Déjà vu All Over Again: Fighting About Richard III
NPG 148; King Richard III by Unknown artist
Some stories never die. For years, those who think Richard III ordered the murder of his nephews (aka the Princes in the Tower) and those who believe he was the victim of a Tudor smear campaign* have continued a low-grade specialist pissing match. With the discovery and authentication of Richard's bones, the battle has moved from the journals and conventions aimed at specialists and enthusiasts to mainstream venues.
Ricardians and their foes** are all over the media, traditional and web alike, drawing conclusions from the evidence of the dead king's bones with varying degrees of enthusiasm and civility. Two points in particularly seem to be in contention.
- Richard's remains clearly show that he had a badly curved spine as a result of scoliosis. So far I've seen arguments that this proves that he 1) did not have a hump or 2) definitely had a hump.
Image courtesy of the Richard III Society
- This reconstruction of his head, made using forensic technology, is remarkably similar to the famous portrait in Britain's National Portrait Gallery (above)--without the expressiveness of the portrait. Dr. Phil Stone, writing on the Richard III Society website, says "…when I looked him in the eye, 'Good King Richard' seemed alive and about to speak". The website itself describes the reconstructed face as "young, earnest and rather serious". Dr. Sean Lang, in a snarky post in the History Today blog, takes the opposite position: "…my first thought on seeing the face was that I have never seen such ruthlessness in a human face in my life." ***
And so forth.
I will admit to a slight pro-Richard bias, thanks to Josephine Tey's classic novel The Daughter of Time.**** What about you?
* William Shakespeare was not only a great poet and playwright, he was a hell of a spin doctor. Modern politicians can only dream of having such a talented propagandist in their corners.
**I'm never quite sure whether those who believe Richard was a bad guy are actively pro-Tudor or simply anti-Richard. Either way, they are just as passionate about their beliefs as the Ricardians, though I don't believe they've formed a society to espouse their cause. If you know differently, please let me know.
***Personally, I think the reconstruction has the same vacant stare and lack of emotion common to all such reconstructions. The bones by themselves give us the shape of the face, not the shape of the mind or the soul.
**** Read it! Then read the rest of Tey's novels.
The Making of the First World War: A Pivotal History
Despite its title, The Making of the First World War: A Pivotal History by historian Ian F. W. Beckett is not another account of the events leading up to World War One. Instead Beckett is concerned with what he describes as “pivot points”: decisive moments that affected not only the course of the war itself but also that of later history.
Beckett begins with a theoretical discussion of what makes a moment pivotal, but the heart of the book lies in the twelve chapters that follow. Each is a self-contained essay dealing with the genesis and consequences of a single episode in World War One. The events Beckett discusses are an international mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. He considers military turning points, political decisions, and symbolic moments. Along the way he analyses seeming turning points that are actually dead ends, makes asides about smaller long term changes, and offers an occasional breathtaking insight. The creation and impact of the first war documentary, The Battle of the Somme, is treated with the same seriousness as Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare.
The sheer range of Beckett’s chosen key moments is ultimately the book’s weakness as well as its strength. The theoretical framework for the book seems strained: too flimsy to support the powerful chapters that follow it. Nonetheless, whether he is discussing the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire or the introduction of daylight savings time, history buffs will find Beckett’s combination of storytelling and nuts-and-bolts analysis compelling.
This review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Word With a Past: Silhouette
I'm poking around in the long eighteenth century these days and stumbling across lots of surprising tidbits.
Take silhouettes. I had long known that charming likenesses cut from black cardstock became a popular and affordable alternative to oil portraits in the mid-eighteenth century. To the extent that I thought about the word at all, I assumed it was the name of a clever scissors-wielding artist who started the new fashion.
Wrong.* The art form, originally called "shades" or "profiles", pre-dated the name.
Étienne de Silhouette was a French attorney with intellectual leanings and political ambitions. He wrote treatises on this and that, translated Alexander Pope into French, made friends with Madame Pompadour, and earned a name as a garçon fort savant** for a book he wrote on the English taxation system. That book would get him in trouble.
In 1759, halfway through the Seven Years War, he was appointed Controller-General of France. The war was expensive and Silhouette had the thankless job of balancing a budget with a shortfall of 217 million livres.*** To make things harder, more than sixty years of almost constant warfare, had left France with a shortage of metal money and a budget crippled by existing debt. Silhouette issued some long-term debts and cut some expenses, but he realized that the long term answer was raising tax income. He took the not-unreasonable position that the easiest people to raise money from were the people who had money--especially true in the Ancién Regime, where the nobility and the clergy were exempt from taxes. He took away their tax exemptions and cancelled a range of pensions, sinecures and handouts. With the wealthy and powerful already in an uproar, he then instituted new taxes on luxury goods, from jewelry and carriages to servants and windows. The marquise du Deffand, writing to Voltaire, complained "they are not taxing the air we breathe, but apart from that, I can’t think of anything that's escaped."
Less than nine months after his appointment, Silhouette was out on his ear and the term à la Silhouette was applied to anything cheap, including the profile portraits known as shades.
* In more ways than one, it turned out. Evidently there were two schools of silhouette artists, cutters and painters. The things you find out when you follow a fact down a rabbit hole.
** Bright kid
***Roughly 459 billion dollars today ****
****Very roughly, since I had to work from livres to francs, then calculate it forward to 1800 and convert it into dollars before I could plug it into this currency converter.