All reviews copyright 1984-2026 Evelyn C. Leeper.
A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES by Winston S. Churchill:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/19/2016]
I finally got around to reading the four-volume A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES (THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN, THE NEW WORLD, THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, THE NEW DEMOCRACIES) by Winston S. Churchill ISBN 978-0-880-29427-0).
[Here I am including only the section on Richard III. See churchill.htm#englishspeaking for the full commentary.]
Not surprisingly, Churchill weighs in on the Richard III controversy: saint or devil? Churchill begins by admitting that Sir Thomas More's account was completely biased against Richard and for the Tudors (who were, after all, usurpers by any reasonable standard):
"Sir Thomas More late in the next reign wrote his celebrated history. His book was based of course on information given him under the new and strongly established regime. His object seems to have been less to compose a factual narrative than a moralistic drama. In it Richard is evil incarnate, and Henry Tudor, the deliverer of the kingdom, all sweetness and light. The opposite view would have been treason. Not only is every possible crime attributed by More to Richard, and some impossible ones, but he is presented as a physical monster, crookbacked and withered of arm. No one in his lifetime seems to have remarked these deformities, but they are now very familiar to us through Shakespeare's play."
And of course Shakespeare also wrote under the Tudors. So Churchill admits More is untrustworthy, and that the physical characteristics attributed to Richard were at best overstated, if not entirely fictitious. (The recent discovery of Richard's skeleton indicates that there was at least some deformity, but the X-rays they show of Richard's spine look a lot like those of mine with its scoliosis, and I am not quite the deformed monster Richard is described as.)
But after acknowledging all this, Churchill goes on to say, "Needless to say, as soon as the Tudor dynasty was laid to rest defenders of Richard fell to work, and they have been increasingly busy ever since. More's tale however has priority." In order words, we know we cannot trust More, but we have no other account, so we will accept his. Churchill then recounts the June 13 Tower scene as told by More as if it is fact.
Churchill claims that after the second Prince was moved to the Tower, "neither he nor his brother was ever to leave [it] again." It is not clear what his source is for this.
He also admits (as far as I can tell) that Edward IV does seem to have been married to someone (either Elizabeth Lucy or Eleanor Butler) before his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, which means that if Richard III did claim Edward IV's children by Elizabeth Woodville were bastards, he was right.
Churchill claims:
"It is contended by the defenders of King Richard that the Tudor version of these events has prevailed. But the English people who lived at the time and learned of the events day by day formed their convictions two years before the Tudors gained power, or were indeed a prominent factor. Richard III held the authority of government. He told his own story with what facilities were available, and he was spontaneously and almost universally disbelieved. Indeed, no fact stands forth more unchallengeable than that the overwhelming majority of the nation was convinced that Richard had used his power as Protector to usurp the crown and that the princes had disappeared in the Tower. It will take many ingenious books to raise this issue to the dignity of a historical controversy."
Of course, he does not provide specific citations for his claims. THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN was published a few years after Josephine Tey's THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, so all this is probably somewhat in response to this. (That Churchill had not read THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, which discussed at length his role in the Tonypandy riots, does not bear consideration.)
Churchill also writes:
"It is certain that the helpless children in the Tower were not seen again after the month of July 1483. Yet we are invited by some to believe that they languished in captivity, unnoticed and unrecorded, for another two years, only to be done to death by Henry Tudor. According to Sir Thomas More's story, Richard resolved in July to extirpate the menace to his peace and sovereignty presented by the princes."
Back to the unreliable More again.
He then writes:
"In the reign of Charles II, when in 1674 the staircase leading to the chapel in the White Tower was altered, the skeletons of two young lads, whose apparent ages fitted the two princes, were found buried under a mass of rubble. They were examined by the royal surgeon, and the antiquaries reported that they were undoubtedly the remains of Edward V and the Duke of York. Charles accepted this view, and the skeletons were reburied in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster with a Latin inscription laying all blame upon their perfidious uncle, "the usurper of the realm". This has not prevented various writers, among whom Horace Walpole is notable, from endeavouring to clear Richard of the crime, or from attempting to cast it, without any evidence beyond conjecture, upon Henry VII. However, in our own time an exhumation has confirmed the view of the disinterested authorities of King Charles's reign."
