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Documentary, British History's Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley, 1S01E01 War of the Roses
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00:00Lots of people remember their history lessons from school as dates and battles, kings and
00:09queens, facts and figures. But the story of our past is open to interpretation, and much of
00:18British history is a carefully edited and even deceitful version of events. You might think
00:24that history is just a record of what happened. Actually, it's not like that at all. As soon
00:31as you do a little digging, you discover that it's more like a tapestry of different stories
00:37woven together by whoever was in power at the time. In this series, I'm going to debunk some
00:44of the biggest fibs in British history. In the 17th century, politicians and artists helped
00:51turn a foreign invasion into the triumphal tale of Britain's glorious revolution.
00:56Hello! Woohoo! In the 19th century, a British government coup in India was rebranded by the
01:06Victorians as the civilizing triumph of the empire. And in this episode, I'll find out
01:14how the story of the Wars of the Roses was invented by the Tudors to justify their power,
01:20and then immortalized by the greatest storyteller of them all. Shakespeare presented this as
01:27the darkest chapter in the nation's history. Now is the winter of our discontent.
01:33Two rival dynasties, the House of Lancaster and the House of York, were locked in battle for
01:41the crown of England. This was the real-life Game of Thrones. Brothers fought against brothers,
01:48anointed kings were deposed, and innocent children were murdered. Never before had the country experienced
01:56such treachery and bloodshed. In 1485, a wicked king, Richard III, was slain, and Henry Tudor took the throne.
02:09Henry's victory would herald the ending of the Middle Ages and the founding of the great Tudor dynasty.
02:18It was to be England's salvation. Or so the story goes. With history, the line between fact and fiction often gets blurred.
02:28In 1455, the village of Stubbins in Lancashire was the scene of a legendary battle in the Walls of the Roses.
02:50The fighting began with bodies of arrows. But then, to their horror, both sides realised that they'd run out of ammunition.
02:59In desperation, the Lancastrians grabbed some makeshift weapons. They happened to have a supply of their local delicacy,
03:08black puddings from Bury. And with these, they pelted the Yorkists.
03:16But as luck would have it, the Yorkists had their own supply of mistyles, Yorkshire puddings, with which they bombarded the Lancastrians.
03:25Now, most disappointingly, this 15th century food fight never really happened.
03:38It's a local legend that was conjured up as long ago as 1983.
03:44But what the Battle of Stubbins Bridge does tell us is that, although the dates and the details might be hazy,
03:51the Walls of the Roses are still alive and well in what you might call our national memory.
03:57What you think you know about the Walls of the Roses, though, and what really happened are two quite different things.
04:05According to the history books, the Walls of the Roses is the story of the fatal rivalry between the House of Lancaster and the House of York,
04:15between the Red Rose and the White. But the saga of a country divided by 30 years of bloody wars and deadly hate
04:24was largely invented by the Tudors, then spun into the dynasty's foundation myth by the greatest storyteller of all, William Shakespeare.
04:35And there is a firm basis for this tale of devastating national conflict.
04:43On a single day in 1461, the bloodshed was only too real.
04:49In the middle of a snowstorm on the 29th of March in Towton, Yorkshire,
04:54the Lancastrian and Yorkist forces clashed head to head.
04:59The result was utter carnage.
05:07The Lancastrians started out the day pretty well, but then the tide began to turn against them.
05:13They were chased by the Yorkists down this steep and icy slope.
05:17The blizzard was still blowing.
05:19And that little river at the bottom was flooded, so they couldn't get any further.
05:23This meant that the Yorkers came down the hill and started massacring them.
05:28So many men died that their blood stained the snow red.
05:36So this became known as the Bloody Meadow.
05:42A century later, William Shakespeare would depict the battle as a medieval Armageddon,
05:48where fathers slaughtered their own sons and sons murdered their own fathers.
05:54Towton had come to symbolise a country torn apart by war.
06:00The scale of the killing was so great that there's been nothing else quite as bad in the whole of our history.
06:08On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, 19,000 British soldiers were killed.
06:16But here at Towton, contemporary reports talk about 28,000 dead.
06:22That's 1% of the entire population killed on a single day.
06:3720 years ago, Bradford University's archaeology department revealed the true barbarity of the fighting,
06:45when they uncovered the remains of 43 men killed at Towton.
06:51George, we've got five skulls of people here on the table.
06:56How was this gentleman finished off here? He's kind of square.
07:00That is with a horseman's hammer.
07:03But this particular skull has another sign of extreme violence inflicted with a pole axe.
07:12The head was forced down into the spine.
07:16So the skull has actually showed signs of splitting.
07:20This sort of desecration of the body, that's actually robbing them of life in the next life.
07:26You're disfiguring them and they can't be resurrected.
07:30This battle is truly horrendously brutal.
07:33But is it the norm for the Wars of the Roses?
07:36No, it was exceptional, certainly in the enormous number of people who fought and died at Towton.
07:45I think people might have the impression that they were just fighting for decade after decade after decade.
07:49But within this period, how many battles actually were there?
07:53Well, there were skirmishes, but in terms of real battles, around about eight.
07:58The feud between the houses of Lancaster and York did fester for three decades.
08:04But the idea that this was a period utterly ravaged by all-out war, well, that's just historical fiction.
08:12Yes, Towton was a truly brutal battle, but it was also unique.
