The New Murrey and Blue blog

Colleen, along the lines of Dr. Lansdale, (and you may have been the one who suggested this speaker to me), have you heard Dr. Tobias Capwell? He has a youtube conference paper on Richard’s scoliosis in respect to his ability to function as a mounted knight (Capwell is arms and armor curator at the Wallace Collection the lucky duck). If you haven’t seen it (the one I saw was from 2004) it’s worth a look, although the audio was wretched and he is often off the track (being more about the armor than the man inside that armor, which is strange considering that man had a twitchy curve in his spine mid back!) One can’t expect someone as engaging as Dr. Landsdale was in his presentation every time, can we!?

(BTW, I am fascinated by your device that can assist with the glucose readings – medical advances blow me away. I think it was in Dr. Capwell’s talk that he mentioned that (the adolescent) Richard’s scoliosis would never have progressed to such a degree today, it would have been corrected, presumably surgically? I also recall something about his ‘harness’ – ie. the armor – was probably a benefit not a hindrance to his condition, if so, it explains quite a lot!)

my warmest regards !

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Good Afternoon Colleen!

Reading your comments (second time around, you have so many threads to examine carefully 🙂 it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, “it is terrifying to think how much is needed to determine the truth of even the most unimportant fact!” That is from Stendhal. I thought of it when you were musing how helpful it would be to have access to primary sources, hmmm. I fear we may find many of the ‘unimportant facts’ surrounding Richard but with SO many documents willfully destroyed – probably by Robert Morton, H7’s Master of Rolls (and John Morton’s nephew) – I find myself disheartened, Henry rigged ‘history’ to his advantage, if you will, and that annoys the heck out of me.

But then, your comments about non-linear approaches revitalizes my hopes that Henry’s destruction of documents were only one kind of information and he could never have foreseen what modern technology, and the persistence that ‘the debate is all,’ would, in time, undo his machinations.

One of the things I most like about Matt Lewis’ work is that he recognizes Richard lived in a truly filthy, brutal age – but in doing so doesn’t strip away his humanity, Richard is victimized as well, and we have discussed, I think by someone I don’t think has been discussed before in biographies or articles – his own brother E4.

Had Lewis not brought up the sheer gall E4 had to expect/demand that Richard should be the one to murder H6, an anointed king, well … it’s just something 6 months ago I would have said, ‘typical propaganda!’ Now, it makes complete sense to me, of course E4 required that from little brother, Edward was the one with the largesse, Richard the titled sibling who was closer to a beggar ‘duke,’ who was granted lands and estates one month and saw them taken away 3 months later when E4 reconciled with some recalcitrant noble. What little we have about Richard’s early years pretty much falls into “may I borrow, will you lend me?” type letters to hopeful friends!

And so, in a similar vein, you have me re-thinking the pre-contract and virtually everything else about E4! I had rather hoped that there was something to that marriage with Elizabeth beyond attraction but it makes more sense that its entire calculated process smacks of this was E4’s usual method. I agree with you that EW and her mother could and would have left no prior contracts/relationships unheeded, her mother was a veteran of both Continental and English courts and likely knew Eleanor and the Talbot family quite well. She was also heavily fined for marrying secretly (to her late husband’s servant Richard Woodville) and obviously well below her station; she knew a thing or two about secrecy.

John A-H’s quite comprehensive work on Eleanor Talbot and her family tends to go in the direction that she was NOT willing, and while not outright rape E4 more or less harried and nagged and just wore her down until she gave in – however, A-H does contend it was a real legal marriage in that her will is quite interesting. I believe she refers to herself with a living husband – which if you consider Butler her husband he most definitely was not in 1468; but E4 was.

As to why E4 DID bother to own up to EW and not ET you may be right there too, the Talbots were a far more illustrious family (Mowbray inheritance!) – but – if it came down to just thwarting Warwick it was also poking LXI in the eye as well, as Bona of Savoy was kin to his wife – this would have been an interesting marriage for E4, it would have given him far better good relations with LXI (the consummate politician and strategist of the 15thc, John Morton and Margaret Beaufort are just sanctimonious parvenus by comparison) – and it would have gotten him connections on the Continent, with options to marry off his two brothers with available political allies. (That too would have been smart, he gains allies, unloads expensive brothers, maybe bypasses the whole fiasco with George down the road…)

In 1464 he can do it too, let EW squawk, he has a few others before her to negate any claims she can make – unfortunately Warwick either did not know about EW or chose to believe it was just another trick play his protege had and proceeded with his plans with LXI .