Actually, all an exhumation could confirm is the approximate age of the two skeletons, and the approximate year they died. The margin of error in these cannot allow a "confirmation" that they were killed during Richard's reign, and as far as they might guess the cause of death, it could apply to either Richard or Henry VII. But Churchill tries a quick hand-waving (I am sure there is a name for this logical fallacy) to convince the reader it has been proved that Richard is the villain.
The irony is that while Churchill cites as support for Richard's villainy that the people supposedly feared him, etc., in THE NEW WORLD he says that in spite of the murders, burnings, persecutions, tortures, "severe penalties," and oppression by Henry VIII, "yet his subjects did not turn from Henry in loathing." This certainly would seem to indicate that the villainy or lack thereof in a monarch is not necessarily reflected in the people's feelings towards him (or her).
[Oddly, this series does not seem to have been issued unabridged in a single-volume, though it might be possible, as it totals 1760 pages, while the unabridged LES MISERABLES is 1488 in mass-market paperback. Also, I will note that it ends with the Boer War, probably because after that point, Churchill had become involved in politics and so, when writing this work, felt either that he could not be objective or that he would not appear objective.]
A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN by Winston Churchill:
THE DAUGHTER OF TIME by Josephine Tey:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/04/23]
The "Classical Stuff You Should Know" podcast has been doing an on-going series about the Plantagenets and is finally getting to Richard III (referred to from here on out as just Richard, since there is no other Richard in sight here). They have been quoting a lot from Winston Churchill, presumably from A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN (Bloomsbury USA Academic, ISBN 978-1-472-58524-0), so I decided I should get the jump on them for Richard III, since I count myself as a Ricardian, which is to say, I believe that Richard did not kill the two Princes, and that Henry VII did. (And also that most of the other negative claims about Richard are also false.)
I will admit to being influenced by Josephine Tey's THE DAUGHTER OF TIME (Scribner, ISBN 978-0-684-80386-9, although I highly recommend the audiobook read by Derek Jacobi, BBC Audiobooks America, ISBN 978-1572702448), but I realize that is a work of fiction. Therefore what I base my conclusions on are facts that I can verify in real sources, and logical conclusions from them, rather than citations from (possibly) fictitious sources (e.g., Oliphant).
Starting with the obvious, Churchill seems determined to take Sir Thomas More's biography as reliable. First he explains why More should be considered unreliable: "Sir Thomas More late in the next reign wrote his celebrated history. His book was based of course on information given him under the new and strongly established regime. His object seems to have been less to compose a factual narrative than a moralistic drama. In it, Richard is evil incarnate, and Henry Tudor, the deliverer of the kingdom, all sweetness and light. The opposite view would have been treason. Not only is every possible crime attributed by More to Richard, and some impossible movies, but he is presented as a physical monster, crookbacked and withered of arm. No one in his lifetime seems to have remarked on these deformities, but they are now very familiar to us through Shakespeare's play [based on Holinshed's Chronicles, which were written under the Tudors as well]. Needless to say, as soon as the Tudor dynasty was laid to rest defenders of Richard fell to work, and they have been increasingly busy ever since."
(Just a reminder: Thomas More was eight years old when Richard was Killed Bosworth, so hardly a reliable witness to the goings-on of Richard's reign.)