08:19The other battles in the Wars of the Roses had much lower death tolls.
08:24And the idea that the country was totally consumed by war is wrong.
08:29Some historians argue that out of the 32 years of the Wars of the Roses, the fighting only lasted for a total of 13 weeks.
08:38That would mean that there were months, years, even a whole decade when England was at peace.
08:48The reason we talk of this era as the Wars of the Roses isn't an accident.
08:53It's the story told by the winning side, the history the Tudors wanted us to remember.
09:01It began with their account of the battle that brought the war to an end, the Battle of Bosworth.
09:11The Lancastrian Henry Tudor emerged as a victorious hero who'd ended 30 years of bloodshed.
09:18He'd saved the nation from a villainous tyrant, the Yorkist King Richard III.
09:27The Tudors made sure Bosworth would be remembered as the ultimate clash between the forces of good and evil.
09:35Helped along by William Shakespeare, who relished their juicy tale.
09:40The battle has been so mythologized that it's hard to sort fact from fiction.
09:44Historians used to think that the Battle of Bosworth took place about two miles away, over there, up on top of the hill.
09:52But over the last ten years, all sorts of interesting finds have been emerging from the fields immediately here.
09:59That's things like parts of 15th century swords, and badges, and about 40 of these fantastically deadly-looking cannonballs.
10:11The battle must have taken place here.
10:14Now, despite this confusion about its location, a myth, a legend has grown up about exactly what happened that day.
10:22It's one of our great national stories, and it goes something like this.
10:29King Richard III goes into battle wearing a crown, symbol of what's at stake that day.
10:37Richard declares, this day I will die as king, or I will win.
10:41And even his enemies admit that he fights courageously.
10:46Richard gets within a sword's length of Henry Tudor, but the enemy forces overwhelm him.
10:53In desperation, he cries out, my horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse.
10:59And then he's killed with a blow to the head, and he loses his crown.
11:10After Henry's victory, Richard's crown is discovered in a hawthorn bush.
11:16And Henry is crowned with it on the battlefield.
11:20Now, how much of this really happened? It's impossible to say.
11:33But the reason that this is the story we know is because it's the one Henry wanted us to remember.
11:40Henry wanted to make everyone aware of his decisive victory on the battlefield.
11:46But that was the easy part.
11:47In a nation divided, Henry's enemies still believed that he was a usurper,
11:53who'd stolen the crown from the anointed King Richard III.
11:58Henry needed to legitimize his new reign.
12:02So when his first parliament met a few months after Bosworth,
12:05he made sure that it was his version of events that was recorded.
12:10One telling detail that Henry had written into the records of parliament
12:14was that his reign had begun on the 21st of August 1485.
12:20Now, this is a bit odd, because the Battle of Bosworth wasn't until the 22nd of August 1485.
12:28Was this a slip of a quill? No, it was deliberate.
12:32Henry was claiming that he'd already been king even before the battle.
12:40So he wasn't a usurper stealing the crown.
12:44He was just taking what was rightfully his.
12:47He cunningly realized that his success didn't just lie in victory on the battlefield.
12:52It also lay in the way that the history of the Wars of the Roses would be written.
13:01Henry's next move was equally cunning.
13:04On the 18th of January 1486, Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV.
13:12Henry would present his match as the start of a glorious new chapter in the nation's history.
13:23Henry realized that picking the right wife was important,
13:28but that telling the right story about the marriage was even more so.
13:33The story that he wanted to tell was that this was one of the most important marriages in history.
13:39Here he was, a Lancastrian, marrying Elizabeth, a Yorkist.
13:45They were going to heal the nation.
13:48They'd once been bitter rivals, but now they were loving bedfellows.
13:53But his cunning storytelling had another advantage too.
13:57It glossed over the very inconvenient fact
14:00that an awful lot of people thought that he had no right to the throne at all.
14:04Henry hoped that his marriage to Elizabeth would be seen as a fresh start.
14:19It would also divert attention away from his less-than-royal lineage.
14:23This is a genealogical role showing the kings of England going right back into the mists of time.
14:33It goes back as far as Brutus, the mythical king a thousand years before the Romans.
14:39You can't even see Brutus because he's still rolled up.
14:42We couldn't fit the whole thing onto the table.
14:44And as you come down this end towards me, you move forwards into the period of the Wars of the Roses.
14:52These circles contain pictures of all the different kings, most of them called Edward.
14:58This one's called Rex Ted, which pleases me.
15:02As we get down here, we have some Henrys.
15:05Henry VI. Here's another Edward.
15:08Here's Richard III.
15:09And then the main red line peters out.
15:12Where is the next king, Henry VII?
15:15Well, he's been squished in at the side as the husband of Elizabeth of York.
15:21So where's he popped up from?
15:24This black line tells us.
15:26It goes back to Henry's grandmother, Catherine, who was a proper Queen of England.
15:32But her second husband, Henry's grandfather, was this chap, Owen Tudor.
15:38A servitor in camera.
15:40That means a chamber servant.
15:43Or in other words, a bit of ruff.
15:47This family tree reveals Henry's dirty secret.
15:52The fact that his claim to the throne was decidedly dodgy.
15:56It won't surprise you to learn that the scroll belonged to a family who didn't like Henry.
16:02The Delapoles.
