Portrait of a Human Being?
James Gairdner concluded that "a minute study of the facts of Richard's life has tended more and more to convince me of the general fidelity of the portrait with which we have been made familiar by Shakespeare and More."[10] To which Paul Murray Kendall retorted: "What is astounding about this statement is not so much that Gairdner supposes the sensational protagonist of the melodramatic Richard III to be a portrait of the real Richard but that he supposes it to be, in any way, the portrait of a human being." [11]
A.L. Rowse considers More to be a journalistic account, claiming that More wrote the story "in installments as [he] remembered them...A closer study of More has revealed in how many respects he has subsequently been corroborated in details...."[12] Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts called More "an historian who is capable of employing truth only as cement in a fabric of fiction" and thought that he write the History "to amuse his leisure and exercise his fancy." [13]
Virtually no two historians agree, and not necessarily because of their opinions about the guilt or innocence of Richard III. While it is true that devoted Ricardians either despise More or prefer to think that he was writing some sort of fiction (satire, fable, allegory), most historians inclined toward the Tudor tradition do not consider More to writing the straight truth. Alison Hanham writes in her historiographical study that "[n]o commentator, whether literary critic or historian, conveys a sense that the author of the History...had one of the subtlest intellects of his age" or that "he thought nothing to be well spoken unless he had ministered some mock in the communication."[14]
More's unknown ideas and biases in writing the History do not mask its humanist slant; More's reputation as a humanist can rest on this one work alone. Whether it should stand as the first English historiography or the first English novel is relevant only insofar as its impact on the historical interpretation of the last years of the Plantagenets and the first years of the Tudors. The History is a humanist tract, sharing with the later Utopia the theme that tyranny is the result of absolute power. In Utopia, the impersonal state is the tyrant; in the History, tyranny takes a human form.
Footnotes
[10] James Gairdner, History of the Life and Times of Richard III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), xi-xiii.
[11] Paul Murray Kendall, Richard III (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), 431.
[12] A.L. Rowse quoted in Alison Hanham, Richard III and His Early Historians 1483-1535 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 154.
[13] Horace Walpole, Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III (London: Alan Sutton, 1987 edition), 119.
[14] Hanham, Richard III and His Early Historians 1483-1535, 154, 159.