It’s mad to make this child killer a national hero
SUReLY i can’t have been the only person to think the world had gone stark staring bonkers as i viewed, with mounting stupefaction, the grotesque televised travesty in Leicester on Sunday involving the remains of the usurper-king, Richard iii — without question one of the most evil, detestable tyrants ever to walk this earth.
Two-and-a-half years after his bones were unearthed under a car park in the east Midlands city, and at the shameful and outrageous cost of more than £2.5 million — a sum that could have fed and housed a multitude of homeless people — Richard was prepared for reburial.
The hoopla caught the imagination of the crowds who turned out to line the streets for the occasion, and they were back in huge numbers yesterday.
His coffin was accorded a 21-gun salute, a posse of ‘medieval re-enactors’ pranced about in shiny armour and plumed helmets, children wearing paper crowns waved and onlookers hurled white Yorkist roses at the wooden coffin.
it was all a disturbing echo of the mass hysteria that briefly gripped the populace at the funeral of Princess diana, someone infinitely more worthy of public grief than this murderous robber of a throne.
The distasteful jamboree, aptly described by one spectator as an ‘undignified, money-grabbing pantomime’, caused another royal Richard, the present duke of Gloucester — there as the Queen’s cousin and as Patron of the absurd Richard iii Society — to blink in a bemused way behind his glasses. And well might His Royal Highness blink.
An attempt has been made to confer on Richard iii an aura of heroism for being the last english king to die in battle. Those who subscribe to this view omit to mention that he was only in battle because his usurpation of the throne, and his abduction and murder of his nephew, edward V, had provoked a popular rising and invasion against him led by Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond.
But Richard need not have died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Unseated from his horse, he was urged by supporters to withdraw from the field. But he knew that if he did so, the throne he had stolen was irrevocably lost, and his future was a life on the run and in exile.
He died still attempting to hack his way through to Henry Tudor, knowing that if he succeeded in killing him, then the throne was his.
Was this heroism? No. Like everything else he did, it reveals the mind of a murderous pragmatist.
in this light, much of what took place on Sunday caused serious doubt about the sanity of some of the key figures involved.
At a service in Leicester Cathedral, held on the basis that Richard was a pre-Reformation Catholic — though one who, for most of his life, was in anything but a state of grace — the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, in a preposterous eulogy, claimed that ‘in his two years as King, he reshaped vital aspects of the legal system, developing presumption of innocence and the practice of granting bail’.
Has Cardinal Nichols temporarily misplaced his marbles? Has he read
any of the history of Richard’s infamous and bloody reign? Where was the throne-robber’s development of the presumption of inno- cence when he had his late brother edward iV’s loyal friend, William, Lord Hastings, dragged out of the Tower of London without any vestige of a trial and his head hacked off? And where was the judicial process when the young edward V’s maternal uncle, earl Rivers, his halfbrother Lord Grey, his chamberlain Sir Thomas Vaughan and his cousin Richard Haute were all beheaded without trial on Richard’s orders? For decades, the fruitcakes of the Richard iii Society have insisted Shakespeare’s ‘caricature’ of Richard as an evil hunchback was fictional propaganda. They even denied that he had any physical deformity.
They have been proved wrong. The skeleton found under the Leicester car park was afflicted by scoliosis and curvature of the spine. That part of Shakespeare’s portrayal had a genuine basis in fact. So does the rest.
dr Phil Stone, chairman of the Richard iii Society, insists: ‘Richard was a man of integrity who cared for his subjects.’ He cared for them so much that he slaughtered 27 of them (that we know about) in cold blood, and very probably hundreds more besides. And this does not include those who died in battles fought on his behalf.
Among his victims was the rival Lancastrian monarch in the Wars of the Roses, the saintly, mentally ill Henry Vi, whom Richard, then duke of Gloucester, stabbed to death in his prison cell in the Tower in order to make his brother, edward iV, the undisputed occupant of the throne.
This took place shortly after Richard had also brutally murdered Henry’s son and heir, edward, Prince of Wales, after the battle of Tewkesbury, then married his widow, Anne.
But the worst of this massmurderer’s manifold atrocities was the slaughter of his nephews, aged 13 and 11, the rightful King edward V and Richard, duke of York.
His apologists have invented every kind of conspiracy theory to try to absolve him of their killing. But the fact remains that after arranging for his brother’s sons to be declared illegitimate, Richard seized the throne, and, one month after his coronation, the two boys disappeared from their prison in the Tower of London and were never seen again.
AS THAT most reliable of historians, Lady Antonia Fraser, observes: ‘ The murder of two innocent children was a horrible crime even by 15thcentury standards, but it is difficult to see how Richard could have let them live without risking needless conspiracies in their names.’
Should a serial killer such as Richard iii be honoured with 21-gun salutes and triumphal parades?
On Thursday, the poor duke of Gloucester has to return to Leicester Cathedral for the actual funeral, conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, at which Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, will represent the Queen. even Her Majesty, i was astonished to learn, has been persuaded to write a message in the Order of Service, acknowledging Richard’s ‘ importance’ to British history. i am sure her words will, as always, be judiciously measured.
After this inexplicable glorification of infamous criminality, may we now expect memorials and celebrations of Adolf Hitler? There is also the Russian despot Vladimir Putin, recently described in a court of law as a murderer and common criminal. And how about an equestrian statue of that geriatric dictator Robert Mugabe, hopefully large enough for people to throw rotten eggs at?
if we can turn a child-killer into a national hero for children to cheer and admire, then just about anything seems possible.