Hicks. Ricardian No. 74. p.399. ':" 6. Dominic Mancini. The Usurpalion of Richard the Third. translated C. A. 1. Armstrong (Clarendon Press. Oxford I969: second edition). p.65. 7. Thomas More. Hislory of King Richard III in The Greal Debale (Folio Society I965), p.43. ibid.. p.36. 9. Michael A. Hicks. The middle brother: “False. fleeting, perjur’d Clarence’, Ricardian No. 72 (I981), p.309. - IO. W. E. Hampton. Sir James Tyrell. Ricardian No. 63 (I978). p.1 1. l 1. Paul Murray Kendall. Richard the Third (London I955), p.454. l2. Mancini. p.63. l3. Hicks. Ricardian No. 72, p.309. 14. Hicks. Ricardian No. 74, p.400. 15. Mancini. p.63.

RICHARD AND CLARENCE M. A. HICKS

WHAT DIVIDES Miss Wigram and myself are different standards of what constitutes acceptable use of evidence. Given several alternative interpretations, Miss Wigram always plumps for that most favourable to Richard, whereas I adopt the explanation most consistent with the sources. My approach is less daring, and certainly less exciting, but rather more reliable. Should concrete evidence to the contrary materialise, my interpretation would have to be altered, but it has not happened yet. Miss Wigram still believes that it was ‘a delicate and honourable consideration for her feelings’ that prompted Richard to remove from Clarence’s clutches to sanctuary in 1472. He wanted her person as well as her property: the 1474 partition enabled him to 'retain her inheritance only So long as he remained unmarried, which was not in his long-term interest. True. But in 1472 Richard had been offered Anne’s hand in marriage without her inheritance,‘ and had insisted on having the lands as well. He was not inte'rested in having her without her inheritance, yet the 1474 partition reveals that he contemplated having the lands without having her. This clause, which benefited only him and was presumably drafted at his request, disinherited Anne but left Richard in possession until he chose to marry again; Given that a lasting marriage to Anne was the price of permanent possession, he enjoyed the best of both worlds, and he could hang on to the northern Neville lands regardless. Both the Pastons and the Croyland continuator saw the dispute as one about property and there is ample evidence to support this viewpoint.2 Richard may have been motivated by delicacy and honour, but that is pure speculation, without supporting evidence. It is not true, incidentally, that many managed without dispensations and Richard could hardly have been ignorant of their importance

20 :5!" in his case. We need to know whether the Countess of Warwick had any choice in her residence before drawing conclusions from it. Moving on to the pre-contract story, Miss Wigram rightly indicates a contradiction in my dating of Stillington’s arrest,J which apparently occurred after the 1478 parliament was dissolved. What matters here is that there is no direct evidence to link the story with either Clarence or Stillington (or anyone else) before 1483. We don’t need the story to explain events in 1478, when it does not feature among the amazing ragbag of stories collected in the chronicles and the act of attainder itself. Again, the suggestion that it played a part in Clarence’s fall and Stillington’s confinement is mere speculation, without supporting evidence, and it is better to stick to what we know. This need not mean that the pre—contract story itself is false. As for Richard’s part in Clarence’s fall, there is again no contemporary ' evidence that he regretted Clarence’s death. Members of the Richard 111 Society are surely sufficiently conscious of the to appreciate the pitfalls of accounts written after the event? More was writing in the next century and did not believe that Richard’s regrets were sincere.‘ Mancini was writing in 1483, but was a foreigner only briefly resident in dependent for information on the past on what he was told, not what he had seen. Both may have been influenced by what Richard was saying, as in that letter to the Bishop of Annadown, in which case the three independent sources boil down to one. From 1483 Richard had good reason to distance himself from the Wydevilles, now his enemies, and to place a different construction on his actions in 1478. Then, as the record evidence clearly shows, he received solid benefits from Clarence’s fall before his death and even before parliament sat, benefits that were dependent on Clarence’s attainder. It is surely beside the point whether he charged enough for his support! It could perhaps be argued that Richard favoured the attainder but not the execution, if such a distinction was politically possible, but the only contemporary account of such intercession casts his mother in the réle.‘ Our debate has wandered far from Clarence, whose reputation was not enhanced by my book, though I hope his behaviour makes rather more sense. Paradoxically the main loser is Richard, whom Miss Wigram regards as virtuous and emotional, the prey of romantic love for his childhood sweetheart and brotherly love for Clarence, in defiance of his own best interests and p'ractical politics. Not the portrait surely of a man worthy of the crown in the difficult conditions of late medieval England. Is it not better to appreciate Richard as he really was, to recognise his strengths and weaknesses, and to set‘him in context rather than treat him in isolation?

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. ‘The Kynge enlretyth my lorde ofl' Clarance for my lord of Glowcester, and as in is seyde he answerylhe that he maye weell haue my ladye hys susler in Iawe. but! they schall pane no lyvelad. as he seythe’ (my italics), Pasta" Letters and Papers of the Fifleemh Century. ed. N. Davis, Vol. 1 (Oxford 1971), p.447. 2. This is fully treated in my False, Fleeting. Perjur'd Clarence (I980). pp.l 12—17, 123—4; ‘Descent, Partition and Extinction: The ‘Warwick Inheritance} ', Bullell'n of the Institute of Historical Research, Vol. 52 (1979). pm I6—128. Hicks, Clarence, pp.l63—4. T. More, History of Richard III. ed. R. Sylvester (Yale 1963), pp.8. 100. 5. J. de Roye, Journal, ed. 3. de Mandrot, Vol. 2 (Paris 1896), p.64.

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