16:04They were plotting against him.
16:06The document also explains why he had to marry Elizabeth.
16:10She really was royal.
16:12She was the daughter of a king.
16:14Whereas Henry himself was just the grandson of a servant.
16:18But this isn't the tale that Henry would tell us if he were here.
16:21He didn't present his marriage as a matter of political expediency.
16:26He described it as an extraordinary act of reconciliation.
16:34Henry made his marriage, the union of the houses of York and Lancaster,
16:40into the centrepiece of a super successful propaganda campaign
16:44to secure his new dynastic ambitions.
16:47This really beautiful book is a medieval anthology of poetry, prose,
16:53and advice for educating a prince.
16:56But it's best known for its wonderful illustrations.
17:00Including this one at the Tower of London.
17:04This particular picture has a coat of arms.
17:07And these two creatures are very curly haired lions.
17:11They're black now because they've tarnished, but they were once silver.
17:16And they were the silver lions of King Edward IV.
17:20They show that this book was once in his library.
17:25The Yorkist, King Edward, won the throne in 1471 after defeating his Lancastrian opponents.
17:33This time in the border, we have got red and white roses, representing the House of Lancaster,
17:41and the House of York, and their rivalry in progress at the time of the Wars of the Roses.
17:46The odd thing, though, about this illustration is that during the actual time of the Wars of the Roses,
17:54when this manuscript was first produced, the red rose had nothing at all to do with the House of Lancaster.
18:00The border was changed. It was added in at a later date by Henry VII himself.
18:06He was the one who adopted the red rose as the House of Lancaster's symbol.
18:13And now, look at this. Adopting the red rose for Lancaster was only the first stage of Henry's iconographical plan,
18:22because now he could combine it with the white rose of his wife, Elizabeth of York, to create the multicoloured Tudor rose.
18:29Normally, the inner petals are white and the outer petals are red.
18:34This one happens to be quartered, but you get the general idea. It's red and white together.
18:40And so, this new Tudor rose became the symbol of the new Tudor dynasty.
18:46And it was such a powerful symbol that it allowed Henry VII to completely revise history.
18:52The rose became Henry VII's logo, shorthand for the story of how he'd heroically united a divided nation.
19:03Over time, he made it the universally recognised symbol of Tudor might.
19:09Across the country, from books to buildings, Tudor roses started to bloom.
19:15In Cambridge, Henry made King's College Chapel into the backdrop for one of the most overwhelming displays of Tudor propaganda.
19:28Anna, this chapel was begun by Henry VI, but he didn't finish it, did he?
19:33Well, the chapel had been being built for quite some time, but then the Wars of the Roses happened, resources got diverted.
19:38And so, when Henry VII became king, it was unfinished.
19:43It looked nothing like this, none of this beautiful vaulted ceiling.
19:46It was makeshift, it had a sort of timber ceiling, and it was very much a sort of work in progress.
19:52And really, it was much more of a sort of blight on the landscape than anything that made a great statement of power.
19:59But in 1508, Henry VII gave the chapel a much-needed cash injection.
20:05Now, this is a bit different, isn't it?
20:06Henry died the following year, but his financial backing ensured that the chapel was completed and decorated according to his Tudor vision.
20:16It's fantastic. I mean, it's the story, really, of Henry VII's journey to the throne. It's his claim to the throne.
20:23We have the Greyhound, which is the symbol of Margaret Beaufort, his mother.
20:27We have the dragon, highlighting Henry's Welsh descent.
20:31And we have, of course, Tudor roses everywhere.
20:33They look like they're on steroids. What kind of chemicals have they been treated with to make them so juicy and enormous?
20:40They look like cabbages.
20:41It's Tudor chemicals, isn't it? It's the sort of vitality, the virility of the Tudors.
20:45And, of course, above the Tudor rose, you see the crown. So, again, it's underlying. These are now royal symbols.
20:51This is Henry saying, game over. Now it's the Tudors all the way.
20:55And really, I would argue that it's almost like one of the first sort of ubiquitous brands that people across the country, you know, identify with.
21:03They know the Tudor brand. They know the Tudor rose.
21:06It's all about propaganda. It's all about myth-making. But I think, you know, we're still talking about it, so it was hugely successful.
21:12With control of the crown, Henry also controlled the narrative. In the emerging Tudor tale of the Wars of the Roses, Henry was the conquering hero.
21:25And, not surprisingly, the historians during his reign all agreed.
21:29This book is called The History of the Kings of England.
21:34And it's the work of an exceptionally unreliable narrator.
21:38It's written by John Rouse, who is an antiquary and historian. And he's writing it during the reign of Richard III, but he actually finishes it after Henry VII has become king.
21:51John Rouse has written this book for his new boss, Henry VII. What's he got to say about him?
21:56He talks about Henry being such a good king, that he will be remembered for generations to come.
22:03Future executives for many centuries, he will be remembered.
22:06Rouse started writing this book when Richard III was still the boss. What does he have to say about Richard III?
22:15John Rouse isn't very complimentary about Richard at all. And, in fact, let's look at the passage where he describes Richard's own birth.
22:22OK.
22:23It says that he had been in his mother's room for two years. He was born cum dentibus, with teeth, et capillus ad humerus.
22:35That's hair to the shoulders.
22:38Very hairy. And then there's this slightly mysterious word that could be talons.
