A thoroughly decent political biography of Richard III, though fairly dry and quite repetitive in places. I learned a great deal, anyway, and that would have been more than enough. ( )

Professor Hicks is professor of history at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He has written extensively on Yorkist history, though as ever with this period in particular, his expertise will be challenged by some. This is one of the standard works on Richard III. The author considers both sides of the key arguments and makes strenuous efforts to consider in a balanced way how people would have viewed Richard's actions and possible intentions at the time. While a lot of evidence postdates Richard's fall and can to some extent be viewed as victors' evidence (though not generally as the crude Tudor propaganda that Ricardians would rationalise it), the chronicle by the Italian merchant Mancini who wrote as he saw events and talked to people throughout the early months of 1483 is a valuable source of contemporary testimony, though of course it should be, and is here, critically assessed as should any other primary source.

I think Hicks's conclusions are largely valid and evidence based. My problem is more with his writing style, which tends to be rather dry. This is especially the case in the first chapter on the background to England of the time and the nature of Medieval kingship, which is too long and verges on being padding; and to some extent the same fault is present in the second chapter on Richard's career before King Edward IV's death, with quite a lot of great detail on estates gained and lost, property disputes and so on, though I accept this is a valid part of the narrative. As one would expect, it is when he gets to the meat of the story, Richard's taking over the throne, that the book becomes more readable. He sets out the case for the prosecution and the case for the defence quite cogently and enlarges on these in subsequent chapters on Buckingham's and other rebellions against Richard, and on the latter's downfall and blackening in the eyes of future generations.

My own views on the "Great Debate" as Ricardians term it, have been formed through reading a number of books as well as this one, including a few years ago Paul Murray Kendall's elegantly written defence of Richard, Richard III: The Great Debate.

I do not think Richard is the totally evil black-hearted villain of Shakespeare (though all educated people should know that Shakespeare's interpretation of history should be seen in the light of his own contemporary interpretations and sources, anyway). Nor do I believe that he was the wholly misunderstand hero of Ricardian tradition. On the positive side, he was an able administrator, genuinely thought of with affection in the north; while no doubt exaggerating the faults and corruption of Edward IV's rule in order to justify his usurpation, he does seem to have had a genuine concern with justice for the common man (interestingly this is also a trait of that other maligned monarch, King John); and he was capable of inspiring great loyalty among some of his followers, though also alienating others who were prepared to support him as Lord Protector so long as he pledged loyalty to Edward V, but not to support him when he took the throne for himself. On the negative side earlier in his life, he does seem to have been avaricious in gaining lands and wealth for himself, somewhat more so than most of his contemporaries, though no doubt many others were very similar.

Richard pledged loyalty to Edward V after his brother's death, but took the young King into custody, allegedly for his own protection against plots. When young Edward's brother Richard, Duke of York, was similarly taken, Richard of Gloucester held all the cards. The frequent postponing of the date for young Edward's coronation also stretches the interpretation of "protection". No doubt the Woodvilles would have wanted influence over the young King also, but evidence of active plotting seems fairly tenuous. It is in the sudden announcement of the discovery of Edward IV's pre-contract of marriage, thus meaning his marriage was adulterous and the young Princes therefore bastards, that credulity surely stretches breaking point. Why now? The coincidence of its being convenient to Richard is of course theoretically possible, but surely one must assess this claim on the balance of probability and a sober assessment of who had most to gain from this. And even if it were true that Edward's 20 year marriage was canonically suspect, could those years of history really have been rewritten in practice? Ricardians have attempted to interpret earlier events such as the downfall of Clarence and Richard's summary execution of Hastings as being connected with evidence about this alleged pre-contract, but this surely smacks of speculating in order to make history fit one's preferred theory.

On the most controversial issue in question, I believe that, on the balance of probability, he very likely did murder his nephews. Ricardians often argue that his guilt would not stand up in a modern court of law where the standard of proof is "beyond reasonable doubt". This is true, but it misses the point. That rigorous standard cannot really apply to events of 500 years ago where modern means of gathering and recording evidence cannot possibly apply. The key point to me is that the Princes disappeared within the Tower of London after Richard had put them there and seized the throne. They were never heard of again. Now there is a possibility of Buckingham's having killed them or ordered their deaths, without Richard's connivance, as Kendall argues. But the chance of someone having got into the Tower to kill them on Henry Tudor's or someone else's behalf is slim, and the chance of their still being alive in the Tower for over 2 years without trace, only to be killed by Henry on his accession is too remote to be worthy of serious consideration. The revelation of the Princes' disappearance and probable death was the spark for a rebellion of much of the southern Yorkist establishment in late summer as well as that of Buckingham, so people believed they were dead and Richard never showed them in order to disprove it. He faced widespread opposition very quickly and so, guilty or not his regime never survived long enough for a more balanced assessment of these issues and his rule in general could be made feasible.