But it may not have been enough just to thwart Warwick – there is another element to the EW vs ET situation. EW had proven that she could in fact have children, something ET had not provided Butler, nor as far as we know, to E, and while Bona ‘might’ be capable of having children (she would have two sons and two daughters before her husband, Galeazzo Maria Sforza was murdered) she was also 7 years younger than E4, about 15 or so to his 22, not unusual at all for the time but nonetheless dicey compared to a woman you know has produced living children. (An interesting side note, Isabella of Castile, future mother of Katherine of Aragon, was considered for … both E4 and then Richard! Imagine if that marriage had happened, she was about the same age as Richard, the mind boggles).

John A-H gives no credence to ET having children with E4, I’m not ready to go there yet, Thomas More’s little ditty about his merriest, wiliest and holiest harlots can’t be entirely the ravings of a sexually deviant lawyer (or his mentor, the decrepit cleric John Morton) – even if it was only rumour, salacious gossip, More may have heard if from more than one source and while John A-H goes to great pains to illustrate ET’s very real, genuine, piety and charitable acts (she was not a late-to-the-game like Margaret Beaufort) it is not mutually exclusive to be the king’s unwilling mistress and then in church! And there are more than a few sources that list her dying in 1468 from complications of childbirth (at about 31; I’m surprised Alison Weir is one of these sources, 1989).

Anyway, John A-H sees ET as a complete victim, and perhaps she was, along with her whole family, and your point about what E4 did with/to property rights IS very truly an abomination that caused what is called an ‘unforced error’ in American baseball (and a veryyyyy bad thing lol) – too much, as you said, has been made by historians (none of whom were there) about the ‘missing princes’ when the people who lived in 1483 were far more likely to be outraged by their long held rights of inheritance and other property rights were just shredded by E4 (and later by H7; that Henry had most of the nobility paying him to prove their ‘loyalty’ and good behaviour so they could complain – privately – all they wanted as he and his mother absconded with whatever they wanted – think Anne de Beauchamp for just one, or Katherine Hastings complaining that Richard3 treated her better than Henry was!)

I recently picked up Michael Hicks’ latest biography of Richard (Self-Made King) but I haven’t the strength yet to tackle it, he is on my cr*p list due to how he misrepresents so many easily corrected assertions about both Richard’s intentions and his actions – the whole debacle with the Countess of Oxford is a case in point; another perfect example of E4 manipulating a situation to suit the ends he wants without looking like the heavy – in American culture its called ‘good cop/ bad cop’ – E4 gets to play good cop, offering Oxford and his sweet innocent mother chance after chance to reconcile, finally bury that Lancastrian hatchet (and not in his head), while little brother – all of 19 or 20 – gets to play bad cop, dropping by the nunnery to tell her he now has been given all of HER estates etc. Meanwhile, its E4 who is summoning her to answer to him – for the whole of Easter, on pain of very significant fines if she doesn’t – but who does a faux scholar like Hicks see as the brute harassing some widow? Yea, I may need to start drinking before I read Hicks’ latest. And I don’t drink!

Why do my replies run so long? I apologize! Bonne apres-midi!

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Well, Colleen, where to start?! After reading about WorldAnvil (no gamer here, if I could figure out how to put a photo on my profile you’d see me with one of my 4 grandsons, all of whom are – to some degree – the youngest is just 3 and the oldest a veteran of 10; they are patient with their ‘Amma’ – hence the name)

Perhaps I should change my online name to PrehistoricAmma as I have more in common with those manuscript illuminators Richard would have seen working in the scriptorium than I do with the many variations of RPG! I am sadly not exaggerating. For the last year I have been plotting out what superficially would be called a ‘graphic novel’ covering the months March through November 1483, the critical months for Richard, but I am no manga devotee. My students (I teach art history on the college level as an ‘elective’ for the Humanities and while they have managed to convince me to get an iPad and the pencil I still prefer to draw by hand, letter by hand; this whole project will be done by hand, no computer or digital intervention at all. For one thing, I have no idea how to do that lol, even with my many ‘beta readers’ who have no idea who Richard is beyond the Shakespearean version, and for another, I prefer to use the same methods of figurative drawing and composition that Michelangelo, Del Sarto, Pontormo, Raphael et al would not only recognize but one could say were my ‘teachers’ haha.

