This week we have another special guest episode from the Xander and Erik of ReConsider, a podcast that takes current events and makes the listener think about them in whole new ways. They have us pause and reconsider the propaganda around Richard III, and whether he wasn’t actually, you know, a really good king.
Check out the ReConsider Podcast!
Also, I’m running a book giveaway right now to celebrate the great review it received from the editor of the New Books in Historical Fiction podcast. Enter to win the book here.
Transcript of ReConsidered on Richard III:
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko. We have another great guest episode today from the gentleman of ReConsider.
ReConsider is a podcast by Xander and Erik that takes on in-depth pressing political issues facing western democracies with a fresh, researched, and challenging perspective. A reminder that both of our podcasts, mine and ReConsider, are part of the Agora Podcast Network.
The Agora podcast of the month is Wittenberg to Westphalia, which should interest listeners to this podcast especially in a very short period of time, everything from warfare to art changed radically in in early modern Europe. In n Wittenberg to Westphalia: Wars of the Reformation, Ben Jacobs uses the narrative of the Protestant Reformation and a large dose of humor to examine the stories and events of this critical period, so check that out as well. So many great podcasts to check out. So that’s the plug for the podcast of the month.
Remember, you can also hop over to England cast.com to get links to today’s shows, the archives etc. Also it’s contest time, because I’m celebrating a really great review that my novel got from the host of the New Books in Historical Fiction Podcast. So she wrote a really awesome review of my novel. I’m really happy about it. To celebrate, I’m giving away five copies of my novel. So you can go to England cast.com and sign up there.
I’m having the drawing later this week. Also it’s five copies to five individual people. It’s not like one person gets five copies because that would just be silly. So head on over to Englandcast.com to enter to win one of five copies.
Okay, on to the show. Thanks so much Erik and Xander for this awesome guest episode. I loved it and I’m fairly certain all of you listening are going to love it too.
Xander:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up,
About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.
So welcome to the Renaissance English History. As you may have guessed, we aren’t Heather. This is Xander and Erik from the ReConsider Podcast subbing in today.
Erik:
Yeah, we’re so excited! We love Heather’s show Renaissance English History is a ton of fun to listen to, and I’ve learned a lot from it and gotten more excited about digging in. We’re from ReConsider. We’re another Agora Podcast Network member. What we do is politics, not the English Renaissance history variety, but the contemporary variety.
But we don’t do the thinking for you. What we do is we provide historical, geopolitical, and structural context, what’s going on in the world so that you can understand it better without the spin of the media, and also better position yourself as a citizen making decisions in a democracy. So we asked folks to reconsider something in each show. Heather brought us on today to help you reconsider a little bit of something that happened in Renaissance England.
Xander:
So let’s get right into it. Heather did an episode a while back about Renaissance propaganda, especially as it relates to certain portraits of Henry VIII, and his daughter, Elizabeth. If you haven’t listened to it, check it out. It’s a great episode that talks about how subtle metaphors and these illusions in these paintings were meant to solidify certain political images. And that kind of got us thinking, and today, we’re gonna talk about propaganda as well, but a different type of propaganda.
Erik:
Yeah, some propaganda like the Tudor paintings creates a specific political goal image for contemporary use where it tries to make you think about the people that are in power at the moment. We’re going to talk about another kind. The kind that crafts historical narrative to usefully benefit the contemporary political leaders. So that’s right.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re going to talk about Shakespeare’s Tudor propaganda of the past.
Now Xander, I keep hearing something that some guy named Victor always writes history what’s up with that?
Xander:
It’s a common name for historians.
Erik:
Apparently. So we’re gonna be talking about a lot of Victors today. So that intro that Xander read and I offered highly insightful commentary to, is the introductory monologue to Richard III by Shakespeare. It’s Richard III speaking after his brother Edward IV had unexpectedly died. Edward IV who had been vying for power for decades with the Lancastrians, was the patriarch of the York family.
Xander:
So Heather talks a little bit more in detail about this particular episode in Renaissance English History, and the ascension of Henry VII in one of her earlier episodes, actually. But very long story short, the War of the Roses, it was a civil war between this one family called the Yorks and this other family called the Lancastrians. Can you think of more British names, I can’t really.
But the Yorks kind of won for a while until Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII killed Richard III, who is the last remaining York at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, which basically ended the war of roses, claimed Lancastrian victory, and ushered in the age of the Tudor dynasty.
Erik:
The Battle of Bosworth is super interesting. It’s one of the cooler, more wild, and unexpected, dramatic battles in history. I can only think of one more British name than the Yorks and Lancastrians and it’s Benedict Cumberbatch. That’s the most British name I can ever think of.
Now a lot of historians probably named Victor, marked Richard’s defeat at Bosworth Field as the end of the late Middle Ages in England and the beginning of a Renaissance. That means we’re gonna cheat just a tiny bit and talk a little bit about the late Middle Ages. But really, what does this Victor guy know anyway? Why does he get to decide when is the late Middle Ages and when’s Renaissance? So we’re just going to go for it. But the propaganda that you hear about this period, that’s pure Renaissance Shakespeare baby.
Xander:
I mean, if you were to think about this classic archevil supervillain it is Shakespeare’s III. Not only does he scheme against his family, kill his nephews, and plot for really superficial personal game. He was also physically deformed. He was this hunchback, which in Shakespeare’s audience’s mind, would have been seen as a clear sign from the powers of the universe that this guy is marked as really evil, evil, evil.
Erik:
But he also seems to enjoy being evil. So he says:
“And therefore, — since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days, —
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”
I mean, really, he’s just he’s no fun, right? So basically, “I’m bored. I’m going to be a super evil dude. If I can’t have fun, then nobody can.” And it kind of reminds me of that Eddie Izzard skit about Hitler’s moment of truth where he’s painting in art school and it goes “Damn trees, can’t get them right. Gosh, I’ll kill everyone that’s involved!” I mean, that’s basically what happened with Richard?
Xander:
Yeah, I mean, it’s a pretty famous literary depiction, not Eddie Izzard-Shakespeare, some would call a sociopath, some of these characters who does evil for the sake of entertainment.
Kevin Spacey, the famous actor, the guy who plays President Frank Underwood in House of Cards has talked about how he basically based this character in House of Cards on Richard III. It’s just basically impossible to like Shakespeare’s Richard III. It’s interesting actually, Kevin Spacey plays Richard III in a production. You can go on YouTube and kind of hear him talking about how he formed his character for being in this role. He talks about how all Richard III is just this archetype for this evil person. It’s just really interesting because it’s just not necessarily grounded in full historical context.
But that’s what we’re going to talk about today. The question is, how accurate is this presentation of Richard III?
Erik:
Yeah, how evil is he really? This idea of Richard III really being a monster has lasted to the modern day. It’s what a lot of people believe. He’s attributed with killing his nephews, the sons of Edward IV, including Edward V, who’s the heir to the throne. So he locks them up at a tower and nobody sees them. He starves them to death or poisons them or puts a blade through him, trip down the stairs or something like that. He’s accused of plotting against his brother, the King, to bring him down and take power for himself.
A big part of this evil interpretation of him comes from the lasting image that Shakespeare depicts him play. But we have reason to be doubtful of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III. First, and most importantly, his name is William not Victor, and therefore he is not a historian. But there are other reasons to doubt him as well.
Xander:
Yeah, I mean, let’s think about this for a second, right? Richard III was the last Plantagenet King. Without getting into detail of the long and confusing line of British monarchs, basically, both the Yorks and Lancastrians fall into this Plantagenet family. So Richard III was the last. He was the last House of York before he got crushed by Henry Tudor.
It’s important to remember that Shakespeare lived in England that was ruled by the granddaughter of the king that beat Richard III at Bosworth Field.
Erik:
So just as with any crime, we need to think about this potential character assassination from the perspective of motive. How did artists get by back in the 17th century, by of course, the largest of wealthy patrons, including as it turns out, Elizabeth I, particularly in the case of old Billy there.
Now for most monarchs, it’s pretty important to have a credible claim to legitimacy of some sort. So if the people don’t think that the Monarch has a mandate to rule, well, there starts to be problems. That’s where you get rebellions left and right, which we know British history is kind of full of. And Henry Tudor happened to have a pretty weak bloodline claim to the throne compared to Richard. So this seems a little bit suspicious.
Xander:
Yeah, Henry VII took the English throne the good old-fashioned way with the sword.
Erik:
Paid the Iron price.
Xander:
Oh, thank you for the Game of Thrones reference.
Erik:
You’re welcome.
Xander:
And by getting his enemy, Richard III’s friends to turn against him. The problem with a monarch taking power with the sword is that it raises this issue of legitimacy. Does this person really have the right to rule? Well, the thing with taking power with the sword is that you probably can just kill whoever asked those questions, right?
