A Meditation on King Richard Iii

By Margaret J. Howell

Documents may have been destroyed, the graves left unmarked, the records rewritten, but his idea dominated the minds and experiences of those who knew him best and who shared their recollections, so that he has joined that rare group of singular personalities who make friends centuries after they have passed from the world. Richard III was a king, with all that implies, and he has returned after five centuries trailing some of his mediaeval glory. He was also pious. This little book provides a brief biography, describes the form and feature of the time, its ceremony and its hope. It reviews briefly the history of deposed monarchs and concentrates also on the inward life which was the mainspring of action and recalls the lost faith we once all shared with King Richard. Some techniques for contemplation give the reader unfamiliar with such concepts a good start with simple methods, sentences for meditation, and set prayers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503567214

Margaret J. Howell

Margaret Howell was born in Exeter, Devonshire, and educated privately there. Afterwards she graduated from Indiana University, in Bloomington. During a very varied career, she has taught English at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia and was for twenty two years a popular teacher of English and History in Vancouver. Her special interests are English literature and the study of texts, including the Bible, the history and the writings of the English-speaking people, and also the history of the Arab peoples, particularly the current problems in the Holy Land. She was for sixteen years Book Editor for Middle East Perspective. She has published articles on various subjects, two pamphlets of poems, and two books, one on Byron’s plays, Byron Tonight, an entertaining account of the nineteenth century theatre; and a history of the Byron family, The House of Byron, with Violet W. Walker, late archivist of the City of Nottingham. The Spirit of Understanding was written in response to the removal of literature and history from curricula, a deletion which has caused confusion and poverty of spirit. She likes walking, painting in oils, and reading. She is a member of the Society of Authors.

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Copyright © 2015 by Margaret J. Howell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 05/20/2015

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 MYSTICS, PRIESTS, AND KINGS

CHAPTER 2 A KING’S LIFE

CHAPTER 3 CODA

CHAPTER 4 AFTERMATH

CHAPTER 5 THE EARTH OF MAJESTY

CHAPTER 6 A CROWN OF ALL THE STARS

CHAPTER 7 SAD STORIES OF THE DEATH OF KINGS

CHAPTER 8 THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

CHAPTER 9 SPIRITUAL WARFARE

CHAPTER 10 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

CHAPTER 11 DE PROFUNDIS

GLOSSARY

A SHORT LIST FOR FURTHER READING

KING RICHARD III

BY THE GRACE OF GOD

KING OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE

AND LORD OF IRELAND

2 OCTOBER 1452 - 22 AUGUST 1485

Loyaulté me lie

(Loyalty binds me)

HADRIAN :   What is it that man cannot see?

EPICTETUS : The heart and the thought of others.

— Translated by Jean de Coras

A good life is a main argument.

— Ben Jonson

CHAPTER 1

MYSTICS, PRIESTS, AND KINGS

On the 22nd of August, 1485, King Richard III fell at the battle of Bosworth Field. Three months later Caxton gave to the world his magnum opus, the Golden Legend. The royal line of Plantagenet came to an untimely end; the Printing Press was fairly launched upon its beneficent mission. Two such events distinctly mark a new point of departure in the annals of our country, and suggest contrasts between the England of to-day and that of four hundred years ago, upon which it may be instructive to dwell.

— Alfred O. Legge, The Unpopular King, 1885

A WELL-KNOWN CRICKETER AND schoolmaster, Hugh Boyd, once pointed out to a student that could John Milton, the august puritanical author of Paradise Lost , return to earth, he would need footnotes to explain life some three centuries after his death. And King Richard III, who has returned from the earth, in a manner of speaking, would need many such notations, and there would be much awkward explaining to do. To a time traveller, or an immortal like Virginia Wolfe’s Orlando, the centuries abound in ironies, and the story of the last Plantagenet monarch evidently teems with them.

It is a truism that the victors write the history of their exploits, and the losers are soon forgotten. Indeed even the winners are not seldom forgotten. Leaving no one behind him who dared to speak for him, King Richard was traduced for long years after his death. Yet so unremitting are the slow processes of time and truth that the passing centuries have seen a transmutation. The living take their quickness from the dead. Documents may have been destroyed, the graves left unmarked, the records rewritten, but his idea dominated the minds and experiences of those who knew him best and he has joined that rare group of singular personalities who retain the art of making friends centuries after they have passed from the world.