After King Henry VI was replaced by Edward IV, Henry VI said (as quoted by Churchill), "Since my cradle, for forty years, I have been King. My father was King; his father was King. You have all sworn fealty to me on many occasions, as your father swore it to my father." Then Churchill goes on to say, "But the other side declared that oaths not based on truth were void, that wrong must be righted, that successful usurpation gained no sanctity by time, that the foundation of the monarchy could only rest upon law and justice, that to recognize a dynasty of interlopers was to invite rebellion wherever occasion served, ..." Churchill conveniently ignores what this means in terms of Henry VII, who was arguably a usurper and interloper (and who specifically claimed the kingship by right of conquest), or for that matter King William I (a.k.a. William the Conqueror).
Churchill acknowledges the possibility of an earlier marriage of Edward IV, saying, "[Clarence] may have discovered the secret of Edward's alleged pre-contract of marriage with Eleanor Butler which Richard of Gloucester was later to use in justifying his usurpation. Certainly if Edward's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville were to be proved invalid for this reason Clarence was the next legitimate heir, and a source of danger to the King [Edward IV]."
But then he announces, "More's tale however has priority." And why? Apparently because it describes a very dramatic scene at the Council in the Tower. Whether there is any evidence that this scene took place, or is one of the "impossible crimes" of Richard, Churchill does not say. But the fact that it is dramatic does not make it real.
Churchill also quotes Fabyan's Chronicle about how the English people came to hate Richard because of his crimes, and though he adds, "It is contended by the defenders of King Richard that the Tudor version of these events has prevailed," he still seems to take Fabyan as accurate--even though Fabyan's Cronicle was published (posthumously) in 1516, thirty years into the Tudor dynasty.
Later, he says of Richard's tour of England, "Yet he could not escape the sense that behind the displays of gratitude and loyalty which naturally surrounded him there lay an unspoken challenge to his Kingship." Apparently, Churchill can not only read minds, but can read minds 450 years dead. This is fabrication, pure and simple.
Churchill says, "[We] are invited by some to believe that [the Princes] languished in captivity, unnoticed and unrecorded, for another two years [after what Churchill says was their last appearance, in July 1483), only to be done to death by Henry Tudor." But apparently he believes that Richard would have the Princes killed in secret and pretend they are still alive--and expect to keep up this pretense for years, if not decades. As many have pointed out, if he had them smothered, the smartest thing to do would be to announce they had died of a sudden fever and display their bodies, thereby removing them as a rallying point.
Richard is quoted to have asked, "Whom should a man trust when those who I thought would most surely serve at my command will do nothing for me?" This is too similar to "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" (Henry II speaking of Thomas Becket) to be taken as accurate without some real evidence.
Of the supposed actual murderer, Sir James Tyrell, Churchill writes, "But it was not until Henry VII's reign, when Tyrell was lying in the Tower under sentence for quite a separate crime, that he is alleged to have made a confession upon which, with much other circumstantial evidence, the story as we know it rests." Why he would have confessed these murders is not clear (unless Churchill is referring to a confession to a priest). But note that it is merely alleged that he made such a confession, and all the other evidence is circumstantial.
In 1674, two skeletons were found under some rubble in the Tower, They were the apparent ages of the Princes, and the royal surgeon and others "reported that they were undoubtedly the remains of Edward V and the Duke of York." Charles II had them buried in Westminister with an inscription blaming Richard. Churchill dismisses attempts to clear Richard and to blame Henry VII by saying, "However, in our own time (1933), an exhumation has confirmed the view of the disinterested authorities of King Charles's reign."
Even if the exhumation proved the skeletons were those of the Princes (and there have been many criticisms of it, including that no tests were done to determine even the gender of the children, or the number, since what was found was not two intact skeletons, but disarticulated bones in a wooden chest), it is certainly true that in 1674, there was no way to determine whether they were murdered in 1483 or 1485.
Churchill does have a sense of humor, at one point saying, "Money--above all ready money. There was the hobble which cramped the medieval kings; and even now it counts somewhat."
