The Average Brute

RICHARD THE THIRD (602 pp.)--Paul Murray Kendall--Norton ($5.95).

Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting

hog . . .

The slave of nature and the son of hell! Thou slander of thy mother's heavy

womb ! Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!

Shakespeare is throwing this mud at Britain's Richard of Gloucester, alias "Richard Crookback," better known as Richard III. Generations of students have gasped with horror at the monstrous doings of Britain's basest king, notorious for the murder of his young nephews ("The Little Princes in the Tower''). Not for three centuries did historians begin to wonder whether Crookback could possibly have been quite so crooked. Now. Ohio University Historian Paul Kendall has tried once more to get at the truth.

Author Kendall's big book, which has been hailed excitedly in Britain, differs from its predecessors by virtue of the raw material on which it is based. Kendall argues that after Henry Tudor destroyed Richard at the Battle of Bosworth. he was careful, as Henry VII, to take away Richard's reputation as well as his crown. Tudor historians (whom Shakespeare followed) spent the next hundred years or so blackening the defeated monarch in order to whitewash their own regime. So, Kendall argues, all Tudor evidence is suspect; only the evidence of Richard's contemporaries should be taken into account.

Across the Golf Links. The first thing to clear up in Richard's life is his behavior before he entered it. According to various Tudors, Richard spent a cagey two years in his mother's womb, waiting for the appearance of "a hostile star'' that would make him a proper "Antichrist." When at last he made his delayed entry (in 1452), he did so feet foremost, with a set of teeth, and black hair flowing down to his deformed shoulders. On his face was a "malicious, wrathful, envious" expression.

This obstetrician's nightmare is not confirmed by the records, which only say that Richard was a small, sickly infant, eleventh child of "quiet, solid" Richard, Duke of York. He was still a negligible, unnoticed boy when his big, handsome brother chopped his way to the throne as Edward IV. Richard became a Knight of the Bath and of the Garter. He was then nine. Next year he became Admiral of England. Ireland and Aquitaine. When he was 16, he wrote a letter asking a friend to lend him 100 pounds. That is substantially all that the records have to say.

Author Kendall tries to fill in the vacuum by suggesting that puny Richard practiced swordsmanship so vigorously that his right arm and shoulder developed at the expense of his left, making him seem "crookback'd." What is certain is that at the age of 18 he was a trusted general and led a flank of his brother's army against the Earl of Warwick at the Battle of Barnet. (Author Kendall's maps show modern landmarks so the reader can picture Warwick driving south across the "Golf Links.") But only with the sudden death of Edward IV does Richard step into the limelight--chosen by his dying brother as Lord Protector of England and guardian of twelve-year-old Edward V.

Up to this point Author Kendall succeeds in giving Richard a clean sheet. He is unable to continue doing so, for the simple reason that clean sheets were virtually unknown in 15th century England --which had reached about the same stage of political ethics as Russia is enjoying today. Lord Protector Richard arrested and executed his brother's advisers. Conveniently, a friar preached a sermon on the ominous text: "Bastard slips shall not take root," whereupon Richard declared his brother's children illegitimate, and took the throne himself. For a short time, the little prince and his brother were seen by passers-by "shooting at butts ... on the Tower greens." Then they disappeared. Atween Two Feather Beds. "Some said," writes a contemporary chronicler, "they were murdered atween two feather beds, some said they were drowned in malvesey (wine) and some said that they were sticked with a venomous potion." Two hundred years later, the skeletons of two children were discovered by workmen at the base of the White Tower and laid reverently in Westminster Abbey. Kendall considers it "very probable" that the remains were those of the princes. Who killed them remains a mystery, but Kendall is too honest not to admit that Rich ard may have done the dirty work.

Nevertheless, Kendall argues that Richard took the throne not because he was an unscrupulous villain but because the nation needed a strong ruler. Richard reigned for two years before he got his comeuppance. During that time he "laid down a coherent program of legal enactments, maintained an orderly society, and actively promoted the well-being of his subjects." Besides, murder was "the accustomed fate of deposed monarchs . . . Edward II was murdered, perhaps by a red hot spit thrust up his bowel. Richard II was starved, poisoned or hacked by steel . . . The feeble-witted Henry VI ... put to silence." So, guilty or not guilty, Richard demands--through Historian Kendall--a measure of sympathy. His predecessors were brutes. His successors were brutes. Richard, too, was just an average brute.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.