Richard III, Black or White

Shakespeare’s Richard III is a black-hearted hunchbacked murderer. But there has been another legend of Richard III, as a gallant ruler, the victim of Tudor propaganda. Over the past century, the white legend has often prevailed over the black.

Desmond Seward’s Richard III is mostly black, and that’s because he takes Thomas More’s portrait as a basis for his account of Richard’s life: “however unreliable, Sir Thomas More remains the fullest source of information about Richard III. . . . Undeniably his history has many faults. There is no question that it dramatises the principal characters’ speeches and much else besides. It’s wrong about Edwards IV’s age and Lord Hastings’s Christian name, it confuses Eleanor Butler with Elizabeth Lucy, and it portrays Queen Elizabeth Woodville as a spotless figure when in reality she was a grasping intriguer.” 

Still, Seward defends More. Records were scanty and difficult to come by. Besides, More’s manuscript as we possess it was an early draft that More never was able to finish. More’s character and professional training should lead historians to give him the benefit of the doubt: “Sir Thomas has strong moral convictions about public life, and certainly wanted to tell a good story. Yet it should never be forgotten that he was a brilliant and very experienced lawyer – Erasmus thought that he had the finest legal brain in Europe. No one could have been more skeptical of allegation or rumour, fairer in weighing evidence. Describing the murder of the Princes, he says he does so ‘not after every way that I have heard, but after that way that I have so heard, by such men and by such means as me thinketh it were hard but it should be true’” (20-21).

Seward’s Richard is dark, but not a monster. Rather more like another Shakespearean description: Richard was a “Machiavel,” a “peculiarly grim young English precursor of Machiavelli’s Prince” (21).