Reconstituting Richard

By * Brad Darrach

WE SPEAK NO TREASON by ROSEMARY HAWLEY JARMAN 576 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

THE KILLING OF RICHARD III by ROBERT FARRINGTON 287 pages. Scribners. $5.95.

"That bottled spider," Shakespeare called the last Plantagenet. "That pois'nous bunch-back'd toad." Other Tudor chroniclers--variously declaring that he arranged the murder of his brother, poisoned his own wife, usurped the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London --have made Richard III Britain's very own Ivan the Terrible.

But there is another Richard, the man behind the monster mask of Tudor propaganda, a ghost wailing disconsolately for historic justice. Ever since 1768, when Horace Walpole published his Historic Doubts about Richard's alleged misdoings, revisionist historians have been trying to substantiate that ghost. In 1933, the Tudor version won points. When the skeletons of two young boys were found buried in the Tower, it was generally assumed that the bones were those of the little princes. Since then, passion and speculations have fueled at least half a dozen novels and several notable studies (including one that claimed the princes were alive and well in London years after their supposed murder).

This year two new revisionist novels have appeared, both presenting fresh and contradictory portraits of the man, both bloody good reading in the winter of our discontent.

We Speak No Treason is a king-size gothic romance by Rosemary Hawley Jarman, who writes medieval English almost as gorgeous as Charles Reade's in Cloister and the Hearth. Her pages are dotted with sarplers, live-lodes, oxters, and muster-develers. 'Zooks if anybody knows what they mean; 'zounds if they aren't fun anyway. So is her version of Richard. She sees him as a 15th century Bobby Kennedy, the runt of a glittering litter who as a youth is devoted to his glamorous older brother, King Edward IV, and as Edward's successor displays rare qualities of social conscience.

Unhappily Richard develops into a vanilla paladin who might more aptly wear a cherry than a crown. According to Jarman, Richard committed none of the crimes imputed to him. She says he accepted the crown with a heavy heart (for which there is no historic evidence) only when he became convinced that the princes were truly illegitimate. Later, he did not murder the princes; he had them sent for safekeeping (for which there is one very doubtful piece of historic evidence) to Barnard Castle.

In The Killing of Richard III, Robert Farrington is something of a Richardist but more of an entertainer. His hero--modern, brisk, amused--is James Bond in a baldric, a lewd, shrewd "clerk" who undertakes secret missions for the king. Seen through his eyes, Richard comes off as a reasonably decent Renaissance statesman, astute in the chancellery but stupid in the field.

Author Farrington acquits Richard of murdering his wife and the Duke of Clarence and, all things considered, is inclined to suspect Richard's treacherous friend, "the deep-revolving witty Buckingham" (as Shakespeare called him), of finishing off the princes in the Tower. Richard had nothing to gain from the crime, Farrington reasons; as certified bastards, the princes were no longer a real threat to his legitimacy. Buckingham's motive? He hoped to overthrow Richard by making him seem a monster. The princes, moreover, were a potential obstacle from Buckingham's own path to the throne. These ideas are not new, but they are ingeniously worked out. Farrington cannot match Jarman's atmosphere, but then she cannot match his wit. The one should be read for historic mood, the other for political analysis.

Read about him till the shelves are empty, Richard will still be an enigma. Farrington to the contrary, many authorities agree that Richard was not astute; he was principled, even moralistic. Raised in the wilds of Yorkshire, he was a deep-country conservative, almost religiously loyal to his liege -- even, it appears, to his wife. But in an age of scurrying change, the old pieties were giving way before the impact of the new humanism, nationalism, and the rising power of the middle class. A study of Richard's legislation suggests strongly that in the course of his brief reign (1483-85) he was obsessed with social justice in a generation that, after 100 years of civil war, was obsessed with stability -- peace at any price. The great lords on whom his power principally depended did not understand or trust his policies, and they turned against him at Bosworth Field. He was a man both behind and ahead of his time: a remnant of the Middle Ages; an early Puritan.

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