Raiders of the Lost King

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of battle…and buried under council car parks.  This, according to recent speculation, was the fate of Richard III, England’s last Plantagenet king, killed at the Battle of Bosworth in August, 1485.  Now archaeologists working in Leicester say that they may be close to finding his remains, under the said municipal car park. 

Actually what they are really saying is that they may have found part of a Franciscan foundation known as Greyfriars – dissolved and destroyed during the Reformation - , where the monarch may have been buried after his naked body had been gawped at for several days after death. 

While I have no desire to criticise the team headed by Professor Richard Buckley of Leicester University (nonsense, I do!) it all seems a tad premature.  Yes, OK, it attracts attention, though not in the best archaeological tradition.  Well, maybe we are playing at Raiders of the Lost King. 

At the risk of being accused of academic snobbishness there seems to me to be a strong element of wishful thinking and pop archaeology here, not really that surprising in that the dig is to be featured in a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary. 

On reflection that might not be that bad – after all Time Team, a Channel 4 show, is pop archaeology at its best – but for the fact the Richard III Society is also involved in this sack him up project. 

Now, the Richard III Society, as you may very well know, has an agenda, not one, I have to say, that is politically or academically disinterested.  No, for them Richard is a much misunderstood man, a black villain only in Tudor propaganda, the wicked hunchback of Shakespeare’s fertile imagination.  Their man, rather, is more sinned against than sinning. 

I’ve never quite understood why Richard, who ruled for only two fairly disastrous years, has excited such fascination.  He was a bad king, a bad politician and an appalling strategist.  But for his miscalculations the Lancastrian cause, comprehensively defeated in the so-called Wars of the Roses (it was the Scot Scott who gave it that title) may itself have been buried forever. 

His fall began with a crime - the murder in the Tower of his young nephews Edward V and Richard, duke of York.  Oh, there is no doubt about that, despite the objections of the Richard III Society, as anyone who has the least knowledge of medieval records like Close Rolls and Pipe Rolls will confirm. 

These documents are an exhaustive account of royal grants and expenditure, mention often being made of the most politically insignificant people.  The Princes are there, at least until the summer of 1483, when they vanish altogether from the record, receiving no further mention.  To save himself, and to completely undercut Henry Tudor in 1485, Richard only had to produce them in public.  He could not.  He was Banquo and they were the ghosts at his feast. 

So, let’s get back to the dig.  I read in the press that the archaeologists and their Richardian allies hope that finding the remains, if they find the remains, will help change the way the king is viewed historically.  Really?  Do bones speak?  How on earth could a few broken fragments change the past? 

The Richard III Society view is that it would end the “enormous disparagement” of his reputation.  Quite frankly that’s just nonsense.  All the dry bones could prove - if there are enough of them - is that he wasn’t a hunchback with a withered arm, but that’s a perception that has long been discarded.  Hunchbacks with withered arms don’t generally ride into battle. 

I welcome archaeology as genuine archaeology and I really do hope that Richard is found, if only to answer a long-standing mystery.  But so far as his reputation is concerned, any remains, no matter how complete, will stay stubbornly silent.  

A Rattling Good Yarn

It began with a ship wreck.  The year is 1120.  The vessel in question is the White Ship, leaving France for England, setting sail in the dark on a late November night.  All on board were in a party mood, including, according to some accounts, the crew.  The wine and ale has been flowing with liberality.  No sooner had the vessel left harbour than it hit a submerged rock.  All but one of the passengers and crew died.

Norman England might be said to have died that night also; for the drowned included William Adelin.  The grandson of William the Conqueror, he was the only surviving legitimate son and heir of Henry I.  Henry, who was to rule for another fifteen years after the tragedy, had no choice but to leave the throne to his daughter, Matilda, a kind of forlorn hope in a militant male-dominated world.  And so it proved.  No sooner had the king died than the throne was seized by Stephen of Blois, Matilda's cousin, ushering in a long period of civil war, known subsequently as the Anarchy. 

