The New Murrey and Blue blog

Well, Colleen!

I am wildly impressed, any degree in Library and Information Science is stunning, I am so envious! My BFA is in painting (ages ago) came back for a MA in Art History because the field is dominated by scholars and writers who are not from the studio (I used to say I was surrounded by professors who wouldn’t know oil paint if you dumped a can of it over their head; I was routinely chastised for being a ‘formalist’ who privileged the artist’s Viewpoint over that of the Viewers … wish I was making this up) and I wanted to at least be part of the corrective there! (I’m actually not alone, quite a few ‘studio’ based artists do pursue corrective measures in Art History, I could go on but I will spare you the details 🙂

But my best friend from high school went on to get her Master’s in Library Science and I know what she went through, amazing effort, her curriculum made my head spin. Alot of what I read about the science portions – from the the archaeological surveys to the forensic analysis, left my head numb – and yet, the scoliosis had me riveted, even if I barely understood how Richard could mount a horse every day and fight (medieval fighting!) I was not surprised that scholars like Michael Hicks refused to believe that the remains were indeed those of Richard (I wonder if he has since amended that opinion?)

Coming from such different backgrounds we do – I think – intersect in one of my absolute favorite areas: research! and in particular, FOOTNOTES! I love them! I used to tell my professors that all the best stuff is in the footnotes, all the snark, anecdotal details, material for articles the author wishes that they could have written, observations that they couldn’t put in the body of the text (Matt Lewis uses this device alot, and I love him for it), and in my field, the footnote is where one scholar skewers another’s thesis, unloads on the work of a lifetime of a perceived adversary, throws in possible solutions that they just can’t put in the body of the article or text without being destroyed, professionally speaking, oh I love love love footnotes! All my best information comes from them. It’s like a giant puzzle, patching bits of info from one author, hiding some detail in their footnotes, linking it to another author, finding the full citation in yet another.

Well, enough about footnotes. I have not read any Mark Lansdale, the name is unfamiliar to me. Is he a Tudor apologist? I have tried to read as much of the Tudor material as I can as well (not easy). Nathan Amin’s House of Beaufort is every bit as adoring as you can imagine but again, I am obsessed with research wherever I find it – also Thomas Penn’s Winter King (the first real effort I think to rehabilitate Henry VII, an effort to convince, someone, anyone, that there really was a decent guy, really, he means it!) and from what I hear Penn has a new biography of all three of the York brothers – I dread the thought of what he will do with that one. He’s a elegant apologist but a Tudor apologist all the same.

One bio that I can recommend is the now standard King’s Mother by Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood (1993) – it is tedious reading for the most part but if you are a careful reader you realize that it reveals just how avaricious, petty, vengeful, predatory ole Mother Beaufort was – Henry’s greed was nothing compared with his mother! She is a suffocating presence in her own biography, which is meant to be highly complimentary, but it drones on and on about how she essentially scammed this widow or that relation or this unfortunate out of their inheritance, not to mention Elizabeth of York was – to put it nicely – a shadow on the wall. Imagine if she had had the spine, the guts of her Aunt Margaret of York!

Oh, that is another biography worth reading, by Christine Weightman, terrible title as it reflects the Tudor bias against her, “Margaret of York: the Diabolical Duchess” (fairly recent 2012) – beautifully written, M was quite the cultural and intellectual heavyweight.

Many people (ricardians) do not seem to like Ann Wroe’s Perfect Prince (2003, over 600 pages, lol and most likely footnotes yea!) but I found it fascinating, if not entirely coherent. Then again, there is an abundance of detail (more research) on people, events, situations that filled in alot of holes that I had. Brampton, in particular, and he is one curious character! Personally I can accept Warbeck as the missing, lost, ‘sent to Aunt Margaret of York’ nephew Richard of Shrewsbury, and if not the way Warbeck related it to Margaret and Maximilian then that is likely the ‘story’ manufactured for him by Brampton (and who knows how many others).

Before I leave off here, my comment about Henry and his nightmares, it was a reference to Skidmore perhaps, at Bosworth, where Richard apparently got within FEET of Henry, literally feet, having unhorsed the jousting champion Sir John Cheney and then killing the standard bearer Sir William Brandon and just before he could finish off Henry that is when William Stanley’s men, some 3000, had set upon the rear of Richard’s core around him.

There are so many versions of how this went down but for Stanley to have arrived just before Richard delivered that final blow (Henry would have had no ability to fend him off) Stanley must have started his charge after Richard as soon as he saw Richard breaking off for Henry’s position behind his men. Imagine how it looked to Henry, Cheney was a giant of a man, he sees him knocked away, he sees Brandon killed, he sees a war hammer coming, and then a mass of bodies bring down Richard in what must have been a horrendous death. A slaughter of all who were with him at that point. To have come that close to death, when you literally did nothing to get yourself there, not the plotting, not the financing, not the strategizing, not the fighting, nothing, you just did what mom and uncle Jasper and the French regent (Madame Anne de Beaujeu) tell you to do … and yet, you survive that? Because William Stanley’s troops killed men from behind?