22:43Which was quite creepy, isn't it? That's very monstrous.
22:48And then it says he was born under the sign of Scorpio. And he continued to behave in life like a scorpion.
22:55This is a really striking vilification of Richard III. Is this the first one? Does it all start here?
23:03Essentially, yes. The demonisation of Richard is taking place here. And, in fact, later down on this particular page,
23:10Rouse accuses Richard of committing several murders, including the murder of his own wife, the murder of his nephews, and also the fact that he had killed, with his own hand, Henry VII.
23:24What do you think Rouse's motives were for writing this history in this particular way?
23:28John Rouse's writing specifically in order to praise the new king of England, Henry VII. He was only writing what he expected his readers would want to read.
23:41Demonising Richard, when you're now ruled by his arch-rival Henry, was certainly sensible.
23:48And Tudor historians onwards went to town. Richard III was said to be malicious, loveful, and envious as a king.
23:56He was also a lump of foul deformity, ill-featured of limbs, and hard-favoured of visage.
24:05As Rouse revealed, telling the truth was less important than pandering to the right master.
24:12At an earlier stage of his career, he'd written other works in which he praised Richard III instead.
24:19This document is called The Rouse Roll, and John Rouse actually made it for presentation to Anne Neville, who was the wife of Richard III.
24:29We've got the same historian, John Rouse, writing just three years earlier.
24:34While Richard III is still king of England.
24:35This is Richard himself, and in fact, he's described here as the most mighty Prince Richard, King of England, and of France, and Lord of Ireland.
24:49And then it goes on to say that he got great, thank of God, and love of all his subjects, rich and poor, and great love of the people of all other lands about him.
25:03So, this couldn't be any better, really. He's a fantastic king, he's doing a great job, and everybody loves him.
25:10And, physically, he's not what I was expecting at all.
25:15We have no sign of a hunchback here at all, is there?
25:18No, he's the perfect knight, in fact. He's wearing his armour, he's got rather a lovely face, he's got beautiful curly hair, although it's in a bit of a pudding basin, which isn't my favourite hairstyle.
25:31He's actually depicted more as a Renaissance Prince, rather than the deformed caricature that we know of from the works of Shakespeare.
25:41So, Julian, we've got two very contrasting pictures of Richard III from the same historian. Where does the truth lie?
25:50Well, who knows where the truth actually lies, but what we can say is that John Rouse was writing in order to give him a favour of the people who were actually paying him.
26:02That's really depressing. We can't believe historians.
26:05You can never believe a historian.
26:07That's right.
26:10Well, tell that to the Tudors, because Henry and his historians' dodgy stories were unshakable.
26:16When Henry VII died in 1509, and his son Henry VIII succeeded him, the new Henry didn't abandon his father's dynastic founding myth.
26:26Far from it. He embraced the tale, and made it his own.
26:30Unlike his father, the new King Henry hadn't had to fight for his crown, and there were no questions over his right to rule.
26:38But he still emblazoned the dynasty's new symbol, the Tudor Rose, onto one of the country's most formidable institutions, the Yeoman of the Guard.
26:48I think I might have a better codpiece than you.
26:52I think you might do.
26:54Alan, I'm clearly wearing the trousers of a muscular giant, like yourself.
27:00When were the Yeoman of the Guard formalised as a body of men?
27:05Well, that was after the Battle of Boslefield in 1485.
27:09Henry VII, of course, defeated Richard at that battle, and having defeated him, of course, was pretty much worried for his own safety.
27:17Yeah.
27:18And so then formed up to 300 Yeoman of the Guard.
27:22Henry VIII adopted his father's Yeoman guards, and increased their number to 600.
27:29When Henry appeared on important occasions, he'd be surrounded by this magnificent troop.
27:35Show me my Tudor version.
27:37Henry also introduced the Yeoman's iconic scarlet uniform, and a modern version of it is still worn today.
27:45And you're going to slip into something equally comfortable yourself.
27:49Yes, I am.
27:50Well, I'm in.
27:52Now, let's discuss our chests.
27:55Okay.
27:57On my chest, I've got a Tudor rose, but it's going to become the Rose of England.
28:02It is indeed.
28:03It's still there 500 years later. This is a symbol that's really endured, isn't it?
28:07Absolutely.
28:08And that's a very fancy fissile.
28:10Introduced when King James VI of Scotland became James I of England.
28:14Of course, over here, the shamrock, which was introduced on the Act of Union.
28:17So you have the whole of the United Kingdom on your belly.
28:21We do.
28:26Superb.
28:27I'll be ready for our photo opportunity.
28:30Indeed.
28:39Under Henry VIII, the Tudor rose went from being the symbol of one royal marriage to an emblem for the whole nation.
28:45This Tudor rose has been an incredibly powerful and long-lasting symbol.
28:52You'll still find it today representing England on the Queen's coronation dress, on the Duchess of Cambridge's wedding dress.
29:00And you might even find it in your pocket, because it's still on the 20p.
29:16Henry VIII had nailed down his father's version of the story of the Wars of the Roses.
29:21By the middle of the 16th century, the people who'd experienced the wars had pretty much all died.
29:28But the story was still alive.
29:32And when Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, her grandfather's myth-making proved incredibly useful.
29:39Ah, here I am in my younger days.
29:44This is Elizabeth I's coronation portrait.
