RICHARD III: 'NEW' EVIDENCE

Sir George Buck's life of Richard is being republished. Does it change anything?

Sir George Buck was a man of many parts. Born in or just before 1560, he was Cambridge scholar, a Middle Temple lawyer, a foreign ambassador, an MP. He fought the Spanish Armanda and he was a courtier to Elizabeth I and James VI/I.

Under the latter he was appointed Master of Revels, which meant he got to organise everything from bear baiting to line dancing. He was effectively England and Scotland’s chief censor, making sure that plays (including Shakespeare’s) were fit for public consumption.

Buck was also an antiquarian and a writer, whose knew his way around most of the subjects considered the pillars of a late sixteenth-century education - grammar, rhetoric, music, philosophy, etc. He wrote poetry. He composed mimes. He made quite a lot of money.

But Buck’s keenest interests were in genealogy and history, and his favourite topic - for which he is still known today by those who take an interest in such things - was the reign of Richard III. Buck discovered several manuscripts still very useful for students of Yorkist history, including the Croyland Abbey Chronicle continuation and Titulus Regius, the legal document on which Richard’s legal claim to the throne was based.

Buck’s book, The History of King Richard the Third, which he began in 1619 and never finished, is the founding text of Ricardianism.

It laid out the basis of the case in favour of Richard’s kingship: that his claim was sound in law, and that he played a blinder in his short time as king. Good monarch, nice poor laws, etc.

Buck also invented the Ricardian defence strategy: querying the quality of each single item of evidence against Richard, and subjecting the historical case to a stringent legal standard.

This week, it was announced that Buck’s book, or rather, a version edited by the late Arthur Kincaid, founder of the American branch of the Richard III Society, is to be republished by the Society of Antiquaries.

This news was reported with interest by mainstream newspapers, including The Times and The Daily Mail. Unsurprisingly, the reports got quite a lot arse-about-tit. Even less surprisingly, one report implied that this was somehow ‘lost’ evidence, which would undermine Shakespeare, rewrite history etc etc.

The republication of Kincaid’s edition of Buck is A Good Thing. It’s hard to get hold of a cheap copy of the original 1979 edition - mine cost me more than £100.

But the big question is - does it change anything?

The short answer: no.

I said above that Buck was a man of many parts. The part I did not mention was that he was a partisan. And he was a particular partisan when it came to Richard III.

Buck’s super-achieving career ought to give us a clue why. What would drive a man to do so much in a relatively short life? (Buck died, insane, in 1622, aged around 62.)

One answer would be ‘preternatural talent and a will to achieve and succeed’. Well, it seems Buck had those. But, just as importantly, he had a chip on his shoulder.

Why? Because in 1485 the Buck family had suffered a great indignity.

Buck’s great-grandfather, John Buck, had fought for Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. Needless to say, that didn’t go so well. And the Bucks had paid the price. Here’s the parliament record for Henry VII’s first parliament, held in November 1485, which concerned itself heavily with mopping up the mess. For ending up on the losing side at Bosworth, Buck (and a couple of dozen other Richard loyalists):

shall stand and be convicted and attainted of high treason, and disabled and dispossessed of all honour, estate, dignity and pre-eminence, and the names of the same, and forfeit to our said sovereign lord and his heirs all the castles, manors, lordships, hundreds, franchises, liberties, privileges, advowsons, nominations, presentations, lands, tenements, rents, services, reversions, portions, annuities, pensions, rights, hereditaments, goods, chattels and debts, of which they, or anyone else to their use, or to the use of any of them, were seised or possessed on the said 21 August or at any time since, within the realm of England, Ireland, Wales or Calais, or their marches…

Translation: Buck was condemned as a traitor and attainted.

All the family’s property was confiscated. They were ruined - and would have remained so were it not for the patronage of a greater aristocratic family, the Howard earls of Surrey (subsequently dukes of Norfolk).

John Howard, 1st duke of Norfolk, had also been on the losing side at Bosworth: he commanded the vanguard, but was killed, supposedly fighting one-on-one with a knight called Sir John Savage.

Both the Howards and the Bucks eventually made it back to their own versions of the big time. But noble memories are long, and grudges are passed down the generations like with titles and genetic defects. Buck’s interest in Richard III was by no means unbiased. His purpose in writing about the king was to argue for the validity of a cause his own ancestor had believed in, suffered for and died in the pursuit of.

He dedicated his Life of Richard to Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel: a direct descendant of the 1st duke who died at Bosworth.

There you go, it suggests. We were right all along.

So here is an irony. Buck is today lauded for his sober lawyerly analysis of evidence by those who see him as the first man to whom the truth of Ricardianism was revealed. His approach - an isolating approach to every piece of evidence, a repetitious and earnest dedication to methodically developing his case - is that shared by most high-profile Ricardians today.

(It is the approach that underpins the plot of The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, in which a copper, rather than a lawyer, does the evidence sifting.)

Yet let us remember this: lawyers are not scientists.

Lawyers are the most partisan analysts on earth. (They are rivalled only by sports fans.) The job of the lawyer is not to amass all the evidence, review it without bias and come to a reasoned and balanced conclusion.

It is the opposite.

The job of a lawyer is to start with a desired outcome and arrange every single piece of evidence in the best light and best order to construct a story that leads to the desired conclusion - and then to claim that this is the only fair and logical interpretation of the evidence.

If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.

So Buck - lawyer, censor, rhetorician - was in fact the last person he himself would have trusted to give unbiased evidence about Richard III. He just happened to be on what he considered the right side of history.

Which brings us back to the republication of his work. Kincaid’s edition of Buck’s biography of Richard is an important text. A seventeenth-century edition of Buck’s book grossly distorted the original; Kincaid pieced it back together. It’s a valuable item on the shelf of anyone interested in the late fifteenth century, and just because it was written by a raging partisan of the Ricardian cause does not mean it is not a useful document.

But what it doesn’t do in the slightest is change anything we already know about Richard III.

The case remains as it always was.

Richard was a hard-headed, pragmatic politician, who made the wrong-but-probably-only-possible call in 1483, got himself into an increasingly horrible series of pickles, mostly stemming from that bad call, which required ever-bloodier and more drastic action. He tried to govern according to some enlightened principles, but to concentrate on the quality of his poor laws and hope that this mitigates his blatantly unjust usurpation and probable responsibility for the murders of his rival candidates for the crown is to admire the Amazon rainforest logger for sipping his coffee through a paper straw.

Richard lived by the sword, he died by the sword, and he left a decidedly wonky corpse.

And yes, all of the above could be altered by the discovery of some new evidence about Richard’s reign. But a republished version of Buck’s Life ain’t it.

No matter how hard we try and spin it.