Due to the sheer weight of fake news headlines and
stories that were floating around about the recent US election, there have been
a lot of articles written on this subject in the last few days.
These articles ranged from listing websites to avoid and
outraged demands to shut all fake news websites down because they are dangerous.
Of course, spreading false rumour is never a good thing.
False stories can make people alter the way they think and that will lead to an
alteration in the way they act, and if that leads to them voting for someone
they wouldn’t have done otherwise, then these fake stories start to become
something other than innocent.
Such was the wide-spread nature of these stories due to
them being shared more than the genuine news, posterity may well lead to them
being read and believed because they overwhelm the truth.
Where does the fake story stop being a bit of a laugh and
start to be propaganda, a force for ill and not for fun, a deliberate attempt
to mislead and smear someone’s good name?
We’ve seen the devastation wrought when a false account
causes an official body to act, just ask Cliff Richard and Sir Leon Brittan’s
widow.
Whenever someone casts malicious doubt on the reputation
of an individual, it is wrong. When you read stories that are just not true,
that are intended to be taken as gospel, it is wrong. We have more access to
news than any generation before us, everything is instant, but in that respect
it is also far more transient and the falsehoods will be forgotten when
something else comes along, but they’ll always be there, a short search and
click away.
Imagine, however, that such falsehoods do last, that your
reputation has been besmirched, not just for a few days, or a few years, but a
few hundred years. How would that feel?
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| Richard III - the face of a monster? |
I read something else this week - The Daughter of Time by
Josephine Tey. For those who do not know it, it is a novel about a detective
flat on his back in hospital in great need of diversion, and is given a
selection of portraits to amuse him, one of which intrigues him, for its
goodness, and its sadness. He firmly decides that if he were to appear in a
court room, his natural place would be on the bench, rather than the dock, and
being a detective, he feels he can read faces. So he is pretty shocked to be
told that the face belongs to a criminal, a nephew-murdering monster, called
Richard Plantagenet - better known as Richard III.
Alan Grant, no, not the one from Jurassic Park, spends the next few weeks of his hospital
confinement researching the story of Richard III, approaching the material in
the only way he knows how – as a detective. He looks rather at the material
that was not intended to be history, not the chronicles, but the administrative
records that are far less likely to be influenced by opinion in its need to
record fact, such as wardrobes records, proceedings of parliament and the like.
I don’t know that everything that is contained in this
volume is 100% true. I suspect no one now does. But what CAN be proven is
rather compelling. To cut a long story short, the Tudors, so long revered by
everyone, re-wrote history to make a man who was determined to settle peace, an
excellent administrator, a great warrior, a diplomat, a fair-minded, NICE, man
who cared for his family, into a cardboard-cut-out monster who murdered his
nephews. And we’ve all bought it.
OK, specifics. I can’t continue without qualifying this. Let’s
start with The Act of Attainder, supplied here by Matt Lewis with my gratitude,
sets out the case by Henry VII against Richard, to cause him to be reviled and
deposed as ever a rightful king:
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| Henry VII from the V&A, he looks haunted to me |
‘Every king, prince and liege lord is bound, in proportion to the loftiness of his estate and pre-eminence, to advance and make available impartial justice [p. vi-276][col. a] in promoting and rewarding virtue and oppressing and punishing vice. Therefore, our sovereign lord, calling to his blessed remembrance this high and great charge enjoined on his royal majesty and estate, not oblivious or unmindful of the unnatural, wicked and great perjuries, treasons, homicides and murders, in shedding infants' blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and man, and in particular against our said sovereign lord, committed and done by Richard, late duke of Gloucester, calling and naming himself, by usurpation, King Richard III.’
The
Act mentions ‘shedding infants’ blood’
but does not mention anything specific. If you KNEW that someone who you wanted
the world to believe was the worst person ever born had murdered CHILDREN,
you’d mention it, right? You’d do more than ‘mention’ it, you’d shout it from
the rooftops because it would be the smoking gun, the conflagration that caused
the smoke. It would be your entire raison d’etre. And yet you don’t mention it.
You waffle, you add in a throw-away line, probably aware of a rumour, but you
don’t back it up.
