Ricardo III

"Tonypandy é fica no sul do País de Gales. Se você for ao País de Gales, vai ouvir que, em 1910, o Governo usou tropas para atirar em mineiros galeses que estavam lutando por seus direitos. Você vai provavelmente ouvir que Winston Churchill, que era 'Home Secretary' na época, foi o responsável. O Sul do País de Gales, vão te dizer, nunca vai esquecer Tonypandy!




Os fatos na verdade são estes: as partes mais violentas da multidão estavam completamente fora de controle. Lojas estavam sendo saqueadas e propriedades destruídas. O 'Chief Constable' de Glamorgan enviou um requerimento ao 'Home Office', pedindo tropas para proteger os cidadãos. Se um 'Chief Constable' acha que a situação é séria o suficiente para pedir ajuda ao 'Home Office', o 'Home Secretary' tem muito pouco o que fazer a respeito. Mas Churchill ficou tão horrorizado com a possibilidade de tropas ficando frente a frente com um grupo de baderneiros e tendo que atirar neles que ele parou o movimento das tropas e em vez disso mandou um grupo de policiais civis com cacetetes. As tropas foram mantidas em reserva, e todo o contato com os vândalos foi feito por policiais londrinos desarmados. O único derramamento de sangue que ocorreu em todo o negócio foi um ou dois narizes sangrando. O 'Home Secretary' foi criticado severamente na Câmara dos Comuns por causa desta 'intervenção imprecedente'.
Isso foi Tonypandy. Essa foi a história das tropas que massacraram civis que o País de Gales nunca esquecerá. Todo homem que esteve lá sabe que a história é mentira, e apesar disso ninguém nunca a contradisse. É uma história completamente falsa que se tornou lenda porque os homens que sabiam a verdade não disseram nada na época e continuaram calados."
TEY, Josephine - The Daughter of Time - tradução livre.

Richard III reigned for less than three years. He was the last king of the House of York, and the last English king to die in battle. His defeat at the Battle of Bosworth marked the end of the Wars of the Roses.
That is what anyone will find when fist making any research about Richard III.
That, and a few other not so ordinary facts.
In Wikipedia, for example, which is the best place to make a research about 'what the average person knows' on a determined subject, it is written that after the death of Edward IV, his older brother, Richard became regent of England with the title of Lord Protector until his brother's son, Edward V, became old enough to rule. But then he placed Edward and his brother Richard in the Tower, and "acquired the throne for himself".
The website 'Britannia', that considers itself "the internet's most comprehensive treatment of the Times, Peoples and Events of British History", says that Richard is credited with the responsibility for several murders: his brother Clarence and his nephews Edward and Richard, Henry VI and his son Edward. It also says that after his brother's death, Richard "seized the throne from the young Edward V", fearful of a continuance of internal feuding should Edward V continue on the throne under the influence of his mother's relatives of the Woodville clan. The 'Britannia' historians soon add that "most of this feared conflict would have undoubtedly come from Richard", and that the old nobility, also afraid of a strong Woodville clan, helped Richard, declaring the succession of Edward V as illegal. Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was considered bigamous "due to weak evidence", and their children were considered illegitimate and therefore ineligible heirs to the crown. The text finishes with a very dramatic "Edward V and his younger brother, Richard of York, were imprisoned in the Tower of London, never to again emerge alive".
Richard the Third now becomes, in the eyes of the idle researcher, from a king who governed England for only two years to a man who murdered his own brother and two nephews.
But a lot of historians do not think he murdered any of those people the 'Britannia' subtly say he murdered. A lot of historians think that he was not only innocent of those so called crimes, but also a great king, who deserves to be remembered by what he really did - and he managed to do quite a lot of things in such a small period of time: he was thirty-one when he died at the battle of Bosworth.

Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More
Of course a great deal of Richard's fame comes from Shakespeare's play, "The Tragedy of King Richard the Third". It has been infinitely played, as well as adapted to movies, with great interpreters such as Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen and Al Pacino.
The play portrays a physically deformed Richard, resentful of his brother and hungry for power. Peace, after the long civil war, has been the rule of England under King Edward IV and the victorious Yorks. But, using deception, intelligence and political manipulation, Richard begins his path to the throne.
He manipulates a noble-woman into marrying him; he has his younger brother executed, transferring the blame of it to his sickly brother Edward, the king, in this way accelerating his illness and death; he kills the men who are loyal to his nephew, and has the boy's relatives on their mother's side arrested and executed, by then having the boys and their mother at his mercy. He manages to become king of England using his political influence, and then orders the murder of the two children, who were imprisoned in the Tower.
By this time, the people of England fear and loathe him, and when another successor to the throne, the earl of Richmond, appears in France, all noblemen join Richmond to defeat Richard.
Richard murders his wife Anne in order to marry his niece Elizabeth, since this alliance would secure his claim to the throne. Elizabeth, however, manages to escape him, and secretly promises to marry Richmond.
The earl of Richmond finally invades England, and Richard is killed. Richmond is crowned Henry VII, and marries young Elizabeth, in order to unite the quarreling families Lancaster and York.
This play is supposed to be viewed as the fourth part of a trilogy (Henry VI 1, 2, and 3), but it is usually performed on its own.
Most scholars admit that Richard III is written by Shakespeare as a personification of evil, and that the historical character may or may not have been similar to Shakespeare's - in the play, it is difficult to establish a reason to Richard's acts, and some critics say that Richard is not a fully developed Shakespeare character because he does not possess a complex human psychology: Richard does not justify his villainy, he is simply bad.
It is also important to remember that Shakespeare wrote his play when Elisabeth I was ruler of England: she was the descendant of Henry VII, the same earl of Richmond who invaded England and overthrew Richard. The official government policy was to regard Richard as a monster who had no claim to the throne, and that the people of England of that time had wanted Henry VII to succeed him.
One of the books consulted during the research for this essay portrays an interesting idea: that, by the end of the Wars of the Roses, the contemporary historic documents are full of political propaganda, and are therefore little to be trusted. The result of that is very negative lack of information about that time.
According to this author, Shakespeare used historic characters in his play, but the descriptions and actions of these characters were, for the most part, created by him.
And yet it is widely known that Sir Thomas More wrote an account of the end of the Wars of the Roses that described Richard as being much the same tyrannical, murderous, greedy character that Shakespeare portrays. The first compilation of More's "History of Richard The Third" was published in 1543, and was believed to be perfectly true, since Sir Thomas More was "a contemporary of Richard".
However, some historians believe that this account was not really written by More, but by another person who lived before him. In the time of Queen Elizabeth I, More's account was already said to be written by a Cardinal Morton. More was not a contemporary of Richard. He was chancellor to Henry VIII, and by the time of Richard's death he was five years old. He grew up in the house of Cardinal Morton, and so it is said to have copied and improved a text by Morton, who was himself a contemporary of Richard. That's why that "History of Richard the Third" was attributed to More instead of to Morton.

