By SuperBlue
Paul Murray Kendall (1911-73) was a Professor of English, famous for writing three landmark historical biographies. Apart from “Warwick the Kingmaker” and “Louis XI”, his “Richard III” was published in 1955. Scientific and historical records are always developing and thus Kendall had the advantage of knowing things that Markham could not, just as Markham knew more than Halstead, Halstead more than Walpole, Walpole more than Buck and Buck more than Stow.
In nearly sixty years since Kendall’s first great tome arrived, things are even more clear. Were he writing towards a 2015 deadline instead, there are things he would know now.
Thanks to Barrie Williams in two issues of the 1983 Ricardian (http://www.r3.org/on-line-library-text-essays/back-to-basics-for-newcomers/elizabeth-of-york/), the Portuguese records have proven Richard’s plans, being negotiated by proxy just two weeks after his Queen’s death, to marry Juana of Portugal, whilst her cousin Manuel of Beja was to become the husband of Elizabeth of York – a plan only scotched by the French invasion. Kendall (pp.393-5), faced with the ridiculous myth that Richard wished to marry his own niece, had no evidence save his own logic – that the case he was combating, written by “Tudor”‘s paid liars, had no evidence shows the degree to which the Cairo dwellers themselves to have inverted the burden of proof. We can be quite sure that copies of these documents were available in Richard’s own records during spring and summer 1485, before the Human Shredder could lay his hands on them.
Not least among the Cairo dwellers on this point is Hicks, whose biographies of, inter alia, Richard (2000) and Anne (2006) repeat the discredited myth despite post-dating Williams by two decades, freely using terms like “incest” and “paedophilia” although contrary evidence is once again available.
The publication years of Hicks’ opi – almost all after 1983:
- False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence (1980), ISBN 0-904387-44-5 (about George, Duke of Clarence)
- Who’s who in late Medieval England (1991), ISBN 0-85683-092-5
- Richard III and his Rivals : Magnates and their Motives in the War of the Roses (1991), ISBN 1-85285-053-1
- Bastard Feudalism (1995), ISBN 0-582-06091-5
- Warwick the Kingmaker (1998), ISBN 0-631-16259-3 (about Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick)
- Richard III (2000), ISBN 0-7524-1781-9
- English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century (2002), ISBN 0-415-21763-6
- The Wars of the Roses 1455-1485 (2003), ISBN 0-415-96864-X
- Edward V (2003), ISBN 0-7524-1996-X
- Edward IV (2004), ISBN 0-340-76005-2
- Anne Neville: Queen to Richard III (2006), ISBN 0-7524-3663-5
- The Wars of the Roses (2010), ISBN 978-0-300-11423-2
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