I like the idea of the hunchbacked Richard III, newly exhumed from his final resting spot beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, visiting the Oval Office. You can imagine the late, unlamented English monarch exchanging pleasantries with U.S. President Barack Obama about horseback riding and complaining about what a pain it is to deal with the intolerable French. They might also exchange notes on the inevitable headaches of leadership -- though, in Obama's case, he's not likely to take his skeet-shooting gun and parachute into Helmand province to battle the Taliban.
More...
But the conversation could quickly take a more somber turn. If
there is a lesson from the 1485 fall of Richard's House of York, it's
that there are worse things than judicious appeasement.
In general, the Wars of the Roses -- the 30-year civil war between Richard's
Yorkist family and their Lancastrian cousins -- continued a three-way policy
dance that dated far back into the Hundred Years War. The Lancastrians often
found support among the French; their bitter enemies, the Yorkists, found their
friends among the powerful Dukes of Burgundy. In 1475, Edward IV, Richard's
older brother, became the first solvent English king in decades by finally
cutting a good deal with the French. In exchange for no longer pressing his
dubious claim to be the legitimate king of France, the French gave him a cozy
pension and lucrative trading benefits. Yes, Richard's very distant cousin Henry
V had been more dashing in all his belligerence at Agincourt, but it had cost
his realm dearly. Edward was learning that diplomatic success was easier and
cheaper to achieve than military victory, and often had longer lasting results.
By the end of Edward's reign, however, that agreement between France and
Yorkist England was starting to weaken. Edward's brother Richard III came to
the throne determined to ignore it and to readopt a more swashbuckling attitude
toward France. Huge mistake: France eagerly dumped money and resources into the
invasion planned by Richard's Lancastrian enemy, Henry Tudor. (Henry had
been living in exile first in Brittany and later in France itself.) If Richard
had not antagonized the French, they almost certainly would not have supported
Henry -- whose claim to the succession was weak at best -- and Richard might have
escaped the double ignominy of death in battle and eventual burial under a
parking lot, though perhaps he would not have been immortalized by history's
greatest playwright.
In general, Richard III is less explicitly focused on
foreign policy than Shakespeare's other early history plays. In terms of
dramatic interest, murdering little princes and drowning people in malmsey
butts trumps treaty negotiations and ambassadorial exchanges. But as Richard
rallies his troops to fight Henry, he speaks disparagingly of the
"overweening rags of France" who have accompanied Henry back to
England. Discounting the significance of French support was a mistake. A fatal
one.
SUBJECTS:
