Quotulatiousness

November 29, 2012

Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

In History Today, Paul Lay talks about the power of well-written historical fiction to raise interest in real history:

The case of Richard III was long ago examined in a historical novel, which has come to recent public prominence due to its championing by the High Tory journalist Peter Hitchens and the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, an incongruous pairing if ever there was one. The subject of their mutual admiration is Josephine Tey’s 1951 thriller, her last, The Daughter of Time. It takes its title from Francis Bacon’s adage — ‘Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority’ — and features Tey’s fictional detective, Inspector Alan Grant. At the start of the novel he has broken his leg and is recuperating in hospital. There he is handed a reproduction of a contemporary portrayal of Richard III. Grant fancies himself as a great judge of character and is convinced that the king he sees before him is a kindly and wise character, the very opposite of the Shakespearean monster. With his leg on the mend, Grant heads off to the British Museum to research the truth about the king’s life.

Grant’s conclusion makes The Daughter of Time a firm favourite with members of the Richard III Society, apostles of the last Plantagenet, for the inspector convinces himself that Richard III is indeed a victim of the Tudor propaganda machine. We can believe that or not, but what makes The Daughter of Time such a compelling read is not its rather flimsy conclusion but its extraordinary depiction of process, for few books have so vividly brought to life the historian’s quest, the desire to reveal exactly what happened in the past and the methods used to discover that truth. That’s why historians love it. Beard found it an inspiring work: it ‘partly made me a historian’, she claims; while Hitchens praises Tey’s ‘clarity of mind’; her ‘loathing of fakes and propaganda are like pure, cold spring water in a weary land’.

November 26, 2012

“[W]e must rewrite the history distorted by that, ahem, writer from Stratford”

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

More on the project to determine if the remains discovered in Leicester are those of Richard III:

Whether the bones prove to be Richard’s or not, the discovery in September has already set academic journals, websites, university lecture circuits and the mainstream media abuzz across Britain, sparking intense and occasionally impolite exchanges. On the floor of the House of Commons, members of Parliament are eloquently clashing, with representatives from York — for whom Richard was the last hope against rival Lancastrians in the War of the Roses — demanding the restoration of his tarnished image. One organization of die-hard Richard III supporters (there are at least two) is running a national ad campaign to clear the king’s name.

There are even calls for a state funeral, giving the medieval king a send-off steeped in the pomp and circumstance of contemporary Britain.

“I suppose we won’t dash off to the Folger Library in Washington and destroy the First Folio, but we must rewrite the history distorted by that, ahem, writer from Stratford,” Hugh Bayley, a member of Parliament from York, said with tongue only partly planted in cheek. “The fact that a Mr. Shakespeare decided to write some play about a hunchback shouldn’t blacken the name of a fine, upstanding defender of country.”

Yet if the remains are indeed those of the long-lost sovereign — something archaeologists call extremely likely — it also raises a conundrum: Where to bury one of England’s most demonized characters?

Under Church of England protocol, the bones, should they prove to be Richard’s, appear destined to end up in the cathedral at Leicester, the city where the remains were found. But many insist they should instead go to the Anglican cathedral in York, the city where history suggests that he wanted to rest. Still others question whether burial should be in an Anglican cathedral at all, as he died a Roman Catholic, reigning by the grace of God and the pope.

September 20, 2012

Over-hyping the importance of the Richard III archaeological dig

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

At the History Today blog, Linda Porter points out that some of the breathless claims about the historical significance of the Leicester archaeological dig are rather overblown:

Major finds don’t come along very often and this would certainly be one of the most significant in the last hundred years. But the huge claims being made for it are not the sort that sit well with most historians. Assertions that, if DNA tests prove positive, this discovery ‘has the potential to rewrite history’ and is of ‘global importance’ make me sigh.

