward, Hastings, Rivers and Richard
ending up so poor in Burgundy that they had to catch rabbits to feed
themselves is well supported?

I think there are a fair few things in Kendall you can't prove. Kendall does have Richard (and Anne) retreating to the North after their marriage. Other biographers have pointed out that Richard's other offices such as Constable took him all over the country in the service of Edward. You could find a fair few holes in the book, but it's the persuasiveness of Kendall, like that of Tey, Penman (albeit fiction in their case) that makes him invaluable to the Ricardian cause, and that really hasn't changed. And you also have to add to that his real belief in Richard's good intentions as duke, protector and king. I can't think of another biographer (and I'm not counting Annettte as a biographer here) who in the last hundred years has been brave enough to stake their reputation on whole-heartedly embracing Richard. They all get cold feet in the last chapters.
 
That's why we desperately need a new biography by a reputable biographer with Kendall's faith. That being said, they have to be able to come up with the sources to back up their arguments.
 
As for Richard in the North, the earliest reference I can find of him levying troops with Warwick and Montague, but with no George is in York in Jan 1466. But new records are going online every day.


________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 18:40
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

 

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 6:01 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

> I have that edition (1972). You're right if you take that paragraph out
> of context - which is how many things get into the news these days. But he
> then goes on to analyse Richard's life and the paragraph I quote is indeed
> just down the bottom of page 323.

Yes, it is.

> I don't take it that he's catagorically claiming that Richard did these
> things, in fact as Carol says he's in the Buckingham camp; he's asking how
> you square what the king is purported to have done with what his actions
> show us.

You mean, you think that he's saying that Richard *appears* at first sight
to have usurped the throne, rather than that he actually did so? Could be,
yes - I'd prefer to think you're right. But if so it's definitely open to a
darker interpretation and it's part of what I'm saying about him not
differentiating clearly between things which are strongly supported by
contemporary or near-contemporary evidence, and things which are really
speculation or novelisation.

It's Kendall who speaks of Richard spending a lot of the 1470s in the
saddle, patrolling the Scottish border, and I don't know if he can prove it
or whether it's speculation.

In re. Richard and George being appointed to raise levies I see he reckons
George stayed in London, which if true would udnermine my theory, but he
doesn't give dates. Since he thinks Richard actually moved to the north at
this point and stayed there for three years, he may just have evidence that
George was in London at some point during those three years - but my theory
only requires the boys to have gone north for a few months from November
1461, and I'd like to know whether there's evidence of where George was
during those few months or not.

And does anybody know whether the rather charming detail (which I now can't
find, but saw a few days ago) about Edward, Hastings, Rivers and Richard
ending up so poor in Burgundy that they had to catch rabbits to feed
themselves is well supported?

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)


> Thanks, Claire. I had forgotten about this passage, which didn't come up
> in my search for "usurper." My feeling is that Kendall, like so many other
> people interested in Richard III, doesn't know what to make of the
> Protectorate, which *seems* (because we have only the biased Croyland
> chronicler and the inadequately informed Mancini as our sources) to
> present the Lord Protector as a ruthless, insecure, and ambitious man who
> usurped the throne from the "rightful" heir, after which Richard slips
> back (almost) into his former character.

Yes, quite. They haven't got the point which Hilary made, i.e. that if
Richard believed Stillington's story about the pre-contract to be true then
he would feel morally obliged to accept the throne, whether he actually
wanted to or not. Then they assume he must have wanted it, then they twist
their interpretation of his character out of true by trying to shoehorn into
it a ruthless ambition he probably wouldn't have recognised if it bit him on
the bum.

> But if we consider the possibility that the boys survived

Or died of natural causes or in some other way completley independent of
Richard.

> and read the Protectorate differently (Richard really was or really
> believed he was threatened by conspirators, including Hastings; he really
> did try to serve as the loyal Protector of king and kingdom until the
> revelation that Edward V could not be king; Rivers, Grey, and Vaughn were
> tried by Northumberland and others, not judicially murdered; the petition
> by the Three Estates was an election, not a usurpation)--then the
> Protector is the same man as the loyal brother and the "welldoing" king.

Yes, exactly. That in itself is good evidence that he didn't deliberately
seek the throne and didn't off his nephews - I mean, that his behaviour
seems far more internally consistent if you assume he didn't. Doggedly
trying to pick up the pieces and do his best with an appalling political
mess which had just been dumped on him from a great height is just what
you'd expect from his past history. He was somebody whose life had been
full of alarming sudden reverses and he had always just girded up his loins
(like the little fishes) and dealt with it, even when he was barely old
enough to have any loins to gird.

> I would not discard the whole book because of one passage in which Kendall
> is struggling and failing to understand Richard.

No, indeed, but it's very frustrating because you don't know what bits you
can trust. Two pages after the "usurped" passage he goes on to cite
Richard's amiably bemused letter about Jane Shore as evidence that he was a
proto-Puritan and says that Lynom didn't marry Shore, although I've seen an
article (in a Ricardian I think) which demonstrated pretty conclusively that
he *did*.

How harsh was Shore's imprisonment, do we know? Are we talking dungoens
drear, or genteel house arrest, or what?

> I suspect that the misreading of the Protectorate, in particular the
> "murder" of Hastings, has persuaded many a person who might otherwise be
> sympathetic to Richard that Richard was a "ruthless" man of his times and
> therefore more likely than not to murder his nephews.

Yes, quite.

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)


> That's why we desperately need a new biography by a reputable biographer
> with Kendall's faith. That being said, they have to be able to come up
> with the sources to back up their arguments.

Yes. I wish Pamela Tudor-Craig would write one, as she writes so well about
him in the 1973 NPG catalogue.

> As for Richard in the North, the earliest reference I can find of him
> levying troops with Warwick and Montague, but with no George is in York in
> Jan 1466. But new records are going online every day.

It's in the Patent Rolls, apparently - Kendall himself refers to it.
Richard and George were appointed to raise levies in the north in November
1461, unless Kendall misread the date, but I don't know if there are any
other physical records of them actually being there. But it seems to me
more likely that Edward used his barely-nine-year-old-brother as an
on-the-spot propaganda ploy - with the fluffy hair and the thin bones, he
must have looked like Bambi - than that he had him doing reams of
adminsitrative paperwork.

I just joined this forum, and I re-read Kendall a couple of weeks ago, after purchasing the book. From the looks of things I'm going to need to go back to the beginning of this discussion before I can actually comment without making a fool of myself. That's going to take a while. . .


--- In , "Claire M Jordan" <whitehound@...> wrote:
>
> From: Hilary Jones
> To:
> Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 6:01 PM
> Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)
>
>
> > I have that edition (1972). You're right if you take that paragraph out
> > of context - which is how many things get into the news these days. But he
> > then goes on to analyse Richard's life and the paragraph I quote is indeed
> > just down the bottom of page 323.
>
> Yes, it is.
>
> > I don't take it that he's catagorically claiming that Richard did these
> > things, in fact as Carol says he's in the Buckingham camp; he's asking how
> > you square what the king is purported to have done with what his actions
> > show us.
>
> You mean, you think that he's saying that Richard *appears* at first sight
> to have usurped the throne, rather than that he actually did so? Could be,
> yes - I'd prefer to think you're right. But if so it's definitely open to a
> darker interpretation and it's part of what I'm saying about him not
> differentiating clearly between things which are strongly supported by
> contemporary or near-contemporary evidence, and things which are really
> speculation or novelisation.
>
> It's Kendall who speaks of Richard spending a lot of the 1470s in the
> saddle, patrolling the Scottish border, and I don't know if he can prove it
> or whether it's speculation.
>
> In re. Richard and George being appointed to raise levies I see he reckons
> George stayed in London, which if true would udnermine my theory, but he
> doesn't give dates. Since he thinks Richard actually moved to the north at
> this point and stayed there for three years, he may just have evidence that
> George was in London at some point during those three years - but my theory
> only requires the boys to have gone north for a few months from November
> 1461, and I'd like to know whether there's evidence of where George was
> during those few months or not.
>
> And does anybody know whether the rather charming detail (which I now can't
> find, but saw a few days ago) about Edward, Hastings, Rivers and Richard
> ending up so poor in Burgundy that they had to catch rabbits to feed
> themselves is well supported?
>

As Annette says, Edward was notorious for appointing people who were too old, too young, too feeble or too busy to positions. Richard had to spend most of his time in the North through one role but was also Constable of England, which required him to be in London, along with other temporary posts.
----- Original Message -----
From: Claire M Jordan
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 7:20 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)



From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

> That's why we desperately need a new biography by a reputable biographer
> with Kendall's faith. That being said, they have to be able to come up
> with the sources to back up their arguments.

Yes. I wish Pamela Tudor-Craig would write one, as she writes so well about
him in the 1973 NPG catalogue.