It ushered in much more; it ushered in the devil’s brood.  It ushered in the best of kings and the worst of kings.  It ushered in the Plantagenets.  Reputedly descended from a daughter of Satan, they were set to become England’s longest reigning dynasty.  There is a story worth telling. It’s a story told with enthusiasm, insight and panache by Dan Jones in the recently published The Plantagenets: the Kings Who Made England. 

The sinking of the White Ship is one important marker; the other is Matilda’s marriage in 1128 to one Geoffrey of Anjou. It was a marriage made in hell, or at least Matilda might have thought so.  A widow of twenty six, previously married to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, she now found herself bound to a red-headed teenager of fourteen, a marriage arranged by her father for the sake of the peace.  Geoffrey, son of the count of Anjou, had taken to sporting a sprig of yellow broom as his personal emblem- the planta genista in Latin -, hence the name of the ensuing dynasty. 

Matilda and Geoffrey were never to rule England, an honour that fell to their son, who succeeded Stephen in 1154 as Henry II.  Red in hair and red in passion, Henry set the pattern to come.  There was war, bloodshed, brutality and massacre aplenty; but there was also innovation, consolidation and development.  It was under Henry and his successors that England began to take shape as a nation, not a mere appendage of a French-speaking continental power. 

Jones is a story-teller of considerable skill.  In six hundred or so pages he simply carries one along in a strong narrative and chronological vessel, the sort of thing that was once dismissed as, well, just a tad passé by the high priests of the historical profession. 

The focus is very much on the politics and the personalities of power. When his kings are good they are very, very good and when they are bad they…have red hot pokers thrust into their bowels.  Actually, the supposed gruesome death of Edward II is one of the myths that the author hits on the head with a hammer that might very well have been borrowed from Edward I, hitherto busy hammering the Scots. 

The measure of ‘good’ here really needs to be refined.  Good means effective.  It does not mean as in good as in good; anything but, if you take my meaning.  For Jones the effective include Henry II, Richard I, Edward I and Edward III.  The bad, or rather the ineffectual, are King John (isn’t he on every list of great historical baddies?), Henry III, Edward II and Richard II. 

The former – the good -were to stamp their mark on England, through war, law making and administration.  The latter – the bad - also stamped their mark, possibly in some even more lasting ways.  John, by being bad, brought about some good, albeit unwillingly, some lasting innovations in the common law of the land, including the provisions of Magna Carta, the most important of all. 

Indeed it might also be said that it was his incompetence as a soldier that began the process of making England England, rather than greater Normandy or the jewel in the crown of the Angevin Empire.  It was thanks to John that the Channel began to serve in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.

King John was not a good man, and no good friends had he.  He stayed in every afternoon…but no one came to tea.  Dan Jones certainly did not.  He serves him up as he has been traditionally served up - an all round rotter.  This personally is where I take my leave, seeing John more as the victim of monkish chroniclers.  He was a man who could certainly sin with the best of the Plantagenets, but whose reign saw some important innovations in administration and government.  In this regard I’m a revisionist, not a traditionalist like Jones, who draws up a heavy charge sheet spread over some sixty pages, a catalogue of crime and personal failure that Matthew Paris, the medieval chronicler and character assassin, would doubtless applaud. 

As for the effective ones, John’s grandson Edward I, in his restless imperial ambitions, was to poison relations between England and Scotland for centuries.  Before that we have the example of Richard I, who cared little for England, other than as a mortgageable asset, to be used in financing the pursuit of a crusading chimera. 

The author and I can at least agree on one thing: we both admire Edward III, whom I described in a recent English Standard article as the real father of the English nation.  Although his ambitions in France were fruitless his time saw great innovations in both military and parliamentary affairs.  It was a time that saw the beginning of the end of the old England of humble peasants and hungry barons, never the twain to meet. 

It’s in his account of the ‘black’ fourteenth century that Jones is at his best, in his treatment of the highs of Edward III and the lows of Richard II, his grandson.  His handling of the reign of the latter, the first gentleman of England, is particularly good, hardly surprising in that he previously published a commendable account of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. 

