A (White) Rose By Any Other Name

I sat in the barber's not long ago waiting my turn in the chair, and leafing through a slightly elderly copy of History Today. An article caught my attention - a revisionist account of the life of Henry V, that great paragon of medieval kingly and chivalric virtue, pointing out that he was, in fact, a bit of a psychopath. Far from the Shakespearean image of the monarch who passes from dissolute youth to heroic kingship, Henry was thoroughly involved in the English policy of war from his early teens, and as a result of his survival of a near-fatal wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 when he was 16, developed a sort of morbid piety which, combined with a ruthless approach to warfare, produced some deeply unattractive traits and acts when he acceded to the throne. Henry's low point, from the viewpoint of modern morality - and frankly even from that of the time - was the siege of Rouen in 1418-19 when, after the city authorities had expelled several thousand women, children and poor people expecting that the English would, chivalrously, allow them through the siege lines, the king insisted that they were the city's responsibility and confined them to the town ditch. On Christmas Day he allowed two priests to distribute food to the prisoners, but for the rest of the siege was content to watch them starving to death.

Conversely the rehabilitation of Richard III continues apace in preparation for his reburial in Leicester, whenever that actually happens. Good King Dickon exercises a mysterious hold over many of my Goth friends, and always has, it seems. Years ago when Jennie Grey was compiling her fake history of the Gothic Society it was Richard who she retrospectively roped in as the Society's founder, and I number quite a few partisans of the late Duke of Gloucester among my friends. I suppose it has to do with the sense of his being maligned and marginalised, and the realisation that beneath the vilified villain of children's history books across the decades there lies in fact a complex figure who did a remarkable amount of good during his short time as king (notwithstanding what may or may not have happened to his nephews).

History Today reminded me how futile it is to imagine you can control what other people think about you. Medieval monarchs suffer the problem most acutely, because the amount of information about their acts and motivations is remarkably limited, but the same sort of thing happens to us all. If you asked people in Swanvale Halt about my predecessor and what kind of a person she was like, you'd get a variety of highly contrasting answers - as I've experienced. I wonder what people will say about me when the time comes. In the end all one can do is to get on with doing what you think is right and disregard what other people think of it, and you. That's their business.

How close we will manage to get to Richard's funeral, and whether we will indeed be able tearfully to cast white roses on the coffin as it rolls past, I don't know, but I suspect we will be there somewhere.