Richard was a king, with all that implies, and he has returned after five centuries trailing some of his mediaeval glory. He was also pious. This little book considers some of the significance of this, an aspect of character which tends to get overlooked in these days; and for those unfamiliar with his story it briefly recounts the king’s life (Chapters 2 and 3). It describes the world view and the philosophy of the time, its form and feature, its ceremony and its hope. It reviews briefly the history of deposed monarchs (chapter 7) and concentrates also on the inward life which was the mainspring of action (chapters 8 - 11). Some suggestions for recovery of the faith through meditation and simple study give the reader unfamiliar with such concepts a good start with uncomplicated techniques and set prayers.

Most experience disappears, fleeting into the past and out of memory; but traces may remain and, for recent centuries, more than traces. There may be diaries, letters, books, documents. From these the historian sketches a biography, reconstructing from the fragments, rather as an anthropologist reconstitutes dinosaurs from bits of bone, or the archaeologist calls up ancient cities from buried walls and chunks of statuary. Arthur Weigall (1880 - 1934), an Egyptologist, has written : The true archaeologist does not take pleasure in skeletons as skeletons, for his whole effort is to cover them decently with flesh and skin once more, and to put some thoughts back in the empty skulls . …

The present grows from the past and cannot be separated from it. The idea that passing time means progress, that every way things are getting better and better, has been one of the most conspicuous stupidities of the present epoch, and historical study may provide a necessary corrective. It enables the student to understand that the same verities apply, century after century. The fifteenth century mirrors the present age — the struggling interest groups, the armed militants, the conniving, politic courtiers, the battles and shifting allegiances that go on and on. The story of King Richard III is our story, too.

Skeletons of monasteries, the outlines of buildings are reminders. The names of streets, houses and towns recall the things that were and which still are, though outward forms have changed. For the centuries that came between the fall of Rome in the fifth century and the rise of the nation state in the sixteenth century, there is more than this: we indeed have records — government and personal — and chronicles, and histories. For the fifteenth century these are relatively few and partial, but an outline of King Richard’s public career as scholar, knight, statesman, administrator, king, has been constructed from them.

Much of that life is blank to us. Few hints survive to tell of his inner world. His thoughts are largely hidden, his motives sometimes obscure, but biographers in their note-taking may guess at them from his recorded action. And beneath it all, the ebb and flow of time, run the verities of every age.

A man’s acts are seen, and are temporal; the unseen, his hidden life, is eternal. We can find out something, can get some clues to this enigmatic king in his time and in his place largely through scraps of biography. The outward life of King Richard III (1452 - 1485) is the story of a soldier king, a practical man, diligent in his devotions, decisive in action, thoughtful and accomplished in governing, quick to laughter and to anger. It is natural to fill in blanks and construct his portrait for ourselves — partly because he is iconic: the son of a king, a warrior, an exile, a loyal brother, a younger son unexpectedly precipitated to a throne. He marries his childhood love, we like to think. This sounds like a fairy tale, animating deep desires and archetypes. Here is a hero who suffers loss: his father dies violently when Richard is very young, he goes into exile, he sees more violence, he assumes command, he is slain fighting for his crown. Especially he desires the chivalric ideal, he has written that he longs for it. If it be a sin to covet honour, then Richard was one of the most offending souls.

The conflicts of his age are complex and bitter, but he is no mere warrior. Not only is he a good son of the church, he loves books, he cares about the law, he endows universities, he lives up to the splendours expected of him as a nobleman and as a monarch. His brother patronises William Caxton (1415 - 1492), who sets up his printing press in Westminster and publishes Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the stories of King Arthur, and dedicates a volume to King Richard. The king is seen, however, from the outside. His inner life remains a mystery. There are few letters, no direct statements. Rather he speaks through his action.

Moderns are camping out among the ruins of the rich and beautifully intricate civilisation he knew, that was built up in the centuries between Rome and the Renaissance, a culture grounded in the Christian faith. In it, man was a little lower than the angels. In a one-dimensional world, however, what the nineteenth century poet and thinker William Blake (1757 - 1827) called the single vision of Newton’s sleep, man has been reduced to a ghost in a machine, a spirit detached from himself, accustomed to think of his body as an engine and the universe as a meaningless concourse of atoms. The very human being becomes a fortuitous combination of chemicals, called out of chaos by the merest chance, doomed to death. This world routinely uses the term mediaeval as a term of contempt.