Erik:
Well, you can’t kill everyone who asked that question, right? I mean, at some point, your subjects need to believe that you, their monarch are the rightful ruler, or else you’re going to be king of a pile of bodies, right? So you’ve got to be appointed by God, in particular, if your conventional claim of primogeniture is pretty weak, as it turns out for Henry Tudor. So you gotta have people say that “Oh, yeah, God totally wanted me to kill that guy. Because he was terrible. Ain’t that right, Victor?”
Xander:
Yeah, and since Richard III had a much stronger claim than Henry VII, this Tudor king-to-be really needed a reason to justify his ascension to the throne by force.
Erik:
And through propaganda.
Xander:
As you’ve noticed, “the victors write history”.
Erik:
These Victors were working for this particular victor.
Xander:
Say that 10 times fast.
It would be much easier to justify Henry VII and therefore Henry VIII and Elizabeth I’s rule if the people think that Henry VII kicked out this morally-based traitorous usurper king. And even if that king did have a better claim to the throne, well, maybe if he depicted him as a sufficiently evil guy, that guy just wouldn’t matter.
Erik:
Right. So the English don’t have this idea of the “mandate of heaven” quite the way that the Chinese do. But if you’re going to be interrupting the legal inheritance method primogeniture, it better be because the old king was so bad that God would have been like, “Yeah, totally take that guy out. He’s no good for the Brits.”
So let’s add some specifics here. Starting with just the superficial – Richard III’s physical form. Shakespeare depicts Richard III as a really deformed hunchback, the Quasimodo level. His physical deformity is supposed to add to this archetype that he is a monster, and therefore not fit for the throne.
Xander:
But how deformed was he really? Well, let’s think about this. Richard III actively fought in this Battle of Bosworth on a horse leading his troops into battle. If you know anything about medieval battle, it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. And this guy didn’t just chill in the back behind some protective lines either.
In fact, at one pivotal point in this battle, Richard III saw a clear shot to Henry Tudor, who was right there on the battlefield as well, and personally led a charge deep into enemy ranks, who tried to kill his opponent mano a mano, and just end the battle right there. And then because so frequently with these medieval battles, if you can cut the head off the snake, that was it.
So while Laurence Olivier portrays Richard III as this guy who’s just barely able to walk, dragging his foot behind him due to all of these physical deformities, the real Richard III was sufficiently not deformed enough to handle horse and fight hand to hand in the chaos that was medieval battle.
Erik:
Which, by the way, I’m not all that deformed and I couldn’t do that, so good on him, right? And to further build some evidence into this, it turns out they dug up Richard III in 2012. In part to answer this question, turns out there’s a Richard III defense club that wants to – it’s true! They want to right his place in history and undo the tarnish on his good name.
And when they dug him up, it turns out that Richard did show signs of having scoliosis, but just not in a way that made him so physically deformed as to impede his day-to-day activities, including battling and chopping things and drinking and whatever else kings do. Even though Shakespeare depicted him this way, it’s just not true.
As for the nephews, Heather actually talks about this some on her show, on Henry VII. But there are plenty of reasons to actually believe that Richard III with the princes acted in good faith, and that either someone else was involved in the murder, or you simply move them away from court life and didn’t kill them.
And if they were killed, it might have been someone trying to please Richard III, even though it wasn’t his order. What happened to the late Edward IV’s sons, has been fiercely debated by historians, and a whole lot of people had motives to kill them. Now, of course, Richard did need them sort of out of the way because they had a rival claim to the throne.
But in the end, nobody actually knows what happened to the princes in the tower. And it turns out, it is neither rare nor in some regards, from the morality of the time, all that unreasonable to take rival claimants to the throne and get rid of them, right? Because that’s important for stability.
Xander:
Yeah, I mean, a lot of historians talk about Richard III and they say so much has been focused on his moral character. But contemporary historians tend to focus a little bit less on issues like that. They say we need to consider his actions in the context of his time. It’s really bloody difficult time to be in the nobility in late 15th century England, so we need to judge his actions based on what he has dealt with.
And from that perspective, there were some arguably decent governing decisions that Richard III made that kind of get lost in the Tudor-friendly telling that tend to focus more on the disappearance of these nephews.
For example, Richard III is credited with institutionalizing what was called the Council of the North, which brought regional governance under a more central control, which let that central power then punish lawbreakers and more effectively resolve land disputes. So real practical governing measures.
