A King For Our Time

They were debating on Radio 4 the other evening why on earth anyone was so bothered about the re-interment of the bones of a late-medieval king with a dubious and contested reputation, and it's a question I might ask myself. I've commented before about the strange hold Richard Plantagenet seems to have on a number of members of the Goth fraternity, and although I had a few other things to do and consequently couldn't get near Leicester for the festivities, Young Lord and Lady McHenry did manage to go up for the funeral procession on Sunday, while others were cheering/weeping from the sidelines. Even though when the news was first announced of Richard's body being identified a couple of years ago, I found my eyes misting up a bit, looking at all this pageantry I feel slightly uncomfortable at prelates of the Established Church and others being quite so thoroughly roped in as elements of Leicester's tourism strategy.

I suspect, in so far as there is anything more to it than that, the rehabilitation of Richard has to do with our growing suspicion of established narratives and accounts of history. Britain at large seems substantially to have bought into the Richard III Society's insistence that their hero has been traduced, that he wasn't responsible for the deaths of the Princes in the Tower and did some things as king suggesting that, had he lived, he would have proved a reformer and somewhat champion of the rights of the people. When the first episode of Black Adder was broadcast in 1983 (in which Richard's hump turns out to be a bag of presents for his nephews) this view was a joke; now it seems mainstream (except among historians). Although I rather go along with this, I can't bring myself to care about it quite as much as the Ricardians. I wonder what will happen to the Richard III Society now they've won; campaign for Henry VII to be dug up from Westminster Abbey and moved to a civic amenity site in Pembroke, perhaps?

So the events of the last few days have the sense about them of a wrong being righted, a wrong in which everyone seems to want very much to believe, even if it does coincide very neatly with the economic interests of a Midlands city not very well endowed with 'heritage' (I lived there for a year in the early '90s). However I do think criticism of the funeral as a 'pantomime' by the Ricardians who wanted the bones to go to York are a bit misplaced. York, I think, can do panto just as well.