Historians have long known that the Tudor narratives on Richard III are propaganda. Shakespeare’s compelling villain may still resonate with the man on the street but has nothing to do with a measured analysis of the past and anyone with even a general interest in the late fifteenth century will be aware of this. And ‘global significance’? Cross the Channel and I’d be surprised if you found anyone outside the academic world who knew about Richard III and the saga of the Princes in the Tower. Those involved in the project, which appears to have been rigorously conducted from the archaeological perspective, clearly want headlines. As someone who has worked in public relations herself I congratulate them on a successful communications campaign — it has to be acknowledged that the Richard III Society is very good at this kind of thing — but wearing my historian’s hat extravagant claims make me uncomfortable.

September 15, 2012

The Richard III debate moves to “where should we bury him this time”

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

In the Telegraph, Dan Hodges calls for giving Richard III “a last, glorious summer”:

It’s a brilliant idea. Seriously. Think of where Richard stands. At the centre of our history, our art, our education, our national identity. What a staggering opportunity this represents.

Let’s give him a full, no-holds-barred state funeral. Everyone’s been banging on about preserving the Olympic spirit; well here — DNA tests permitting — is our chance. This is a once in a generation opportunity. In fact, it’s a once in about 20 generations opportunity. Let’s bring our history alive.

Just imagine the crowds that would gather for the chance of watching a 21st century ceremonial to a Plantagenet king. And not just an English king, but thanks to Shakespeare, a global monarch.

Picture the moment. A silent Mall. A slow drum beat. An honor guard, heads bowed in tribute to their leader who fell 500 years before. Richard, making his last journey, laid upon a ceremonial gun carriage, draped in the flag of the kingdom he died fighting for. And ahead of him walks a riderless horse. The horse that in his last moments, he would have swapped that kingdom for.

Bloody hell, I’d miss an episode of Strictly for that. And I bet a few million others would as well.

Okay, there’s the slightly unfortunate business of the Princes and the Tower. But we’ve all made the odd mistake. Plus, if you read Josephine Tay’s the Daughter of Time, it was a fit up anyway.

If there’s one thing we’ve learnt over the past couple of months it’s that — to borrow a phrase from another high profile if much maligned senior statesman — we are at our best when at our boldest. Or more accurately, when we say “damn it, let’s do it”.

Now is one of those moments. Damn it. Let’s give Richard III one last, glorious summer.

September 12, 2012

Richard III’s remains may have been found in Leicester

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Fascinating announcement today from the dig site:

11.12: He says one skeleton and other human remains have been found and a barbed metal arrowhead was found between vertebrae of the skeleton’s upper back. The arrow was near the spine, but not embedded in the bones.

11.15: Mr Taylor says that an articulated skeleton has been found that is of significant interest to us. Scientists have also found a set of “disarticulated human remains” but because they are female and therefore not Richard III.

The skeleton shows signs of “near death trauma” that “appears to be consistent with injury from battle”. Scientists now hope to extract DNA from the bones.

He added:

“It also has spinal abnormalities and an individual form of spinal curvature, which makes his right shoulder visibly higher than his left shoulder. We believe the individual would have had severe scoliosis. The skeleton was not a hunchback.”

It is consistent with other accounts of Richard III.”

It is now at an undisclosed laboratory where it is going through “rigorous” testing.

August 31, 2012

The search for the burial place of Richard III

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:40

Elizabeth sent me another link on the ongoing archaeological search for the burial place of King Richard III:

A high-profile search for the gravesite of the 15th-century monarch King Richard III — begun Saturday beneath a parking lot in the English city of Leicester — has a remarkable connection to a Canadian family whose members hold the genetic key to solving one of British history’s most enduring mysteries: Where is Richard III’s body?

The London, Ont.-based Ibsen family, recently proven to be descended from King Richard’s maternal line, has provided DNA samples aimed at confirming the regal identity of any human remains found during the unprecedented dig, which continues this week at the former site of a medieval church where — 527 years ago — the violently overthrown monarch was buried.

The University of Leicester-led archeological project was launched after the discovery that the maternal bloodline of the last Plantagenet king — killed in 1485 in the climactic battle of the War of the Roses — survived into the 21st century through Joy Ibsen, a British-born woman who immigrated to Canada after the Second World War and raised a family in southwestern Ontario.

