[ SECRET POST #6116 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6116 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #874.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You know what super annoys me about this debate which is obviously referring to The White Queen series? The idea that Richard is portrayed in the series as some sensitive woobie who did nothing wrong ever. Both Richard fangirls and Richard haters seem to think this is what happened in the series and it is not. The series merely posits that he did not murder his nephews (the person PG tries to blame probably didn't do it either but that's for another conversation). He is still clearly someone who is *capable of murder* as he is, in fact, *shown helping his two brothers secretly murder someone*. Am I the only person who saw that?

[(Anonymous)]

THIS. i remember people talking so much, for good and ill, about how sympathetic TWQ made richard, and it really does not. (i actually watched it on that account, hoping that it would even out to at least a semi-historically accurate take on the man and got...also not that, lmao.)

[(Anonymous)]

I think this is actually a really good illustration of why Ricardians tend to err on the side of overcorrecting and over-romanticizing him, honestly. You'll get a show like The White Queen that portrays its characters, not necessarily *well*, but at least with a degree of nuance on all sides, as people capable of both good and evil acts - and *still* people come away complaining that it was too kind to him.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean he also probably did murder his nephews

[meadowphoenix]

tbf the baseline for the war of the roses is that all the big players were willing to commit extrajudicial murder of some sort to a family member however distant. so moral characterization would come from either being worse or better than that. the closeness of the princes in the tower to Richard means that it's on the "worse" scale, even though...they are all family of one sort or another.

[(Anonymous)]

Also the fact that they were kids!

[meadowphoenix]

Also fair!

[(Anonymous)]

If a kid is old enough to be crowned a king, he's old enough to be murdered about it! /s

But, come on, there is not an age range in which murder becomes worse. It's bad all around.

[(Anonymous)]

True, but it's not just the murder of children*, though that was certainly bad enough. It's that Richard III went on a spree of very public, rather flimsy attempts to discredit his own brother (to whom he had a reputation of being completely loyal and one of his staunchest supporters, so this looks uber-backstabby) and nephews on a political level by attacking and legally invalidating their legitimacy first, after his successful campaign to execute political rivals (like various Woodvilles and Lord Hastings) also using rather flimsy, unsubstantiated accusations. It's because he set himself up as ostensibly as young Edward V's protector against those vicious, scheming Woodvilles... but it very, very quickly turned into his own run for the throne, which makes his earlier protests about protecting his nephew look like obvious bullshit.



* Because Henry VII had Perkin Warbeck executed and never faced the amount of criticism Richard III has faced for it. You can certainly argue that circumstances were different - Warbeck wasn't his blood relation, he was being used as a pawn, there'd been multiple rebellions against Henry VII already, and he was clearly already becoming the focus of potentially larger and very serious threats to Henry's throne.

Ironically, those are all very similar and good reasons as to why Richard III would've had a good motive to execute his nephews, but many of his supporters are kind of in denial about that. It's one thing to claim he didn't do it, but claiming he had no motive or reason to kill his nephews is just silly. Of course he did. The politics of the time were motive enough and political murder is always on the table as an option, no matter how noble someone might appear in other areas of their life.

[meadowphoenix]

i quibble with analogizing this to perkin warbeck, but i agree that in every way richard's positioning of himself as a more respectable claimant than even his dead brother, to the point of slandering his mom a bit, which is W I L D, suggests something entirely different and yes a little worse about richard's ethics.

there's also an assumption in this whole conversation that richard's culpability resides in whether he gave an actual order, and like....it doesn't lmao. "i won't tell you to do [bad thing] but i also won't inquire if anything happens" is a common political workaround even now.

[(Anonymous)]

Richard wasn't the one going around accusing Edward IV of being illegitimate. You're thinking of George. Richard's defense of his usurpation rested solely on questioning the legitimacy of Edward's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and the children thereof.

[meadowphoenix]

No, Richard WAS in fact going around saying that lmao (in addition to it being part of George's attainder). It was supposedly made in that wild "sermon" at Richard's request by Ralph Shaw made when Richard was trying to shore up his claim and which comprised most of his arguments (eta: probably to gauge what would stick...unsurprisingly that one did not stick). Richard was doing absolutely the most.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't disagree that Richard was being underhanded with the Titulus Regius, but the central claim was not that flimsy. Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth *was* shady and Edward IV ought to have known better, as a king, than to go about it in such a way.

[(Anonymous)]

Phillipa Gregory is currently the most well known writer of this time period thanks to her popular books and series like The White Queen, but you're jumping to conclusions if you think she's the ONLY one, and of COURSE that must be what the secret is referring to, even though it doesn't actually mention her or her work.

The whole Richard III and Princes in the Tower issue predates her work by many, many decades. There are many works (both fiction and non-fiction) that argue for Richard III's innocence, and anyone who has more than a superficial knowledge of history knows this. It'd be safer to assume the secret referred to the controversy as it exists in academic and historical circles because that's where the bulk of the debate has been, not amongst fans of a TV show.