Richard III:
A Thoroughly Modern Man?

By Sandra Worth

If Helen’s beauty launched a thousand ships, Richard III’s charisma can be said to have launched an armada of books. My own interest in Richard III began one rainy afternoon in London when I encountered his portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. Like Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant in Daughter of Time, I found myself intrigued by the gentle face that belied any hint of villainy. That day marked the beginning of my odyssey in search of the real Richard III and at the end of the road, after what has proven to be a long, and in many ways a remarkable journey of discovery, what I have found most fascinating is Richard’s ability to connect with a wide variety of diverse modern Ricardians half a millennium removed from his world. His ability to resonate with our innermost being and our reality, so that we actually feel we know him as a person, as a friend, as someone we can relate to, not just some awesome historical figure half-hidden by the thick mists of Time is a truly remarkable phenomena that bears closer examination.

Statue of Richard III, Middleham Castle
click on image to enlarge

We are all familiar with the fascinating elements of Richard’s life: From the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, to his Romeo and Juliet love story with Anne Neville, to the Cain and Abel aspect of his relationship with his brother George, his story is imbued with myth. In discussing his classic, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the late Professor Joseph Campbell said:

“Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance, and what we human beings have in common is revealed in myths. We all need to tell our story, and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to life, and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, and to understand the mysterious.”

In this sense Richard’s appeal is clear. His story is one of suffering, of striving, of living, and of noble self-sacrifice. We can all relate to that, but the way we relate to Richard as a human being transcends time and space, and is remarkably personal. How is this possible with an historical figure that lived in such a totally different time, who thought so differently from us, and who spoke in such a way that we moderns might barely recognize his language as our own today? After ten years of researching Richard’s story, I finally fathomed the surprising facet that had escaped my notice for much of that time, and the answer is at once simple and confounding: It lies in Richard’s modernity. In many ways, Richard III conflicted with the age he lived in. This conflict ultimately contributed to his doom, but it is this conflict that binds us so closely to him.

The feudal age was in itself a time of contradictions. In this tumultuous period of war and uncertainty, betrayal and treason had become commonplace, yet men also revered the idealism and lofty values of King Arthur’s court. It was Richard’s era that presided over the birth of Sir Thomas Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, in no small measure because the age itself reflected, in many ways, the good and the bad of King Arthur’s colorful time. Throughout history mythical heroes have stirred man’s imagination and yearning for a kinder world, and inspired by such heroes as Homer’s Hector, Mallory’s Arthur, and Tolkien’s Aragorn, real men have shaped our world by the force of their own blood. Like King Arthur, King Richard fought the darkness of his world by serving the cause of justice and using his strength to help the weak.

In Richard’s time inequality was considered ordained by God. The poor were seen as non-persons—in other words, they were invisible. While charity has existed as long as Man and charitable folk in that period tried their best to alleviate the misery of the poor around them, most people were concerned mainly with their own survival. Those on the higher rung of the social ladder who could best afford to be generous tended to look upward, to where more power and riches lay, rather than downward, to the pit of hunger and human misery. In this, the feudal age shares obvious similarities with our own. The Woodvilles who provide a blazing example of lawless greed and ambition in the fifteenth century compare vividly to modern corporate leaders such as those of Enron, World Com and Global Crossing who exemplify the greed and corruption representing the worst of today. But in our modern world, we have a system of laws for dealing with such flagrant abuse of power. Violators do get stopped and eventually punished. In the fifteenth century, no limitations were placed on those in power, except by the king. Since abuse of the law was tolerated, law alone could not be used to serve justice. Abuse by the powerful could only be checked by the more powerful.

In the fifteenth century, the Woodvilles were checkmated by Richard III. We can relate to him as he dealt with the Woodvilles because he represents our entire modern system of laws—he was judge, jury, and executioner on behalf of justice in a feudal age. If we had only this to cheer from our modern stalls, in all likelihood Richard would not claim our hearts and imagination as completely as he does. A stronger bond binds Richard the feudal lord to us, the democratic modern thinker—this feudal king saw his world with modern eyes and acted as a catalyst of change on his age.

