A Bum Rap

  Richard III may have gotten a bum rap.  Since his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, he has been almost universally vilified as a monstrous king—murderous, Machiavellian, deformed in mind and body.  Most of us have absorbed this judgment from Shakespeare's eponymous play, itself largely based on an earlier book attributed to Sir Thomas More.  The trouble is that history is written by the victors.  Richard was the last Plantagenet king, while More and Shakespeare wrote their politically correct accounts under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of the usurping Tudor line.

  So what?  Why in the world would I be interested in the rivalries of English royalty more than five centuries ago?  Two reasons.  First, the recent discovery and exhumation of Richard's remains created a splash in the newspapers (see New York Times article) and a fresh discussion of history's verdict on him.  Second, in a desperate search to find a good mystery novel to read, I found citations of Josephine Tey's 1951 book The Daughter of Time as first and fourth, respectively, on lists of the best 100 mystery books of all time by the British Crime Writers' Association and the Mystery Writers of America.  Tey was a writer of British police procedurals, not my favorite mystery genre, but such acclaim was hard to ignore.  So I bought the book after reading its synopsis on Amazon.com and finding to my surprise that the mystery it investigates is Richard III's bum rap.

  A little dynastic history is needed here.  When King Edward IV died in 1483, he left his two sons under the Protectorship of his brother, Richard.  The elder prince, 12-year-old Edward, ascended the throne as Edward V, but that was soon challenged.  Edward IV's marriage to Prince Edward's mother was declared by an act of Parliament to be invalid, as records showed that he was already married at the time to another woman.  The two princes were therefore illegitimate and not eligible for the throne.  Richard III—next in line—was anointed king.  He reigned for only two years until dying at Bosworth at the hands of forces under the Earl of Richmond.

  Richmond assumed the throne as Henry VII, the first Tudor king.  He had everything to gain from defaming the defeated Richard in order to shore up his own legitimacy as king, which was weak from the viewpoint of bloodlines.  (The closest he came was as the great-grandson of an illegitimate son of a younger son of a king.)  Aspersions were therefore retroactively cast at Richard, the most odious being the alleged murder of the two princes.  That is the crime indelibly etched in all our minds by Shakespeare's play.

  Tey uses the detective Alan Grant of a number of her mysteries as the protagonist in her book, who tries to unveil the truth about Richard.  I can do no better than quote from the Amazon.com synopsis:

"Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history.  Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world's most heinous villains—a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother's children to make his crown secure?  Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the usurpers of England's throne?  Grant determines to find out once and for all, with the help of the British Museum and an American scholar, what kind of man Richard Plantagenet really was and who killed the Little Princes ..."

    In mulling over the evidence he acquires, Grant asks a bevy of trenchant questions.  Among them:

• If Richard was the fiend he was later portrayed to be, why do contemporary, pre-Tudor accounts paint him as a gentle noble, in touch with the people, a good administrator and a "good lord" with a "great heart," who often forgave his enemies.  Why was his great villainy discovered only after Henry VII's accession?

  • Why did the most vicious attacks on Richard occur even later, by those who had no first-hand knowledge of him—e.g., Thomas More, who was just five when Richard ascended the throne and seven when he died?

• The Little Princes disappeared from view only some time after they had been delegitimized and Richard III crowned.  Since they were by then no threat to his ascension to the throne, what motive could Richard have had in having them murdered, especially since he forgave so many actual enemies and maintained an ongoing friendly association with their mother?

• Why would Henry VII, in drawing up a Bill of Attainder against Richard III immediately after being crowned in 1485, list in it any number of Richard's purported crimes, but not mention the most heinous, the murder of the Little Princes, which he only later alleged?  Does this mean that he knew they were still alive at the time he started impugning Richard's reputation?

• Soon afterward, Henry VII married the Little Princes' sister.  He had the delegitimizing act of Parliament rescinded, presumably in order to re-legitimize her and strengthen his own claim to the throne.  But that also re-legitimized the Princes and restored their succession to the throne, thus challenging Henry's own hold on it. Did Henry therefore know that they were by that later date dead, and therefore posed no threat?  In fact, did he have a hand in their death? 

• Why was Sir James Tyrrel—who was said to confess in 1502 to the Princes' murder—given a general pardon by Henry VII in June 1486 and then an unheard-of second general pardon a month later?  For what crimes?  Had he been Henry VII's agent in the Princes' deaths?

  Grant, using the police procedures of Scotland Yard, makes a case that (1) Richard III was scapegoated by the Tudors and their supporters for all sorts of malefactions in order to strengthen the weak Tudor title to the throne, and (2) the disappearance and presumed murder of the Princes was likely Henry VII's doing.  In my mind, it is a strong case.  But the pall over Richard III was heavily laid by More and Shakespeare, and only after the Stuarts replaced the Tudors as monarchs of England in the early 17^th century did some historians dare try to remove the stain, not very successfully.  The controversy continues to this day.  Tey, although not a historian, did much to tilt the balance more in Richard III's favor.  

