We humans should have grown weary of kings, but it seems we haven't. Perhaps that's why stories about kings remain, particularly in the historical novel world, interesting. As we've just passed the 541st anniversary of what was a major battle for the small kingdom of England, and because I spent years of my childhood obsessing over the Wars of Roses, I thought I'd post a blog about the last Plantagenet, the infamous (or famous, depending upon your POV) Richard III. He's the "car-park king," whose body, interred secretly after he lost his last battle, remained "lost" until recently. As the wonderful Time Team(c) demonstrates with every episode, dig a foot down in the UK and you will come up with a piece of the past.
Richard has his own coterie of devotees these days, who defend his reputation and do not believe he was the villain, usurper, and murderer imagined so powerfully by William Shakespeare. His passing marked not only the end of the Plantagenet line, descending from William, The Norman Conqueror, but the end of the so called Middle Ages. At least his successor had the grace to claim he was King by right of conquest, not because he had a better claim to the throne.
Look into the cold, calculating eyes of Henry VII and you will see a truly modern man--devious, paranoid, and cunning, a man who spent much of his reign chopping off heads and seizing the property of friends and foes alike. I was happy to read about the beheading of William Stanley, whose change of sides during that final battle, decided the outcome. Clearly, Henry understood "once a traitor, always a traitor." Henry used a lot of people to get the throne, but not many survived his rule.
The poem below is a farewell to the ancient past as well as to the almost modern age (gunpowder, printing press, colonization of the "new" world) in which Richard died.
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For Richard of Gloucester
Where tree trunks span the
girth of twenty men,
The forest floor leaf
littered lay,
Where red deer grazed and
dragons hid
In grandfather's memory,
I stand upon a hollow hill,
Built by men, ringed by stone
dancers.
Here I remember Kings‑‑
Betrayal and murder,
Love, and death in
battle.
Long ago, ecstatic harpers who knew the
oldest songs walked
On foot to find the sacred
places, a full moon's travel
From distant Cornwall
To the Hyperborian islands,
Shuddering, battered by the white-fanged Northern Sea.
Wizards from the chalk-cliff strands of sunken Lyonnese,
Legendary enchanters, masters of
rain and wind,
Who summoned the Sun's return and
Immersed sacred victims in flowering,
fairy-haunted bogs.
For us, what corpse of Once Upon A
Time,
Remains whereon to dream?
Everywhere -- ruins.
Proud castles looted stone-poor,
Towering abbeys sacked,
Jeweled windows smashed.
A later King's Avarice loosed
wolves
Wearing Reformation's black,
All truly lusting, not for God
But for Gold.
At the end came Wars for
Roses;
A triple sun heralded
Morton's Cross.
Severn tides flowed red,
knights strewn,
Once chivalry's flower, now, a raven's
feast
In Tewksbury’s water meadows.
Cathedrals, stone
polyphony, bells,
Music and belief, all laid
Upon the altar of an old, cannibal
God.
The last Plantagenet died in
battle,
Sword in hand.
An old style warrior, charging
fearless
Into the thick of his enemies,
Humble servants found arms and charged beside him
Loyal to the end.
They died together,
Following a man who led
his army from the front.
Majestic, ferocious,
Tusked boar bearing alone
The fatal burden of his line.
The round table is broken;
There have been too many
betrayals.
The Grail was a mad man's dream.
Now, ancient truths are swimmingly
exchanged
For remunerative modern
fictions.
Our age, this sullied,
Oil‑stained, digital perdition,
Ushered in by
A yelping pack
Of curs.
~~Juliet Waldron
