Lessons from Richard III

Are we - and I mean this globally - just way too gullible?

Last night, after finishing up my friend Anne Easter Smith's first novel, A Rose for the Crown (which I was reading for the second time), I began to think about the English King Richard III and how everyone believed, or still believes, Tudor propaganda about him more than 500 years later.

And I thought he would serve as a good example of bad marketing, while King Henry VII, who killed Richard in battle and seized the throne (with little or no actual right to it), would serve as a good example of good marketing, spin and PR in general. In fact, nearly the whole bunch of Tudor monarchs nearly re-wrote Medieval history in order to make themselves look better.

What do we know about Richard III?

That he was a hunchback. If you took any English history, you will have been told that he was a hunchback with a withered arm. I don't know exactly how those physical disabilities correlate to evil, but apparently they do. (This idea was probably helped along more recently by the German Kaiser Wilhelm, who was similarly afflicted with a withered arm.)

The words, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" But wait, those words were penned by Shakespeare, who wrote during the reign of Elizabeth I, granddaughter of Henry VII.

He declared his two young nephews as bastards, which enabled him to grab up the throne for himself. Well, yeah ... but what if he really thought they were bastards (his older brother, Edward IV, had reportedly declared himself to another woman before marrying their mother)? The laws of succession were pretty clear about not letting illegitimate children inherit the throne.

Mostly, though we just know that he killed those two nephews, known as "The Princes in the Tower." Well, actually, that's still up for debate (and even if he did, that's what people did back then, as icky as it seems to us) - and if he did do it, why didn't the Tudors use that to generate hatred of Richard? (Hint: Henry VII had just as much, if not more, to fear from those Plantagenet heirs to the throne than did Richard.)

So what about written history? Can it be trusted?

Now we know that portraits of Richard were altered to make him look (more?) disabled and even untrustworthy, so people would loathe him throughout the centuries. Shades of Fox News here. We know that he was at least somewhat unfairly characterized as a villain by people in whose best interests it was to do so.

And it worked!

Meanwhile, Henry VII's son, Henry VII, is rather glorified, even though he killed off a couple of his six wives, all in the name of his Christian faith (or so he said).

Henry VIII, if historical accounts can be trusted, seems to have been quite the person. I would love to have met him (and still be here to report about it). He made totally arbitrary decisions, brooked no dissent, and believed everything he did was what God wanted him to do and therefore, he could make his own rules.

Hmmmm ... does any of this sound at all familiar?