Blake meant that the single vision perceives only mechanism and a dead universe. The middle ages did not think like that. They did not imagine, either, that they were living in the middle of time. A twelfth century writer calls himself one of the moderns. Neither did they see everything ironically. For them the cosmos is alive and life is purposeful. It is like a great drama, watched by the heavenly hosts, and man is on the pilgrim way. Thus although Richard Plantagenet lived in the final century of that epoch, and although his era was chaotic, as most times also are chaotic, its people were endowed with a confidence and a psychological security which seems to have been denied to their latter-day descendants who have jettisoned their traditions but have not escaped from despair.

The rich civilisation that had arisen from the remnants of the collapsed Roman Empire, and built up from centuries of learning, was precise in its thought, brilliant in its literature, glorious in its architecture, joyful in its faith. Some of the greatest spiritual writings come from this period. Colleges were developed and endowed within the universities.

Ordinary life was punctuated by planting and sowing, and by the daily offices of the church. People rose at dawn and retired to bed at dusk. The year went round, as it still does, through Advent, Christmas, Epiphanytide, Candlemass, Lent, Easter, Trinity, and these seasons were celebrated by all, not just the few. Faith had not retreated into citadels. Everyone kept the great solemnities, went to church not just on Sundays but through the week. In the Royal households and the great mansions of the nobility Mass would be said each morning before breakfast, before hunting, before work. Monasteries rang the call to prayer throughout the day. The workers in the fields would put down their implements and crowd into their parish churches for the Eucharist and then return to their reaping. Life marched on in step with these rhythms of the heavens and the calendar of the faith.

Christmas lasted over many days. Advent, preceding it, was a penitential season, a little Lent, a period of reflection and preparation for judgment before the welcome to the Christ child. King Richard would have enjoyed many of these solemnities, joyful and serious at once. They were anticipated on 6 December by the Feast of St. Nicholas of Myra (270 - 343), a bishop known for visiting the poor and distributing gifts, who has, unhappily, been developed into the bloated figure of a commercial Father Christmas. Saint Nick brought gifts of fruit, nuts, spiced cakes and gingerbread. He gave dowries to poor girls so that they could be properly married and escape disgrace. On his feast day some of the cathedrals chose a Boy Bishop or Lord of Misrule who presided over the merry-making when masters and servants changed places. This reminded all of the equality of men and women before God.

The Feast of Fools on the first day of January allowed even priests and learned clerks to wear wigs and fantastical masks. The twelve days of the Christmas Feast, from 25 December to the Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January, sometimes ended up in rioting and drunkenness. Excessive eating, drinking and singing were accompanied, however, by various games. Mummers performed plays, perhaps about St. George killing the Dragon, which were acted with great gusto. Gifts could be exchanged on the Feast of the Epiphany or Twelfth Night, to commemorate the wise kings who brought offerings to the manger. And fortunate were those born on the Christmas feast because they shared their stars with the Christ child.

At the end of the year 2014 a priest in the United States, Father Robert Hart, issued the following statement: Every year, at this time, I am acutely aware of the difference between how the commercial world views this season, and how we should view it. To the department stores and shopping malls ‘Christmas’ runs from — what? Maybe the fourth of July? — until December 25, when they are grudgingly forced to close for a whole day. They think it is all over at 12:01 AM December 26. Suddenly, when the twelve-day season of Christmas is just beginning, they have ended their season. Some stores advertise what they now call ‘the twelve days of Christmas,’ by which they mean the last twelve days of Advent, the ‘shopping days’ leading up to the unfortunate day in which they cannot make any more money. But to us, the twelve days of Christmas begin with the Feast of the Nativity on December 25, and end just in time for the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. Beginning, this year, on November 30, we enter the season of Advent, beginning a new church year. Now, I say all this because the world has converted our holy days and liturgical seasons into something unrecognizable, and the secular ‘Christmas’ has a way of applying pressure of its own that can, if we let it, drown out the true meaning for us. To some degree that is unavoidable; so just remember not to let it spoil your joy in Christ.

This great festival reminded everyone of the greatest narrative of all, that Christ had come to redeem the world, a second Adam; and its purpose, like the purpose of