Richard, by the Grace of God
Richard III
St. Thomas More
In 1989, at the Richard III Society annual meeting in Cincinnati, a Catholic saint was put on trial for the crimes of slander and libel against Shakespeare's greatest villain. To everyone's surprise, he was found not guilty. As devoted a Ricardian as I fancy myself to be, I have long argued that St. Thomas More does not deserve to be sarcastically referred to as the "sainted More" in Ricardian circles...he merely wrote a pointed little satire that has been seized upon as gospel truth by historians ever since. To a large degree, one of the worst misfortunes visited upon Richard III is that Thomas More suffered a martyr's death, so that his contemporary reputation as a satirist is buried in his supposed saintliness.
I wrote a short paper for a graduate seminar on the infamous tract (never finished) by More on Richard III. All quotations in the paper remain the copyrighted work of the original authors and were quoted by me to illustrate my thesis...that to insist always on More's serious purpose is a grave mistake.
On August 22, 1485, the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, was betrayed, defeated and killed in battle at Bosworth Field by the forces of the Welsh pretender Henry Tudor, the self-styled Earl of Richmond. Among Richard's enemies who contributed to his downfall was one John Morton, Bishop of Ely, a politically ambitious priest whose future held a cardinalate, the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and the chancellorship of England under the victorious Henry VII. Morton was known to be a man "not without inveterate malice against the house of York"[1], and had figured prominently in the June 1483 "strawberry" conspiracy with Hastings and Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV's queen, to overthrow Richard's protectorship during the minority of Edward V. Richard imprisoned Morton but later released him to the custody of Henry Tudor's family, a mistake whose costliness to Richard and England became apparent after Bosworth.
Morton proved to be an ideal minister for Henry and served him well as the author of "Morton's Fork", a taxing device for raising revenue from rich and poor alike. Morton's Fork contributed to the general lack of grief at Henry's death[2].
Footnotes
[1] Francis Bacon, quoted in Jeremy Potter, Good King Richard? (London: Constable, 1983), 113.
[2] Writing about Edward IV, More commented that "[h]e had left off all gathering of money (which is the only thing that withdraws the hearts of Englishmen from a Prince. "Edward was never known to refrain from asking for money when he needed it, but Henry VII and Morton raised taxation to a new art form. Indeed, Henry had imprisoned More's father over a tax dispute. More described Morton as "a man of great natural wit, very well learned, and honorable in behavior, lacking no wise ways to win favor." Whatever he thought of his erstwhile patron, More cannot have written such a sentence seriously about a universally hated man who had visited such suffering on his family. Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third, reprinted in Paul Murray Kendall, Richard III: The Great Debate (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1965), 33, 109.
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