29:47She's wearing all the trappings of majesty.
29:50She's holding her orb and sceptre.
29:52And she's wearing ermine, the royal fur.
29:55But this picture glosses over the fact that Elizabeth's coronation was a bit of a touch-and-go affair.
30:02The problem was that she was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, the product of a marriage that had been declared null and void.
30:11You could argue that she was illegitimate.
30:14This was such a big problem that it was actually quite hard to find a bishop willing to anoint her.
30:20Right at the start of her reign, Elizabeth had to assert her right to rule.
30:25And she did so in the same way that her father Henry VIII and grandfather Henry VII had done before her.
30:33If you look closely at her magnificent gold coronation robe, you'll see that it's embroidered with the Tudor rose.
30:41She herself was treated as the living embodiment of the Tudor rose.
30:47The poet Edmund Spencer even describes how in the royal cheek, the red rose was melded with the white.
30:55In almost every respect, Elizabeth brilliantly delivered on the promise of her predecessors.
31:01But as the decades passed, she failed to produce an heir.
31:06And without that heir, Elizabeth's subjects were haunted by spectres of a horribly familiar past.
31:14As the country faced an uncertain future in the 1590s, the memory of the Wars of the Roses took on a new meaning.
31:22People started to worry that when the Queen died, there might once again be civil war, with rival claimants fighting for the crown.
31:31History might repeat itself.
31:34At the end of the 16th century, the history play transformed Tudor fibs into compelling fiction.
31:50For the nation's greatest playwright, William Shakespeare, the Wars of the Roses had all the ingredients for drama.
32:00And with his Machiavellian plots and his murderous villain, he wrote the complex definitive script.
32:07Henry VI Part I was the first of Shakespeare's plays covering the wars, and it proved a very palpable hit.
32:20One of the play's best-known scenes is set in the gardens of Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court.
32:26It's the very start of the conflict, and the leading nobles are deciding which side to fight for, red or white.
32:35Richard, Duke of York, is going to challenge the King, Henry VI, for the crown.
32:41And he tells his supporters to pluck a white rose.
32:45The Duke of Somerset, who's on the King's side, he tells his supporters to pluck a red rose.
32:53A bleeding rose, he calls it.
32:54And at the end of the scene, the Earl of Warwick prophesies the bloodshed to come.
33:02This brawl today in the temple garden, he says, shall send between the red rose and the white a thousand souls to death and deadly night.
33:15The scene became famous because it neatly turned the messy reality into a straightforward struggle between red and white.
33:24And it went on to inspire an Edwardian painting, which is one of the war's most celebrated images.
33:31This floral, phony war preceding the actual fighting didn't really happen.
33:38But nevertheless, you'll see pictures of it in history books.
33:42And that's because Shakespeare's fictional version of the Wars of the Roses is such a good story.
33:48It's so powerful that it trumps the truth.
33:51From John Rouse's character assassination of Richard the third onwards, Shakespeare found his history books packed with tales of the conflict.
34:03They were ripe for recycling.
34:05After Henry the sixth parts one, two and three came one of his masterpieces, Richard the third.
34:12Andrew, this is an early, very early, collected edition of Shakespeare's works.
34:18And it's split into the comedies and the tragedies, but then also the histories.
34:23Is that a new category of play?
34:25There have been history plays before, but Shakespeare's one of the first writers who writes a sustained number of histories.
34:30The Henry the sixth plays are blockbusters. Parts two and three are written first, and they are so popular that part one is then written afterwards.
34:38It's the first kind of trilogy that we have surviving.
34:42So is a history, it's not funny, it's not sad, it's a bit of both?
34:45So you can do what you want with a history, depending on what the facts tell you.
34:48You don't have to stick to the facts, goodness me!
34:50You don't quite have to stick to the facts, no.
34:52How old-fashioned of you!
34:53How does Shakespeare go about taking history and turning it into fiction? What's his method?
35:00Shakespeare's very much a magpie. He uses bits and pieces from history as he wants to.
35:06He uses chronicles like Hollinshead, which is one of the most important of Tudor chronicles that shows the triumph of the Tudors.
35:15Sometimes you can catch him in the act of being inspired by these histories, can you?
35:20Oh, certainly. There's this passage which describes Richard III.
35:24He was small and little of stature. So was he of body greatly deformed, the one shoulder higher than the other.
35:31His face small, but his countenance was cruel. A man would judge it to savour and smell of malice, fraud and deceit.
35:40That's a killer line. I recognise this character. This is the evil Richard that we know and love.
35:46Exactly, and that's something that Shakespeare clearly expands.
35:50He's really not afraid to use history, to use the past, to make moral points, is he?
35:55Good, bad. Do it like this, don't do it like that.
35:58That's exactly right. History is told and retold because it tells you lessons.
36:03Because you start to think about things that you might be able to do rather better than last time.
36:07A cautionary tale.
36:10For Elizabethan audiences, tales of the country torn apart by rival factions struck a powerful chord.
36:18Just 60 years earlier, Henry VIII's break with Rome had caused the country to divide along religious fault lines, Protestant and Catholic.
36:29So another civil war seemed an ever-present danger.
36:34Is this all happening because Elizabeth I is getting old, they're worried she's going to die, they're worried there's going to be another War of the Roses?
