Richard III & a Contributor to “A House of Kings”

By Merlyn MacLeod

I recently purchased the 1972 imprint of A House of Kings: The Official History of Westminster Abbey, with a message from Her Majesty the Queen, and was startled to find a few paragraphs sympathetic to Richard III within its pages.

This official history was first printed in 1966, with the latest edition appearing in 1992. The copyright belongs to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, and my 1972 edition was printed on behalf of the Westminster Abbey Bookshop by John Baker Publishers Ltd.

The editor of this official publication of the Abbey was Dr. Edward Frederick Carpenter K.C.V.O., Dean of Westminster. Born 27 November 1910, he died 26 August 1998, and his ashes are buried in the nave of the Abbey, near the graves of the deans who preceded him.

The official web page of Westminster Abbey discussing Dr. Carpenter states, “The grace quoted on [the stone marking his grave] was the one most often used by the Dean (although in the older version using “honour all men”).” The inscription reads:

Edward Carpenter 1910-1998

Canon 1951-1974
Dean 1974-1985
Fearless in the cause of truth, scholar, reconciler, friend.

Go forth into the world in peace, be of good courage, strengthen the fainthearted, support the weak, help the afflicted, honour all, love and serve the Lord rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit+

At the coronation of Elizabeth II, Dr. Carpenter carried the orb in the litany procession prior to the main ceremony, and he was knighted upon his retirement from the Abbey.

I purchased A House of Kings because its illustrations include a reconstruction of the Abbey and the Palace of Westminster, c. 1532, which I need for a novel I’m working on.[1] Since A House of Kings focuses on the official history of the Abbey, I did not expect to find any mention of Richard in it beyond his coronation. I was therefore startled to discover at the beginning of chapter six – which opens “Part II: The Reformation and Its Aftermath 1474-1600” – an introduction entitled, “After Bosworth.”

The entire of Part II was written by the Reverend Arthur Tindal Hart, M.A., D.D., who was a respected historian of the English clergy, and whose “sympathies were always with his subjects”[2]. The reverend’s research was impeccable, his output was considerable. In 1949 he published a prodigious biography on John Sharp, the 17th-century Archbishop of York. He was likely also familiar with the imprisonment of Thomas Rotherham, a fifteenth-century Archbishop of York who was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, as well as the reasons behind the archbishop’s incarceration while Richard was Duke of Gloucester, Constable of England, and Protector of the Realm.

It might be expected that Rev. Hart would toe the traditional historian’s line regarding Richard III.

On the other hand, if Rev. Hart was sympathetic to Richard III, then the editor of A House of Kings would be justified in removing whatever commentary Rev. Hart inserted that did not focus on the official history of Westminster Abbey.

Rev. Hart does prove sympathetic to Richard III, and editor Dr. Carpenter did not remove the reverend’s words.

Excerpt from Chapter 6: Abbot Islip and the Funeral of the Middle Ages: “After Bosworth”, as written by Reverend Arthur Tindal Hart, M.A., D.D., pp. 87-88 of A House of Kings: The Official History of Westminster Abbey:

It is of absorbing interest to speculate on what might have happened had Henry Tudor rather than Richard Plantagenet fallen on Bosworth Field. The Tudor was practically the last serious Lancastrian claimant to the throne of whom the Yorkists had reason to be afraid; while Richard himself, who was not yet thirty-three years old, by a second marriage possibly this time with some foreign princess, could well have fathered a long line of Yorkist kings.

After Bosworth, Richard, no less than Henry, must needs have devoted himself to curbing the over-great powers of the feudal aristocracy; to erecting a strong national monarchy based upon the loyalty of his own household, an efficient civil service and a compliant Parliament; and to building up those very policies in the economic and financial fields that his great brother Edward had so successfully pursued, and which in the event were largely taken over by his successors. There is in fact little doubt but that some sort of kingly despotism, tempered on the one hand by the growing power of the House of Commons with its fingers on the taxation money-bags and the increasing prestige of the Common Law on the other, would have emerged under the Plantagenets, as it certainly did in the case of the Tudors and Stuarts. What it might be harder to believe in or to visualize would have been such a violent break with the papacy and the wholesale plunder of the Church as were so successfully and cynically engineered by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell.

Richard was indeed a child of the Renaissance, and sufficiently Puritan at heart to study Wycliffe’s English New Testament; yet neither he nor any of his successors was in the least likely to approach the problem of the sixteenth-century Church in the spirit of the Welshman. Reformation from within in line with those demands of the Oxford Reformers or the ideals of Thomas Wolsey, rather than a drastic Cromwellian purgation from without, would have been more in keeping with Plantagenet traditions. Moreover, as one peers into the mists of ‘what might have happened’, it is possible to glimpse the outlines of a shadowy Plantagenet dynasty as the ally of Spain and a champion of the counter-Reformation in Europe: helping to exploit the wealth of the New World, while coercing the Protestantism of the Old; helping to win the Thirty Years War for Catholicism; and ultimately climbing off the back of a declining Spain and Holy Roman Empire into very much the same kind of leadership in Europe that Louis XIV aspired to at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

At Westminster the Yorkist sympathies of his immediate predecessors would have insured for Abbot Islip the royal patronage. Richard had already proved himself the lavish founder of chapels, colleges, chantries and hospitals; his coronation was one of the most spectacular that the Abbey had yet witnessed; and his first wife lay buried within its walls. He had moreover endowed the convent with ‘an egle of gold garnysshed with perles and precious stones in which is inclosed the precious relique called the Ampule’; and it is credibly reported, although never proved, that he himself had received from the Yorkist abbot Eastney St Edward’s scepter a week before he was actually made king. Is it then beyond the bound of reason to suppose that Henry VII’s Chapel could still have risen to house a Yorkist dynasty; while so much that was lost, the Confessor’s own shrine and a host of other irreplaceable medieval beauties, might well have survived into our own day? Furthermore Islip would not have been the last abbot to continue the enlargement and beautification of the Abbey; and we should certainly not have had to wait until the eighteenth century for the present far from satisfactory West Front. These things were not to be. Bosworth Field decided once and for all not only that England was to become Protestant, but also that Westminster Abbey would soon be dissolved, stripped of most of its wealth and much of its loveliness; and in its present reconstructed status as College and peculiar, stand forever as the sadly mutilated shell of its former splendours.

But it is now high time that we left the realms of fantasy for those of hard fact.

~ * ~ * ~

What have we here? Rev. Hart penning not a word about Henry VII rescuing England from…whatever it is that the “Tudor” was supposed to have rescued England from?

Nothing about the glory of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I?

Not a word about the evil, tyrannical, usurping child-murderer some claim was Richard III? Only a mourning of what might have been, if only Richard had lived?

And this, in an official publication of the history of Westminster Abbey with editions spanning forty-eight years? With additional editions to be reprinted in the decades to come, to continue being sold in Westminster Abbey’s Bookshop?

It’s interesting that the official history of Westminster Abbey – written by the Dean of the Abbey and other, respected religious historians – makes no mention of the usurping monster some obstinate, misleading historians claim Richard III was. Instead, A House of Kings castigates the Tudors for the damage they did, not only to the Abbey, but to the religious, artistic, and social fabric of England.

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[1] The reconstruction was drawn by A.E. Henderson, F.S.A., based on information in the Abbey Muniments.

[2] Rev. Hart’s obituary can be found online here, on page 102 of Priests and Prelates: The Daily Telegraph Clerical Obituaries by Trevor Beeson, Bloomsbury Academic, 2006.