So, in conclusion, I don't believe that Richard's reputation should be significantly re-evaluated. He should be seen more as a figure of his own time than he often is and not be regarded as a one-dimensional black-hearted villain. He had his good points, as did King John. I believe him to be innocent of some of the other accusations of which he has been charged such as killing Henry VI, poisoning his own wife Anne Neville, and scheming to marry his own niece Elizabeth of York to deprive Henry of that chance and give himself a male heir, his only legitimate son having died young. Though even on the latter point, the scheming was widely believed at the time, so that he had to publicly deny any plan to marry his niece, a fortnight after his wife's death. So his reputation was very low even at the time; his poor historical reputation is certainly not all down to Tudor exaggeration or propaganda, and must surely substantially, though not entirely, be justified by how his actions were seen and interpreted by his contemporaries. 4/5 ( )

This revised edition cut away its former subtitle "The Man Behind the Myth" which captured very well the intent and focus of the book. It is not a complete biography of Richard III but an examination of the different myths surrounding him, although, vexingly, most of these myths cannot be resolved. Some of the gross misconceptions and slanders, such as a two-year pregnancy of his mother, can be dismissed. Supposedly easily answerable questions, such as about whether he was hunchbacked or not, cannot. Unfortunately, his bones have been lost when his grave was disturbed, so genetics is of no help. Thus, as in most things Ricardian, one ends up with "on the one hand", "on the other hand". I found this book a good introduction to many of these issues. Plenty of illustrations help to recreate the era, the man and his (mis)deeds. ( )

In this book, Michael Hicks gives us a carefully reasoned and plausible scenario by which Richard III may have been plotting to seize that throne as soon as he heard of his brother Edward IV's death. I think there are some overlooked facts that cast doubt on his conclusions, but it is certainly worth serious consideration. Hicks makes the pertinent point that what people believed can be more important than what actually happened. He also does an excellent defense of Mancini as a source, pointing out that although he spoke no English, he and most educated Europeans spoke Latin, so his sources extended beyond Italian speakers.

And then Hicks says the thing most likely to cause me to question his judgment: "And indeed he was the dissimilator and manipulator and propagandist presented by More and Shakespeare." Hicks even has a picture of Anthony Sher's portrayal of Shakespeare's image, presumably the Richard that he prefers. Similarly, Desmond Steward says in his book, Richard III The Black Legend that he once had a more positive view of Richard, but in the end was unable to bear up under the strain of contradicting More and Shakespeare. And James Gairdner was at one point reduced to arguing in his biography that we must give weight to tradition, even if the facts don't seem to entirely support it. Indeed one of the claims of the Ricardians is that conventional historians are mesmerized by More and Shakespeare, and intent upon defending an orthodoxy about monstrous Richard. I am not convinced whether or not Richard was a usurper, or murdered his nephews, but I think that historians have done a bad job, and have been forced to reconsider only very reluctantly by the pressure of his defenders.

Shakespeare is a dramatist, and his works are not historically reliable, beginning with have Richard fighting battles and advising his father when he was less than eight years old. More is problematic: his account of Richard III has a number of errors in fact ranging from getting people's ages wrong to howlers like arguing that Richard's mother was pregnant with him for two years (Hicks at least admits that is wrong). Hicks tries to salvage More's anecdote about Richard claiming that his infirmities were due to sorcery. The problem is that Richard's acknowledged defect is uneven shoulders. More's story claims that he complained about a withered arm; what renders More ridiculous is that he claims that Richard's arm was well known to have been withered from birth. [Since the discovery of Ricjard's body, we now know that he did not have a withered arm.] In short, Richard, who is well known to have been a competent soldier, is supposed to have been able to fight while being a hunch-back with only one functional arm. When questions are raised about More's reliability as a historical source, the argument is subtly changed to a defense of his reputation. But in the end, it doesn't matter whether he is wrong because he didn't have time to revise, or because he was a propagandist, or because his intentions were literary, the operative word remains wrong. Part of his work, like his account of the the princes' death, cannot be checked and cannot be assumed to be right or wrong. More's story also suffers from what I call the Obvious Problem. If it is obvious to us that some of the people More knew might have information about what happened to the princes, why wasn't it obvious to Henry VII and his advisors? Why would people have stonewalled Henry VII and babbled all they knew to More?

