Dickon's Loyal Opposition
Charles T. Wood's damning assessment of Richard III is tempered by a curious sympathy for his predicament

Wood with boar cake at Richard III Society 1993 American Branch meeting, where he delivered his talk, "If Strawberries were ripe on June 13, was October 2 really Richard III's birthday?" Photo by Peggy Allen.

A well-developed sense of whimsy brought Dartmouth history professor emeritus Charles T. Wood to the study of Richard III -- a study that has spanned more than a quarter-century, embracing both teaching and writing, and including several articles and a critically-acclaimed book on comparative constitutional history.

Wood began his academic career, metaphorically speaking, on the other side of the Channel, as a French historian; his The French Apanages and the Capetian Monarchy 1224-1328 (Harvard Historical Monographs No. 59, Harvard University Press, 1966) is among his early publications. In the late 1960s, though, Wood was tapped to teach an experimental freshman seminar at Dartmouth. These seminars were designed to serve as a replacement for the mandatory second semester of English composition, placing students as close to the frontiers of knowledge within a field as possible.

Recalls Wood of the time, "The late 60s were a crazy time to be an historian and especially a medieval historian. The counter-culture was in; history was out; and anything that had happened more than five minutes ago was deemed irrelevant. Being of a somewhat impish disposition, I was naturally curious to find out just how bad the situation was really becoming, so decided that I should teach my seminar on absolutely the most irrelevant topic I could think of." [1]

Wood in his study, mid-1980s

As it happened, irrelevancy was easy to come by. Wood had studied medieval English history under Helen Maude Cam at Harvard during the period when Josephine Tey and Paul Murray Kendall were stirring the pot with their revisionist works. Miss Cam, a constitutional historian of some repute, was not shy about expressing her annoyance. According to Wood, one day in class Miss Cam remarked with some asperity: "I just do not understand how people can get so upset over the fate of a couple of sniveling brats. After all, what impact did they have on the constitution?" [2] And so, in search of medieval irrelevance, Wood remembered Richard and Miss Cam, and his first Freshman Seminar became "The Great Richard III Murder Mystery."

"My assumption here was that students would of course recognize the hopeless irrelevance of the topic," he explains. "At the same time, though, my bet was that they would find the whole notion of investigating crouch-backed Dickon intriguing or 'camp' enough that adequate numbers would sign up, as indeed they did. Then, once in the course and familiar with the evidence, I anticipated that not a few of them would find themselves desperately anxious to pin down the truth of the matter, totally irrelevant though they knew that truth to be. Such a contradictory set of reactions struck me as not a bad introduction to the whole academic enterprise." [3]

And desperately anxious they became. One resourceful freshman undertook a series of surveys of popular opinion about Richard's reputation. The results were not encouraging to Richard's defenders: ten out of thirteen Dartmouth librarians found him guilty: as did eight out of twelve faculty members. "Nor were these results limited to Dartmouth," adds Wood. "Snowed in one day at Boston's Logan Airport, our budding sociologist found that passenger opinion went against Richard of Gloucester ten to one (three undecideds), while at American the unfavorable margin was fourteen to two." [4]

There were two significant consequences to Wood's choice of Richard as a seminar topic. First, his "irrelevant" subject, fueled by the passions and discoveries of his students, inevitably became a research topic. As Wood puts it, "I learned more than my students did. And among the things I learned was that the reign of Richard III was one heck of a lot more interesting than either Miss Cam or any other historian had ever made it out to be. Richard III went on my research agenda, and my first article on him appeared in the mid-1970s." [5] Second, and perhaps equally inevitably, he was invited to be the American Branch AGM speaker in 1968 and has maintained a Ricardian connection ever since.

