Annette Carson opens with the statement (p 7) that her ‘overall objective … has been to establish a greater understanding of the offices of Lord Protector and High Constable as held by Richard, Duke of Gloucester … between the death of his brother Edward and his assumption of the throne’.
At the core of this book, there is indeed an interesting discussion of the significance of Richard’s Constableship to an understanding of the events of this period, and the legal underpinnings of his actions. Carson argues that the arrest and execution of Anthony, Earl Rivers, Richard Grey, Sir Thomas Vaughan and William, Lord Hastings, were carried out by Richard in his role as High Constable, which empowered him to try and summarily condemn traitors. Her argument is well supported by the appended grants of the Constableship (here made available along with translations for the first time). Carson also does a good job of setting Richard’s Protectorship in its historical perspective, and his actions in the context of contemporary definitions of treason (although she sometimes has a tendency to rely on over-extensive quotes from secondary sources to support her points).
The weakest strand is perhaps Carson’s assessment of the chronicle evidence. There is a tendency to re-tread familiar old ground; more importantly, in setting out to ‘strip away … editorial comment and adhere strictly to reported facts’ (p 70), she sets herself an inherently difficult, if not impossible task. Nor are her assessments always convincing – for example, her judgement that ‘it seems likely’ that Dominic Mancini (De Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium) ‘got hold of a reliable account’ of the arrest of William, Lord Hastings, is questionable. Eyewitness accounts may well have been ‘on the streets within hours’, but as we cannot tell how Mancini acquired his information (and as Carson notes elsewhere, he was not above inventing details), assessing its ‘reliability’ remains problematic (p 70). Similarly, the ‘circumstantial detail’ of Earl Rivers’ hair shirt (a familiar trope of the martyr tradition) in John Rous’s Historia Regum Anglie can be interpreted as part of Rous’s presentation of Rivers in this role, rather than as an indication that Rous had special knowledge of the background facts (p 75).
Carson also sometimes fails to interrogate chronicle passages that support her arguments. In her account of the Council’s debate about the government of the realm during Edward v’s minority, she states unequivocally: ‘when advised not to rush through such important matters before Gloucester’s arrival, [Thomas Grey, Marquis of] Dorset was heard to proclaim: “We are so important that even without the king’s uncle we can make and enforce these decisions”’ – relying on a direct quote from Mancini. It is only when moving on to assess Mancini’s statement that, on the same occasion, the Council resolved ‘that the government should be carried on by many persons, among whom the duke [of Gloucester] would not be excluded’, that she reminds the reader that Mancini ‘was a foreign visitor with no privilege of access to council debates’ (p 51). Furthermore, unsupported asides such as the assertion that ‘Richard had been the embodiment of firm and fair administration in the North’ (p 50) lend an air of bias to the book, reinforced by a persistent tilting at the windmill of a ‘traditional’ view of Richard which is not representative of modern Ricardian scholarship.
In all, this is an interesting, if somewhat flawed and uneven book, which highlights a new dimension in a very well-researched field. The appendices form a useful addition to the existing corpus of printed material on Richard’s career.