  Interesting history.  I myself wouldn't list The Daughter of Time among the top 100 mystery novels, but it was certainly a captivating read.

Songs of Thrushes

O thrush, your song is passing sweet

   But never a song that you have sung,

Is half so sweet as thrushes sang

   When my dear Love and I were young.

William Morris (1834–1896)

  I've drawn twice in this blog from a memoir I wrote about Helen and me after she died [1,2].  The memoir was meant for our children, its contents mostly family lore and photographs, not designed to be of much interest to anyone else.  Yet those two excerpts spurred enough response to show me that what I wrote has more general appeal.  I shouldn't have been surprised—much of the purpose of writing is to share thoughts and feelings with possible strangers, especially when the writing crosses between generations.  It re-assures the younger among us that they are not the first to feel as they do, that there truly is nothing new under the sun.

  So I'll dip once again into the memoir, this time into the chapter about Helen's and my courtship, which was prefaced by the verse above.  For those who know me now as an octogenarian, to read that I once was in the throes of love may challenge the imagination too far.  I had an advantage in reading William Morris' poem: it froze him in time for me as a young swain, not the aged writer he became.  Perhaps strangers who read this essay will likewise be able to see me in my thirties.

  I first saw Helen in 1963 while I was ringing a doorbell: not exactly her, but her partial, backlit image, mottled and ambered by an antique glass door pane.  It was like an Impressionist painting, soft-brushed and romantic.  The image is still with me, fifty years later; I can even now feel my heart skipping a beat.  She smiled as she opened the door.  Beautiful blue eyes, I thought.  Flashing smile.  We exchanged a few insignificant words, and I watched as she went down the stairs, on her way out from visiting my cousin, with whom I was to dine.  I’d rarely felt as engaged as this on a chance encounter.  I remember asking myself,  "Could this be the One?"   I was 33, no youngster, so I was amazed by my gushiness.

  I wheedled Helen's telephone number from my cousin, and soon dated her, anxious to know if my first impression was accurate.  It was.  She was lovely, vibrant, a little wacky.  She wore her hair rolled up behind her head in a French bun, severely accentuating the beautiful bone structure of her face.  Her nose had a funny twist in it, the result of a skiing accident, I later found out.  She smiled with her whole face, wide-mouthed, her eyes laughing too.

  As we exchanged information about each other, I thought It’s like we’re from different planets. Maybe opposites really do attract: magnetic north and south poles, electrons and protons.  I was from the megalopolis of New York City, she from a small town in Utah.  I was Jewish, she Mormon.  I was scheduled, organized to the point of rigidity, always—except perhaps after a few drinks—reserved and uncomfortable with small talk.  She was impetuous, unscheduled, people-oriented.  I was an engineer, mathematically analytic; she a psychologist, immersed in the understanding of emotions.  Mars and Venus.

  Many dates later, those differences spawned an inevitable first argument.  Never much bound by the clock, she kept me waiting for the better part of an hour as she prepared to go to dinner with me.  I, a devoté of Chronos, ran by the clock.  My annoyance showed— even if it hadn't, the psychologist in Helen would have sensed it.  The date was a disaster.  Helen, incensed by my unspoken animus, blew up at the end of it, throwing back at me the earrings I had given her some weeks before.  I was stunned by her vehemence.

  Weeks went by without a word between us.  When we did talk to explore our rift, Helen asked if I was afraid of anger.  In fact I was, as I was afraid of most emotions.  I had learned well from my family that spoken words take on a life of their own, never to be recalled, always hanging in the air as a ghostly reminder of the sometimes regretted emotion that launched them.  Helen's family, when they were angry, had at each other, then made up, the venomous words disappearing as if never spoken. 

  “Don’t you know that expressing anger, getting it out of you, is good?” Helen said.  “What’s worse: bottling anger up—leaving it to the other person to figure out if and why you’re angry—or expressing it so as to leave no doubt, and then working it out?  Who benefits from keeping feelings to yourself?”  My response was, “Who benefits from speaking hurtful words without first thinking about them and perhaps suppressing them?”  That interchange, I more and more understood as our relationship developed, characterized our different psyches.

  Given the polar extremes of our personalities, I agonized about whether to propose to Helen, trying—true to form—to be scientifically precise about my feelings.  On one side of the scales I placed the many ways in which she and I differed; on the other side I put my growing love for her.   In the balance, was a life-long commitment tenable? 

  In the end, rational analysis didn't matter at all.  One evening, after a romantic dinner, I looked into Helen's eyes and could see in them the question, "When are you going to ask me to marry you?"  Thrushes sang in my ears, and I blurted out my proposal over their song.