Hicks, in much of his work, has had a tendency to excoriate Richard as a vicious, ruthless, conniver, and then admit, openly or covertly, that actually, he was pretty typical as a member of his class. As an example, I quote from my review of his biography of Anne Neville: " He makes provocative statements such as: "One must moreover deplore the immorality of the match. A custodial sentence and registration would result today for any man like Duke Richard [then 19] guilty of having sexual intercourse with a fifteen-year-old girl, but fifteenth century standards permitted such relations and indeed regarded them as normal and legitimate." [p.130] That's certainly having it both ways! Hicks has already told us, without any evidence of disapproval, that Margaret Beaufort was married at 12 [her husband was about 25] and a mother at 14. Anne was a already a widow before she married Richard: at 14 she perhaps had a consummated marriage with 17-year-old Edward of Lancaster. (Historians disagree on whether or not it was consummated) It certainly wasn't necessary to tell us again that early marriage was common; Hicks apparently just wanted to associate Richard, and only Richard, with sex offenses."

A number of historians, such as Pollard in his generally excellent Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, have made similar remarks about Richard's venality in marrying a woman for her inheritance, as if that were not the usual procedure for their class in that time, and as if he was a guttersnipe. Anne Neville was in fact the widow of a prince of the losing side of the civil war, an unwanted claimant to an inheritance living under the control of her brother-in-law who wanted all settled in its entirety on his own wife. By marrying Richard and having him secure her share in her parents' lands, they became a powerful and wealthy couple, one of the highest ranking in the country, and she has the chance to rule her own household and hope for children.

Perhaps Hicks would justify himself on the grounds that some Ricardians have romanticized Richard, to the point of arguing that he married only for love, or that he didn't demand his wife's inheritance. But if that is so, the book should be on record as being a polemic, not presented as an ordinary balanced history.

So, perhaps surprisingly, I do recommend this book, with reservations. It is certainly better than some of Hicks's other efforts. I like that Hicks, unlike Giles St. Aubyns in The Years of Three Kings, and other authors, considers that propaganda against Richard began before 1485. Some parts are carefully reasoned and his conclusions fully supported. Other times, he is just making unsupported claims. So read it carefully, but if the reader is interested in this period, do read it.

Added later: On 24 August 2012, University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society announced that they had joined forces to begin a search for the remains of King Richard. On September 12, 2012, the body of an adult male with multiple wounds was found beneath the the site of the destroyed Grey Friars Church. On 4 February 2013, based on DNA and other evidence, it was announced that the skeleton was almost certainly that of Richard III. The body showed that he suffered from scoliosis, but was not a hunchback. He was described as a "crookback," which has been interpreted as meaning a hunchback, but perhaps it could also be applied to scoliosis. He definitely did not have the "withered arm" that More attributed to him. He was interred in Leicester Cathedral 26 March 2016. ( )

Richard III was the last Plantagent and the last medieval king of England. He reigned only two years and was killed on Bosworth Field by rebellious forces lead by Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who established the Tudor Dynasty and brought an end to England's long dynastyic civil war known to History under the romantic epithet the War of the Roses. In order to secure their tenuous claim to the throne, Richard's character was blackened until that he has entered the popular imagination as Shakespeare's hunchbacked arch villain.
Was Richard III a tyrant? Was he deformed? Did he have his nephews murdered in the Tower of London? Or was he a hard pressed monarch, surrounded by treacherous and envious plotters, and forced to take drastic action to prevent a return to civil strife?
In Michael Hicks's biography of Richard III and his era, the Duke of Gloucester emerges not as the dastardly villain nor as one more sinned against than sinning, but as a legitimate claimant to the throne who attempted to keep his factious kingdom together by whatever means necessary.
Hicks does a masterful job of bringing late Medieval England to life and sorting out to complex web of alliances and betrayals among the nobility who sided with the Lancastrian and Yorkist claimants to the monarchy. Nicely illustrated throughout. ( )