MONSTERING RICHARD

There is a practice known to contemporary British journalists as ‘monstering’. The editor of a ‘tabloid’ paper plans to focus on a notorious individual in order to increase their notoriety and so generate stories by portraying that individual as sensationally as possible. This involves provoking them and their associates into further statements and disclosures. Competing newspapers will join in and the more respectable ‘broadsheets’ will find a way of conveying all the stories generated in the guise of a critique of their colleagues’ behaviour. In this process the line between legend, speculation and truth is blurred, becomes irrelevant; the effect is the creation of a kind of disposable folklore, at the expense of a living person.

The ‘monstering’ of the Duke of Gloucester (1452–85), crowned King Richard III in1483, has its origin in Shakespeare's sources, most notably in the life of Richard by Thomas More (probably written between 1510 and 1518), but the popularity of the play kept the legend alive. It has become the focus of a continuing, if perhaps academically marginalized controversy as to the extent of the historical Richard's ‘guilt’. There is a longestablished Richard III society dedicated to clearing his name, several websites (I give addresses in my bibliography), and a number of speculative fictions like that of the detective story writer Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951), the daughter of time being, proverbially, truth.

The process of a revision of history whose aim is to declare Richard innocent began with Sir George Buck, in his The History of the Life and Reigne of Richard III, written in 1619 but not published until 1706. Buck was a descendant of a Yorkist family; his great-grandfather was executed after the battle of Bosworth, as a supporter of Richard. Perhaps it is a combination of support for the underdog and an unquenchable taste for conspiracy theory that has kept the pro-Richard camp going. Whenever I told a non-academic friend or acquaintance that I was working on this book, it was the forensic issue, the matter of evidence for Richard's guilt or innocence, that they wanted to talk about.