  I imagine that bookies would have given long odds against our marriage being successful, and certainly there were naysayers among our friends and families [2].  But sometimes, when strong magnetic north and south poles meet, they clamp together so tightly that they can't be pried apart.  And so it was as we melded during our 34-year marriage.  Again, always looking to literature for the right words, I can do no better than the Bard:

So we grew together,

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,

But yet an union in partition.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Act 3, Scene 2

          

A Montague and a Capulet

Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set

On the fair daughter of rich Capulet:

As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine;

And all combined, save what thou must combine

By holy marriage: when and where and how

We met, we woo'd and made exchange of vow,

I'll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray,

That thou consent to marry us to-day.

Romeo and Juliet,

Act 2, Scene 3

  After Helen died, I wrote a memoir for our children giving an account of our lives until we met, our married years, and her death.  I started each chapter and sometimes each section of a chapter with a quotation from the literature.  Especially when in deep mourning, I found those a balm for a sore soul.  (See Writing and Reading as Balm.)  Yet even in more normal times, when I'm not assuaging raw pain, literature comforts me, letting me know that I'm not all alone here, that I'm part of a living human fabric which comfortingly enwraps me.

  The chapter on Helen's and my marriage started with the Shakepearean passage above.  Unlike Romeo and Juliet, we were of course not from long-feuding family clans.  Still, our problem was one of clannishness, for religions are simply very large clans.  Substitute "Jewish" for "Montague" and "Mormon" for "Capulet" and you have a suggestion of our story in the couplet "… but this I pray/That thou consent to marry us to-day."

  My mother and Helen's father were against our marrying because of our difference of religion—we were caught in a tribal conflict.  Helen was less religious than I was then, so she had no misgivings when I suggested that we be married by a rabbi, thus possibly assuaging my mother, if not her father.  (Two of her siblings had already married outside Mormonism and a third was about to, but all to Christians; perhaps I was beyond the pale.) 

  Helen doubted that I would be able to find a rabbi who would agree to marry us.  Nevertheless, I set about trying to find one.  It was a disturbing revelation to my then-naīve self that none I initially asked would do so, unless Helen converted first.  I finally found a liberal rabbi who said he would require only that Helen take six weeks of lessons on Judaism and agree to raise our children as Jews.

  Although Helen was willing to meet those requirements, I couldn’t agree to placing conditions on her as a premise for our marriage, and told the rabbi so.  He responded that he felt himself bound by his own rather minimal interpretation of his duties, and reasonably pointed out that a civil marriage was available as an alternative.   I quarreled that rabbis were constantly decrying the falling away of Jews from the fold because of intermarriage.  Weren’t they concerned that their rigidity actually accelerated the trend?

  The rabbi cited the Book of Ruth: “Remember that Ruth converted,” he said, in defense of the traditional outlook.  I was stopped short by this argument.  My vague remembrance of Ruth from my Hebrew-school days was that Ruth, a Moabitess who had married the Jewish Naomi's son, had declared her conversion—famously saying to Naomi “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”—not in advance of her marriage, but only after her husband had died, when Naomi was preparing to return from Moab to Judah.  The marriage itself had had no strings attached; Ruth's later conversion was entirely voluntary.  Wasn’t the moral of the book one of toleration and acceptance, not of exclusion?  Only the next day, on re-reading Ruth, did I find that I was correct.  I was angry at the rabbi for having played the sophist, and chagrined at myself for not having had a response at my fingertips. 

  In the event, as the negativity from Helen's father and my mother increased, I became more and more nervous that we might not be able to withstand it, so I suggested to Helen that we immediately get married in a simple civil ceremony.  She agreed, and within days we were married in the San Francisco Superior Court, with only two close friends attending.  Ironically, the judge was the son of a rabbi and performed a touching ceremony.

  It was all an eye-opener for this ingénu.  Although Helen and I did raise our children as Jews, that personal brush with the mischief of religious tribalism was just one more spur in my long trek of distancing myself from my own "tribe"; it might also have contributed to my already growing atheism.

  E. O. Wilson says in a book I previously discussed that the tribal instinct was already deeply inbred into hominid ancestors of Homo sapiens well before our species emerged.  It led early humans to form clans to underpin their needs for identity, security and well-being.  That may be so.  Yet of all the tribal associations in which we immerse ourselves, perhaps the most pernicious is religion, possibly the cause of more pain and destructiveness than any other form of tribalism, even more than nationalism. 

  Will the clergy ever abandon their stultifying doctrines, which serve only to maim our psyches, constrain our humanity, and oftentimes lead to religiously induced mayhem?  Probably not.  I find it encouraging, though, that a few parts of the world, particularly the democracies of Western Europe, are becoming more secular.  Those countries have discovered that all of the moral and ethical behavior claimed by religions as possible only through their auspices can also be fruits of secular democracy, without any of the pitfalls.  Would that the rest of the world follow the example, including our still hyper-religious America!