A CELEBRITY DEFENSE
Bertram Fields' Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes
Regan Books, 1998, $25.00

Laura Blanchard

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Buy the book online! (New paperback edition)
A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Richard III Society, American Branch

Imagine Dustin Hoffman, Mario Puzo, Dominick Dunne, Charlie Rose, Nora Ephron, and dozens of other luminaries turning out to celebrate a new book defending Richard III. It happened in October 1998, when Hollywood attorney Bertram Fields' Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes was released by Regan Books. For Ricardians resigned to seeing their hero dumped on by the world's all-time greatest playwright, a saint, and every columnist looking for a metaphor for egregious wrongdoing, this was a welcome change.

Some Ricardians, watching the media hoopla with mingled elation and bemusement, had another question: who is this Bertram Fields, and why is he writing a book about Richard III?

The Harvard-trained Fields needs no introduction to those in the entertainment business, and especially to those in the field of entertainment law. His client list includes the Beatles, Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, James Cameron, Tom Cruise, Warren Beatty, and almost every major studio. He defended Steven Spielberg and the Dreamworks Studio in the lawsuit over the Armistad script, and was retained by Paramount to argue the appeal of Art Buchwald's high-profile lawsuit against Eddie Murphy over Coming to America. He met his wife, art consultant Barbara Guggenheim, while defending her in a lawsuit brought against her by Sylvester Stallone. According to the Harvard Law Bulletin, "[H]is reputation as a legendary litigator is based on stellar performances in the courtroom and at the negotiating table, in high-profile cases often involving huge sums of Hollywood money. He is also famous as the lawyer able to argue any side of the issue, for any industry party, and win..." Vanity Fair put it even more succinctly, calling Fields "the most feared man in Hollywood."

So, just why is this legal powerhouse taking a break from celebrity cases to take on Richard III? Not surprisingly, the reasons are both compelling and complex.

"I've always been interested in English history," Fields explained in a recent telephone interview, adding that he has also read and seen all of Shakespeare, including Richard III. "It's fascinating, and very good theater," Fields says of Richard III, "but I was left with the feeling that the guy had been more or less piled on. Some years ago, I read The Daughter of Time, and then somewhere along the line someone gave me a copy of Walpole's Historic Doubts." Besides winning cases for the rich and famous, Fields is a novelist -- having written two novels, The Sunset Bomber (1986) and The Lawyer's Tale (1993), under the pseudonym D. Kincaid. After the publication of The Lawyer's Tale, Fields' 92-year-old father, a retired surgeon, challenged him by asking when was he going to do something worthwhile with his life. "My father is a man who honors scholarship," Fields explained. "In addition to being a surgeon, he has multiple interests and has published articles on other topics -- like economics, for example." Responding to his father's challenge, Fields began work on Royal Blood the next day. What made him pick Richard III? "I can't think of anything more worthwhile than the search for the truth." Fields dedicated Royal Blood to his father, now 97, and his mother, 86.

Wall Street Journal reviewer Ned Crabb described Royal Blood as "a most fascinating book -- a step-by-step lawyer's brief using 500-year-old evidence in an attempt to solve one of the great mysteries of Western history." Fields begins with an overview of the factors to be considered in an effort to determine guilt or innocence: motive, opportunity, means, and proclivity. In subsequent chapters, Fields weaves together a re-telling of the events of Richard's life and an analysis of the available evidence, in which he looks at these four factors as well as the reliability of the sources. "Many of the sources of information are highly suspect, if not completely unreliable. Moreover, we are faced not only with determining who committed the crime, but even whether a crime was committed. The princes disappeared; but it is by no means certain that they were killed by anyone," Fields warns us in Chapter II, "Solving a Murder."

Did Fields approach the research for this book -- research that spanned four years and two continents -- as counsel for the defense, or as an impartial observer? "I was committed to bringing out the truth," says Fields. "Although my gut told me that Richard was innocent, I intended to approach it like a law case, and to go where the evidence took me. If it pointed to Richard's guilt, that was the book I was going to write." Fields began his investigations unaware of the existence of the Richard III Society. "I think I read about the Society in the introduction to one of the books I read, early on -- probably Charles Ross's biography," Fields recollects. He joined the Society in 1994 and was a regular user of our non-fiction library, sending couriers from his Century City law office to librarian Helen Maurer's home in Mission Viejo and back in his search for sources. "The Society library is a great resource, especially for articles, and Helen Maurer went out of her way to be helpful," Fields comments, adding that he and his wife Barbara have contributed to the research library fund.