The Wars of the Roses
The Wars of the Roses were a civil conflict that lasted from 1455 to 1485. This name comes from the general belief that the house of Lancaster used a red rose as an emblem, and the house of York used a white one. Most people don't know that these symbols were seldom used by the houses.
It all began, in a sense, with the usurpation of the throne of Richard II (1377 - 1400) by Henry, Duke of Lancaster, who became Henry IV in 1399.
Richard II was becoming unpopular among his nobles, and he imprisoned one of the most popular nobles of his time, John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward III (Richard II's predecessor). Soon after that the nobles rebelled, and Henry the Duke of Lancaster (John of Gaunt's son) deposed Richard. But Richard had no children, and there were two possibilities. One of them was the earl of March, the grandson of Edward III third son. The other was Henry of Lancaster.
Since Henry was stronger, he won the support of other powerful nobles and got the crown.
The house of Lancaster remained in power for almost sixty years, and Henry V (Henry of Lancaster's son) became one of the most popular kings in England. He died when his son (Henry VI) was only nine months old.
Henry VI grew up surrounded by advisers, and unfortunately he wasn't very good at choosing them. Soon the nobles were once more discontent, and started reminding everyone that his grandfather had usurped the throne from Richard II. These nobles were divided: some of them were still loyal to Henry VI (the Lancastrians), but some believed that the Duke of York, son of the earl of March, was more fit to be a king (the Yorkists).
Soon a battle for the throne began, and when the duke of York was killed, his son Edward took his place and the crown, after he won the battle of Towtown.
Edward was crowned King Edward IV in 1461. He ruled until 1483.
His brother Richard ruled from '83 to '85. Henry Tudor, the Duke of Richmond, who had a distant claim to the throne, entered England and met Richard with an army at Bosworth. Half of Richard's army changed sides, and the battle ended with Richard's defeat and death.
Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII in 1485.
The Wars of the Roses were said to be devastating for England, but actually the people of England didn't suffer much. The wars were mainly among the nobles, who were heavily weakened after the wars. The Tudor dynasty was able to start everything from scratch, since most of the York and Lancaster nobility was destroyed.




