Abstract
The institutions of kingship and queenship both underwent major changes in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Beginning during the reign of Edward IV and reaching their peak under Henry VIII, the Crown and Parliament attempted to curb the power of aristocratic factions—one of the main forces behind the Wars of the Roses—and consolidate it in the person of the king. As a result, the queen’s public role as mediator and intercessor was minimized, and although she could still wield power in the shadows, as it were, there no longer existed a framework within which she could do so openly. Official histories from this period, particularly those dealing with the fifteenth century, become a textual inscription of these administrative changes by manipulating the queen’s role within the narrative. This chapter focuses first, on the most famous of those official histories, the Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, before proceeding to a text whose generic instability and unfinished state suggest a potentially subversive reading of not just tyranny in general, but of the role a queen might play in a dangerous power struggle—Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III.
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Notes
D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26.
The majority of Vergil criticism is biographicalor in the context of a larger thematic or historiographical study such as F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1967). His treatment of specific historical figures has garnered attention due to his indirect influence on Shakespeare and later biographical traditions but to my knowledge, there has been no literary criticism of the Anglica Historia other than Thomas Freeman’s 1992 article, cited later in this chapter.
Quoted in Denys Hay, introduction to The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil A.D. 1485–1537, ed. and trans. Denys Hay, Camden Society 3rd ser., vol. 74 (London: Nichols, 1950), xxviii.
Polydore Vergil, Polydore Vergil’s English History Vol. 1, containing the first eight books, ed. Henry Ellis, Camden Society, o.s., vol. 36 (London: Nichols, 1846), 107. Cicero, in De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton. Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1942), 2.15.62, declares that a historian’s first duty is to tell only the truth.
Translation in Charles L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 256–67.
Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1990), 22.
Polydore Vergil, Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III, ed. Henry Ellis, Camden Society, o.s., vol. 29 (London: Nichols, 1844), 62.
Laura D. Barefield, Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 4.
Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 58.
Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9.
Pope Pius II, The Commentaries of Pius II. Trans. Florence Alden Gragg (Northampton, MA: Smith College Studies in History, 1937–57), 231: 13–14, Translation, Gragg, 3:268.
Thomas S. Freeman, “From Catiline to Richard III: The Influence of Classical Historians on Polydore Vergil’s Anglica historia,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario A. di Cesare (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 208.
Rerum Anglicarum Scriptorum Veterum, ed. William Fulman, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1684), 566; Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard the Third [Dominicus Mancinus ad Angelum Catonem de Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium Libellus], ed. and trans. C. A. J. Armstrong (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 88/89.
These include Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, “A ‘Most Benevolent Queen’: Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s Reputation, Her Piety, and Her Books.” The Ricardian 10 (1995) who confuse Vergil and More on 221–22; A. J. Pollard, “Elizabeth Woodville and Her Historians,” in Tradition and Transformation in Late Medieval England, ed. Douglas Biggs, Sharon D. Michalove, and A. Compton Reeves (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 157–58; and the biographies of David Baldwin and Arlene Okerlund.
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 218.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 54.
Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 155.
Carolyn P. Collette, Performing Polity: Women and Agency in the Anglo-French Tradition, 1385–1620 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 10.
See Richard Sylvester’s “Introduction” in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol, 2, The History of King Richard III, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), xvii–cvi;
Daniel Kinney’s discussion of MS fr. 4996 in Complete Works, vol. 15 (1986), cxxxiii–cliv; and David Womersley, “Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III: A New Theory of the English Texts,” Renaissance Studies 7 (1993): 272–90.
Alison Hanham, “Honing a History: Thomas More’s Revisions of his Richard III,” Review of English Studies 59 (2008): 197–218, disagrees with some of the points made by these critics and provides additional information about More’s processes of revision.
Dan Breen, “Thomas More’s History of Richard III: Genre, Humanism, and Moral Education,” Studies in Philology 107 (2010): 468. More’s deconstructionist tendencies have been remarked upon by other critics, including
Peter C. Herman, “Henrician Historiography and the Voice of the People: The Cases of More and Hall,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 39 (1997): 259–83, who uses references to popular opinion in both More and Edward Hall’s account of Henry VIII to “produce texts that are critical and yet not subversive” in the New Historicist sense of the word (260).
Tacitus, The Annales, Books I–III, trans. John Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 1:3, 4.
Judith Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 94.
More, 27, 28. Gillian Day, “Sceptical Historiography: Thomas More’s History of Richard III,” in The Anatomy of Tudor Literature, ed. Mike Pincombe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 25.
Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Anthony Hammond (London: Thomson, 2003), 4.4.431.
Elizabeth Story Donno, “Thomas More and Richard III,” Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982): 441.
Lee Cullen Khana, “No Less Real Than Ideal: Images of Women in More’s Work,” Moreana 14 (1977): 44.
Alan Clarke Shepard, “‘Female Perversity,’ Male Entitlement: The Agency of Gender in More’s The History of Richard III,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 26 (1995): 327.
Hanan Yoran, “Thomas More’s Richard III: Probing the Limits of Humanism,” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 521.
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© 2012 Kavita Mudan Finn
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Finn, K.M. (2012). “By meane of a woman”: Changing the Subject in Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia and Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard the Third. In: The Last Plantagenet Consorts. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392991_3
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