In sharp contrast to feudalism, democracy sees everyone as equal in the eyes of God, and therefore equal before the law. On the day Richard accepted the Crown, he summoned before him all his lawyers and judges and ordered that justice be dispensed without regard to a man’s position in society. Everyone, no matter how lowly, was to be seen as equal in the eyes of the law. With a wave of the scepter, Richard III proclaimed in essence that justice should be blind, thus setting the feudal age firmly on its course to modern western democracy and altering man’s vision of his place in the universe.

During the two brief years of his reign, Richard fine-tuned his legacy. When he took the throne, juries were packed with itinerants and verdicts were routinely bought and sold. The outcome of any jury deliberation was therefore determined by a man’s power and wealth. Richard curtailed much of the corruption by enacting statutes against bribery and tainted verdicts and demanding that all members of a jury be of good repute. At great cost to himself, he took power from the nobles, and gave it to the common man. Though the poor could do nothing for him, he cared enough to do what he could for them and he knowingly compromised his base of political support to bring them justice. On that first day of his reign, Richard III leapt forward three hundred years in time to hand a critical precept to the Founding Fathers, and from America the legal concepts that underpin our democratic system eventually spread across the entire civilized world.

Law is not the only area in which we find ourselves sharing similar values with Richard. Even in his personal life he broke the feudal norm to unite with us moderns. In the fifteenth century noblewomen maintained their own households and children were sent away at an early age to be educated in other noble households. Yet Richard’s mother-in-law lived with him at Middleham Castle, as did all three of his children. Some will argue that Anne Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick, could afford no other option since Richard’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, had stolen her wealth and turned her into a pauper. No doubt if Richard had not wished her to live with them—had the countess proven as onerous a burden on him as some modern mother-in-laws are known to be on their families—he would have found another castle for her far away and paid to keep her there. The fact that he didn’t means that financial need did not dictate their living arrangement, and that it came about as a mutually amiable agreement.

Middleham Castle, Yorkshire
click on image to enlarge

Some may argue that Richard’s son Edward was sickly and this is the reason we find him living with his parents past the age he would have normally been sent away to learn knightly training. Since the same cannot be said of Richard’s bastard son, John of Gloucester, and his bastard daughter, Katherine, who lived with him, this argument falls apart. Neither John of Gloucester nor Katherine was known to be fragile in health, and indeed it would be extraordinary if all three children had been. In fact, what little information has survived of John of Gloucester indicates that he was a hardy young fellow. It would seem then that Richard, like any modern parent, preferred to raise his own children rather than have someone else do so. When one considers that he also took in his young nephew Edward, Clarence’s son, and John of Montague’s son, George Neville, after they were orphaned, the picture that emerges is of one large happy family of grandparent, parents, and five young ones, all living together under one roof. It is a truly remarkable modern touch, quite out of kilter with the feudal way of life.

Richard’s modernity does not end here. In an age when Jews were persecuted, he was the first king to raise a Jew to England’s knighthood. Sir Edward Brampton, a Portuguese Jew, had converted to Christianity and taken the name of his benefactor, Edward IV. Brampton served King Edward with distinction for over twenty years, yet Edward did not see fit to confer a knighthood on him. Richard, with his passion for justice and fairness, lost no time creating Edward Brampton a knight once he took the throne. Clearly, he believed in rewarding merit without regard to race, creed or the usual feudal considerations. This morally courageous act diverged from feudal thinking and no doubt caused a flurry of criticism in its time, but it makes sense to us in today’s world because it conforms to modern ideas of what is right.

In such ways, large and small, Richard the feudal lord displayed his modernity. We connect with him because his ideas resonate with us. He may have lived in a feudal age, but he thought like one of us. Across the divide of five centuries, we feel his relevance to our lives. He fits in. He saw the shortcomings of the feudal world in which he lived and did his best to change what he could. His views, which he had the courage to translate into law, gave us the legal concepts on which our democracy is based. Over time, his gift of laws flowered to give us a more equitable world and to lighten our life. The tragedy of King Richard III is that so few of us living today know what we owe him.

i. Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, p.5

Return to the Articles about Richard III index.

Richard III: A Thoroughly Modern Man?

Richard III:
A Thoroughly Modern Man?