Well, it worked, but Henry was the first king to feel the need to keep an armed guard with him at all times, at night in his bedchamber, every where he went. A king or other noble may have had a servant in their room at night, but not armed guards, plucked from the very battlefield he just came from, without even being ‘on the books’ as it were, unofficially as they were pressed into service before such details could be hashed out… only Henry’s obsession with spies and informers comes close to telling me that his insecurity ran deep and that that was one image he couldn’t escape. I actually pity Henry.

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Dear Colleen,

Honestly, we could be twins in spirit and circumstance! I am fascinated by what you are describing in 3D mapping (it sounds too good to be true, to reach past a dry, linear, mostly missing documentary level, to one that more fully realizes someone, like Richard, within the context of medical and biological reality… gives me chills!

I’m so full of things to say I forget half of them and hit post and then think, oh, I forgot to add… so I’ll start first with thank you for the link, I will check that out first, I should have known Philippa Langley had something to do with it, between her vision and John Ashdown-Hill’s tenaciousness I suspect the ‘traditional’ or mainstream historian like Michael Hicks (and the late Charles Ross) must be feeling like some prehistoric relic.

Desmond Seward is a travesty, LONG before I ever even thought twice about Richard I was a huge Hundred Years War buff (albeit from the French perspective! I was fascinated by Jeanne d’Arc, la Pucelle, and that is her era, if not the whole of it she has tended to dominate it through the sheer peculiarity of her life and my own curiosity). Well, Desmond Seward, in his ‘history’ of the period, manages to drive a stake through its heart and render it utterly boring… HOW I can’t imagine anyone could mishandle that period is beyond my interest to analyze but it left a permanent impression on me! The man is incompetent! And once anyone with any effort to read up on the WoTR (which I would date to Richard II’s reign) would consider Seward’s “Black Legend” typical and plodding tripe.

I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t have time for rehashed ‘mainstream’ authors/historians rewriting the Tudor script, they should be ashamed of themselves, they are just the latest generation of ‘scholars’ working the well worn path expected of them, and I suspect Thomas Penn’s York bio will be like this – I have instead been chasing down as many of the actual ‘documents’ as I can find, I am surprised how many of Richard’s letters DID survive (across a number of locations, again, thank you footnotes!) – I prefer to find – when I can – examples of his handwriting too. Being an art major his handwriting is simply gorgeous, when you compare it to anyone else of his period, including the nobility, well, he must have been intended for the Church or Cambridge (he had a distinct preference for Cambridge).

I don’t know why I didn’t think to start a collection of original sources before, but that file is growing, along with an odd one – every time I find a reference to known documents, evidence of something that DID exist but is now or hasn’t been extant since at least H7 I add it to my file of ‘what happened to this…?’ It includes quite a number of startling examples, rather a nice case could be made for everything that would exonerate him for the pre-contract, Hastings, even the Countess Oxford nonsense, all oddly ‘missing.’ Indeed.

That’s why your comments about a vertical not linear approach to revealing Richard and his world at large is such a opportunity – I am witnessing an amazing time!

I also feel for your loss of your pet, your dog. 2019 was a bad year for many of my friends and their pets, I lost, suddenly, my rescue cat (Mango) and two of my friends likewise lost their pets, one was only a cat maybe 7 or 8 months old but my friend is going through chemo for leukemia and Ginger was a lovely companion, just an unexpected loss. Many people do not understand that pets are not ‘just pets’ – I wish people had the sweet personalities of animals, my golden, and my beagle, were better than most if not all humans I have ever known!

So many things running through my mind, your comments about Edward in particular, I think I too have given him a pass! I am aware of his vicious streak but like so many others I now think I have been sloughing it off as ‘well, he did so many other things right, it was in the context of war, he had to be that way, etc etc’

YOU have made me reassess all that! I have been giving him a pass… Now I find myself wondering, did he know about Richard’s back, did he send some of those doctor’s I read about (E4 had a stable of them, many of whom did attend R on the Scottish campaign) – and did R have to go through some awful medieval version of braces, bindings, good grief, my mind reels at the thought. He would have been better just staying in harness (armour)! And if E did know about R’s back he obviously wasn’t concerned, he had the ‘kid’ leading his van at Barnet and Tewkesbury at 18, a complete battle newbie who lost up to 5 or 6 of his squires around him in the fighting (Barnet was a mess, R’s group was stuck fighting up a ravine, in thick fog, way off from their opposite force – Exeter – and yet he and his group managed to fight their way up and back into the fray, it was Hastings’ side that crumbled).