> As for Richard in the North, the earliest reference I can find of him
> levying troops with Warwick and Montague, but with no George is in York in
> Jan 1466. But new records are going online every day.

It's in the Patent Rolls, apparently - Kendall himself refers to it.
Richard and George were appointed to raise levies in the north in November
1461, unless Kendall misread the date, but I don't know if there are any
other physical records of them actually being there. But it seems to me
more likely that Edward used his barely-nine-year-old-brother as an
on-the-spot propaganda ploy - with the fluffy hair and the thin bones, he
must have looked like Bambi - than that he had him doing reams of
adminsitrative paperwork.

From: Stephen Lark
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 7:27 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)



> As Annette says, Edward was notorious for appointing people who were too
> old, too young, too feeble or too busy to positions. Richard had to spend
> most of his time in the North through one role but was also Constable of
> England, which required him to be in London, along with other temporary
> posts.

Which supports my idea from some days back about him spending a lot of time
in the saddle and probably being rather weatherbeaten. Every transition
from north to south, or back, would probably require three or four days in
the saddle - and at the northern end, wearing a hat wouldn't help, because
the rain (and snow, and hail, and sleet) comes in almost horizontally.

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:
>
> [snip] But it seems to me more likely that Edward used his barely-nine-year-old-brother as an on-the-spot propaganda ploy - with the fluffy hair and the thin bones, he must have looked like Bambi - than that he had him doing reams of adminsitrative paperwork.
>
Carol responds:

More likely, he was conjugating Latin verbs and whatever else his tutor required of him when he wasn't commissioning troops (with adult help).

Carol

"Stephen Lark" wrote:
>
> As Annette says, Edward was notorious for appointing people who were too old, too young, too feeble or too busy to positions. Richard had to spend most of his time in the North through one role but was also Constable of England, which required him to be in London, along with other temporary posts.

Carol responds:

Here's Richard's own list of his positions in 1478 from the invaluable Middleham charter: "Richard, duc of Gloucestre, grete Chamberlain, Constable and Admiral of Englond, Lord of Glomorgan, Morgannok, Bergevenny, Richemond, and Middleham." If I'm not mistaken (and I'm not taking time to look them up), some of those towns were in Wales. But it seems likely that his duties as Lord of the North required him to spend most of his time there, with other duties, especially those of chamberlain and admiral, performed mostly by deputies directly answerable to him.

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 8:41 PM
Subject: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)


> Here's Richard's own list of his positions in 1478 from the invaluable
> Middleham charter: "Richard, duc of Gloucestre, grete Chamberlain,
> Constable and Admiral of Englond, Lord of Glomorgan, Morgannok,
> Bergevenny, Richemond, and Middleham." If I'm not mistaken (and I'm not
> taking time to look them up), some of those towns were in Wales.

Well, Glamorgan's not a town, it's a county in, yes, South Wales and
includes Cardiff and Swansea. Confusingly Morgannwg is now another name for
Glamorgan but they must have been discrete, adjacent districts in Richard's
day. Bergevenny must be Abergavenny, a town in Monmouthshire, on the road
between Hereford and Cardiff, which tells us that when he entered Wales he
at least sometimes did so from Hereford rather than Gloucester.

For those who don't know, Gloucester and Hereford ar eboth close to the
Welsh border. Gloucester is lined up with the south coast of Wales and to
get from Gloucester to Cardiff you pass along the coast road via Chepstow
and Newport. Heford is about 30 miles north-west of Gloucester and to get
from there to Cardiff you cut diagonally across inland Wales via Abergavenny
to pick up the coast road at Newport.

Is the Middleham charter online?

Glamorgan is a county in South Wales. Morganwg is Welsh for Glamorgan and I suggest that is what is meant by"Morgannock" in Richard's list. Maybe he was giving both the English and Welsh versions. Bergevenny I would think is Abergavenny which is a town in East Wales relatively near to the English border. Richard spent time in Wales, he is commemorated by a window at Cardiff Castle. He was on his way back to England from Wales, don't ask me dates as I can't remember neither can I remember where I read it, when travelling northwards somewhere on the border between England and Wales he caught Thomas Stanley up to no good and he " had words with him" Stanley rode straight to London to complain to Edward While Richard proceeded North sending a messenger to Edward about the incident. Edward didn't exactly take Stanley's side but neither did he punish him for whatever he did. Apparently the incident caused bad blood between Richard and Stanley. Thinking about it the book could either be Mary Clive or Cora Scofield.

--- In , "justcarol67" <justcarol67@...> wrote:
>
> "Stephen Lark" wrote:
> >
> > As Annette says, Edward was notorious for appointing people who were too old, too young, too feeble or too busy to positions. Richard had to spend most of his time in the North through one role but was also Constable of England, which required him to be in London, along with other temporary posts.
>
> Carol responds:
>
> Here's Richard's own list of his positions in 1478 from the invaluable Middleham charter: "Richard, duc of Gloucestre, grete Chamberlain, Constable and Admiral of Englond, Lord of Glomorgan, Morgannok, Bergevenny, Richemond, and Middleham." If I'm not mistaken (and I'm not taking time to look them up), some of those towns were in Wales. But it seems likely that his duties as Lord of the North required him to spend most of his time there, with other duties, especially those of chamberlain and admiral, performed mostly by deputies directly answerable to him.
>
> Carol
>

Claire said:

No, indeed, but it's very frustrating because you don't know what bits you
can trust. Two pages after the "usurped" passage he goes on to cite
Richard's amiably bemused letter about Jane Shore as evidence that he was a
proto-Puritan and says that Lynom didn't marry Shore, although I've seen an
article (in a Ricardian I think) which demonstrated pretty conclusively that
he *did*.

 
Liz replied:  Her father's will refers to his daughter Elizabeth Lineham or Lynom.  Elizabeth was her real name.    That makes it pretty certain that she did marry him.

And he also appointed people who were never really intended at that point to carry out the roles he gave them. If you look at the Coventry Leet Books in the 1470s, after Warwick and Clarence's demise/disgrace, the Mayor was petitioning the Prince of Wales, who was an infant. Rivers dealt with it on his behalf, of course.



________________________________
From: Stephen Lark <stephenmlark@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 19:27
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

 

As Annette says, Edward was notorious for appointing people who were too old, too young, too feeble or too busy to positions. Richard had to spend most of his time in the North through one role but was also Constable of England, which required him to be in London, along with other temporary posts.
----- Original Message -----
From: Claire M Jordan
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 7:20 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

> That's why we desperately need a new biography by a reputable biographer
> with Kendall's faith. That being said, they have to be able to come up
> with the sources to back up their arguments.

Yes. I wish Pamela Tudor-Craig would write one, as she writes so well about
him in the 1973 NPG catalogue.

> As for Richard in the North, the earliest reference I can find of him
> levying troops with Warwick and Montague, but with no George is in York in
> Jan 1466. But new records are going online every day.

It's in the Patent Rolls, apparently - Kendall himself refers to it.
Richard and George were appointed to raise levies in the north in November
1461, unless Kendall misread the date, but I don't know if there are any
other physical records of them actually being there. But it seems to me
more likely that Edward used his barely-nine-year-old-brother as an
on-the-spot propaganda ploy - with the fluffy hair and the thin bones, he
must have looked like Bambi - than that he had him doing reams of
adminsitrative paperwork.

If you look at the York House Books (and it's too late for me to look them up tonight) you'll find a few occasions when Richard is in London and they send folks to discuss their issues with him. One is certainly during the Spring of 1478 when Clarence is in trouble, another is when Edward is ill in the Spring of 1477 (? sorry it is late). What I've found when looking at the period after 1472 is that Richard's periods in the North seldom go uninterrupted for long - the French expedition, the Clarence troubles, the Mowbray marriage, the visit of sister Margaret etc etc. And we probably still don't know about some of his other trips, we may as more county records go online. The North was hardly the idyllic permanent retreat where he frollicked with Anne until the Scottish wars that some novelists would have us believe. And when he was in the North it wasn't always Middleham; it was the grind of hearings in Pontefract, Sheriff Hutton as well - quite a
hard itinerant life.  


________________________________
From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 20:41
Subject: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 

"Stephen Lark" wrote:
>
> As Annette says, Edward was notorious for appointing people who were too old, too young, too feeble or too busy to positions. Richard had to spend most of his time in the North through one role but was also Constable of England, which required him to be in London, along with other temporary posts.

Carol responds:

Here's Richard's own list of his positions in 1478 from the invaluable Middleham charter: "Richard, duc of Gloucestre, grete Chamberlain, Constable and Admiral of Englond, Lord of Glomorgan, Morgannok, Bergevenny, Richemond, and Middleham." If I'm not mistaken (and I'm not taking time to look them up), some of those towns were in Wales. But it seems likely that his duties as Lord of the North required him to spend most of his time there, with other duties, especially those of chamberlain and admiral, performed mostly by deputies directly answerable to him.