Erik:
Sounds pretty cool. Richard III also created the Court of Requests, which let people who couldn’t afford legal representation to have their case heard, pretty progressive. He passed laws to protect individuals who are indicted for crimes for being imprisoned and having their property taken from them before they were declared guilty. I mean, how cool is that, right? We kind of take that for granted. But that wasn’t a thing before Richard III.
He also lifted restrictions on the sale of books and printing. I mean, seriously restrictions on books, who does that, right? Well, I guess people who want to keep the people under the heel of ignorance as well as absolute power.
So Richard III’s starting look like a pretty good guy. And there’s this contemporary historian, I don’t know his name, but it’s probably Victor. I’m just gonna lift this language from the Wikipedia page, called “good lord” who punished “oppressors of the commons”, adding that Richard III had a great heart.
Now, there’s a bunch more examples of this on the Wikipedia page, you know how to get there. But even a quick glance at this king begins to seem far more complex and multifaceted, and maybe kind of cool.
Then Shakespeare’s claimed that “he was determined to prove a villain” And oh, did we forget to mention that Henry totally had a French-funded invasion fleet when he came to take the throne? I mean, that’s right. This guy was a total foreign lackey. Don’t care about that, Shakespeare, do we?
Xander:
No, not usually. And frankly, for what it’s worth, this propaganda aspect is a reason why I personally tend to like some of Shakespeare’s older histories like Julius Caesar a little bit more. He still took liberties with the narrative in Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, but because he was so far removed, both temporally and politically from ancient Rome, that afforded him to read a little bit more neutrally into the histories that he had available to him at the time.
Erik:
Yeah, he actually does the same character assassination to Macbeth, who was actually a totally reasonable dude in Scotland. I mean, it was a tough time, but he wasn’t like running around murdering everyone and consorting with witches or any of that stuff. Turns out they weren’t any witches.
Xander:
Really?
Erik:
Really.
Xander:
Oh, man.
Erik:
I know. It’s disappointing.
Xander:
Now on ReConsider, we like to discuss one main topic each show and then ask our listeners to reconsider their position. So let’s think about the reputation that Richard III has retained for half a millennium after his death. I mean, it’s been a long time, right?
Erik:
It is a long time.
Xander:
And all the motivations that people like Henry Tudor and Shakespeare had in perpetuating this narrative through, really what amounted to very well written propaganda, very well written.
Now, given that that perception was so powerful as to persist for so long, what we want to ask you to reconsider is – what other narratives do you know that are just 100%? true that you might have just taken at face value? Are there any narratives that are so central to how you interpret the state of the world today, that if they changed, would shake your perspective?
Erik:
That’s the power of reconsidering history, which is why you need to keep listening to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I mean, I think Heather has a really strong finger on the pulse of what was the narrative then, and what have we learned over hundreds of years of scholars studying what was actually happening on the ground.
Questioning, investigating the past, of course, teaches us about today, and helps us better understand what tides in history have actually occurred and what’s likely to recur. And Renaissance English History is, I think, extremely relevant to US culture, since in particular, it was the age that immediately preceded Enlightenment philosophy.
In particular, English Enlightment philosophy and governance style that birth so many of the political ideas in the United States and other democracies around the world that we sort of take as gospel today, that we think are just obvious.
What’s so cool about Renaissance history in England was that we were starting to see I mean, even with Richard III, these liberal ideas start to take root. We start to see some of the arguments for why these should be happening. And I think understanding those is really important to understanding not only how our government came about, as it did, or our governments came about as they did, but also help us actually understand why we believe what we do, and help us to start thinking about like, “Oh, this democracy thing, or this liberty thing,” like, what’s the basis of it? Where can I start questioning some of the ways that our current government works, as opposed to just take it for granted.
So, anyway, we hope you guys had fun thinking about Richard III. If you decide you want to check us out at ReConsider, you could find us at reconsidermedia.com You can find the ReConsider Podcast Overcast, iTunes, Google Play, Acast, or you can just RSS it from our website. You can also get in touch with us at Reconsider Podcast on Facebook or Twitter.
We’d love to have you and we’d love to get some ideas from you on what you really want to hear about from us. So we’re gonna give you guys a twist on our normal sign-off. First, thanks so much to Heather for having us on. We had a lot of fun researching this and we hope you had a lot of fun listening to it. And as you go forward, remember, don’t let the 17th-century poets do the thinking for you. Stop and reconsider. This is Erik signing off.
Xander:
And this is Xander signing off.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.