Was Richard III Really All That Bad?
Was Richard III really all that bad?
Richard III is one of the most notorious monarchs in British history and regarded as one its worst tyrants - but what would Crisis Management specialists Lexicon PR have done to alter that widely held perception?
1. “History is written by the victors”
Sounds simple, but the best thing Richard III could have done to change his image was to have won at the Battle of Bosworth.
History is written by the victors and, had Richard been able to put down the rebellion, he would have had the opportunity to portray the Tudors as power-crazed traitors - and himself as a wrongly maligned, kindly king with the best interests of his subjects at heart and whose accession to the throne had been a legitimate one.
As it happens, Richard’s 8,000-strong Yorkist army was roundly defeated by 5,000 of Henry Tudor’s men fuelled by a hatred stirred up by Tudor’s rampant anti-Richard propaganda and PR machine.
With that victory, Henry Tudor was then able, uncontested, to consolidate his own position as new king by further lambasting his vilified predecessor’s reputation to enhance his own. And it served his successors and descendants - those of the great Tudor dynasty - to do likewise, creating a duality of in which Richard III personified evil and those that had conquered him, the Tudors, as the embodiment of all that was good. And who was going to argue with them?
Remember, of course, Shakespeare wrote Richard III – and therefore, in Richard, one of the most hated fictionalised characters in history – under the reign of the greatest Tudor monarch of them all, Elizabeth I (herself being one of the greatest ever PR practitioners). Shakespeare naturally sought favour with Elizabeth, and there was no way he was going to risk putting his head upon the executioner’s block by lauding her dynasty’s most notable domestic enemy!
2. Be proactive
You did lots of good stuff, man, so why not shout about it a bit more? Here are a few examples of what we would have looked to highlight if he was King today.
A fairer deal for the North
Richard is seen to have terrorised the people of northern England both before and during his reign, but the reality was very different. Richard's Council of the North, derived from his ducal council, greatly improved conditions for Northern England, as commoners of that region were formerly without any substantial economic activity independent of London.
· Press release – ‘Richard a champion for the North and its business interests’
· Twitter campaign to drive home his desire to give a voice to the rugged, hard-working and welcoming people of the North.
· Speaking engagements, school visits and visits to businesses within the various regions of the north to ensure balance i.e. he can’t be seen to just be sticking up for the people of Yorkshire – he needs to be seen to be helping those in the North East, Manchester, Merseyside and so forth, too
Protector of the poor
Talk about being a man of the people and ‘a father of modern democracy’, Richard instituted what later became known as the ‘Court of Requests’, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard! Now that is quite something, and flies in the face of image of him as a cruel oppressor.
· Press release – ‘Noble king wants justice for all’
· Twitter activity highlighting his belief in justice for all sections of society
· Get Billy Bragg or similar on board as a spokesperson supporting the policy campaign and hope (or force him to through threat of violence) he writes a chart-topping song about it
· Get TV, radio and press to follow Richard as he visits the homes of real people (whose cases have of course been properly researched and vetted!), sympathises with them and explains his plans for making sure everybody is properly represented in court.
Champion of free speech and expression
Richard also banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books - making him a pioneer of free speech - and ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English.
· Press release – ‘Patron of the arts King Richard determined that his people should enjoy freedom of speech’
· Get Richard booked in for a laid back interview with Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby on This Morning, where the king discusses his love of books and shares his thoughts on some popular new releases
· Get #WhyIValueFreedomofSpeech and #ILoveBooks trending as topics on Twitter
3. The Princes in the Tower – what’s your side of the story, Richard?
Plenty of historians feel the evidence linking Richard to the disappearance of Edward V (whom Richard replaced as king when he was ‘found to be illegitimate’ – it seems Richard was capable of creating high impact, roguish PR campaigns of his own) and his brother aka The Princes in the Tower is flimsy at best.
So why wasn’t Richard clearer with his own story? One of the great dangers in PR is letting important questions about yourself or your company go unanswered. Richard’s strategy for dealing with the rumours that he had murdered the princes so that the displaced Edward could not later challenge his right to the throne was to ignore them until they went away – poor strategy, Richard.
The rumours snowballed and were used to their full advantage to the Tudors as they plotted their rebellion, turning the kingdom against him.
4. Body image
It’s shallow, we know, but it matters to people what leaders look like, or are perceived to have looked like.
True enough, Richard looks alright in extant portrait paintings, and portraits were of course used very effectively as PR and propaganda tools before the dawn of photography.
The problem, though, is that Richard has been imagined - thanks chiefly to Shakespeare - as some kind of ghastly gargoyle that clawed his way to power and afterwards devoured his subjects. Thomas More, for one (demonstrating appalling prejudice, as we’d see it now), emphasised Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind, linking his physical attributes - "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage" to a devious and flattering nature that saw him plan the downfall of his enemies and supposed friends. Shakespeare followed suit, adding in a hunch, a limp and a withered arm for good measure.
These days, of course, we’d have an open goal to aim at, castigating his detractors for their dreadful prejudices and highlighting the fact that good looks and physical attributes do not a good person or leader make, and vice versa.