Carol

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:
>
> [snip] Is the Middleham charter online?
>
Carol responds:

Yes, it's here http://www.r3.org/bookcase/texts/mid-stat.html on the American branch site (which I didn't know or I'd have copied and pasted instead of manually typing those long quotations)!

Carol

"ricard1an" wrote:
>
> Glamorgan is a county in South Wales. Morganwg is Welsh for Glamorgan and I suggest that is what is meant by"Morgannock" in Richard's list. Maybe he was giving both the English and Welsh versions. Bergevenny I would think is Abergavenny which is a town in East Wales relatively near to the English border. Richard spent time in Wales, he is commemorated by a window at Cardiff Castle. He was on his way back to England from Wales, don't ask me dates as I can't remember neither can I remember where I read it, when travelling northwards somewhere on the border between England and Wales he caught Thomas Stanley up to no good and he " had words with him" Stanley rode straight to London to complain to Edward While Richard proceeded North sending a messenger to Edward about the incident. Edward didn't exactly take Stanley's side but neither did he punish him for whatever he did. Apparently the incident caused bad blood between Richard and Stanley. Thinking about it the book could either be Mary Clive or Cora Scofield.

Carol responds:

That incident occurred when Richard was only about seventeen. Kendall mentions it, but I don't recall his source. (Penman also includes it in her novel.) I don't know whether the "bad blood" is real or imagined, but it does seem likely that Stanley was embarrassed to be caught and chastened by a boy half his age.

Carol

Carol

Claire M Jordan wrote:
//snip//
"But it seems to me more likely that Edward used his
barely-nine-year-old-brother as an
on-the-spot propaganda ploy..."
//snip//

Well, to be fair, propaganda posters hadn't yet been invented...
Doug

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 10:27 PM
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)


> If you look at the York House Books (and it's too late for me to look them
> up tonight) you'll find a few occasions when Richard is in London and they
> send folks to discuss their issues with him. One is certainly during the
> Spring of 1478 when Clarence is in trouble, another is when Edward is ill
> in the Spring of 1477 (? sorry it is late).

On the mystery itinerary for 1477 there's a note saying "14 or 15 Jan.
Richard and George arrived in London. This was Richard's first visit south
for about 18 months. (P.L. III p.173)", but no mention of Edward being ill.

Some time in the next few months I'm thinking of tidying this itinerary up
and posting it and then people can make corrections and add new incidents.
It could also be used as a spine for the sort of information AJ suggested,
with hotlinks to articles about the various events.

> And when he was in the North it wasn't always Middleham; it was the grind
> of hearings in Pontefract, Sheriff Hutton as well - quite a hard itinerant
> life.

Yes. Somebody - Carol? - said he wouldn't have spent all that much time in
the saddle because his duties in the north were mainly adminstrative, but
think back to the days before teleconferencing, and how often an
administrator would have to go to a meeting or a working lunch or to inspect
paperwork - then think of those meetings etc being up to 50 miles from your
starting point, and 50 miles meaning eight hours on horseback, each way. I
visualise him crawling out of his nice warm bed at 4am and pouring himself
onto a horse in order to get to a midday meeting somewhere, followed by some
big boozy dinner and then back onto the horse at 4am the next morning, only
this time with a hangover.

> Claire said:
>
> No, indeed, but it's very frustrating because you don't know what bits you can trust. Two pages after the "usurped" passage he goes on to cite Richard's amiably bemused letter about Jane Shore as evidence that he was a proto-Puritan and says that Lynom didn't marry Shore, although I've seen an article (in a Ricardian I think) which demonstrated pretty conclusively that he *did*.
>
>  
> Liz replied:  Her father's will refers to his daughter Elizabeth Lineham or Lynom.  Elizabeth was her real name.    That makes it pretty certain that she did marry him.

Carol responds:

True, but IIRC the will had not been discovered when Kendall wrote his book, so he can't be blamed for drawing the wrong conclusion (though I'm afraid he trusted More on this occasion and a few others).

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 10:43 PM
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)


> That incident occurred when Richard was only about seventeen. Kendall
> mentions it, but I don't recall his source. (Penman also includes it in
> her novel.) I don't know whether the "bad blood" is real or imagined, but
> it does seem likely that Stanley was embarrassed to be caught and
> chastened by a boy half his age.

Worse, a short, skinny boy half his age and, if it's true about people
hitting puberty later then, quite possibly a squeaky one.... I wonder if
some of what went wrong with Hastings, later, wasn't that Hastings didn't
take Richard seriously because he still saw him as a kid.

He owned Cardiff Castle, didn't he? - it was part Warwick's "empire" and went first to Clarence.
I guess that window was added in the 19th century when William Burges altered the castle for the Marquis of Bute, to underscore the one-time "royal" heritage of the place. I love Burges's work - Castle Coch and the church at Studley Royal are both even richer (decoration-wise) than Cardiff.

--- On Fri, 22/3/13, ricard1an <maryfriend@...> wrote:

















 









Richard spent time in Wales, he is commemorated by a window at Cardiff Castle. .

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> [snip] No, indeed, but it's very frustrating because you don't know what bits you can trust. [snip]

Carol responds:

I think it's fairly easy to tell when Kendall is speculating (as, for example, when he tries to guess motives or character) and when he's providing straightforward information (though, occasionally, it's outdated as in the case of Mistress Shore and Thomas Lynom). If he cites a source, the information is as trustworthy as that source. The same is true for any biographer. As far as interpreting the evidence and determining the reliability or otherwise of a source, Kendall is no worse than any other biographer. All of them make mistakes, usually based on their own preconceptions (or over-reliance on biased sources).

Carol

--- In , Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
> If you look at the York House Books (and it's too late for me to look them up tonight) you'll find a few occasions when Richard is in London and they send folks to discuss their issues with him. One is certainly during the Spring of 1478 when Clarence is in trouble, another is when Edward is ill in the Spring of 1477 (? sorry it is late). [snip]

Carol responds:

I can't afford them, unfortunately. I can only hope that they'll be available online for Society members in a year or so. "Spring 1478" can't be right for Clarence being in trouble. He died in February of that year.

Carol

Yes it was Burges' work. Part of me loves Cardiff Castle and part of me wishes it was more in keeping with the medieval period. It is ages since I have been there and not sure if Richard owned it. I thought the window was to do with him being Lord of Glamorgan.


--- In , Janet Ashton <jaangelfire@...> wrote:
>
> He owned Cardiff Castle, didn't he? - it was part Warwick's "empire" and went first to Clarence.
> I guess that window was added in the 19th century when William Burges altered the castle for the Marquis of Bute, to underscore the one-time "royal" heritage of the place. I love Burges's work - Castle Coch and the church at Studley Royal are both even richer (decoration-wise) than Cardiff.
>
> --- On Fri, 22/3/13, ricard1an <maryfriend@...> wrote:
>
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> Richard spent time in Wales, he is commemorated by a window at Cardiff Castle. .
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I know what you mean. I love the "victorianisation" of these castles, but regret not seeing them as they once were! This happens a lot in Germany too; in the 19th century they were busy inventing he past...:-)

--- On Fri, 22/3/13, ricard1an <maryfriend@...> wrote:

From: ricard1an <maryfriend@...>
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)
To:
Date: Friday, 22 March, 2013, 23:30
















 









Yes it was Burges' work. Part of me loves Cardiff Castle and part of me wishes it was more in keeping with the medieval period. It is ages since I have been there and not sure if Richard owned it. I thought the window was to do with him being Lord of Glamorgan.



--- In , Janet Ashton <jaangelfire@...> wrote:

>

> He owned Cardiff Castle, didn't he? - it was part Warwick's "empire" and went first to Clarence.

> I guess that window was added in the 19th century when William Burges altered the castle for the Marquis of Bute, to underscore the one-time "royal" heritage of the place. I love Burges's work - Castle Coch and the church at Studley Royal are both even richer (decoration-wise) than Cardiff.

>

> --- On Fri, 22/3/13, ricard1an <maryfriend@...> wrote:

>

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> Richard spent time in Wales, he is commemorated by a window at Cardiff Castle. .

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Sorry I meant early Spring, a week or so before his execution. Spring comes early for me :)



________________________________
From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 23:19
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 



--- In , Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
> If you look at the York House Books (and it's too late for me to look them up tonight) you'll find a few occasions when Richard is in London and they send folks to discuss their issues with him. One is certainly during the Spring of 1478 when Clarence is in trouble, another is when Edward is ill in the Spring of 1477 (? sorry it is late). [snip]

Carol responds:

I can't afford them, unfortunately. I can only hope that they'll be available online for Society members in a year or so. "Spring 1478" can't be right for Clarence being in trouble. He died in February of that year.