If nothing else, the media coverage of this dig may generate lots of new members for the Richard III Society (Canadian branch, American branch).

August 24, 2012

Digging up a municipal car park … to find the body of a king

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:51

An interesting story on the search for the lost burial place of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England:

Archaeologists are hoping to find the lost grave of a medieval monarch in a dig that is due to get underway today.

In what is believed to be the first-ever archaeological search for the lost grave of an anointed King of England, experts from the University of Leicester are set to begin their quest to find the site of a church where it is believed King Richard III was buried in the city more than 500 years ago.

It is thought the site of the church may be on land currently being used as a car park for council offices in the city.

King Richard III, the last Plantagenet, ruled England from 1483 until he was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

The most famous battle of the War of the Roses was fought on August 22, 1485, and famously saw the death of Richard III.

The battle ended decades of civil war and was won by the Lancastrians.

It paved the way for Henry Tudor to become the first English monarch of the Tudor dynasty.

The battle also inspired the scene from Shakespeare’s play Richard III when the defeated hunchback king declares: ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

August 5, 2012

Angers still pushing for compensation for Plantagenet murder in 1499

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

I mentioned this amusing little issue last month. The city of Angers is still trying to get the British crown jewels as compensation for Henry VII’s judicial murder of the last legitimate male Plantagenet claimant to the English throne. Lowering The Bar has more:

What’s the connection between these French people and the English throne? It looks like the first connection that mattered was between Matilda, the daughter of King Henry I, and Geoffrey of Anjou (the county in which Angers was located). Their oldest son became Henry II of England in 1154. After 331 years of exciting adventures, the ruling line ended with Richard III, who was killed in battle by the forces of Henry Tudor (Henry VII). (Since history is written by the victors, Richard III now appears in plays as a murderous hunchback and the Tudors got their own miniseries on Showtime.)

But Angers doesn’t appear to care about any of those guys (especially the hunchback), only about Edward, Earl of Warwick. He had a claim to the throne (he was Richard III’s nephew, or something), but was only 10 in 1485, and judging from this portrait was so poor that he could not even afford to be drawn from the neck down. But Henry threw him in the Tower of London anyway and kept him there until he was old enough to kill, basically, which happened in 1499. He was the last legitimate male Plantagenet.

Angers is sponsoring a petition drive about this 513-year-old outrage and will send the official results to Queen Elizabeth II (House of Windsor) in September. This will coincidentally coincide with Angers’s annual cultural festival. A spokesperson for the city admitted that the petition “had little chance of success” (the original crown jewels were done away with by Oliver Cromwell anyway), but said that the crime against the Plantagenets was worth remembering. According to the report, he also “encouraged British people to visit Angers, which has medieval buildings including a magnificent castle which recalls the glory days of the Plantagenets.”

December 23, 2011

Correcting Shakespeare’s sources: the real Richard III

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

Robert Fripp talks about the historical Richard III and the vicious caricatures that Shakespeare drew upon to produce his famous play:

In 1983, I was working a high-stress job pulling together CBC TV’s weekly investigative program The Fifth Estate. I still ask myself: Why, on top of that, did I spend my nights and weekends imitating a long-dead playwright? My labour of love was a play called Dark Sovereign, which I wrote in the four-century-old English of William Shakespeare and his 17th-century contemporaries.

The same year, 1983, also happened to be the 500th anniversary of King Richard III’s accession to the English throne. Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, is widely believed to have murdered his two nephews in the Tower of London, usurping the elder boy’s crown and reigning just 25 months before the upstart Henry Tudor (Henry VII) killed Richard in battle in 1485 and displayed his body for three days.

King Henry went on to inflict judicial murder on many whose claim to the throne was better than his. Nearly 20 existing portraits of Richard III were disfigured after his death to show humps painted onto the subject’s back. Writers, principally Sir Thomas More and Raphael Holinshed, gave the dead king a hostile press.