Life of Richard III
Richard Plantagenet was born on October, 1452 at Fotheringhay Castle, son to Richard, Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, of the powerful Neville family. He was their fourth surviving son, and by the time he was born, the conflicts between Yorkists and Lancasters were at full power.
When he was eight years old, his father and his older brother were killed in a battle by Lancastrians, and the Yorkists accepted Edward, Richard's elder brother, as their leader. Edward defeated the Lancastrians at Towtown and became king when Richard was only nine. During the struggle, Richard and his younger brother George were sent to the Netherlands for safety. When they returned to England, George was created Duke of Clarence by Edward, and Richard became the Duke of Gloucester. In November 1461, Richard was sent to Middleham Castle to complete his knight training under his cousin Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick. There, Richard learnt Latin, French, law, mathematics, penmanship, music, horsemanship and military training, practicing with swords, daggers and battle-axes. He also learned the fine arts of his time - harping, singing, piping and dancing.
In the future, Richard would marry Warwick's daughter, Anne.
In 1464, while Warwick was negotiating Edward's marriage to a French princess, the kind decided to marry Elizabeth Woodville, a Lancastrian widow, in secret. This created an uproar throughout the kingdom, specially because, after the marriage, the queen's relatives were all over the place. Edward made sure that all her relations married well, in an attempt to create a nobility largely dependant on himself. But his own family was not at all happy, since most Woodvilles were also, by some or every family relation and loyalty, Lancastrians.
It is said that the estrangement between Edward and Warwick began when Warwick tried to marry his two daughters to Edward's two younger brothers, Richard and George.
The two of them were forced to decide between their brother and their cousin; Richard chose Edward, George chose Warwick. George married Warwick's older daughter in 1469. Warwick and George raised a rebellion with the help of exiled Lancastrians, including the wife of the deposed king Henry VI, ex-queen Margaret of Anjou, and her son, Prince Edward of Lancaster.
Edward and Richard were forced to flee the country, and the victorious Warwick put Henry VI back on the throne.
But in the winter, Edward and Richard came back to England; Edward was able to join another army, Richard persuaded George into a reconciliation. Warwick was defeated in the battle of Barnet, and Prince Edward of Lancaster was killed in the battle of Tewksbury. Henry VI was put in the Tower, where he died leaving no other descendants.
After the battle of Tewksbury, Richard was Constable and Admiral of England, and was sent to Scotland.
When Richard returned, he found out that his cousin Anne Neville was living with her sister Isabel, in the residence of his brother George of Clarence. George, it seems, wanted the vast amount of land and riches of the Neville family all for himself. Richard appealed to his brother Edward, who requested George to drop his claim on Anne's estate. After a long legal struggle, George and Richard settled their issues, and Richard married Anne Neville in 1472. They started living in Middleham Castle. She gave birth to a boy named Edward in 1473.
Richard was well known and loved in the city of York, where he established ten chapels and two colleges.
He is said to have been just, able with the law, and formidable at war. He is also praised by his brilliancy during the Scotland campaign, in 1481-82.
In 1478, George's wife Isabel died in childbirth. George accused one of the maids of poisoning her and the baby, and executed her soon afterwards.
The king considered that George had acted in a most hurried and unjust way, especially because he had subverted the king's justice. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death.
Richard tried to persuade Edward not to carry out the sentence, strongly enough for even Richard's detractors to narrate it. It wasn't enough, however, for George of Clarence was executed in the Tower of London in 1478.
After that, Richard remained in Middleham and rarely came to court.
In April, 1483, Edward died. He named in his testament Richard as Lord Protector of England, since Edward's oldest son was too young to govern on his own. The Woodvilles ignored the will and tried to take control of the young king. If they could crown young Edward before Richard came to London, his protectorship would lapse and the Woodvilles would govern the country.
Richard was notified of his brother's death by William Hastings, Edward IV's Lord Chamberlain and friend. Hastings also warned Richard of the conspiracy against him. Taking 100 men with him, Richard stopped at York where a requiem mass was said for the soul of his brother; he also led his men in an oath of fealty to his nephew and king. Richard, aided by his cousin, Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, caught up with the young king's escort at Stony Stratford. Richard arrested the Woodville conspirators, including the queen's brother, confiscated barrels of arms and armor and brought Edward V to London for his coronation.
Elizabeth Woodville, hearing of the news, fled into sanctuary with her other children. While in London, Richard discovered another plot against his life, this time led by William Hastings.
While Richard was preparing for his nephew's coronation, Robert Stillington, who had been the Chancellor of England twice under Edward IV, informed Richard that Edward V could not be legally crowned king. Stillington revealed that Edward had been betrothed to another woman when he married Elizabeth Woodville, making all of the royal children illegitimate.
With the untimely death of his brother, Edward IV in 1483, he was petitioned by the Lords and Commons of Parliament to accept the kingship of England.
On July 6 1483, Richard III was crowned.
His first and only Parliament was held during January and February of 1484. He passed the most enlightened laws on record for the Fifteenth Century.
He set up a council of advisors that diplomatically included Lancastrian supporters, administered justice for the poor as well as the rich, established a series of posting stations for royal messengers between the North and London. He fostered the importation of books and commanded laws to be written in English instead of Latin. He outlawed benevolences, started the system of bail and stopped the intimidation of juries.
He re-established the Council of the North in July of 1484 and it lasted for more than a century and a half. He established the College of Arms that still exists today. He donated money for the completion of St. George's Chapel at Windsor and King's College in Cambridge. He modernized Barnard Castle, built the great hall at Middleham and the great hall at Sudeley Castle. He undertook extensive work at Windsor Castle and ordered the renovation of apartments at one of the towers at Nottingham Castle.
In October of 1483, Richard learned that Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, had begun an uprising against him. The rebellion was not as successful as Buckingham had hoped; he was captured and executed for treason.
Richard's kingship was filled with personal tragedy: in 1484, while Anne and Richard were at Nottingham Castle, they received word that their son, Edward, who was at Middleham, died suddenly after a brief illness. Richard appointed his nephew, John De La Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as his new heir.
His wife, Anne, never recovered from the loss of her son, and died almost a year later. Her body was borne to Westminster Abbey and laid to rest on the south side of St. Edward's Chapel. Richard wept openly at her funeral and shut himself off for three days. In eighteen months, Richard lost his brother, son and wife.
A hostile chronicler reported that while Queen Anne was ailing, Richard hastened her death to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York.
Upon hearing the rumor, Richard sent Elizabeth away to join the household at Sheriff Hutton Castle where his other nieces and nephews lived. Then he gathered together the most influential men in London and publicly denounced the rumor.





