Welsh Journals

definitive biography of Richard III. But Charles Ross's work, first published in 1981 and now issued in paperback, remains an excellent attempt, with well-chosen illustrations and only two significant misprints (pp. 67, 76). Ross exploits the brevity of the narrative to analyse his sources and discuss alternative interpretations at satisfying length, and he deals, with humour but without scorn, with the views of many of Richard's detractors and defenders, from Shakespeare's Margaret of Anjou-who characterised Richard memorably as an 'elvish-marked, abortive and rooting hog'-to Tallulah Bankhead, a founder-member of The Friends of Richard III Incorporated. Ross himself aims not to unlock Richard's heart, but to make his career a key to fifteenth-century politics, and the book is at its best when analysing the politics of patronage and affinity. Richard's Nevill marriage and the following it brought him are emphasized as the basis of his strength in northern, and at length in national, politics. The king's rewards to his northerners and their loyalty to him are explored in detail, as are the links between the rebels of 1483 and their probable motives for revolt. Richard's insensitivity in colonizing the south with his northern retainers in the wake of the rising becomes his most crucial political misjudgement, alienating much of the southern establishment: a misjudgement uncharacteristic in a man who tried to spread patronage widely during his brief protectorate and was not unsuccessful in buying the loyalty of the peerage. The danger in such a treatment of politics is that the use of patronage, the easiest aspect of kingship to document securely and the easiest to examine over a short span of time, can readily become the prime test of successful government, but Ross avoids this pitfall. He shows us Richard the statesman, though perhaps less clearly in the context of his predecessors and successors than might have been instructive. The king emerges as a guarded innovator, institutionalizing his personal control in the north through a council led by a southern peer, offering prerogative justice to the poor, shifting administrative weight from the great seal to the signet, entrusting responsibility to 'men who might reasonably be regarded as upstarts by the standards of the day', sparing in the creation of peers, cowing his opponents with bonds and recognizances, seeking to enforce a crown monopoly on the retaining of royal tenants, and cultivating sea-power and the use of firearms. In particular, Richard appears as an ardent, often manic, propagandist, denouncing the political and sexual irregularities of his rivals in the attempt to woo a public opinion disturbed by rumours of rampaging northern armies, disappearing princes, and plans for the king to dispose of his wife and marry his niece. It was in these efforts to win his subjects' approval by means other than selective reward that character met politics, as the contemporary estimate of Richard determined his ability to command support. The estimate was unfavourable enough for the support to be dangerously brittle, though, Ross argues, Richard's behaviour was not outstandingly monstrous by the standards of his family and his age, 'an age of extreme political ruthlessness', in which his father-in-law, father and brothers had betrayed loyalties, flouted the laws of inheritance, broken sanctuaries, executed prisoners, committed judicial murder and deposed anointed kings. In this context, Richard's sense of survival sufficed to guide him through the early summer of 1483,