Carol

Thinking about that window - what's interesting is the way they portrayed him, as the thoughtful-looking King rather than deformed monster.....obviously a revisionist view was already popular in the 19th century among people whose homes were connected to him!

--- On Fri, 22/3/13, ricard1an <maryfriend@...> wrote:

From: ricard1an <maryfriend@...>
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)
To:
Date: Friday, 22 March, 2013, 23:30
















 









Yes it was Burges' work. Part of me loves Cardiff Castle and part of me wishes it was more in keeping with the medieval period. It is ages since I have been there and not sure if Richard owned it. I thought the window was to do with him being Lord of Glamorgan.



--- In , Janet Ashton <jaangelfire@...> wrote:

>

> He owned Cardiff Castle, didn't he? - it was part Warwick's "empire" and went first to Clarence.

> I guess that window was added in the 19th century when William Burges altered the castle for the Marquis of Bute, to underscore the one-time "royal" heritage of the place. I love Burges's work - Castle Coch and the church at Studley Royal are both even richer (decoration-wise) than Cardiff.

>

> --- On Fri, 22/3/13, ricard1an <maryfriend@...> wrote:

>

>

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> Richard spent time in Wales, he is commemorated by a window at Cardiff Castle. .

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Yes that is interesting especially as the Marquis of Bute's surname was Crichton Stuart. Did he have family connections to the Stuart Kings I wonder. I love that window.


--- In , Janet Ashton <jaangelfire@...> wrote:
>
> Thinking about that window - what's interesting is the way they portrayed him, as the thoughtful-looking King rather than deformed monster.....obviously a revisionist view was already popular in the 19th century among people whose homes were connected to him!
>
> --- On Fri, 22/3/13, ricard1an <maryfriend@...> wrote:
>
> From: ricard1an <maryfriend@...>
> Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)
> To:
> Date: Friday, 22 March, 2013, 23:30
>
>
>
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> Yes it was Burges' work. Part of me loves Cardiff Castle and part of me wishes it was more in keeping with the medieval period. It is ages since I have been there and not sure if Richard owned it. I thought the window was to do with him being Lord of Glamorgan.
>
>
>
> --- In , Janet Ashton <jaangelfire@> wrote:
>
> >
>
> > He owned Cardiff Castle, didn't he? - it was part Warwick's "empire" and went first to Clarence.
>
> > I guess that window was added in the 19th century when William Burges altered the castle for the Marquis of Bute, to underscore the one-time "royal" heritage of the place. I love Burges's work - Castle Coch and the church at Studley Royal are both even richer (decoration-wise) than Cardiff.
>
> >
>
> > --- On Fri, 22/3/13, ricard1an <maryfriend@> wrote:
>
> >
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Yes you're right.  I haven't read Kendall for  years and of course he's flawed because things have moved on massively since he wrote his book but it's still good.



________________________________
From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 22:53
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

 

> Claire said:
>
> No, indeed, but it's very frustrating because you don't know what bits you can trust. Two pages after the "usurped" passage he goes on to cite Richard's amiably bemused letter about Jane Shore as evidence that he was a proto-Puritan and says that Lynom didn't marry Shore, although I've seen an article (in a Ricardian I think) which demonstrated pretty conclusively that he *did*.
>
>  
> Liz replied:  Her father's will refers to his daughter Elizabeth Lineham or Lynom.  Elizabeth was her real name.    That makes it pretty certain that she did marry him.

Carol responds:

True, but IIRC the will had not been discovered when Kendall wrote his book, so he can't be blamed for drawing the wrong conclusion (though I'm afraid he trusted More on this occasion and a few others).

Carol

Not for the rest of us - it's snowing here!
 
 


________________________________
From: Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...>
To: "" <>
Sent: Saturday, 23 March 2013, 9:54
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 
Sorry I meant early Spring, a week or so before his execution. Spring comes early for me :)

________________________________
From: justcarol67 <mailto:justcarol67%40yahoo.com>
To: mailto:%40yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 23:19
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 


--- In mailto:%40yahoogroups.com, Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
> If you look at the York House Books (and it's too late for me to look them up tonight) you'll find a few occasions when Richard is in London and they send folks to discuss their issues with him. One is certainly during the Spring of 1478 when Clarence is in trouble, another is when Edward is ill in the Spring of 1477 (? sorry it is late). [snip]

Carol responds:

I can't afford them, unfortunately. I can only hope that they'll be available online for Society members in a year or so. "Spring 1478" can't be right for Clarence being in trouble. He died in February of that year.

Carol

--- In , "Claire M Jordan" <whitehound@...> wrote:
>
>
> And does anybody know whether the rather charming detail (which I now can't
> find, but saw a few days ago) about Edward, Hastings, Rivers and Richard
> ending up so poor in Burgundy that they had to catch rabbits to feed
> themselves is well supported?
>

I read Christine Weightman's biography of Margaret of York the other day, and she says:

'The English were heavily dependent on their hosts. They had left England in such haste that they had very little money with them. Gloucester had to borrow from the town bailiff of Veer to pay for his minor expenses and Gruuthuyse sent his men out scouring the countryside to find rabbits to feed the unexpected guests.'

I suppose that story got slightly twisted in the telling - and who knows if the 'unexpected guests' helped in the rabbiting!

Yes, in the head, not reality!!



________________________________
From: liz williams <ferrymansdaughter@...>
To: "" <>
Sent: Saturday, 23 March 2013, 19:43
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)


 

Not for the rest of us - it's snowing here!
 
 

________________________________
From: Hilary Jones <mailto:hjnatdat%40yahoo.com>
To: "mailto:%40yahoogroups.commailto:%40yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, 23 March 2013, 9:54
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 
Sorry I meant early Spring, a week or so before his execution. Spring comes early for me :)

________________________________
From: justcarol67 <mailto:justcarol67%40yahoo.com>
To: mailto:%40yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 23:19
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 

--- In mailto:%40yahoogroups.com, Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
> If you look at the York House Books (and it's too late for me to look them up tonight) you'll find a few occasions when Richard is in London and they send folks to discuss their issues with him. One is certainly during the Spring of 1478 when Clarence is in trouble, another is when Edward is ill in the Spring of 1477 (? sorry it is late). [snip]

Carol responds:

I can't afford them, unfortunately. I can only hope that they'll be available online for Society members in a year or so. "Spring 1478" can't be right for Clarence being in trouble. He died in February of that year.

Carol

Hilary Jones wrote:
>
> Sorry I meant early Spring, a week or so before his execution. Spring comes early for me :)

Carol responds:

But early spring would be around March 21 (the vernal equinox). February 18m the date of George's execution, is still winter, especially in England, right? (Here in Tucson, we could argue that spring begins in February . . . .)

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2013 8:53 PM
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)



> But early spring would be around March 21 (the vernal equinox). February
> 18m the date of George's execution, is still winter, especially in
> England, right?

It entirely depends on the year - sometimes it's freezing, sometimes it's
shirtsleeve weather. Here we are in mid March with blizzards and snowdrifts
and people dying of the weather, but one year in the late '90s I went
paddling in the sea in February and it was warm. And remember the calendar
drift - it was Feb 27 in our terms.

Exactly. But in my head Spring begins when the nights get lighter - ie early Feb (sorry I'm sad, some would say optimisitic given the weather today!). I will look it up again as the dates in the Books are all over the place - but I can tell you that Richard was in London on 15th November 1477, when he wrote to York about their petition to Edward over fishgarths, and which was also when the Clarence troubles were going on. (Perhaps my head is still scrambled from the years when Spring began in September). Many apologies. H
 

________________________________
From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
To:
Sent: Saturday, 23 March 2013, 20:53
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 

Hilary Jones wrote:
>
> Sorry I meant early Spring, a week or so before his execution. Spring comes early for me :)

Carol responds:

But early spring would be around March 21 (the vernal equinox). February 18m the date of George's execution, is still winter, especially in England, right? (Here in Tucson, we could argue that spring begins in February . . . .)

Carol

--- In , "justcarol67" <justcarol67@...> wrote:
>I agree with you that he is probably mistaken in his assessment of Richard as a dour, guilt-ridden (and, as you didn't mention, puritanical) man but with Hilary that his biography is the best we have at this time since Ross assumes that Richard killed his nephews (based in part on Elizabeth Woodville's seeming to back Henry Tudor as king).
>

You know, I don't know if it's just me, but Ross doesn't bother me because he thinks Richard killed his nephews. I'm more bothered by the more subtle instances of negativity and belittlement that crop up in the text.