Fields read widely to prepare himself to write Royal Blood ("I think I've probably read just about every book written about Richard III"), and made repeated trips to England to see some of the original source documents and to revisit key sites. Because he was emotionally drawn to the defense but still struggling to maintain objectivity, Fields refrained from contacting the Society in England. "I wanted to do this on my own," Fields explained. "I was also very surprised by my reception at libraries and at the sites I visited over there. I thought there would be some resentment of me as an American working on this, but everyone was very welcoming."

Pacing the Tower of London, Fields says, gave him a good feel for many of the issues involved in the Traditional accounts of the murder of the Princes, especially what he called "the absurdity" of the notion that the Princes would have been buried under one staircase, dug up, and then re-buried under another staircase to bring them closer to the chapel. He visited the city of York and Middleham Castle years ago, while stationed in England during the Korean War. Emotionally, though, the key site for Fields was Bosworth. "Standing on top of that hill, thinking that the course of history was changed by what happened there, I had a feeling I can't describe. I tried to imagine what it must have been like, seeing the enemy approaching and knowing that any minute Northumberland could attack from the rear. It was a tremendously moving experience."

While in England, Fields' research also took him to the British Museum, the College of Arms, Windsor Castle, and the Society of Antiquaries. "The people at the Society of Antiquaries were just incredibly helpful," says Fields, "and went out of their way to bring portraits out of storage. They even volunteered that they had x-rays of the Broken Sword portrait, and dragged them out for me to look at."

Fields' letters on behalf of his clients have been described as "notoriously stinging." Echoes of this can be found in some of his comments about Alison Weir, whose 1992 book, The Princes in the Tower, raised U.S. Ricardian hackles when it was released here in 1994 and has annoyed us ever since. Fields' research predates his first reading of Weir's book, but her abuse of the sources clearly irks him. "Even the traditional historians, like Gairdner, try to be even-handed in describing Richard," he observed, "but Weir goes for the pejorative every chance she gets. She had absolutely no basis for forming the conclusions she drew." Fields relentlessly demolishes Weir's arguments, which at one point he says "defy logic and common sense," along with her credibility, chapter by chapter and point by point.

Along the way to publication, Fields had the obligatory Ricardian author's manuscript setback. He placed pages of his hand-written manuscript on the top of his car and then drove to his office, with months of work fluttering away behind him. His wife decided to copy the technique employed by the police when they attempted to recover Lorena Bobbitt's husband' s severed penis (they threw hot dogs out of the window of a police cruiser and searched the areas where they landed). She placed a pile of soggy newspapers on top of the car and re-drove the route, stopping and searching where papers blew off. In the case of the Fields manuscript, alas, it didn't work.

Where did Fields' four years of research and two years of writing bring him at the end? There is nothing new in Richard III being acquitted in a courtroom simulation, after all -- there was a mock trial in England involving a former Lord Chancellor and two well-known solicitors in 1984, and two trials held before U.S. Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1996 and 1997 -- and Richard was acquitted in all three. Historians, on the other hand, have repeatedly pointed out that the standards of evidence in law and in history are significantly different. "We must assess Richard III's guilt on a balance of probabilities," Alison Weir said at a 1994 book-signing engagement. Unlike Weir -- whose confident assertion that she has "solved" the mystery of the Princes strikes Fields as unjustified hubris -- Fields gives us no solutions, only probabilities. But he's confident that, if Richard III were tried in an O.J. Simpson-style wrongful-death suit, where the standard is "a preponderance of evidence" (in other words, more likely than not) rather than "reasonable doubt," Richard would prevail.

Royal Blood has been a hit at the cash register, going into its fourth printing within three months of being issued. What's more, Fields reports, a number of people with no previous interest in the subject are reading the book and getting caught up in the controversy. The seeds of Fields' next project were sown by this one: Fields hints that he's taking a long look at the Shakespeare authorship question -- from a strict perspective of lawyerly objectivity, of course.

But if Ricardians are very lucky, some of Fields' celebrity clients and friends may consider the possibility that the most effective defense of Richard III will not be in the courtroom, or even on the printed page, but onscreen. And, if the most-feared man in Hollywood were to drop a hint or two in the ears of some of those clients, just imagine what might happen....

NOTE: Some Ricardians have asked about the absence of footnotes in Royal Blood. Fields' original manuscript contained footnotes, which the publisher declined to publish. However, readers will note the following line on the copyright page: "Footnotes are available upon request. Please write to Regan Books, 10 E. 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022." Don't hold your breath waiting for the publisher to send them. Fields has also offered to provide a copy of the footnotes for publication on the American Branch web site. [Update: currently online in an unproofread state as an Adobe Acrobat file.] The interesting blip on the end-paper genealogy chart which has Margaret Beaufort improbably marrying her own father, who died when she was an infant, is an uncorrected typesetting error.

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