Some might think – I did think – that his tale ends rather abruptly in 1399 with the deposition of Richard II. After all, in the Lancaster and York phases, the story of the Plantagenets continues down to the death of Richard III at Bosworth in 1485.  But I suppose this, a period that covers the final dramatic stages of the Hundred Years War and the ensuing Wars of the Roses, would be a mighty postscript in an already lengthy book.  It’s aimed at the popular market and the popular market might baulk at a work heading fast towards a thousand pages or more! 

The publishers have managed to stamp the book with the imprimatur of some impressive heavyweights, including David Starkey and Simon Sebag-Montefiore. These things always seem slightly over the top to me - clearly solicited in advance rather than drawn from a published review - , almost hysterical in their approbation.  The latter, for example, describes The Plantagenets as ‘outstanding’, a judgement echoed by Helen Castor, the best-selling author of She Wolves.  (It must be so: it says so on the cover!) 

It’s good, yes; it’s thrilling, yes; it’s a bit of a royal roller-coaster, yes.  But, really, is it ‘outstanding’?  Well, possibly, in some regards, but are we not suffering from a tendency to exaggeration and hyperbole here?  When every other new publication is described as ‘outstanding’ it tends to jade things somewhat.  Besides, does the book really need this kind of scaffolding?  I don’t think so, not when it serves its purpose, a sprightly filly galloping along nicely in a rattling good yarn.  

Oak Apple Day

The 29th of this month will mark the 350th anniversary of the Restoration of the English Monarchy in the person Charles II. Although in royalist and legitimist eyes Charles had been de jure king ever since the judicial murder of Charles I, his father, in January 1649, England had been governed in the interim period by a republican Commonwealth and then a Protectorate, a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, certainly a monarch, a king in all but name.

The Restoration by happy coincidence also fell on the King’s thirtieth birthday. Parliament, in celebration, both of the royal birthday and the Restoration, declared 29 May 1660 to be a public holiday and;

to be for ever kept as a day of thanksgiving for our redemption from tyranny and the King's return to his Government, he entering London that day.

In the name of Oak Apple Day or Royal Oak Day the holiday was kept for almost two hundred years, only finally abolished in 1859. It’s rather a pity, really, that this quintessentially English celebration did not survive into the modern age, though I suppose it would have become less and less relevant over the years, certainly in recent times, when the whole notion of Englishness and a specific English identity has been under attack. Still, I’m pleased to say, that a toast is still offered at some halls in Cambridge in memory of the occasion.

The oak reference itself is to the famous incident after the Battle of Worcester in September 1651, when the King was obliged to take refuge from victorious parliamentary troops in an oak tree near Boscobel House in Shropshire.

The holiday was more than a celebration of a political event. England under the republic had been a bit like Narnia under the rule of the White Witch, a place where it was always winter and never Christmas. Oak Apple was therefore an opportunity to revive customs displeasing to the puritans, including many with obvious pagan associations. The monarchy was celebrated, yes, but so to was the Green Man, the abiding spirit of the woods, of an even older England that not even Cromwell had been able to destroy.

The One Who Survived

Catherine Parr was probably the most intelligent of Henry VIII’s six wives; she was certainly the most literate. She financed the translation of Erasmus' Paraphrases of the Gospels, choosing the translators for each book, and may very well have translated The Boke of St Matthew herself. She certainly translated John Fisher's Psalms or Prayers. Her greatest achievement, though, was in writing Lamentations of a Sinner, the first work every published by a Queen of England, and the first in prose to be published by a woman in the sixteenth century.

Catherine was also a figure of some political influence. It was largely thanks to her that Princess Mary was brought back into the line of succession. She was trusted enough by Henry to have diplomatic conversations with the ambassadors of the Emperor Charles in the interest of improving Anglo-Imperial relations. When Henry went campaigning against France in 1544 he appointed Catherine Regent-General. She was highly adept in the arts of governance, even being bold enough to countermand an order from the King over military supplies.

So, in all, much more than the most married English Queen!