For example the part where he brings up the Croyland Chronicler's and Bishop Langton's disapproval of the Christmas festivities of 1484, and concludes from this:

'These are slender but certainly significant indications from Richard's own contemporaries, both of whom moved in high places, that Richard's court was perhaps as gay and hedonistic as Edward's had been, however much he inveighed in public against the profligacy of Westminster, Windsor, Greenwich and Sheen whilst his brother had been alive.'

(So Richard's court was one big orgy and he was a hypocrite. Oh well, at least he admits the indications are 'slender'.)

Another example from the end:

'By this fine eighteenth-century term "contrariety", we might nowadays understand "complexity" or even "discordancy" of character. But we do not know Richard well enough to indulge in such psychological complexities. Any discordancy arises from his behaviour patterns (notably his pronounced loyalty to Edward IV and his disloyalty to Edward's sons). He does not appear to have been a complex man. He may not have been a particularly intelligent man, yet it is hard to fault his conduct of government once he became king.'

I don't even understand what this means. We don't know Richard well enough to assume that he was a complex character, but we know him well enough to assume he was *not* a complex character, nor particularly intelligent? Am I missing something here? And there was 'discordancy' in his 'behaviour patterns' but this doesn't mean it would have been a sign of complexity, and doesn't warrant any analysis? I just don't understand.

Things like these are very small things, but they contribute to an overall tone that I find unpleasant, even if Ross for the most part presents his facts well.

From: pansydobersby
To:
Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2013 10:17 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> 'These are slender but certainly significant indications from Richard's
> own contemporaries, both of whom moved in high places, that Richard's
> court was perhaps as gay and hedonistic as Edward's had been,

I thought the evidence was that they all had rather extravagant taste in
clothes, but not Edward's other vices....

> I don't even understand what this means. We don't know Richard well enough
> to assume that he was a complex character, but we know him well enough to
> assume he was *not* a complex character, nor particularly intelligent? Am
> I missing something here?

No, you're not - he's waffling in the hopes that you won't notice that he
has no reasoned or logical point to make.

If I read Kendall's preface correctly, he tried to anticipate future criticism regarding his conclusions and conjectures. In his preface he writes that:

1. He ignored Tudor tradition except so far as it appeared to offer "bits of reliable evidence"

2. He based his biography almost entirely upon source material contemporary with Richard's day

3. He provided extensive notes to afford his readers to criticize the conclusions he had drawn "from conflicting or ambiguous testimony." Starred numbers refer to notes where his discusses evidence or additional information; numbers by themselves refer simply to sources.

4. He tried to indicate clearly "either in the text or in the notes" what is fact and what was his own conjecture. For conjectures of any importance he gave the reasons or evidence on which he based them. "If the events of Richard's life and the general shape of his character had been previously established, I would probably have given freer rein to speculation. AS it is, I have sought to hew him out of the facts, or as close to an approach to the facts as I could make."

5. He points out that a biography is a work of interpretation, that a succession of facts do not create a life or reveal a character. He admits that the accuracy of his portrait of Richard depends on the validity of "the imaginative judgments I have drawn from the facts" [which is also pretty much what a lot of us do on this discussion list a lot of the time].

6. He again reiterates that he means his extensive notes to offer the reader some opportunity of estimating that validity for himself (sic).

And so it goes.

~Weds

pansydobersby <wrote:

> You know, I don't know if it's just me, but Ross doesn't bother me because he thinks Richard killed his nephews. I'm more bothered by the more subtle instances of negativity and belittlement that crop up in the text. [snip]

> 'By this fine eighteenth-century term "contrariety", we might nowadays understand "complexity" or even "discordancy" of character. But we do not know Richard well enough to indulge in such psychological complexities. Any discordancy arises from his behaviour patterns (notably his pronounced loyalty to Edward IV and his disloyalty to Edward's sons). He does not appear to have been a complex man. He may not have been a particularly intelligent man, yet it is hard to fault his conduct of government once he became king.'
>
> I don't even understand what this means. We don't know Richard well enough to assume that he was a complex character, but we know him well enough to assume he was *not* a complex character, nor particularly intelligent? Am I missing something here? And there was 'discordancy' in his 'behaviour patterns' but this doesn't mean it would have been a sign of complexity, and doesn't warrant any analysis? I just don't understand.
>
> Things like these are very small things, but they contribute to an overall tone that I find unpleasant, even if Ross for the most part presents his facts well.
>
Carol responds:

Yes, I know what you mean. It feels as if he's struggling to be objective against his own bias and sometimes losing. Even the Croyland chronicler mentions Richard's intelligence and gifts, for example, when he and George are arguing over Richard's right to marry Anne Neville. And his intelligence is obvious from the thought he put into his legislation (and even the Middleham charter). You get glimpses of a *very* complex personality from his letters to, say, Bishop Russell or the Earl of Desmond.

I think, like Kendall, he can't fit the Lord Protector with the loyal brother and the good king. So instead of looking at the Protectorate in a way that makes sense from the perspective of these other periods in Richard's life, he tries to impose the supposedly ruthless Protector on the other two and comes up with a contradictory two-dimensional character.

Maybe what's needed as a first step toward a new biography is a first-rate analysis of the Protectorate that starts by taking Richard at his word and questioning the reliability of the two chroniclers.

We need more primary sources for that period, starting with the council records!

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 1:58 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> Maybe what's needed as a first step toward a new biography is a first-rate
> analysis of the Protectorate that starts by taking Richard at his word and
> questioning the reliability of the two chroniclers.

Yes, definitely. It seems to me that the first fracture point is when
Richard dined with Rivers in the evening at Northamptoin and arrested him
the next morning. That comes across as ruthless and treacherous, which is
why I thought it important to establish that a message could and may have
reached him overnight, informing him of the Woodville coup in progress in
London.

A possibility has occurred to me which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere
before, and that is that Stillington might have been a conspiracy theory
fantasist who invented the pre-contract and then persuaded everyone,
including himself, that it was true.

Assuming it to be really true, however, it probably explains Edward's
increasing dissipation. He would know, all the time, that he had betrayed
his father's claim to the throne by trying to foist his bastards off on the
nation, that he was cheating his family and his subjects and that he was
leaving his sons a nightmare legacy which was likely to rear up and bite
them. Yet, he had enough coinscience or enough fear of hellfire that he
didn't solve the problem by killing Stillington.

I agree with all you say. I've been able to find little about Ross on the web, other than that he was Prof at Bristol (I think) and that he was murdered in 1986. Paul seemed to know more about his political leanings etc, but I don't. And though I have both his Richard III and his Edward IV they tell me little about the man.  



________________________________
From: pansydobersby <[email protected]>
To:
Sent: Saturday, 23 March 2013, 22:17
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

--- In , "justcarol67" <justcarol67@...> wrote:
>I agree with you that he is probably mistaken in his assessment of Richard as a dour, guilt-ridden (and, as you didn't mention, puritanical) man but with Hilary that his biography is the best we have at this time since Ross assumes that Richard killed his nephews (based in part on Elizabeth Woodville's seeming to back Henry Tudor as king).
>

You know, I don't know if it's just me, but Ross doesn't bother me because he thinks Richard killed his nephews. I'm more bothered by the more subtle instances of negativity and belittlement that crop up in the text.

For example the part where he brings up the Croyland Chronicler's and Bishop Langton's disapproval of the Christmas festivities of 1484, and concludes from this:

'These are slender but certainly significant indications from Richard's own contemporaries, both of whom moved in high places, that Richard's court was perhaps as gay and hedonistic as Edward's had been, however much he inveighed in public against the profligacy of Westminster, Windsor, Greenwich and Sheen whilst his brother had been alive.'

(So Richard's court was one big orgy and he was a hypocrite. Oh well, at least he admits the indications are 'slender'.)

Another example from the end:

'By this fine eighteenth-century term "contrariety", we might nowadays understand "complexity" or even "discordancy" of character. But we do not know Richard well enough to indulge in such psychological complexities. Any discordancy arises from his behaviour patterns (notably his pronounced loyalty to Edward IV and his disloyalty to Edward's sons). He does not appear to have been a complex man. He may not have been a particularly intelligent man, yet it is hard to fault his conduct of government once he became king.'

I don't even understand what this means. We don't know Richard well enough to assume that he was a complex character, but we know him well enough to assume he was *not* a complex character, nor particularly intelligent? Am I missing something here? And there was 'discordancy' in his 'behaviour patterns' but this doesn't mean it would have been a sign of complexity, and doesn't warrant any analysis? I just don't understand.

Things like these are very small things, but they contribute to an overall tone that I find unpleasant, even if Ross for the most part presents his facts well.

In other words he was a professional Professor!