And since E either didn’t know or care about R’s physical condition I now think he decided on what we call over here in the States a “good cop bad cop’” routine with his little brother, which worked out great for E and his regal opinion of himself, but the real muck was handed off to R – like the grisly execution of Hungerford and Courtenay, the murder of H6, the strong-arming of dowagers Countess Oxford and Countess Warwick (his own mother-in-law!), having his henchmen take them into hi s custody, in ‘safe houses’ (as we would call them) where E had a reprieve while he plotted his next moves concerning their inheritance and estates (E needed to keep Oxford’s finances OUT of her son’s hands, but again, it was R would be officially the one playing the heavy, on the books pressuring both women for their estates (which at any given time E could and often did remove from R’s ‘ownership.’)

Such is my estimate of Matt Lewis that I am even willing to consider the idea that maybe R was the only one E was going to have smack the old H6 in the back of the head – the poor old man likely fell forward, onto blankets so as not to damage the face, he was exposed to view later and as such could not appear to have been murdered – but again, WHY R? why not his most trusted Hastings? Definitely not George, E4 already had enough reasons to suspect middle brother of someday relishing doing away with him! (George, like the Stanleys, are unsolved curiosities to me too; although I think the Stanley’s, especially Thomas, was a fairly transparent opportunist, ‘trimmers’ as they were called).

Much has been made of R’s ‘hypocritical’ and moralizing tone he took after E4’s death, when he was king, again we only have the POST Tudor version of everything, the tone set in the Titulus Regius is officious, probably written by Stillington, but IF R was a bit moralistic about E4’s court and methods after 1471 I think I can understand why, maybe he resented being that ‘bad cop’ – maybe he didn’t like being the heavy, when I read in the Chancery notes that he endeavored to pay all of the countess Oxford’s debts, pay for her children’s education at Oxford (I think its Oxford), settle an annuity on her, etc, what does he ‘get’ from the historians, those modern paragons of neutrality like Michael Hicks? ‘Well, he never actually paid anything did he, do we have proof he paid anything, did he really mean it?’ As Lewis has noted, there are alot of things we might accuse R of but lying under oath in Chancery? Probably not.

And dragging his new mother-in-law off from her sanctuary in Beaulieu (ok, that was Tyrell, but you understand) to Middleham when he is still only 20, that was to suit E, who had had it with Anne Beauchamp, dowager countess Warwick and her incessant court demands for her inheritance. He was bush in Shrewsbury setting up the Prince of Wales court, he had the very pregnant Queen along for the thrill of it, George had refused to attend this conference/ council, and E just snapped. Get the darned woman out of sanctuary, send her to Middleham; one of the Paston letters mentions George was so annoyed he was gathering armed troops to go ‘deal with Richard’ – so E made it worse.

Anyway. That’s what you’ve done! I’m now juggling through my notes, reassessing what exactly R’s mindset must have been, lackey to older once beautiful brother; not sure he was impressed, certainly after the fiasco that was the French 1475 Agincourt-bust that bloom had gone off! I hadn’t considered him killing his nephews to protect his own son. Having them rendered illegitimate made them ‘harmless’ – removing them from the Tower and placing them elsewhere would have been the smart thing, I would have sent one to Margaret in the Low Countries if not her actual court (too politically dangerous for her) and the other one to Ireland. However, I suspect E5 never made it past Minster Lovell Hall, which would have been the first stop en route to Ireland.

I have lots of ideas on the move-them-out theory, and it all deals with the awesome, rightly famous post-script of 12 October, in his own hand, from 1483. He was writing to Chancellor Russell, about Buckingham’s treachery. As I said, I have been collecting examples of R’s handwriting, the post-script, as a sample of handwriting is startling. Pure, raw, blistering with blind outrage, his script is fascinating, the wording quite revealing. I’ve written pages in my notes trying to assess just what line Buckingham crossed with R, it is way more than anger at an ungrateful retainer, cousin, when he refers to Buckingham as a ‘creature’ that line that was crossed is now one that has offended even God. As I have said, I look at my copies (I have enlargements, I struggle with R’s middle English, sigh, there is simply NO uniformity of spelling in middle English, is there!) and I can follow distinct streams of his thinking, pause, new thought added, pause again, and he runs out of parchment. And he tells Russell that his courier, his natural son, John, will tell him more! Amazing.

Oh we live in wonderful times Colleen!

ps. as a very short person myself (I claim 5′ but no one has believed that ever, I blame my height on a heart defect – it was in the AV node, well, three heart surgeries later I’m still kinda 5′ lol … so, I prefer to gauge my ‘height’ with a quote by Robert Browning –

“Measure your mind’s height by the shade it casts!”

I rather think you fit that quote very well!

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