The 'Cock-up Theory' of 1483

A youthful Charles T. Wood

Wood's first article on the subject, "The Deposition of Edward V" in Traditio, reviews the events of the April-June 1483 period in the context of other medieval English depositions and, in particular, with regard to the deposition's impact on the power of parliamentary authority. His view of Richard's actions during the period of the Protectorate is comforting to most Ricardian moderates: "There is little evidence to sustain the traditional view that from the beginning Richard aimed at the throne. On the contrary, his every move suggests a much more limited ambition...that at most the Duke of Gloucester was, in modern terms, 'keeping his options open.'" [6] In subsequent paragraphs Wood offers a sympathetic and refreshingly pragmatic Richard's-eye view of the political situation facing him, the fragmentary intelligence he would have received in Yorkshire, and the very real and unpleasant consequences that inaction could bring to him and his family. "Little wonder, then, observes Wood, "that he should have so boldly seized Rivers and the rest at Stony Stratford...since retaining some Woodville hostages provided an obvious form of self-protection against an unknown future..." [7]

In the Traditio article Wood also introduces a view of Richard's character which will later find its full expression in Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints and Government in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1988): "Despite the tactical ability [Richard] displayed in gaining custody over Edward V at Stony Stratford, little in the record of the following month and a half suggests much political skill or sagacity. Far from dominating the situation, Richard appears much more frequently to have been trapped by it, uncertain what his next move would be." [8] This view of Richard's capabilities was colorfully described by A. J. Pollard as Professor Wood's "Cock-Up Theory of History." [9]

Charles T. Wood, 1995, with a 3-D puzzle of Schloss Neuschwanstein won in the 1994 AGM Schallek raffle and put together over a three-month period with the assistance of grandson Luke Arnold. Photo by Susan D. Wood.

Ricardians, reading the Traditio article and the more comprehensive treatment of the issues in Joan and Richard, often become embroiled in the controversies over Richard's actions and character to the exclusion of Wood's analysis of Richard's impact on the development of parliamentary authority. According to Wood, the 1484 Act of Succession stresses parliamentary authority to the extent that "the reader is practically invited to draw the conclusion that, contrary to Richard's own assertions, he had not fully become king until Parliament declared him so." He continues:

If one pursues this line of reasoning, Parliament emerges as considerably more important than a court of record. Its members are no mere judges; rather, they embody the realm, and as its representatives they, not the king, speak to its interests and on its behalf. Pushing the argument even further, one is tempted to say that insofar as the Parliament of 1484 made Richard truly king, its legitimating authority surpassed that traditionally accorded to rights of inheritance, coronation, and the grace of God. Ironic though it may be, Richard III, legendary usurper and tyrant, has some claim to having been the one possessor of a genuinely parliamentary title during the entire Middle Ages. [10]

Wood's Joan of Arc and Richard III is the synthesis of research sparked by three of his classes: the Richard III Freshman Seminar; a subsequent seminar on Joan of Arc; and an advanced class on the comparative histories of England and France. "It suddenly occurred to me for no known reason," explains Wood, "that if I were to write a book on Joan of Arc and Richard III as two fifteenth-century figures whose careers would do much to explain why and how France and England had developed such different forms of government, many of the introductory chapters could be drawn from other articles that had hitherto seemed to lack focus." [11] Central to the thesis of the book is the notion that England evolved its concept of monarchy limited by parliamentary authority as a response to the many discontinuities in royal succession. Wood points out that from Hastings to Bosworth, eight of the 19 kings of England, over 42%, were not the sons or grandsons of their predecessors, as opposed to only three out of 21, less than 15%, in France. To put it simply, England had to evolve an alternative to royal authority because it found itself without that authority so regularly. Early chapters of the book explore issues of royal legitimacy, the age of royal majority, the concept of kingship and the counterbalancing forces of the nobility or parliament during the reigns of Louis IX, Edward I, Edward II, and Richard II.

In the chapters on Richard III, Wood stresses Richard's reliance on the legitimating authority of parliament. Before his accession, Richard apparently intended to have parliament extend the Protectorate. After his accession, Richard called a parliament for November 1483, which was cancelled in response to the Buckingham rebellion; within two weeks of his return to London after quelling the rebellion, Richard had called the January 1484 parliament. The Act of Succession passed by this body profoundly extended parliamentary authority, to the equally profound disquiet of the lords spiritual at least, by rendering a judgment on the legitimacy of Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, "not only on a temporal matter but also a spiritual one, the validity of a sacrament." [12]

At "History in the Comic Mode" symposium, May 1998. From left: Compton Reeves, Charles Wood, Helen Maurer, A. J. Pollard, Gil Bogner.