Since I also work several days a month at our local Barnes & Noble (yes, we are still in business, for now) I have plenty of people to bounce ideas off of, but almost every last one is under 35 or 40 and the idea of drawing every frame of every page, inking every image, doing all the type, and writing it myself, baffles them. So, Brontosaurus here basically understood nothing of your WorldAnvil, I do have students who play D&D and try to explain that to me, or they do Cosplay (?) or Minecraft or they literally get paid by subscription (??) to play games online that others watch (this is quite beyond my grasp; my sheer antiquity amuses them, I think).

They are also intrigued that I chose a ‘graphic novel’ format for Richard (I know it has been tried), as I do not read either manga or graphic novels per se – I know about them, but in my mind any illustrated format is a ‘graphic novel’ and the very use of panels separating these images is oh, shall we say, about as ‘modern’ as Giotto circa 1300! Who, btw, invented them, these panels, buttressed by ornate ‘framing devices, all painted as well, all in fresco – well, invented at least in regard to how we use pictorial language to this day.

I love the WorldAnvil you describe, it sounds very handy for accumulating, collating, cross-referencing information on a screen rather than laboriously doing everything by hand but when I pulled up the WorldAnvil site and signed in the first thing it wanted me to do was create a hero? oh dear. NOW, I will say I am delighted with all the material I am finding online, digitized that I never expected to find, in terms of research, and I find these things usually by accident – just last night I was researching a saddler named John Hertyngton who did a fair amount of work for Richard for his coronation in 1483, and typical iPhone Safari search, you never quite know what will pop up, I found the law school at Houston has digitized virtually everything (probably from Henry I onwards, I just wanted E4, E5, and Richard last night) for the Common Pleas court records, and a host of other items, I almost fell over. AND the digitized parchment rolls as well, if I knew medieval Latin I would have been one happy girl. I can manage medieval French, Latin, not so much.

One might ask, what could possibly be in hundreds of records (I scanned 1483-5 to start) in court cases in Common Pleas of any interest to anyone not in law school or studying medieval law … well, first, who isn’t suing someone? Even Cecily duchess of York had to sue for debts owed to her (in 1484). Usually for debts, but also for trespass, common recovery, ‘ravishment of ward’ (!) but to me it was the sheer host of names that you would well recognize that popped up, Catesby definitely at the top of that quick scan list! Busy lawyer, suing and being sued! I know most of Richard’s lawyers from his northern affinity and their names are all over the counties, not just London or Yorks. Tyrell, Dymmok, Viscount Lysle, John Morton, Lord Lovell! Thomas Howard, etc etc etc, I felt as though I was in the courtroom itself, fascinating the material that DOES exist.

Enough of that, my point is you are quite right, thes documents existed in their medieval Latin for centuries and were only digitized in 2012, AND in collaboration with the English department – not even the History department. Who knows what else is fluttering about waiting to be found’ and available online – access is everything!

well, my mind is spinning now, WorldAnvil, I can barely put a powerpoint together, BUT I can draw anything I want in any style I want (I prefer B&W) and I know exactly how this should look. Now … if only I could decide on things like, DID Hastings plot to have R actually killed, or put in ‘custody’ until they (he and his cohorts in the Council could figure out what to do with him?) … who was the first to contact R about E’s death? who told R about the pre-contract? how much ‘backstory’ (before March 1483) to reference? and on and on and on … I’ve rewritten alot (dialogue is easy, in a graphic novel its all dialogue, but my ‘certainty’ about many key events and individuals keeps changing! ) The drawing will be the easiest part, my senior art project was creating a book from scratch, binding, printing, setting type, 12 hour shifts on the press, etc. This will be a piece of cake by comparison, even without digital anything hahhaaaa.

Have a lovely evening!

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