Will Philippa rescue King Richard's battered reputation?

Richard III is now buried, with appropriate honours, in Leicester Cathedral, a few yards from where his body was found under a municipal car park in 2012. This only happened following diligent research and campaigning by amateur historian Philippa Langley, whose story is immortalised in Richard III: the King in the Car Park (Channel 4). Philippa is now focussing ?on rehabilitating the reputation of Richard by examining one of the most serious charges against him: that he ordered the murder of two young princes in the Tower of London.

?

?William Shakespeare’s play, the most recent TV version of which is The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses: Richard III (BBC 4), illustrates the Tudor view of Richard perfectly. Right from the first few frames we know that Benedict Cumberbatch will play the title role as a grotesque caricature, just as Shakespeare intended. The soliloquys and asides, direct to camera, give us the opportunity of peering into a truly distorted mind. Much is made of Richard’s deformed back, his unsteady gait and withered hand. At one point, his own mother, played by Judi Dench, points to these disabilities as evidence that both his body and mind are grotesquely evil.

?

In The Princes in the Tower: the New Evidence (Channel 4), Philippa Langley recruits criminal barrister Rob Rinder to examine her case. ?Rinder ?started by researching the accepted story. We went back to the Tower of London in the late 15thcentury. It was a bustling small town with a thousand inhabitants, several shops and seventeen pubs.? No doubt there was much gossip, but the only contemporaneous account of the princes’ disappearance is found in a short message from an Italian visitor to London who reported the boys were missing. His grasp of English was questionable. The “death” of the two boys, both in line for the throne, would have suited the King who replaced Richard: Henry VII. Thirty years later the saintly Thomas More wrote an account of the murder of the princes, even naming the killers. By the time Shakespeare wrote his play, in 1590, with Henry’s granddaughter on the throne, it suited him to repeat and amplify Tudor propaganda. Thus, conjecture became myth, myth became fact and cannot be questioned.

?

Philippa’s thesis is that the two boys continued their lives in exile on the continent. However, both sought to re-establish the Yorkist throne during Henry’s reign. She has found several references scattered in archives across Europe, of the princes’ dealings with their peers. She claims Edward launched a campaign which began with his coronation in Dublin but ended with his subsequent defeat and death at the Battle of Stoke. A young child called Lambert Simnel was paraded as a “pretender” to the throne, pardoned and given a job in the royal kitchens. However, a few years later Richard, Duke of York, the other prince in the Tower, began campaigning to be crowned king. At first Henry used the same playbook he had used with Lambert Simnel and ?Richard was renamed Perkin Warbeck, initially treated well but eventually executed. Rob Rinder, looked in detail at the evidence presented by Philippa, and clearly thought it had merit. History, and Shakespeare’s play, may well have to be rewritten.

?

The mid-autumn drama series have been launched to take us up to Christmas. Boat Story (BBC 1) is not for the squeamish. Two strangers meet on a beach whilst walking their dogs and discover that a grounded fishing boating contains two bodies and a stash of drugs worth millions on the street. They decide to take the drugs and find a buyer, but then it gets very nasty. Kin (BBC 1) gets just as unpleasant. This too is about drugs. Those “crackheads” who now seem to dominate every high street have their addiction fed by well organised and vicious gangs, the Kinsella family are one such gang in Dublin. They may have tailored suits and do business on laptops in smart eateries but they are not nice people. At times, it feels as though the writers are trying to get our sympathy for them. On yer bike! Grime Kids (BBC 3 and BBC 1) is set in Bow, London, and features a group of Black school children who want to get involved with the local music scene. When the boys are talking among themselves the dialogue is difficult to follow: it’s not Cockney, but a street patois, reflecting their Caribbean heritage. However, when they speak to adults, even those from the Caribbean, they speak standard English, albeit with an accent. A humorous story which introduces us to a different subculture.

?

Those who fear climate change and global warming may care to watch out for The Day The Earth Caught Fire (Talking Pictures TV). Made and set in 1961 it imagines what would happen if the US and USSR simultaneously set off two powerful nuclear bombs which sends ?the world off its axis and hurtling to the sun. We see serious disruption to the weather, floods, searing heat, food shortages and disease. Improbably the stage for the drama is the Daily Express office in London where the hard-drinking journalists are the first to realise that something is seriously wrong. Alas the film is off-air and encore for the time being, but ?I’m told will be shown again ?in February or March next year. One to look out for, it could become a cult classic.

Methodist Recorder 1 December 2023

Some readers may be interested in my reflections following a recent visit to Zimbabwe

?