36:42That's exactly right. There's a great fear that there will be a religious war that will be even worse than the dynastic War of the Wars of the Roses.
36:51So this is water cooler conversation in the 1590s?
36:55I would have thought so, yes.
36:58Shakespeare redefined the Wars of the Roses and he turned Richard III from a crude Tudor cliché into a truly captivating anti-hero.
37:09From David Garrick in the 18th century to Edmund Keane in the 19th, the biggest stars of the stage have made their names playing the part.
37:20Right from the start, audiences were fascinated by Shakespeare's character of Richard III.
37:27There's a story about the most famous Elizabethan actor, Richard Burbage.
37:33He was playing the part and that night he got a message from a lady who'd been in the audience saying,
37:38come to my room Mr Burbage, I've taken a fancy to you, but she wanted him to come in character.
37:46She'd been seduced by Richard III's blend of cruelty and charisma, which has kept people interested ever since.
37:55Shakespeare followed the lead of Tudor historians by playing up Richard's apparently monstrous appearance.
38:07And the Royal Shakespeare Company's costume collection reveals how Richard's physical body has come to define our image of the man.
38:17Robin, how many different depictions of Richard III have you had here in Stratford?
38:22Well, since 1886, which was the first permanent theatre company in Stratford, there's been around 45 different productions.
38:29Wow.
38:30He's definitely one of the most popular, I think, yes.
38:32The first one I can show you is actually my favourite and that's a 1984 production of Richard III and it was actually played by Sir Anthony Shear.
38:40He played it as a spider.
38:43In the text, he's described as a bottled spider.
38:46He was wearing a very tight lycra bodysuit.
38:51It's a bit like those pyjamas that kids wear with Superman, you know, and they have built-in muscles.
38:55Have you seen them?
38:56Exactly.
38:57Yeah, exactly.
38:59This is one of three humps that were used in the production and it's the one that he wore most of the time on stage.
39:07So it's, I guess you could say, his favourite hump.
39:11Mmm, it smells bad.
39:14It does, yes.
39:15It's a very unattractive item altogether, isn't it?
39:18It was actually strapped on to Anthony Shear.
39:22Little buttons up the front.
39:23So he would have worn this very tight and close to his body.
39:27It's basically because of Shakespeare that I'm thinking that the smell of Anthony Shear's sweat is the smell of evil.
39:35Mmm.
39:36So can we have a look at a contrasting Richard III?
39:39This is from a 1980 production of Richard III. Alan Howard, who played Richard III.
39:45Again, this is a different concentration on another disability. Critics actually compared it to a surgical boot.
39:52Unlike Anthony Shear, who is very nimble across the stage, Alan Howard, his interpretation was very, very slow, very heavy.
40:02You can see how much pain he was in throughout the production.
40:07What's going on with this arm here?
40:08Ah, yes. That's Richard's withered arm.
40:12Oh, it really is withering away. It looks like a zombie falling to pieces as he walks along.
40:16It is, yes.
40:17Is he always portrayed with a physical problem of some kind?
40:21Yes. I think they do all have some type of disability. Today, I think we kind of take that with us.
40:28So Shakespeare's idea of Richard III is kind of our idea of Richard III, really.
40:36For Shakespeare and his first audiences, Richard's hunch in his arm and his limp weren't just physical deformities.
40:45They believed in the science of physiognomy that suggested that your outward appearance reflected your inner self.
40:53So if Richard was deformed, he must have had an irredeemably evil soul.
41:00The tale of the princes in the tower reveals the enduring power of Shakespeare's depiction of the monstrous Richard.
41:12In 1483, Richard imprisoned his two young nephews in the Tower of London after the death of their father, King Edward IV.
41:21And there he had the tender babes murdered, this ruthless piece of butchery, giving him the crown that was rightfully theirs.
41:35In the 17th century, people were still gripped by tales of evil Richard.
41:40So well over a hundred years after the disappearance of the unfortunate princes, their fate remained a fascinating mystery to be solved.
41:50And in 1619, the historian Sir George Buck heard that the bodies of the princess might still be in the tower.
42:00Buck wrote that certain bones, like the bones of a child, had been found in a remote and desolate turret of the tower.
42:10But on closer examination, these turned out to be the bones of an ape.
42:15It's quite a sad story. One of the apes from the tower menagerie wandered off.
42:21It somehow got itself into this turret and there it died.
42:27A few decades later, one John Webb reported a more promising lead.
42:32A secret sealed room had been discovered, built into one of the walls of the King's lodgings.
42:42That's a building that was here. It's gone now.
42:44And in the secret room, there was a table. And on the table, there were bones.
42:52This time, at least the bones were human, not animals.
42:57But the problem was that these were the remains of really little children, six or eight years old, too young to have been the little princes.
43:07At last, in 1674, the 190-year-old mystery appeared to have been solved.
43:16Workmen, excavating the foundations of a predecessor at this staircase, discovered a wooden chest.
43:23And in it were more children, two of them.
43:27This time, it was decided that they really and truly were the little princes.
43:32The discovery of these remains only fuelled an obsession with this legendary crime.
43:39And when the princes were at last laid to rest, the reigning monarch, Charles II, seized the opportunity to condemn wicked King Richard's terrible wrong.
43:51These bones from the tower were brought to a final resting place at Westminster Abbey,
43:56burial place of kings and queens since Edward the Confessor.