The Battle of Bosworth
The unofficial heir to Lancaster was now Henry Tudor. Tudor was descended on his mother's side from John of Gaunt's illegitimate Beaufort children, and on his father's side from an unauthorized liaison between Henry V's widowed French queen, Katherine of Valois, and Owen Tudor, a Welsh esquire. With the backing of the French king, an army from France and the remnants of the Lancastrian army, they prepared to invade England in the summer of 1485. By May, Richard left London for the last time and journeyed to Windsor. His Knights and Esquires of his Household accompanied him. By the middle of June, he was at the centre of his realm at Nottingham Castle. He sent his niece, Elizabeth of York, along with her sisters, his nephews and his illegitimate son, John of Gloucester, to Sheriff Hutton. On the 11of August, a messenger brought news to Richard, who had been at Beskwood Lodge, that Henry Tudor had landed at Milford Haven in South Wales on Sunday, the 7th of August. Richard sent word to Northumberland, Brackenbury, Lovel and Norfolk to join him in Leicester.
On Friday, August 19th, Richard left Nottingham and traveled south toward the city of Leicester. On the 20th of August, Richard was in Leicester with his captains mustering his men. By late afternoon, he learned from his scouts that the army of Lord Stanley was at Stoke Golding. Henry Tudor and his men were at Atherstone. On Sunday, the 21st of August, Richard and his royal army left the city of Leicester. Richard and his commanders took their position on Ambion Hill at Bosworth Field. The Duke of Northumberland and Lords Thomas and William Stanley, along with their troops, waited out the start of the battle while the rest of Richard's army engaged Henry's exiles and French mercenaries. After Richard's commander, the Duke of Norfolk, was killed, Richard tried to win the conflict by a surprise charge at Tudor, before the waiting armies of the Stanley and Northumberland chose sides.
Richard led his household men against Tudor. Stanley's army moved, surrounding and killing Richard and the men of his Household. Northumberland and his army remained waiting on the sidelines and never engaged in battle to assist Richard.

Henry Tudor became Henry VII. He attempted to backdate his reign to the date before the battle in order to attaint for treason men who had fought for King Richard III. His reign was not the golden age his writers proclaimed. Rumors and Yorkist pretenders plagued his reign. Henry VII wanted to glorify the Tudors and justify his kingship. In the Tudor view of English history, the coming of Henry VII saved England from disorder, bloodshed and evil, as personified by the king Henry had defeated. Thus chroniclers and historians under Tudor began a campaign to blacken Richard's name and reputation.



