311.  Summary.

Edward V’s nominal reign of less than three months must be regarded simply as the time during which his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, perfected his plot for seizing the crown by the successive murders of Rivers, Grey, Hastings, and the two young Princes.

Richard III (House of York, White Rose)—­1483-1485

312.  Richard’s Accession; he promises Financial Reform.

Richard used the preparations which had been made for the murdered Prince Edward’s coronation for his own (S310).  He probably gained over an influential party by promises of financial reform.  In their address to him at his accession, Parliament said, “Certainly we be determined rather to adventure and commit us to the peril of our lives...than to live in such thraldom and bondage as we have lived long time heretofore, oppressed and injured by extortions and new impositions, against the laws of God and man, and the liberty, old policy and laws of this realm, wherein every Englishman is inherited."[1]

[1] Taswell-Langmead’s “Constitutional History of England.”

313.  Richard III’s Character.

Several attempts have been made of late years to defend the King against the odium heaped upon him by the older historians.  But these well-meant efforts to prove him less black than tradition painted him are answered by the fact that his memory was thoroughly hated by those who knew him best.  No one of the age when he lived thought of vindicating his character.  He was called a “hypocrite” and a “hunchback.”

We must believe then, until it is clearly proved to the contrary, that the last of the Yorkist kings was what common report and Shakespeare have together represented him,[2]—­distorted in figure, and with ambition so unrestrained that the words the great English poet has seen fit to put into his mouth may have really expressed Richard’s own thought: 

“Then, since the heavens have shap’d my body so,
Let hell make crookt my mind to answer it."[1]

[2] In this connection it may be well to say a word in regard to the historical value of Shakespeare’s utterances, which have been freely quoted in this book.  He generally followed the Chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, which constitute two important sources of information on the periods of which they treat; and he sometimes followed them so closely that he simply turned their prose into verse.  Mr. James Gairdner, who is a high authority on the Wars of the Roses, calls Shakespeare “an unrivaled interpreter” of that long and terrible conflict. (See the preface to his “Houses of Lancaster and York.”) In the preface to his “Richard III” Mr. Gairdner is still more explicit.  He says:  “A minute study of the facts of Richard’s life has tended more and more to convince me of the general fidelity of the portrait with which we have been made familiar by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More.”  On Shakespeare’s faithful presentation of history see also A.G.S.  Canning’s “Thoughts on Shakespeare,” p. 295; the Dictionary of National (British) Biography under “Holinshed”; Garnett and Gosse’s “English Literature,” Vol.  II, p. 68; and H.N.  Hudson’s “Shakespeare’s Life and Characters,” Vol.  II, pp. 5-8.  See, too, S298, note 1. [1] Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” Part III, Act V, scene vi.