While Ricardians debate Elizabeth Woodville's motivations in emerging from sanctuary and coming to terms with Richard in the spring of 1484, Wood observes that she began her negotiations within days of the end of the 1484 session and argues that she, too, accepted the strategic importance of the 1484 Act of Succession:

"Historians have often assumed that the parliament of the later Middle Ages had little practical authority and that its chief purpose in the kingmaking process was merely to lend an air of specious legality to accession that were, in truth, no more than the brutal results of conquest. If so, though, the parliamentary legitimation of a usurper should have had no effect on the conduct of those opposed to him, whereas the present case shows just the opposite. Once parliament had declared Richard to be England's legal king, Elizabeth concluded that the game was lost, dubious though everyone knew his title to be. She would take what she could get, and in so doing, she demonstrated that she, too, believed that 'the court of parliament is of such authority...that manifestation and declaration of any truth or right, made by the three estates of this realm assembled in parliament, maketh before all things, most faith and certainty'...small wonder, then, that Richard should have so doggedly sought a meeting of parliament, for a even a man of his limited political perceptions had to recognize that in its approval lay his best hopes for long term success." [13]

And, indeed, Thomas Howard, early of Surrey, defended his allegiance to Richard III to Henry Tudor's face by citing parliamentary authority, as Wood notes at the conclusion of Joan and Richard: "'He was my crowned king,' Surrey explained, 'and if the parliamentary authority set the crown upon a stock, I will fight for that stock. And as I fought for him, I will fight for you, when you are established by that same authority.'" [14]

A Love Letter to the Society

Shortly after "The Great Richard III Murder Mystery" was launched at Dartmouth, retired Dartmouth art librarian and long-time Society member Maude French spotted the course description in the Freshman Seminary catalog. She passed it along to American Branch chairman Bill Hogarth. As Wood tells it, "I take it that this gripping news arrived just at the moment that Bill was beginning to exercise the chairmanly duty of finding a speaker for the next AGM, one who might prove both more entertaining and less insulting than A. L. Rowse, who had just finished spitting in everyone's soup at the most recent AGM, and in me he saw opportunity." [15] Freshman seminar and AGM talk bore the same name, "The Great Richard III Murder Mystery." Wood did indeed entertain some forty attendees at the meeting, held at the John Barleycorn restaurant in New York City.

Libby Haynes, who attended the meeting, recalls it vividly: "He told us how he designed the course, using To Prove a Villain as text, so that students would do their own research and come to a conclusion using their own reasoning skills, which many of them had never had to do before."

Wood's 1968 Ricardian debut as AGM speaker marked the beginning of an association with the Society that continued for the rest of his life.

Following the AGM speech, Wood became a regular attendee at annual meetings in New York City during the 1970s and early 1980s, and an occasional contributor to The Ricardian. He has lectured on Ricardian topics in many venues, including the International Congress on Medieval Studies held annually at Western Michigan University. When William Schallek established the scholarship fund in 1978, Wood was a natural candidate for the Advisory Board, on which he served for twenty-five years. His commitment to the viability of the Schallek Award program was further evidenced by his status as a leadership contributor to its endowment campaign in the early 1990s. Most recently, Wood advised both the Richard III Society and the Medieval Academy of America as they developed a partnership to administer the $1.4 million bequest from Society member Maryloo Schallek. The program includes an annual dissertation year award of $30,000 and five dissertation research grants of $2,000 each, and was in the final stages of completion at Wood's death.

Further (and this is a fact largely overlooked by many Ricardians), Wood served as an unofficial academic publicist for the Society, taking pains to mention the Society, and especially to cite former chair Jeremy Potter's Good King Richard? as a source wherever possible in his publications. Never mind that his impish disposition would occasionally prompt him to have a little fun at the expense of some of the Society's more charming eccentricities: these citations have served as the impetus for more than one freelance Ricardian to come looking for the Society.

