Obama as Richard III

It's heartening to know that I'm not the only one who sees profound similarities between Richard III, the falsely vilified legitimate King of England, and President Obama. The following comes from a blog by Charles Rowley who is a professor of Economics at George Mason University:

On August 22, 1485, an engagement of great historical significance was fought at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire  between the usurper king, Richard III of England and Henry Tudor,  the former Earl of Richmond , who had been deprived of that title in 1741. This battle would prove to be decisive in ending  a lengthy sequence of increasingly bloody wars between the White Rose of York and the Red Rose of Lancaster.  Henry Tudor (of Lancaster) routed the incumbent monarch on that battlefield and established the Tudor Dynasty and all that it would involve for the evolution of European Civilization. 

Finally, after months of prevarication and dissembling, the usurper president, Barack Obama, has emerged from his funk-hole to engage with a determined upstart  opponent, Paul Ryan (R, Wisconsin) in fiscal maneuvers that will be resolved in presidential and congressional elections of major historical significance in November 2012.  The future economic status of the United States will depend largely on the outcome of that engagement.

 Nobody agreed with me when I drew parallels between the existing attitudes to Obama and the popular beliefs about Richard III. Here, however, we see a conservative professor confess that he does equate Obama and Richard.

Ricardian: A Review of Elizabeth George's "I, Richard"

Elizabeth George's collection of short stories I, Richard hasn't been received very well even by her hardcore fans. The reason for what I believe is an unfair rejection of this collection is the disappointing first story titled "Exposure." If you decide to read I, Richard, I suggest you skip this story altogether and enjoy the rest of the collection.

Only the very last story, "I, Richard" belongs to the genre of Ricardian Apology. George wrote this story to make her Ricardian allegiances known to her fans. Of course, as a mystery writer, she couldn't fail to structure this story as a modern-day murder mystery that is inspired by one of the character's belief in Richard's innocence. 

George is different from many Ricardians in that she does not blame Henry Tudor for killing the young princes. This writer makes us question why we always assume that history was made by men. She allows a woman (of course, I will not spoil your reading pleasure by telling you her name) to become a protagonist of the story. Both the mystery of the princes' murder and the modern-day mystery that frames them are based on the idea that dismissing female protagonism is a big mistake. George reminds us that women make history as much as men do. Those men who try to treat women as objects with no will of their own always end up paying a very high price for this delusion.

Ricardian: A Review of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time

Most of my readers didn't warm to my first Ricardian post. This is completely understandable since the subject of whether Richard III did, in fact, murder the princes Edward and Richard in the summer of 1483 is quite academic. I will keep indulging my love of Ricardian arcana from time to time, while you should feel free to skip posts tagged "Ricardian" if the subject bores you. 

Josephine Tey created several classical British mysteries that any lover of the genre would appreciate. Few people know, however, of her contribution to Ricardian Apology. In The Daughter of Time, Tey offers us her take on the provenance of the myth that blames Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England, for the murder of his nephews (the Princes in the Tower.)

Inspector Alan Grant finds himself stuck in a hospital, bored and desperate to participate in some sort of an investigation. While he is in a hospital bed, he only has access to history textbooks. The story of Richard III catches his eye and as he begins to read accounts of Richard's "crimes", Grant realizes just how senseless and lacking in logic all accusations against Richard are.

I might have believed Grant's asseverations
that murderers don't look like this
had I never seen pictures of Ted Bundy,
a wholesome-looking serial killer

The Inspector's journey begins in a way that I didn't find very convincing. Grant looks at the famous portrait of Richard III and realizes that a man who looks this way could not have possibly been a cold-blooded murderer of two small boys. This, of course, is very naive and smacks of Lombrosianism that had been discredited long before Tey wrote The Daughter of Time.

This, however, is the only weak point of an otherwise logical and reasonable account of the numerous holes in the myth of Richard's guilt. Inspector Grant and a young researcher who helps him discover the truth soon realize that Richard III had absolutely no reason to kill his nephews. The boys had been declared illegitimate by an Act of Parliament and Richard III occupied the throne as a well-loved and legitimate King of England. Elizabeth Woodville, the boys' mother, was friendly with Richard III until his death. Would she had visited his court and allowed her daughter to do so had Richard III, indeed, murdered her small sons? That seems highly unlikely. Moreover, after Henry Tudor defeated Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field, he never declared publicly that Richard had killed the boys or even that the boys were dead. He did, however, imprison the boys' mother in a convent. 

In the view of these facts, Grant arrives at a conclusion that the first Tudor king, Henry VII, was the only person with means, motive and opportunity to kill the Princes. Having absolutely no claim to the throne, he needed to destroy the Plantagenets so that nobody would dispute his rise to power. I need to tell you right now that not every Ricardian shares Tey's belief in the culpability of Henry Tudor. There are many other suspects, and you can make up your own mind as to which one is the likeliest murderer. I will keep bringing you these accounts on a regular basis.

Ricardian

I have a host of weird hobbies and interests. One of them consists in collecting materials coming from Ricardian Apologists. To honor this interest of mine, I will regularly post reviews of Ricardian sources and start a new page on this blog where I will gather links pertaining to the topic of Ricardian Apology. It might seem like a boring subject at first, but bear with me, and I will tell you why it's fascinating.

We have all heard the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York.

In Richard III, Shakespeare presents Richard as a nasty, ugly, humpbacked character who compensates for his lack of male charms with an unquenchable thirst for power:

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, 

Have no delight to pass away the time, 

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun, 

And descant on mine own deformity: 

And therefore,--since I cannot prove a lover, 

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,-- 

I am determined to prove a villain, 

And hate the idle pleasures of these days. 

 Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 by Henry Tudor who started the Tudor dynasty. His death is often considered to be the symbolic end of the Middle Ages in England. Richard has been accused (and this is very important) of murdering his two young nephews who were legitimate successors to the throne. Ricardians believe that Richard was unjustly accused of killing the boys. They have offered very strong arguments as to why it makes no sense to accuse Richard of killing the two young princes and as to who was the real murderer. I will acquaint you with the Ricardian version(s) of events little by little.

Now you might ask why I, who am neither a medievalist nor a scholar of English history, became so interested in Richard III. When I was 9, I discovered the story of Boris Godunov, the Russian tsar who, just like Richard III, rose to the throne against enormous odds and was accused of killing the little prince Dmitri who was a legitimate heir to the throne. There are two famous literary works in Russian literature that take competing positions as to Godunov's guilt in the murder of the little Prince. Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet, wrote a famed play called Boris Godunov that supports the version of Godunov's guilt.

A.K. Tolstoy (not to be confused with a much inferior Leo Tolstoy, the author of the vapid Anna Karenina and War and Peace), however, wrote a much better (in my opinion) play titled Tsar Boris where he suggests that Godunov was not to blame for killing the Prince. I was so impressed by these competing literary accounts that I wrote my first piece of literary criticism at the ripe old age of nine, comparing these two works of literature.

The myth of Boris Godunov, an upstart who ascends to the throne as a result of cunning and a murder of a prince of blood, is as much a mark of Russian bloody separation from the Middle Ages as the story of Richard III is of England's.

Now think about what's going on in the US today for a second. Are we not living through a very similar debate as to who is more worthy of ascending to the throne, Bush Jr., who inherited it or Obama, who forged his birth certificate? Oh, you don't think he forged it? Well, maybe Richard III and Boris Godunov didn't kill anybody either. Maybe a painful entrance into modernity is always accompanied by a debate about whether inheriting power is more legitimate than ascending to power through one's own efforts. Maybe it always involves questioning whether "the upstart" has usurped power through a crime against the true, royal blood.