RICHARD III: HIS LIFE & CHARACTER, REVIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT RESEARCH by Clements R. Markham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/10/24]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about TO PROVE A VILLAIN edited by Taylor Littleton (MacMillan, ISBN 978-0-023-71360-6), which included an excerpt from Clements R. Markham titled "Richard III: A Doubtful Verdict Reviewed". This is an excerpt from Markham's RICHARD III: HIS LIFE & CHARACTER, REVIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT RESEARCH (1906) (CreateSpace, ISBN 978-1-508-60166-1), but it turns out that the entire work is available relatively cheaply, as well as from Project Gutenberg, from the Internet Archive, and through Hoopla (at least from my library).
Reading the full text, I am even more convinced that Josephine Tey used it as her major source for THE DAUGHTER OF TIME. It is not just the historical facts. Tey has basically the same reminiscence of the green and wooded England before everything got divided and fenced in. Tey takes that Richard's mother was the "Rose of Raby" (as mentioned in Markham) and creates an entire historical novel in THE DAUGHTER OF TIME called "The Rose of Raby". She has the same minor details, such as Richard paying for cross-Channel transport with his fur-lined coat, or about Caxton bringing printing to England. Markham calls John Morton "one of the greatest pluralists on record"; Tey refers to him as "the greatest pluralist on record". And so on.
Obviously Markham has more than Tey could cover, including the background of the War of the Roses, detailed descriptions of the various battles, and so on. But much of it will be very familiar to anyone who has read THE DAUGHTER OF TIME.
In fairness, Tey does mention Markham. When Grant asks Carradine when the rehabilitation of Richard III began, Carradine says it was in Tudor times and then, "A man Buck wrote a vindication in the seventeenth century. And Horace Walpole in the eighteenth. And someone called Markham in the nineteenth." But this is not much credit for such a major source.
At any rate, it you're looking for a well-researched non-fiction source on the Richard III controversy, I would recommend Markham.
[Oh, and Josephine Tey claims that Henry VII was the first king to have an armed bodyguard. This is apparently not true; other sources say that Richard II started having a bodyguard toward the end of his reign.]
RICHARD III--HIS LIFE & CHARACTER by Clements R. Markham:
HISTORIC DOUBTS ON THE LIFE AND REIGN OF KING RICHARD III by Horace Walpole:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/05/26]
In the 08/04/23 issue of the MT VOID, I discussed Winston Churchill's views on the Richard III controversy from A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN (Bloomsbury USA Academic, ISBN 978-1-472-58524-0), and mentioned Josephine Tey's THE DAUGHTER OF TIME (Scribner, ISBN 978-0-684-80386-9), although I said at the time that I realized the latter was a work of fiction, and therefore based my conclusions on facts that I could verify in real sources, and logical conclusions from them, rather than citations from (possibly) fictitious sources (e.g., Sir Cuthbert Oliphant).
Well, Oliphant may be fictitious, but Tey seems to have patterned him after James Gairdner as described in RICHARD III--HIS LIFE & CHARACTER by Clements R. Markham (Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36451, 1903). Of Gairdner, Markham writes, "His Richard III. is a prince, headlong and reckless as to consequences, but of rare gifts and with many redeeming qualities. He was wise and able, brave, generous, religious, fascinating, and yet had committed two very cowardly assassinations before he was nineteen, murdered his defenceless nephews, and gratuitously slandered his mother. Such a monster is an impossibility in real life."
And Tey writes of (the fictitious) Oliphant, "He is, to be honest, in a sad muddle himself about Richard. On the same page he says that he was an admirable administrator and general, with an excellent reputation, staid and good-living, very popular by contrast with the Woodville upstarts (the Queen's relations) and that he was 'perfectly unscrupulous and ready to wade through any depth of bloodshed to the crown which lay within his grasp'. On one page he says grudgingly: 'There are reasons for supposing that he was not destitute of a conscience' and then on a later page reports More's picture of a man so tormented by his own deed that he could not sleep. And so on.'"