Why?
Because
the two ‘infants’ in question are alive and carrying on as they always have.
Because Edward V and his brother were still continuing their lessons in the
Tower happily enough. They are not dead.
And why is this not explicitly said? Well, when is the last time you saw a
headline that stated, ‘Elizabeth II is still alive’ following a period when she’s
been hidden away in Scotland or Norfolk? You haven’t. We assume that the status
quo exists until otherwise informed.
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| Elizabeth Woodville, her beauty ensnared a king, and ruined a kingdom |
More
specifics. Elizabeth Woodville, the woman who, according to Titulus Regius -
the document that declared in Parliament that the princes were illegitimate -
had bigamously married Edward IV, fled to sanctuary in Westminster on the
death of her husband. And then left it again, and made friends with Richard,
accepted the allowance he chose to pay her, allowed her daughters to take their
place at court. Had she felt vulnerable, she could have gone to France,
Flanders as her husband had done in 1470. But no. She stayed in England, the
England of Richard.
The
same Richard who she, it is claimed, KNEW had murdered her sons. What kind of
woman would befriend the man who killed her children and not flee with as many
of those that were left as she could lay her hands on? Unless she knew they
were safe and Richard meant her and her family no harm. Makes more sense, doesn’t
it?
She
remained at large until February 1487 when she was sent to a nunnery. By Henry
VII. Under Richard she was free, under Henry she was not.
The
repealing of the Titulus Regius by Henry was to legitimise his wife, Elizabeth
of York. It was not read, and every known copy was destroyed. No one was to
know the contents. Odd. If you want to refute something you argue against it
long and hard. Or not.
Because
in legitimising Elizabeth, Henry also, by default, legitimised Prince Edward,
making him King Edward V of England, and his brother Richard his rightful heir.
So,
who had most to fear from the boys? Richard? Parliament granted him the crown.
He didn’t need to kill the boys, they were already neutralised. Or Henry, who
by making his wife legitimate had also created a powerful rival for the crown?
And if the boys were dead, murdered by Richard, where was the harm in reading
the Titulus Regius and then arguing against every point of it? Except of course
that also put your wife ahead of you as rightful heir.
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| Richard, visiting the British Museum, pretending not to notice the crowds |
When
Richard took the throne there were nine potential heirs to it, including his
deceased elder brother George’s son who was barred from the throne by the
attainder of his father. When Richard died there were still nine heirs. Henry
systematically removed them, including Richard’s illegitimate son John, and
those that he didn’t get around to, Henry VIII, his son, dealt with. The death
of two little boys was abhorrent tragedy; the wholesale wiping out of a dynasty
to apparently achieve the very same ends was shrewd politics…
The
content in Tey might be put forward in too black and white a form, doesn’t allow
for the nuances, maybe she didn’t know of the nuances we now place on the
evidence, the novel was written in the 1950s, but the basics are pretty
reliable. You can’t escape that there was no specific accusation against
Richard before Henry came to the throne, even from the boys’ mother. You can’t
escape that Henry had no claim to the throne, and Richard’s was always better,
murdered nephews or not.
So,
why does every history book state unequivocally that Richard killed his nephews
and that Henry VII was just and good and was taking the crown that was his by
right? How did we reach a situation where the entire accepted history is bunkum
and we rely almost solely on the writings of an Elizabethan playwright for the
gospel truth? Should we therefore take as fact that all spies act like James
Bond? That there really is a small country in the Alps called Roma Nova? And
have you actually tried to enter into a parallel world by pushing a trolley through
the wall to reach platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross?
If
we read and believe the Tudor version of Richard, are we not also continuing to
endorse the place of fake news in the world, encouraging it even? Why is the
story of Richard killing his nephews less outrageous than the Pope endorsing
Trump?
Fake
news stories use drama, hyperbole and outrage to attract readers, clicks on
Facebook.
And
if you saw a headline stating ‘Twisted celebrity slaughters innocents in quest
for power’ you’d read it.
I am very grateful for the help of Matt Lewis, author of several books about Richard III and more recently Henry III. Find out more about him here.