In 1992, Wood confessed to a bit of a soft spot in his heart for the Society; indeed, he also once referred to his Harvard Magazine article, "Who Killed the Little Princes in the Tower?" as his love letter to the Society. And, as he recently remarked, "I have a friend who argues that the whole point of a liberal education is to teach people not to be bored with themselves, so that if the TV breaks down some night, one can happily pick up a book instead. It seems to me that the Richard III Society has that kind of stimulating function for all of its members. It provides a focus for a whole range of activities both mental and physical, and it provides a home for people to do so at an incredible range of levels, from the serious research scholar to the romantic dreamer and/or poet to the determined tourist to Ricardian England to the embroiderer of kneelers for Sutton Cheney. In other words, the Society is a kind of liberal education in action, and I like that." [16]

Predictably, Wood's publications have received mixed reviews from Ricardians. Although the Traditio article was largely sympathetic to Richard's plight, subsequent publications tackle the more difficult issues of his reign, including the legitimacy of his claim to the throne, his competence as king, the Elizabeth of York affair and, of course, the murder of the Princes. Wood's conclusions are not always entirely flattering to Richard.

The characterization, in the Traditio article, of Richard as a man not entirely in control has evolved, by Joan and Richard, into a sympathetic but nevertheless damning assessment of Richard's assets and liabilities. While giving Richard full marks for courage, tactical ingenuity, and forcefulness, Wood sees in these very traits the key to the flaws in Richard's character. "A brave man, given to risking his all on a single toss of the dice, he appears ever to have moved from one unexpected crisis to the next, each time attempting to extricate himself from his immediate difficulties with a bold and decisive stroke." [17] In Wood's view, Richard responded only to "definite and definable problems," which he tried to handle "through the use of brute force, typically applied both pure and simple."

In one profoundly insightful passage which perhaps disturbs Ricardians most because it offers a compelling vision of how a basically decent human being might come to do some appalling things, Wood observes that Richard is "one of those people who sees trees rather than forests, a person never quite able to grasp the fact that events are interconnected and that actions taken in response to one event are likely to have consequences in others, often where they are least expected. In short he was a person who viewed the world in an incoherently fragmented way, and because he acted to contain the forces opposing him individually, without regard for potential relationships, he was to find, in the course of his reign, that matters went steadily from bad to worse. One wonders, really, whether he ever knew why." [18]

In his analysis of the events of Richard's reign, Wood draws on several traditional sources, notably Vergil, Mancini, and Crowland, to support his thesis that Richard's concrete response to specific threats provided the stuff from which Shakespeare's legend was ultimately fabricated.

Encouraging the reader to try to view medieval events as they were seen by medieval people, he stresses, for example, the importance of the tale of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents in the medieval church, and its impact on the contemporary reaction to the rumors of the Princes' demise: "The extraordinary devotion Christians displayed on Holy Innocents' Day can only underscore the extent to which children were never, never to be made pawns in the deadly games played by their fathers." [19] In Richard's apparent willingness to violate sanctuary to gain custody of the young Duke of York; in his summary execution of Lord Hastings; in the presumption of the death of the vanished Innocents and the proposed incestuous marriage with his niece; and, finally, in the chaotic events leading up to the battle of Bosworth, with troops bereft of priests or breakfast and Richard dying in "that last, mad, and lonely charge," Wood sees the unconnected responses that fueled the Black Legend. As he puts it, "Blindly and all unknowingly, Richard III was well on the way to creating the factual basis for Shakespeare's myth of the monster." [21]

Ricardians will find a dismally satisfying number of specific points with which to take issue in the last chapter of Joan and Richard. In fact, it prompted former Society chairman Jeremy Potter to comment, "All in all, [the final chapter] confirms me in the belief that the impact of the Society on academic historians has been wholly negative. They have simply been put on their mettle to resist revisionism." [22]

Yet when Ricardians pause in their debates of such issues as whether Richard did in fact ever think of marrying Elizabeth of York, or whether he did indeed order the murder of the Princes, they find that Wood's two central points remain unchallenged: Richard's accession had a far-reaching impact upon the constitutional development of parliamentary authority; and his tendency to solve problems with bold strokes failed to take into account probable consequences, to his lasting detriment.