Then Shakespeare borrowed from Holinshed to write The Tragedy of Richard III. (It may be significant that the first edition’s title omits the word “King.”) Shakespeare wrote his character assassination around 1591. It was probably performed first for the Court of Queen Elizabeth I shortly thereafter. Tudor monarchs had been ruling for more than a century by then, but their tenuous claim to the throne still seemed to trouble them. Having denied Richard a decent burial a century earlier, they still had need to heap dirt on his reputation.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I portrayed the Earl of Northumberland in the 1983 re-enactment of the coronation of Richard III (at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto) on local TV, and I portrayed the Earl of Lincoln in the (non-televised) version on the actual anniversary date. You could say I’m biased in favour of the revisionist view of the character of good King Richard.

March 26, 2011

550th anniversary of the bloodiest battle in English history

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

Unless you were paying close attention in your history classes, you probably wouldn’t recognize the name:

It was one of the biggest and probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil. Such was its ferocity almost 1 per cent of the English population was wiped out in a single day. Yet mention the Battle of Towton to most people and you would probably get a blank stare.

Next week marks the 550th anniversary of the engagement that changed the course of the Wars of the Roses. It is estimated that between 50,000 and 80,000 soldiers took part in the battle in 1461 between the Houses of York and Lancaster for control of the English throne. An estimated 28,000 men are said to have lost their lives.

But this bloody conflict is unlikely to remain forgotten for much longer. Archaeologists believe they will unearth what is likely to be Britain’s largest mass grave this summer.

Work is to begin in June, at a site 12 miles south of York between the villages of Saxton and Towton where the battle took place in snowy March weather. The locations of the graves were discovered by archaeologists using geophysical imagery and now, with funding in place, they are able to begin excavating.

And why is such a major battle so little-known? Perhaps because the “wrong” side won:

Very few records of the battle survive, which is one reason that so little is known about it. Historians believe this could be due to an early propaganda campaign by the Tudors.

Author and historian George Goodwin, who this month publishes a new book: Fatal Colours: Towton, 1461 — England’s Most Brutal Battle, said: “The Tudors did a tremendously good propaganda job in making Bosworth the key battle because that was the battle which ended the Wars of the Roses. They were the winners and they got to write the history books. Because Towton was a Yorkist victory that wasn’t really very useful to them.”

February 19, 2010

Bosworth Field, real location now made public

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

As I mentioned back in October, archaeologists have located the actual site of the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Now that they’ve had time to do more research and examination, they’ve gone public with the location:

The true site of one of the most decisive battles in English history has been revealed.

Bosworth, fought in 1485, which saw the death of Richard III, was believed to have taken place on Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire.

But a study of original documents and archaeological survey of the area has now pinpointed a site in fields more than a mile to the south west.

A new trail will lead from the current visitor centre to the new location.

[. . .]

The original announcement was made in October but the exact location was kept a secret until now to protect it from treasure hunters.

Researchers also believe they have identified the medieval marsh where Richard III was dragged from his horse and killed.

October 31, 2009

Bosworth Field located, finally

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:06

It may be surprising, but the actual location of Bosworth Field, “one of the four most important battles in English history” was only definitely identifed this year:

Just after midday yesterday, Glenn Foard stood on Ambion Hill in Leicestershire, next to the award-winning Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre, pointed at the distant church spire of Stoke Golding and declared an end to 500 years of arguments over the location.

“It’s over there, two miles away,” he said, beyond and below the church, off to the right a bit and spread over 250 acres of what is now flat farmland, crisscrossed by hedgerows, pasture and autumnal trees.

Mr Foard, a battlefield archaeologist who has led a four-year, £1.3 million investigation into the whereabouts of the fighting, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Leicestershire County Council, is convinced that he has unearthed the proof.

In an unexpected and thrilling development for the archaeologists, that proof is in the form of 22 lead cannon and musket balls that dramatically reshape thinking about late medieval combat.

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