44:00Charles II commissioned a special marble funeral urn for the little princes.
44:07And this proved to be the perfect place to hold their murderer to account.
44:12The inscription on it said that they'd been killed by their perfidious uncle, Richard the Usurper.
44:19So the Stuarts took the Tudor tale about Richard's crimes.
44:24They accepted it as fact and they even set it in stone.
44:29When Queen Victoria came to the throne more than three and a half centuries after the start of the Wars of the Roses,
44:39the conflict was little more than a distant memory.
44:44And the Victorian vision of medieval England was shaped by the best-selling novelist, Sir Walter Scott.
44:51His rip-roaring tales of knights in shining armour were full of historical fantasy, but very short on historical fact.
45:00To 19th century romantics like Walter Scott, the Wars of the Roses represented the Middle Ages gone wrong.
45:12Scott wasn't very fond of the period.
45:15Out of more than twenty novels, he only set one in it, the rather obscure Anne of Gierstein.
45:22And he doesn't make it sound very nice.
45:25England is torn and bleeding.
45:28There are piles of slain bodies and quite a lot of drenching in blood.
45:33To Walter Scott, the Wars of the Roses had too much brutality and not enough chivalry to be a best-seller.
45:42But what Walter Scott did do for the Wars of the Roses was give it its name.
45:47Listen to this. He talks about the civil discords so dreadfully prosecuted in the Wars of the White and Red Roses.
45:56This is more than 300 years after the ending of the conflict.
45:59But this is the first time that anybody's called it that.
46:04Most Victorians didn't question the well-established mythology of the Wars of the Roses.
46:10And they enjoyed a spot of Shakespeare as much as their predecessors.
46:15But 19th century historians took a very dim view of the period.
46:23So, Helen, we're sitting in the middle of a Victorian vision of the Middle Ages, which they loved.
46:28But they didn't much like the 15th century, did they?
46:31They didn't. They were very interested in the Middle Ages as a whole,
46:34but they saw the 15th century as something dark, corrupted, an unhappy time.
46:39Who were these Victorian historians writing about the Wars of the Roses?
46:43The key figure is William Stubbs, Bishop William Stubbs.
46:46He was a hugely influential figure in the development of the discipline.
46:50It was while he was Regis Professor at Oxford that the first students began to be able to take history as a degree subject there.
46:57But he was also a clergyman. He ended his life as Bishop of Oxford.
47:01He could really turn a phrase, couldn't he, Mr Stubbs?
47:04Yes, certainly. The 15th century, in Stubbs's view, goes something like this.
47:09The sun of the Plantagenets went down in clouds and thick darkness.
47:14The coming of the Tudors gave as yet no promise of light.
47:17It was as the morning spread upon the mountains, darkest before the dawn.
47:22It sounds like Victorian historians were quite happy to pass judgment on the past.
47:28Black and white, good and bad.
47:30They're not only not afraid to judge the past, they saw it as part of their job.
47:34For historians like Stubbs, their Christianity was an intrinsic part of what it meant to be a historian.
47:41So they needed to look in the archives, they needed to find out the information, they were great scholars.
47:47But then they needed to stand back to assess what they found and stand in judgment on it.
47:53And their judgment had to take in the moral dimensions of their world view.
47:59They were quite willing to say that certain actions, certain people and certain periods were evil.
48:07I'm thinking that he's typical of a type of historian that we call Whig historians.
48:12That's a broad grouping, but what is this thing called Whig history?
48:16Really, when we talk about Whig history, we're talking about a view of history as progress,
48:21as a movement towards the best of all possible worlds,
48:25which is embodied in 19th century society, 19th century politics.
48:31So Victorians see an onward march of progress up to the Walls of the Roses,
48:36and then it slips back, and then it's up and up and up again to the glorious perfection of Queen Victoria.
48:41Progress isn't always quite that straightforward, obviously there are lumps and bumps along the way,
48:45but the 15th century seemed a pretty dark age when the country collapsed into civil war,
48:52and it seemed as though the forces of law and the enlightenment of constitutional progress
48:57were being overwhelmed by over-mighty subjects and aristocratic faction.
49:06Although Bishop Stubbs and his colleagues weren't writing for the mass market,
49:10their judgement on the Walls of the Roses as a great leap backwards,
49:15as an interruption to the march of progress, has proved extremely influential.
49:20Ah, now this is perhaps my favourite history book.
49:32It's called 1066 and all that, A Memorable History of England.
49:38It's basically a spoof of those very self-confident Victorian historians like Bishop Stubbs and his chums.
49:46And like them, it's not afraid to make judgements about history.
49:51Here's the 17th century English Civil War, for example, between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads.
49:57The Cavaliers being wrong, but romantic.
50:00And the Roundheads, right, but repulsive.
50:04What have they got to say about the Wars of the Roses?
50:08Well, it was all because the Barons, who made a stupendous effort using sackage, carnage and wreckage,
50:17so to stave off the Tudors for a time.
50:20They achieved this by a very clever plan known as the Wars of the Roses.
50:25So just like the Victorian historians, this book thinks that it was the fault of the Bad Barons.
50:32Clearly the whole thing's a joke.
50:34But minus the jokes, and plus a few more dates,
50:38this was pretty much how generations of school kids were taught their history.