(Gairdner wrote his HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND REIGN OF RICHARD III in 1878; there was a second edition in 1898, as well as a life of Henry VII in 1889.)
And much of the evidence Tey has her narrator and his assistant Brent Carradine discover is also given in Markham's book. It isn't plagiarism in the strict sense, because Markham is quoting various primary and secondary sources, and Tey is also quoting them. But it does seem as Markham did a lot of the "heavy lifting" for Tey. However, Tey does pick up Markham's own description of Thomas More's account as being a "party pamphlet."
I can see why Markham might have been Tey's inspiration, because the previous defender of Richard III, Horace Walpole in HISTORIC DOUBTS ON THE LIFE AND REIGN OF KING RICHARD III (published in 1768), does not lay out a very clear or comprehensible defense. Large portions of his evidence from primary sources are quoted in the original French or Latin, rather than translated (as Markham does). I suppose in 1768 it was assumed that his audience would be fluent in those languages; by 1878, Markham could make no such assumption. And the structure of Walpole's argument is not as straightforward as Markham's; I felt he was jumping around without any particular order.
This is not to say his writing style isn't engaging. For example, in the Preface he writes, "So incompetent has the generality of historians been for the province they have undertaken, that it is almost a question, whether, if the dead of past ages could revive, they would be able to reconnoitre the events of their own times, as transmitted to us by ignorance and misrepresentation. All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages are supernatural." Given that he is about to criticize the veracity of Christian historians, it seems odd to blame misrepresentation on the facts that the historians were pagans, and for that matter, was not God considered supernatural as well?
He is also sometimes snarky: "Sir Thomas More has exhausted all his eloquence and imagination to work up a piteous scene, in which the queen [Elizabeth Woodville] is made to excite our compassion in the highest degree, and is furnished by that able pen with strains of pathetic oratory, which no part of her conduct affords us reason to believe she possessed."
In the matter of the claim that Richard had his own mother accused of adultery, Walpole writes, "The doubts on the validity of Edward's marriage were better grounds for Richard's proceedings than aspersion of his mother's honour. On that invalidity he claimed the crown, and obtained it; and with such universal concurrence, that the nation undoubtedly was on his side--but as he could not deprive his nephews, on that foundation, without bastardizing their sisters too, no wonder, the historians, who wrote under the Lancastrian domination, have used all their art and industry to misrepresent the fact. If the marriage of Edward the Fourth with the widow Grey was bigamy, and consequently null, what became of the title of Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry the Seventh? What became of it? Why a bastard branch of Lancaster, matched with a bastard of York, were obtruded on the nation as the right heirs of the crown! and, as far as two negatives can make an affirmative, they were so." First Walpole disposes of that claim, and then he turns mathematically snarky as well.
And note his use of the understated "unlucky" here: "It happens unluckily too, that great part of the time Ratcliffe was absent, Sir Thomas More himself telling us that Sir Richard Ratcliffe had the custody of the prisoners at Pontefract, and presided at their execution there. But a much more unlucky circumstance is, that James Tirrel, said to be knighted for this horrid service, was not only a knight before, but a great or very considerable officer of the crown; and in that situation had walked at Richard's preceding coronation." I think he uses "unlucky" in the sense of "oops!"
One thing he notes that I don't recall in Markham is that "no prosecution of the supposed assassins was even thought of till eleven years afterwards, on the appearance of Perkin Warbeck." Perkin Warbeck claimed to be Richard of Gloucester, the younger of the two (supposedly murdered) princes, so when he showed up, clearly in line for the throne *before* Henry VII, Henry had to do something to discredit him, and what better way than by claiming Richard of Gloucester had been murdered before Henry claimed the crown.
So there are portions to be gleaned from Walpole, but on the whole, I recommend Markham.
(Sir George Buck published the first defense of Richard III with THE HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND REIGNE OF RICHARD THE THIRD in 1646, but I cannot find a copy of this.)