________________________________
From: wednesday_mc <wednesday.mac@...>
To:
Sent: Saturday, 23 March 2013, 22:28
Subject: Re: Kendall (Was: rallying the troops)

 

If I read Kendall's preface correctly, he tried to anticipate future criticism regarding his conclusions and conjectures. In his preface he writes that:

1. He ignored Tudor tradition except so far as it appeared to offer "bits of reliable evidence"

2. He based his biography almost entirely upon source material contemporary with Richard's day

3. He provided extensive notes to afford his readers to criticize the conclusions he had drawn "from conflicting or ambiguous testimony." Starred numbers refer to notes where his discusses evidence or additional information; numbers by themselves refer simply to sources.

4. He tried to indicate clearly "either in the text or in the notes" what is fact and what was his own conjecture. For conjectures of any importance he gave the reasons or evidence on which he based them. "If the events of Richard's life and the general shape of his character had been previously established, I would probably have given freer rein to speculation. AS it is, I have sought to hew him out of the facts, or as close to an approach to the facts as I could make."

5. He points out that a biography is a work of interpretation, that a succession of facts do not create a life or reveal a character. He admits that the accuracy of his portrait of Richard depends on the validity of "the imaginative judgments I have drawn from the facts" [which is also pretty much what a lot of us do on this discussion list a lot of the time].

6. He again reiterates that he means his extensive notes to offer the reader some opportunity of estimating that validity for himself (sic).

And so it goes.

~Weds

You sum it up in your last sentence. Until we get more primary evidence, or definite proof that there isn't any, it's going to take a brave biographer to stick their head above the parapet knowing that something could emerge to potentially damn their career. Perhaps you've struck on why so many biographers become faint-hearted after 1483. I note Wilkinson's second part never emerged - Paul will be glad!!!


________________________________
From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
To:
Sent: Sunday, 24 March 2013, 1:58
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

pansydobersby <wrote:

> You know, I don't know if it's just me, but Ross doesn't bother me because he thinks Richard killed his nephews. I'm more bothered by the more subtle instances of negativity and belittlement that crop up in the text. [snip]

> 'By this fine eighteenth-century term "contrariety", we might nowadays understand "complexity" or even "discordancy" of character. But we do not know Richard well enough to indulge in such psychological complexities. Any discordancy arises from his behaviour patterns (notably his pronounced loyalty to Edward IV and his disloyalty to Edward's sons). He does not appear to have been a complex man. He may not have been a particularly intelligent man, yet it is hard to fault his conduct of government once he became king.'
>
> I don't even understand what this means. We don't know Richard well enough to assume that he was a complex character, but we know him well enough to assume he was *not* a complex character, nor particularly intelligent? Am I missing something here? And there was 'discordancy' in his 'behaviour patterns' but this doesn't mean it would have been a sign of complexity, and doesn't warrant any analysis? I just don't understand.
>
> Things like these are very small things, but they contribute to an overall tone that I find unpleasant, even if Ross for the most part presents his facts well.
>
Carol responds:

Yes, I know what you mean. It feels as if he's struggling to be objective against his own bias and sometimes losing. Even the Croyland chronicler mentions Richard's intelligence and gifts, for example, when he and George are arguing over Richard's right to marry Anne Neville. And his intelligence is obvious from the thought he put into his legislation (and even the Middleham charter). You get glimpses of a *very* complex personality from his letters to, say, Bishop Russell or the Earl of Desmond.

I think, like Kendall, he can't fit the Lord Protector with the loyal brother and the good king. So instead of looking at the Protectorate in a way that makes sense from the perspective of these other periods in Richard's life, he tries to impose the supposedly ruthless Protector on the other two and comes up with a contradictory two-dimensional character.

Maybe what's needed as a first step toward a new biography is a first-rate analysis of the Protectorate that starts by taking Richard at his word and questioning the reliability of the two chroniclers.

We need more primary sources for that period, starting with the council records!

Carol

It would be difficult to justify killing a bishop without very real cause; ecclesiastical courts still existed, Rome would want to know why. Think of George Neville who got away with treason if anyone did.
The only cleric I can think of executed for treason at this time is Prior Langstrother at Tewkesbury. But that was as a result of his open rebellion in the field.
And before anyone else says so, of course the arch-survivor was Morton.  


________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Sunday, 24 March 2013, 2:24
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 1:58 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

> Maybe what's needed as a first step toward a new biography is a first-rate
> analysis of the Protectorate that starts by taking Richard at his word and
> questioning the reliability of the two chroniclers.

Yes, definitely. It seems to me that the first fracture point is when
Richard dined with Rivers in the evening at Northamptoin and arrested him
the next morning. That comes across as ruthless and treacherous, which is
why I thought it important to establish that a message could and may have
reached him overnight, informing him of the Woodville coup in progress in
London.

A possibility has occurred to me which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere
before, and that is that Stillington might have been a conspiracy theory
fantasist who invented the pre-contract and then persuaded everyone,
including himself, that it was true.

Assuming it to be really true, however, it probably explains Edward's
increasing dissipation. He would know, all the time, that he had betrayed
his father's claim to the throne by trying to foist his bastards off on the
nation, that he was cheating his family and his subjects and that he was
leaving his sons a nightmare legacy which was likely to rear up and bite
them. Yet, he had enough coinscience or enough fear of hellfire that he
didn't solve the problem by killing Stillington.

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 10:43 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> It would be difficult to justify killing a bishop without very real cause;
> ecclesiastical courts still existed,

Stillington hadn't done anything he could reasonably be executed for,
either. No, I was thinking of a discreet little accident - a tumble from a
horse, food-poisoning, a fatal encounter with brigands. If the pre-contract
story was true then Edward must have been aware that it was possible to
solve a lot of future problems that way, but he didn't do it.

That casts an interesting light on the death of Henry VI and could be some
evidence either that he *wasn't* assassinated (he really could just have
slipped on the stairs and cracked his own skull), or that he was but Edward
felt so bad about it afterwards that he couldn't bring himself to repeat the
exercise.

OTOH it could just be that Edward viewed killing a cleric in a different
light from killing a layman, however innocent and unworldly, or that he
couldn't find any henchmen who'd be willing to kill a cleric and could be
relied on to keep quiet about it afterwards. Or that he knew or suspected
Stillington had already passed the story on to too many people to be able to
contain it with a single death. Or that he had a personal fondness for
Stillington that he didn't have for Henry VI - many people find the mentally
ill disturbing.

 I think your last para is the more likely though I don't have Stillington as mentally ill. Edward could usually get round most things by charm, partronage etc and despite being clever he was also lazy, as in the case of Picquigny and HT. If the pre-contract hadn't surfaced in nearly twenty years and those who could know hadn't spoken or been shut up by patronage, why worry about going to the trouble of taking out some  potentially trouble-making old buffer. Just lock him up occasionally to teach him a lesson. Besides if Stillington had announced it to the world during Edward's lifetime who would people have believed? Same answer, lock him up as insane for his own good.



________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Sunday, 24 March 2013, 11:16
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 10:43 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

> It would be difficult to justify killing a bishop without very real cause;
> ecclesiastical courts still existed,

Stillington hadn't done anything he could reasonably be executed for,
either. No, I was thinking of a discreet little accident - a tumble from a
horse, food-poisoning, a fatal encounter with brigands. If the pre-contract
story was true then Edward must have been aware that it was possible to
solve a lot of future problems that way, but he didn't do it.

That casts an interesting light on the death of Henry VI and could be some
evidence either that he *wasn't* assassinated (he really could just have
slipped on the stairs and cracked his own skull), or that he was but Edward
felt so bad about it afterwards that he couldn't bring himself to repeat the
exercise.

OTOH it could just be that Edward viewed killing a cleric in a different
light from killing a layman, however innocent and unworldly, or that he
couldn't find any henchmen who'd be willing to kill a cleric and could be
relied on to keep quiet about it afterwards. Or that he knew or suspected
Stillington had already passed the story on to too many people to be able to
contain it with a single death. Or that he had a personal fondness for
Stillington that he didn't have for Henry VI - many people find the mentally
ill disturbing.

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 11:17 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> I think your last para is the more likely though I don't have Stillington
> as mentally ill.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I meant that Henry VI was mentally ill and this may
have caused Edward not to connect with him as a real person and not to have
felt bad about killing him (if he did) in quite the way that he would have
felt bad about killing somebody like Stillington, whom he actually knew and
probably *did* have a sense of as a real person.

> Edward could usually get round most things by charm, partronage etc and
> despite being clever he was also lazy, as in the case of Picquigny and HT.
> If the pre-contract hadn't surfaced in nearly twenty years and those who
> could know hadn't spoken or been shut up by patronage, why worry about
> going to the trouble of taking out some potentially trouble-making old
> buffer. Just lock him up occasionally to teach him a lesson. Besides if
> Stillington had announced it to the world during Edward's lifetime who
> would people have believed? Same answer, lock him up as insane for his own
> good.