50:45But no account of the Wars of the Roses could ever hope to rival the remarkable staying power of Shakespeare's drama.
50:53In the 20th century, his Richard III made the leap from stage to screen.
51:00March on! Join bravely!
51:04In 1955, Laurence Olivier both directed and starred in Richard III.
51:10He turned Shakespeare's story into a Technicolor Spectacular,
51:15and he turned Richard III himself into the ultimate Hollywood villain,
51:20complete with prosthetic villainous news.
51:23Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York.
51:31Olivier delivers his scheming monologues straight down the camera, eyeball to eyeball.
51:38He draws us into his murderous plots.
51:41I can smile, and murder whilst I smile.
51:46He's both monstrous and magnetic.
51:49And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, and frame my face to all occasions.
51:54This was the definitive Richard III for the 20th century.
51:58Everybody else who played the part would be measured against Olivier.
52:03In America, the film was shown on television the same day that it opened in cinemas.
52:13As many as 40 million people watched it.
52:17That's more than the total number of people who'd seen it in theatres
52:21over the whole 350 years since it was first performed.
52:31Forty years after Olivier, Ian McKellen played Richard III
52:35as the greatest tyrant of them all, Adolf Hitler.
52:39complete with murderous moustache.
52:48Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York.
53:00This version of Richard III didn't make any connection to the real events of the 15th century.
53:06Shakespeare's plot was so well-known that it had become a sort of timeless parable.
53:19Richard III had become the biggest baddie in history,
53:22and the Wars of the Roses symbolised a nation's darkest hour.
53:27But a new and radically different tale of good King Richard was also emerging,
53:44which turned Shakespeare's familiar story on its head.
53:48In 1924, the Richard III Society was founded to counter what they saw as outrageous Tudor lies,
53:57and to paint a much more flattering portrait of Richard.
54:01There Richard was a good lord and a mighty prince, and he definitely didn't have a hunchback.
54:07Centuries after Richard's death, his supporters, the Ricardians, were determined to clear his name.
54:20The culmination of Richard's rehabilitation came in 2012,
54:26with the extraordinary discovery of his body here in this car park in Leicester.
54:33After centuries of conjecture and half-truths and even downright lies,
54:40here was some hard evidence for the real Richard.
54:43Just five feet under the tarmac, archaeologists made the remarkable find.
54:56The Ricardians were delighted finally to lay eyes on their hero.
55:01But even from a quick glance, it was clear that this man did have an abnormal curvature of the spine.
55:08In a battle where opinions mattered more than facts,
55:15Richard's physical imperfections didn't shake the Ricardians' conviction.
55:20In the Wars of the Roses, the wrong man had come out on top.
55:23For them, the final twist in the tale is that Henry VII, not Richard,
55:29was the true villain of the piece.
55:31To the Ricardians, the triumphant Tudor was nothing more
55:37than a ruthless usurper who had slandered Richard's good name.
55:44As Henry VII faced their wrath, his defenders rallied round.
55:48In 2013, another royal fan club was born.
55:52The Henry Tudor Society.
55:55Nathan, what is this?
55:56It's a small representation of a statue that we're hoping to put up in Pembroke.
56:02I feel that Henry Tudor is an overlooked monarch.
56:07Since Richard III was dug up, there's been a bit of sort of rehabilitation of his reputation.
56:12Do you think this means that, inevitably, Henry Tudor's gone down?
56:17Unfortunately, yes, it does seem that way.
56:19For one king to become unmaligned, it seems that some feel that another has to become maligned.
56:24So, how many members have you got?
56:26Currently, there's 12,000 people on my Facebook page.
56:28Wow!
56:29And how many has Richard III got, then?
56:31Shall we? Let's compare.
56:32Did you say you've got 12,000?
56:34I have 12,350.
56:35Oh!
56:36I hate to tell you this, Nathan, but Richard III has got 16,000.
56:41He is ahead of you.
56:42But not by much.
56:43Not by much.
56:44We're hot on your toes, Richard.
56:45And is there sort of tension between the two societies?
56:48How do you get on together?
56:49Not well, I imagine.
56:50If you believe some things you read on Facebook, this man was a monster, a usurper, a ruthless,
56:56evil king.
56:57But in my opinion, this was a king who was without doubt the cleverest man to ever sit on the
57:02throne of England.
57:03And he was recognised in Europe as a generous family man.
57:08The need to find a hero and a villain of the Wars of the Roses remains as strong as ever.
57:17In 2015, 530 years after his death on the battlefield at Bosworth, Richard III was finally laid to rest in Leicester Cathedral,
57:27in a tomb fit for a king.
57:30Ironically, the discovery of Richard's curved spine shows that what had seemed to be the
57:37most outrageous piece of myth-making of all, the hunchbacked king, was close to reality.
57:43But fascinating though Richard's bones are, they can't really tell us what sort of a man
57:50or what sort of a king he was.
57:53Because history is more than a series of dates, facts and bones.
57:58It's a collection of stories.
58:01And all stories reveal just as much about their authors as they do about the heroes and the
58:06villains they portray.
58:08While Richard has been laid to rest, the story of the Wars of the Roses certainly hasn't.
58:15Next time, I'll be exploring the glorious revolution.
58:20Was it really glorious?
58:22And was it really a revolution?
58:25To be continued...
58:55You
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