The New Murrey and Blue blog

“I think we have to change things by going after those who continue to slew the historical evidence at every possible opportunity. When a writer refers to Richard raising an army against a defenceless Woodville entourage in 1483 we need to respond with the evidence that he did the exact opposite and that it was the Queen’s party who raised a small army to escort Edward back to London and Richard who kept his men to a minimum. When Richard is accused of bullying the Countess of Oxford we need to point out that she was funding her son’s treasonous activities abroad and therefore searching her lodgings and cutting off the income streams that funded his enterprises were actually quite reasonable in the circumstances. She paid the price for being Lancastrian to the core in the same way that Cecily Neville was bullied by Marguerite’s troops at the Sack of Ludlow as the wife and mother of ‘traitors’. When Sir Thomas More is quoted as a reliable contemporary source we should counter with the facts that he was a child in 1485, raised by Richard’s implacable enemy Bishop Morton and used him as a key source for his writing during the Tudor period and is therefore neither reliable nor contemporary to events. We do not need to create a saint, far from it. We need to break the cycle that portrays Richard’s actions as anything other than understandable in the context of his world. Moral judgement through C21st eyes is a nonsense in relation to the reality of life in C15th yet almost every historian who approaches Richard’s life falls back on either championing or castigating him at a deeply moral level. It is not that this doesn’t apply to other historical figures, we can think of many other individuals who are treated like this by history. We seem unable to move beyond the eternal questions of justifying or condemning which is ultimately a great hindrance to appreciating the wider picture. Richard will never be understood until we can truly embed him into his own times.”