Good point. And being a bit amoral himself, and apparently willing to pass
his bastards off as legitimate heirs, he may have assumed that other people
would be equally amoral. Since his death seems to have been fairly sudden,
not the result of a long illness, he wouldn't have expected to die while his
sons were minors and he may just have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that his
boys were as amoral as he was and that if they found out they were bastards
they would just hush it up. He hadn't reckoned with the combination of his
own early death and Richard's honesty.

Hi All, speaking of Richard's duties this letter to York regarding fishgarths is very interesting as Richard refers to and I quote " at our next homecoming" so this shows that he regarded the north as his home.
The letter is in York House Books Vol, for those of you who have it,you will find it in the index under fishgarths. Richard has spoken to Edward about the problems of fishgarths blocking the river Ouse, causing problems for river traffic and Edward has by the looks of it told him to go and have a look at them himself.
He is writing to York to tell them he will be visiting on his next homecoming as commanded by the Kings grace.
Letter dated 15th November 1477 London

Ps Richard must have got really fed up of the subject of fishgarths as there are a number of letters referring to them.






--- In , Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
> Exactly. But in my head Spring begins when the nights get lighter - ie early Feb (sorry I'm sad, some would say optimisitic given the weather today!). I will look it up again as the dates in the Books are all over the place - but I can tell you that Richard was in London on 15th November 1477, when he wrote to York about their petition to Edward over fishgarths, and which was also when the Clarence troubles were going on. (Perhaps my head is still scrambled from the years when Spring began in September). Many apologies. H
>  
>
> ________________________________
> From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
> To:
> Sent: Saturday, 23 March 2013, 20:53
> Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)
>
>  
>
> Hilary Jones wrote:
> >
> > Sorry I meant early Spring, a week or so before his execution. Spring comes early for me :)
>
> Carol responds:
>
> But early spring would be around March 21 (the vernal equinox). February 18m the date of George's execution, is still winter, especially in England, right? (Here in Tucson, we could argue that spring begins in February . . . .)
>
> Carol
>
>
>
>
>
>

From: christineholmes651@...
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 12:06 PM
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)



> Ps Richard must have got really fed up of the subject of fishgarths as
> there are a number of letters referring to them.

And the contemporary comment which I saw years ago, where somebody was
complaining that Gloucester smiled a lot and made lots of promises but
didn't always keep them, was an aside to a piece of text about fishing
permissions so it's probably in the York House Books as well and that
probably explains why he didn't keep all his promises about it - it sounds
like it was probably very tangled and so he probably didn't manage to sort
it out as well as he'd hoped.

That's it. You can imagine lazy Edward tossing him the letter from York with a few expletives and telling him to deal. But you're right about the homecoming bit! 



________________________________
From: "christineholmes651@..." <christineholmes651@...>
To:
Sent: Sunday, 24 March 2013, 12:06
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 



Hi All, speaking of Richard's duties this letter to York regarding fishgarths is very interesting as Richard refers to and I quote " at our next homecoming" so this shows that he regarded the north as his home.
The letter is in York House Books Vol, for those of you who have it,you will find it in the index under fishgarths. Richard has spoken to Edward about the problems of fishgarths blocking the river Ouse, causing problems for river traffic and Edward has by the looks of it told him to go and have a look at them himself.
He is writing to York to tell them he will be visiting on his next homecoming as commanded by the Kings grace.
Letter dated 15th November 1477 London

Ps Richard must have got really fed up of the subject of fishgarths as there are a number of letters referring to them.

--- In , Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
> Exactly. But in my head Spring begins when the nights get lighter - ie early Feb (sorry I'm sad, some would say optimisitic given the weather today!). I will look it up again as the dates in the Books are all over the place - but I can tell you that Richard was in London on 15th November 1477, when he wrote to York about their petition to Edward over fishgarths, and which was also when the Clarence troubles were going on. (Perhaps my head is still scrambled from the years when Spring began in September). Many apologies. H
>  
>
> ________________________________
> From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
> To:
> Sent: Saturday, 23 March 2013, 20:53
> Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)
>
>  
>
> Hilary Jones wrote:
> >
> > Sorry I meant early Spring, a week or so before his execution. Spring comes early for me :)
>
> Carol responds:
>
> But early spring would be around March 21 (the vernal equinox). February 18m the date of George's execution, is still winter, especially in England, right? (Here in Tucson, we could argue that spring begins in February . . . .)
>
> Carol
>
>
>
>
>
>

I've read the opposite which is that Richard had to kill some of his own fishgarths in Lancashire because he wouldn't appear a hypocrite. 



________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Sunday, 24 March 2013, 12:26
Subject: Re: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

 

From: christineholmes651@...
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 12:06 PM
Subject: Re: Richard' s duties (Was: Kendall)

> Ps Richard must have got really fed up of the subject of fishgarths as
> there are a number of letters referring to them.

And the contemporary comment which I saw years ago, where somebody was
complaining that Gloucester smiled a lot and made lots of promises but
didn't always keep them, was an aside to a piece of text about fishing
permissions so it's probably in the York House Books as well and that
probably explains why he didn't keep all his promises about it - it sounds
like it was probably very tangled and so he probably didn't manage to sort
it out as well as he'd hoped.

Sorry out the HVI thing, thought you had Stillingto with senility too. Edward probably saw himself as a lucky man, and had his son grown to manhood before he died, Stillington would probably not have dared to raise it. It would only have taken what four more years at the most and son Edward would not have been so easy to challenge.


________________________________
From: Claire M Jordan <whitehound@...>
To:
Sent: Sunday, 24 March 2013, 11:50
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 11:17 AM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

> I think your last para is the more likely though I don't have Stillington
> as mentally ill.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I meant that Henry VI was mentally ill and this may
have caused Edward not to connect with him as a real person and not to have
felt bad about killing him (if he did) in quite the way that he would have
felt bad about killing somebody like Stillington, whom he actually knew and
probably *did* have a sense of as a real person.

> Edward could usually get round most things by charm, partronage etc and
> despite being clever he was also lazy, as in the case of Picquigny and HT.
> If the pre-contract hadn't surfaced in nearly twenty years and those who
> could know hadn't spoken or been shut up by patronage, why worry about
> going to the trouble of taking out some potentially trouble-making old
> buffer. Just lock him up occasionally to teach him a lesson. Besides if
> Stillington had announced it to the world during Edward's lifetime who
> would people have believed? Same answer, lock him up as insane for his own
> good.

Good point. And being a bit amoral himself, and apparently willing to pass
his bastards off as legitimate heirs, he may have assumed that other people
would be equally amoral. Since his death seems to have been fairly sudden,
not the result of a long illness, he wouldn't have expected to die while his
sons were minors and he may just have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that his
boys were as amoral as he was and that if they found out they were bastards
they would just hush it up. He hadn't reckoned with the combination of his
own early death and Richard's honesty.

From: Hilary Jones
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 1:52 PM
Subject: Re: rallying the troops


> Sorry out the HVI thing, thought you had Stillingto with senility too.

's OK.

> Edward probably saw himself as a lucky man, and had his son grown to
> manhood before he died, Stillington would probably not have dared to raise
> it. It would only have taken what four more years at the most and son
> Edward would not have been so easy to challenge.

Yes, and parliament wouldn't have been so interested in taking Stillington
up on his story once young Edward was 16, since I suppose part of their
eagerness to get Richard onto the throne was because they didn't want a
child king, in thrall to the Woodvilles even if Richard was Protector. Was
there already a significant threat of invasion from France/Henry? If so
they'd be doubly anxious to have a seasoned captain and administrator on the
throne, instead of an inexperienced youngster.

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> Yes, definitely. It seems to me that the first fracture point is when Richard dined with Rivers in the evening at Northamptoin and arrested him the next morning. That comes across as ruthless and treacherous, which is why I thought it important to establish that a message could and may have reached him overnight, informing him of the Woodville coup in progress in London.

Carol responds:

I don't know about ruthless since it was at first a house arrest and Richard sent him dinner, which he declined and asked to be sent to Richard Grey (assuming that any of the account we're given is true).

The problem is that we can't rely on Mancini, who wasn't there and got his information second or third hand (and in a different language), yet he presents his version of events as if it were an eyewitness account complete with verbatim conversations. Both his account and Croyland's have to be read in light of their interpretation of his actions as the first step toward a planned usurpation instead of the precautionary measure that it clearly was at that time.

After all, if he had been declared Protector in Edward's codicil, which seems clear from Croyland's roundabout reference to it ("On his death-bed he added some codicils thereto; but what a sad and unhappy result befell all these wise dispositions of his, the ensuing tragedy will more fully disclose"), he was simply doing his duty by taking custody of the boy he then thought was the rightful king.