Or, to let Wood have the final word (as he inevitably did): "I don't at all see a villain with designs at the start. On the contrary, I see a perfectly decent guy who was perfectly prepared to serve honorably as the Protector of his nephew and his realm, but who then got caught up in a series of political binds for which he lacked the human skills needed to resolve them without violence. It's more a tragic story of all sorts of limited people out of their depth than it is one of evil and villainy. I submit that the people I envisage are believable human beings, including my Richard."

NOTES

1. Wood, Charles T. "In Medieval Studies, is 'To Teach' a Transitive Verb?" Keynote address at conference, Teaching the Middle Ages, Eastern Illinois University, March 14, 1992.
2. Wood, Charles T. "The Deposition of Edward V," Traditio, 31(1975), 286.
3. Wood, "Transitive Verb."
4. Wood, Charles T. "Who Killed the Little Princes in the Tower? A Ricardian Murder Mystery," Harvard Magazine, 80, no. 3 (January-February 1978), 36.
5. Wood, "Transitive Verb."
6. Wood, "Deposition," p. 254.
7. Ibid, p. 255.
8. Ibid, p. 263.
9. Pollard, A.J. Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 249. Outlining the reaction of contemporary historians to the events of June 1483, Pollard comments, "Both Horrox and Ross favour the conspiratorial interpretation of Richard's seizure of power. Charles T. Wood....tends to favour the 'cock-up' theory of history. My wife's view might be characterized as that of a cocked-up conspiracy."
10. Wood, "Deposition," p. 282.
11. Wood, "Transitive Verb."
12. Wood, Charles T. Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints and Government in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 195.
13. Wood, Joan and Richard, pp. 197-198.
14. Ibid, p. 207.
15. Letter from Charles T. Wood to Laura Blanchard, March 31, 1992.
16. Ibid.
17. Wood, Joan and Richard, p. 181.
18. Ibid, p. 182.
19. Ibid, p. 33.
20. Wood, Charles T. "Richard III, William, Lord Hastings and Friday the Thirteenth," in Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Ralph A. Griffiths and James Sherbourne (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), p. 162.
21. Wood, Joan and Richard, p. 187.
22. Letter from Jeremy Potter to Charles T. Wood, January 12, 1989.
23. Letter from Charles T. Wood to Laura Blanchard, February 18, 1992.

Selected List of Charles T. Wood's Publications on Richard III

• "The Deposition of Edward V," Traditio, 31 (1975), 247-286.
• (Jointly with William Huse Dunham, Jr.): "The Right to Rule in England: Depositions and the Kingdom's Authority, 1327-1485," American Historical Review, 81 (1976), 738-761.
• "Richard III's 'tytylle & right,'" The Ricardian, 4, no. 59 (December 1977); reprinted in James O. Petrie, ed., Richard III: Crown and People (London, 1985), pp. 64-65.
• "Who Killed the Little Princes in the Tower? A Ricardian murder mystery," Harvard Magazine, 80, no. 3 (January-February, 1978), 34-40; reprinted in Western Civilization Annual Editions, ed. William Hughes (Guilford, CT, 1981), I, 167-171.
• "Whatever Happened to Margaret of Anjou? or, Olivier's Shakespeare and Richard III," Iowa State Journal of Research, 53 (1978-79), 213-217.
• (With Peter Saccio, and edited by Lorraine C. Attreed): "Bad History Makes Good Drama: Richard III at Dartmouth College," The Ricardian 5, no. 71 (December 1980), 268-273.
• "England, 1216-1485," Dictionary of the Middle Ages 4:472b-486b.
• Review, Charles Ross, "Richard III. Speculum, 1983.
• "Richard III, William, Lord Hastings and Friday the Thirteenth," Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Ralph A. Griffiths and James Sherborne (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986).
• Review, Michael Bennett, "The Battle of Bosworth," and Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas, "The Making of the Tudor Dynasty" (double review), Speculum, 1987.
• Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints and Government in the Middle Ages, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; paperback ed., 1991.
• "In Medieval Studies, is 'To Teach' a Transitive Verb?" Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, Vol. 3, issue 2, fall 1992.
• "Richard III and the Beginnings of Historical Fiction," The Historian, 1993.