When I received Richard the Third by Paul Murray Kendall from my parents for Christmas, I went into it with the expectation that Kendall would write a sturdy, generic account of the life of Richard, Duke of Gloucester and later King of England. The king, whose reputation is a byproduct of Shakespearean legend, who is known always as a villain, the usurper of the English crown who would not even hesitate to commit murder to get what he wants, even the murder of his two nephews, King Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, the tragic children known as the Princes in the Tower. It's a story I felt I knew inside and out.
But. I was wrong.
Kendall is no unbiased observer. His goal is simple: to tell the story of what he feels is the real Richard III, and to debunk the rumors as nothing more than what he calls "Tudor tale(s)." Instead of the vicious usurper, Kendall writes about the sickly boy who idolized his older brother Edward, the talented soldier and charismatic ruler who seized the throne and became King Edward IV. In Kendall's version of events, the true villain is Edward's wife, the infamous and beautiful Elizabeth Woodville, the first commoner who ever took the title Queen of England. Elizabeth, and the rest of the Woodville family, metaphorically castrate King Edward and ruin his reign, leaving him soft, emasculated, and disrespected. Upon the king's death, his twelve-year-old son, Edward, is left to manage as king, with his uncle Richard as Lord Protector of England until Edward reaches adulthood. Kendall argues that Richard's decision to take the crown from his nephew was really an unselfish attempt to recuperate the image that his brother destroyed. Kendall's theories are best explained in the following passage:
...The passionately loyal brother who was Constable of England and commander in his teens, who indefatigably bolstered Edward (IV)'s throne and won the devotion of the North, may readily be traced in the King earnestly seeking to dispense justice to his subjects and exerting a prodigious vitality to deal with the problems of his government. But between these lives stands the Protector who usurped the throne, the brother who thus doomed, if he did not murder, the boy king who was Edward's son. The dislocation of this middle moment can be divined, if true, in the progressive corrosion worked upon Richard's relation with his brother by the direction of Edward's later life; and its consequences plainly show themselves in the King's labor to atone for his rupture of the succession, in his compulsive reliance upon loyalty rather than force, and in the haunted and feverish pursuit of well-doing that wore out his heart. Yet it is a fractured life, and the man who lived it must also have been, obscurely, fractured. (Kendall, pg. 389)
Flaws: This book is long, and it is dry. Also, in his attempt to change history's perceptions of Richard, Kendall puts off talking about that most juicy and intricate story of the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower. There is a blurb at the end of the book about it, where Kendall tries to exonerate Richard of their murder -- which is good, providing you have the patience to read Appendix I:
It will perhaps come as a surprise to the reader accustomed to the absolute assurance of history texts and guidebooks that there is no proof that King Richard murdered the two sons of King Edward IV.
Kendall's theories are interesting. Unfortunately, the prose of his book is rather less so, and he is fighting a losing battle in trying to prove the innocence of one of the most notorious reputations in the annals of history. To those who are interested in biographies and history, particularly British history, this is a must-read. For everyone else, skip it. You probably won't even make it to the Battle of Tewksbury, much less Bosworth Field.
Rating: ** and 1/2
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