But it does look as if he received additional information after that friendly dinner, either from the late arrival Buckingham or a messenger from Hastings or a scout spotting the wagonloads of armor. And he certainly knew that the king, whom he was supposed to meet, had been sent forward to Stony Stratford and that the king's mother and "uterine brother" had been illegally passing bills (or whatever the correct word is) in the king's name in violation of that codicil. There's no question that they were pushing for an early coronation that would make the Protectorate meaningless and make the young king their puppet.

If Elizabeth Woodville and Dorset hadn't been plotting against the rightful Protector, if not to kill him then certainly to thwart him, then why would she flee into sanctuary and Dorset flee the country after robbing the Tower? And it's inconceivable that Rivers was not in on the conspiracy. He may have been much more deeply involved than is commonly believed if Annette's theory is correct.

But I agree with you that the arrest of Rivers, Grey, and Vaughn is the point at which Richard's actions *seem* to deviate from his normal pattern and at which we begin to need correspondence that we just don't have. We know that Richard wrote to the council explaining his actions and that they accepted those actions, immediately formalizing his title as Protector. Obviously, they did not hold the same view as Mancini and Croyland.

Carol

--- In , Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
>  I think your last para is the more likely though I don't have Stillington as mentally ill. Edward could usually get round most things by charm, partronage etc and despite being clever he was also lazy, as in the case of Picquigny and HT. If the pre-contract hadn't surfaced in nearly twenty years and those who could know hadn't spoken or been shut up by patronage, why worry about going to the trouble of taking out some  potentially trouble-making old buffer. Just lock him up occasionally to teach him a lesson. Besides if Stillington had announced it to the world during Edward's lifetime who would people have believed? Same answer, lock him up as insane for his own good.

Carol responds:

Also, there would be no point in Stillington's announcing it during Edward's lifetime, especially after such a long silence. Edward IV's own claim was not affected. But once Edward was dead, he would have had a moral obligation to come forward. He must have struggled against fear of retribution before coming forward. Otherwise, he would have done so sooner unless he was ill or held back for other reasons. Or maybe, he had to gather his evidence with Catesby's help?

Carol

Yes Catesby scuttling round with those bundles of papers again, everyone's confidant.



________________________________
From: justcarol67 <justcarol67@...>
To:
Sent: Sunday, 24 March 2013, 17:23
Subject: Re: rallying the troops

 



--- In , Hilary Jones <hjnatdat@...> wrote:
>
>  I think your last para is the more likely though I don't have Stillington as mentally ill. Edward could usually get round most things by charm, partronage etc and despite being clever he was also lazy, as in the case of Picquigny and HT. If the pre-contract hadn't surfaced in nearly twenty years and those who could know hadn't spoken or been shut up by patronage, why worry about going to the trouble of taking out some  potentially trouble-making old buffer. Just lock him up occasionally to teach him a lesson. Besides if Stillington had announced it to the world during Edward's lifetime who would people have believed? Same answer, lock him up as insane for his own good.

Carol responds:

Also, there would be no point in Stillington's announcing it during Edward's lifetime, especially after such a long silence. Edward IV's own claim was not affected. But once Edward was dead, he would have had a moral obligation to come forward. He must have struggled against fear of retribution before coming forward. Otherwise, he would have done so sooner unless he was ill or held back for other reasons. Or maybe, he had to gather his evidence with Catesby's help?

Carol

From: justcarol67
To:
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 5:16 PM
Subject: Arrest of Rivers (Was: rallying the
troops)


> After all, if he had been declared Protector in Edward's codicil, which
> seems clear from Croyland's roundabout reference to it ("On his death-bed
> he added some codicils thereto; but what a sad and unhappy result befell
> all these wise dispositions of his, the ensuing tragedy will more fully
> disclose"),

Considering the source this is good confirmation - if somebody who is
hostile says something good about Richard (or indeed vice versa) then it's
almost certainly true, because they're unlikely to have invented it. If
even Croyland says his claim to be Protector was true we can be 99% sure it
was, even without having the will.

By the same token I believe Baker when he says that one of Richard's first
acts upon accepting the throne (before the actual coronation iirc) was to
summon from sanctuary a guy who had fled there in fear of him, and order the
guy to kneel and kiss his hand and thereby be pardoned. [Can't look up said
guy's name right now, too busy.] Baker tries to put a mean spin on this
benevolent act by assigning dishonest motives to Richard but that's
journalistiuc colour - it's stuff he couldn't have known - and even he can't
hide the fact that it *was* a benevolent act.

> We know that Richard wrote to the council explaining his actions and that
> they accepted those actions,

Showing that he himself was aware that his actions *might* look ruthless and
treacherous, but that he had a convincing alternative explanation, even
though we don't know what it was.

"Claire M Jordan" wrote:

> [snip] By the same token I believe Baker when he says that one of Richard's first acts upon accepting the throne (before the actual coronation iirc) was to summon from sanctuary a guy who had fled there in fear of him, and order the guy to kneel and kiss his hand and thereby be pardoned. [Can't look up said guy's name right now, too busy.] Baker tries to put a mean spin on this benevolent act by assigning dishonest motives to Richard but that's journalistiuc colour - it's stuff he couldn't have known - and even he can't hide the fact that it *was* a benevolent act. [snip]

Carol responds:

The man was John Fogge (the devil figure in Marjorie Bowen's "Dickon"). Baker was not the first chronicler to cite this incident. His source is presumably More, who says:

"when he had declared the discommodity of discord and the commodities of concord and unity, he made an open proclamation that he did put out of his mind all enmities, and that he there did openly pardon all offenses committed against him. And to the intent that he might show a proof thereof, he commanded that one Fogge, whom he had long deadly
hated, should be brought then before him. Who being brought out of
the sanctuary by (for thither had he fled, for fear of him), in the sight of the people he took him by the hand. Which thing the common
people rejoiced at and praised, but wise men took it for a vanity.
In his return homeward, whomsoever he met he saluted. For a
mind that knoweth itself guilty is in a manner dejected to a servile
flattery."

http://thomasmorestudies.org/r3concordance/richard%20iii%20mcf%2011-7-12.txt1.htm#2582

Apparently, this passage did not appear in the original English version but is a translation by his son-in-law Rastell from the Latin version, which he has inserted into its proper place in his 1577 edition. http://www.r3.org/bookcase/more/moretext.html

However, Hammond and Sutton credit this passage to Grafton, who also includes it in Volume 2 of his chronicle:

http://books.google.com/books?id=_r4_AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q=Fogge&f=false

Since Grafton's Chronicle came out in two editions, one before and one after Rastell's edition of More, I can't tell without checking more carefully whether Grafton got his account from Rastell's More or Rastell got it from Grafton (who may have gotten in from More's original Latin).

At any rate, Richard did accept the scepter in Westminster Hall and did call the judges before him.

According to the Great Chronicle (a Tudor source but not nearly as biased as later accounts):

"Wheruppon The thurs[day] next ensuyng (beyng the xix day off June ^) the sayd lord protectour took possescyon At Westmynstyr In the grete
halle, where he beyng sett In the kynges cheyer or place where alle kynges take ffyrst possescion, The duke of Norfifolk syttyng upon his Right hand that beffore dayes was callid lord Howard, And upon his lyfftly hand the duke of Suffolk he calhd beffore hym the Juges Com-
maundyng theym In Right streygth maner that they Justly and duly shuld mynystir his lawe withowth delay or ffavour."

http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/isobel-d-thornley/england-under-the-yorkists-1460-1485-illustrated-from-contemporary-sources-hci/page-10-england-under-the-yorkists-1460-1485-illustrated-from-contemporary-sources-hci.shtml

This account says nothing about Sir John Fogge. Kendall takes the incident as fact.

Carol

Gruuthuyse was wealthy. I don't understand why he had to send out for rabbit hunting! Lolol!
Unless it was for sports.....And an enthusiastic 18 year old jumped at the opportunity to run after cute little rabbits!

Ishita Bandyo
Sent from my iPad

On Mar 23, 2013, at 4:01 PM, pansydobersby <[email protected]> wrote:

> --- In , "Claire M Jordan" <whitehound@...> wrote:
> >
> >
> > And does anybody know whether the rather charming detail (which I now can't
> > find, but saw a few days ago) about Edward, Hastings, Rivers and Richard
> > ending up so poor in Burgundy that they had to catch rabbits to feed
> > themselves is well supported?
> >
>
> I read Christine Weightman's biography of Margaret of York the other day, and she says:
>
> 'The English were heavily dependent on their hosts. They had left England in such haste that they had very little money with them. Gloucester had to borrow from the town bailiff of Veer to pay for his minor expenses and Gruuthuyse sent his men out scouring the countryside to find rabbits to feed the unexpected guests.'
>
> I suppose that story got slightly twisted in the telling - and who knows if the 'unexpected guests' helped in the rabbiting!
>
>