Customer Reviews

Richard III and the Death of Chivalry

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I should mention first that I had this book before the fuller 2011 biography of Richard by Hipshon, and after rifling through this one for details that were new to me (a bad research habit, btw), I simply proceeded onto the 2011 biography. In retrospect, that was a mistake, for here, in this almost elegant study of chivalry and Richard the author was noticably relaxed, his prose delightful, wonderful summaries, insightful profiles of a particular person or event. One might even call his writing here to be winsome, he was in love with his topic, the WOTR, and perhaps Richard in general that it is a measure of his equilbirium that he never plays false in his quest - what is the truth? If he sometimes betrays a fascination with Richard he can't quite rationalize, or allows *Tudor to slip away again into the established mythology it doesn't mean that Hipshon isn't asking the right questions.

One of my key arguments with historians and writers of this period is an almost pathological fear of asking questions, postulating events from a different perspective to say the "authorities" like Vergil or More, who never met Richard much less anyone closely associated with him (and don't even start about Mancini, a more compromised "report" I cannot imagine). If you take events, and the tangled politics from the point well before Bosworth, perhaps even as far back as Richard II, then you can move forward, and just put aside, compartementalise into some backwater neural network what we think "we already know." The list of things we do NOT know about Edward IV, Richard III, or Henry VII is almost unnerving.

Having decided to go back and re-read this title I am quite pleased, Hipshon has a warm, delighted manner of a scholar who has a love for his work that is definitely missing in the 2011 biography of Richard. The only thing that has changed is not Richard, not even Hipshon, but a very public entry into official Ricardian analysis which must have unconsciously put him on notice to tread lightly, be careful, don't go off on all those questions you are just dying to investigate. The iron hand of the preferred academic THEORY on Richard triumphed, and I think at times it cost Hipshon alot to bow to the official pressure. His is a fine and open mind, he deserved to trust his own gut and instincts better.

Read this one, and regardless whether or not the Stanley feud with the Harringtons would have been enough to bring down a king, and not the moral lapses we are usually fed, be very pleased that here, at least, Hipshon dares to question the status quo, dares to think for himself. The answers can elude us, or play tricks on us, and in the end, all we really can do is question, and entice others to do so as well. But for me it is enough, until we get the questions out there in the open then real research won't be coming.

* My little quibbles include the point that Henry VII was capable of "forgiving disloyalty" - I find this almost eye-popping. Tell that to the pathetic Edward of Warwick, a child of ten that Henry threw into the Tower before his own coronation, and then left there in utter neglect, to rot for 14 years before gutlessly executing him to pacify Katherine of Aragon's parents. What disloyalty had Warwick committed to warrant years of abject neglect did its corrosive work? Another small quibble is the idea that Richard was any different than his peers where notions of chivalry are concerned. He may have been particularly sensitive to that "antique, old-fashioned, somewhat romantic concept of chivalry" - but was he any different from Henry who actually named his first son and heir, ARTHUR?