"The Daughter of Time"
In the 1950's, Elisabeth MacKintosh decided that she should do something about Richard III's reputation. She already had a famous name in literature, writing mystery novels under the penname of Josephine Tey, and she wrote a book that is considered the beginning of the modern movement of restoring Richard's image.
Its title is taken from an "old proverb" not to be found in any dictionary of quotations -- "Truth is the daughter of time" -- and its central preoccupation is the theme suggested by that proverb: the elusiveness of historical truth. On its face the novel is a brief for Richard III's defense, but more deeply it is an inquiry into how history is written and for what purposes. The book is written as fiction and it explores the mystery and uncertainty and downright falsehood that too often are at the heart of our inquiries into the past.
The book is about a cop, Grant, who is trapped into a hospital with a broken leg, and decides to try to figure out what really happened to 'the two princes in the tower' (Richard's two nephews who disappeared and were believed to have been killed by him). Together with a young historian, Grant conducts the research as if he were conducting a police investigation. As soon as he finds out that Richard's main accuser wasn't even born when the events with the princes, and that there are no contemporary historians with a detached vision on the subject, he begins looking for other contemporary information: account books, lists, letters, and so on.
He is soon rewarded by the conclusion that there was no contemporary accusation. Nobody was talking about it at the time.
Grant and his historian friend had been sure that Henry VII had used this information (that Richard had done away with his two nephews) to acquire the throne.
They did find a document dated from after Henry's coronation accusing Richard 'only' of tyranny and cruelty. Grant reasons that if, at the time, the princes had been missing, Henry VII would certainly use this.
After that, they discover that Sir Thomas More had lived in Morton's household. Morton was a cardinal during Edward IV's reign.
In his time, Edward took a large bribe from Louis XI to make a dishonorable peace in France, and Richard washed his hands over the matter, and refused to receive the money himself. Morton was one of the most beneficiated by the deal, and actually got a pension from France. After that, he and Richard were not really the best of friends.
Morton was among those who plotted against Richard soon after Edward's death. Other conspirators were Lord Hastings (who was beheaded after a trial, and after Richard had granted Hasting's forfeited estates to his widow and restored his children's right of succession), and Lord Stanley, who was pardoned.
Lord Stanley married to Margaret Beaufort, whose son was no other than Henry VII. Stanley was also responsible for a large number of soldiers who changed sides in the Battle of Bosworth.
Grant also finds out that, according to contemporary archives, both princes were alive and well at the time of Henry VII's coronation.
Grant gets to the conclusion that Richard didn't kill any of those people that he was believed to have killed, and that the responsible for the specific deaths of the two princes was very likely Henry VII.
Richard didn't have any reason to kill the two boys, said Grant, because at the time he was crowned their illegitimacy had been 'approved' by the parliament. Also, there were at least three more heirs to the throne. If Richard had been trying to get his nephews 'out of his way', this would have done him no good at all.
Then there is the matter of Henry's coronation. After Richard's death, Henry tries to invalid his reign, saying that he had usurped the throne from his brother and so forth. He married Richard's niece, Elisabeth Woodville, to try to please the Yorkists and not cause another war, and to make that he proclaimed her legitimate again. By doing so, he had automatically made her brother, Edward V, king of England.
Contemporary historians do not deny that after his coronation, Henry VII started to 'do away with' all York possible claimers to the throne.
In any case, nothing is really proved nowadays. It is highly believed, however, that both princes were eliminated along with all their relatives in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII.
It was only after James I became king, ending the Tudor century, that historians began looking at Richard III without considering him a monster.























Conclusion
History is written by the winners.
During Henry VII's reign, and the following century when England was ruled by Tudors, Richard III was pictured as the worst of kings, hated by all his subjects, and deserving of defeat and death. He was accused, after his death, of several murders, including the ones of his nephews, and was, until the middle of the 20th century, regarded by every English person as a cruel, ambitious, deformed murderer. The Tudor historians had all the time in the world to praise Henry VII, independently of his real qualities, and to 'criticize' Richard.
Richard was the last of his dynasty, despised by the family of his predecessor and hated by his rivals. All literature of the time was devoted on Lancastrian or Yorkist marketing, and therefore were rendered extremely partial to either side, and afterwards, the Tudors were able to erase everything and start 'a new History', since most of the nobility was gone after the period of wars.
The book by Josephine Tey tells us of Tonypandy, that becomes the good humored way her characters find to talk about historical events that for some reason were afterwards altered. Throughout History, we loose count of how many characters, situations and decisions were made to be completely different from what they were originally, depending on the view of those who 'were there' and 'described' it at the time.
Fortunately, nowadays the study and teaching of History has taken a different approach on the subject, looking for contemporary, neutral sources to divulge facts who may influence and inspire more people than we can imagine.
Well, we shouldn't forget to do that to Richard III.



Bibliography
GAIRDNER, James - Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII - London, 1863 (at books.google.com)
HALSTAD, Caroline A. - Richard III as Duke of Gloucester and King of England - London, 1844 (at books.google.com)
TEY, Josephine - The Daughter of Time - New York, 1951
McDOWALL, D. - An Illustrated History of Britain

The Richard III Foundation - www.richard111.com
The Richard III Society - www.richardiii.net
www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/richardiii/
www.britannia.com/history/monarchs/mon39.html
www.washingtonpost.com/articles/josephinetey