A Radical Richard III?

by Matthew Lewis

The December 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine has a striking image of Richard III dominating the cover with an eye catching strapline. This was promoting the issue’s lead article by Matthew Lewis that puts forward a very positive interpretation of Richard III’s kingship. We asked Matthew to give us some background to the article and what he hoped to achieve by it.

I spent most of December 2020 walking up and down magazine aisles in any shop or supermarket I had reason to visit. If it hadn’t been for Covid-19 restrictions, I’d probably have devoted more time to making trips out for no good reason. I couldn’t resist taking repeated peeks at the cover of BBC History Magazine wherever I could see it. Richard III gleamed back every time with the strapline ‘The Radical Richard III’ proudly stamped beside him. Fortunately each time I checked, it was both real and unchanged.

On several occasions I had offered to write something on Richard III for the magazine, and I recently wrote a piece on ‘The Anarchy’, but wondered whether my Ricardian views were not mainstream enough. In the wake of the piece on Stephen and Matilda, the editor agreed to commission an article on Richard’s parliament and his policies. After I picked myself up off the floor, I was hit by a sense of panic that I needed to get this right and insulate it from criticism with simple facts.

The core of the article was something I wrote for the Bulletin in 2020 about Richard’s parliament, which I developed to look at his social agenda. I drew on examples from his time in the north as far back as 1472 to try and demonstrate a core, unbroken thread to his convictions and interests that did not change in 1483 when he became King. The parliament of 1484 is often viewed as a desperate bid for popularity, but I sought to argue that it was actually the very opposite. It diminished the powers of the nobility and gentry, closing down avenues of corrupt practice that both made them rich and kept them powerful. Richard’s policies were concerned for the common man, and in 1484, that was not a section of society with the power to make or break kings. Those with that weight were deliberately shunned and disadvantaged by Richard’s policies.

By connecting these interests back through more than a decade, I hoped to demonstrate that he had not radically altered during the course of the momentous events of 1483. In part, I think it is possible to argue that if his political and social priorities remained unaltered, then it is equally possible that his personality did too, and at no point before 1483 was he considered a vicious murderer without care for the process of law. Edward IV bent and twisted the law when it suited him, and on occasions Richard benefitted from that, but some of his actions in 1483-4 set about undoing Edward’s inequitable tinkering. He gave John Howard the dukedom of Norfolk that Edward had diverted to his own son, and withdrew grants to the daughter of his deceased sister Anne which should never have been made. Equity was, I think, a byword for Richard.

I hoped that this article would offer a foundation on which to build. For a publication like BBC History Magazine to commission a positive article reassessing Richard III was a big step for me. When they asked me to add detail and increase the wordcount, I thought it was another positive move. BBC History Magazine run all their articles past a fact checker, and three queries came back, all seeking to fatally undermine the core assertions of the article. One was that Richard had tried to raise a benevolence before parliament opened but had been refused by parliament and forced to outlaw them. I pushed back on all three queries and requested evidence, and all of them were dropped. Benevolences were a form of taxation designed to circumvent parliament, and therefore scrutiny, so parliamentary assent to to a benevolence would not have been required even if Richard had tried to raise one.

When my copy of the magazine arrived, I was completely blown away to see Richard on the front cover. I had no idea that they planned to run it as the lead article in the issue. I hope this piece will be a good start to taking positive interpretations of Richard III into the mainstream. I firmly believe that for many of those taking the field against Richard at Bosworth, his social agenda and legal reforms drove them much more than the potential fates of Edward IV’s sons. They benefitted from the status quo, and Richard sought to change it. If I’m right, the experiment failed and cost Richard his crown and his life, but there is something admirable in being so fair it upsets people. I’ll be interested to see if there is any feedback on the article amongst letters in the next issue. I’m braced for a backlash, a danger inherent in saying anything positive about Richard, but I think readers would struggle to argue with the facts that underpin the ideas. Hopefully it’s a small step in the right direction.

This article first appeared in The Ricardian Bulletin, March 2021.