[In this essay, Hanham analyzes Vergil's description of the reign of Richard III in Anglica historia to show what sources most influenced Vergil's writing, how the author subtly expressed his own political views, and why Vergil, and not Thomas More, should be credited with writing the first English literary history.]

I

Polydore Vergil was already a scholar of international standing when he came to England in 1502. With the encouragement of Henry VII he undertook to write a history of England, and after some twelve years of research he produced a first complete draft which went up as far as September 1513.¹ He subsequently added and altered material, and the work seems to have circulated in manuscript, as one would expect, before the first edition was published at Basle in 1534.² The beauty and elegance of this volume, a remarkable contrast to the homely black-letter prints produced in England at the time, appropriately symbolize the difference in quality between Vergil and the English chroniclers discussed in the last chapter.

There is no need to detail Vergil's considerable merits as a historian in general: the ground has been ably covered by Professor Denys Hay.³ Vergil produced a sophisticated work by applying modern humanist principles to native material, and the English, although indignant at his debunking of some of their cherished national myths,⁴ were charmed to find their history so elegantly set forth. For the purposes of this book it is chiefly Vergil's history of Richard III that must be discussed. There are three pertinent matters. Was his treatment of Richard's reign deliberately designed as Tudor propaganda, or notably slanted to agree with contemporary views? What were his sources, oral and written, and how did he treat their evidence? And how was Vergil's work used by subsequent historians?

II VERGIL AS TUDOR PROPAGANDIST

Vergil is sometimes written off as a party hack; as far as regards his account of Richard III, the author of an official history that is mere propaganda for Richard's enemies. This approach can be extremely useful: where Vergil's statements are inconvenient to one's pet theory they can be labelled lies, and where they happen to fit in, truth told by the devil must be especially potent. But the view that Vergil was a propagandist contains some more general misapprehensions. There is no real reason to suppose that he wrote history to order in any crass way. The rejection of Geoffrey of Monmouth that made him so unpopular with the Welsh suggests on the contrary that he was a man of independent mind and an honest scholar who followed his own judgement.⁵ Had Henry been interested in obtaining a totally fictitious report on his predecessor's character and reign he could have hired a less distinguished writer (somebody like Rous or a second André) more cheaply and with better results. The value of propaganda was, of course, perfectly well known,⁶ but in this case Henry had no need to blacken the name of the man he had defeated, because that name was dark enough already. The idea that Richard was an excellent king and a beloved man in his lifetime and the malevolence of Tudor historians utterly falsified his reputation has its own perverse attraction. But even when it was first fully developed by Sir Clements Markham it had to be supported by the thesis that the Crowland Chronicle was reliable only in selected parts, and the discovery of Mancini's work has since made it clear that many of the major items of so-called Tudor propaganda against Richard were charges that had already been levelled against him in England in the first weeks of his reign.

In these circumstances, neither Henry VII nor his son was likely to feel himself particularly flattered by any further aspersions upon the character and appearance of Richard. Vergil's flattery of Henry and his kingdom was much more subtle: it lay in his production of a national status symbol of sixteenth-century Europe—a narrative in emulation of classical writings, which raised English history to a level that accorded with aspirations to become an important political power. In this history as a whole the reign of Richard III had been just an unfortunate incident that preceded, and paved the way for, the triumphant establishment of a new dynasty. Denigration of Richard was not, therefore, Vergil's chief aim. But he was not altogether guiltless of suppressing truth and suggesting falsities. If a Tudor king was not to be flattered by lies about Richard, he could be upset by injudicious statements on certain subjects. Vergil was in much the same position as a modern historian of repute who undertakes to write the history of a large business firm. No doubt he accepted the work from genuine professional interest, recognizing the scope it gave his talents, grateful for the access to records it allowed him, and with the understanding that he did not intend to concoct wholesale falsehoods. None the less, he would recognize that some tact was called for when he came to cover recent events and deal with the personalities of those still living, or recently dead but succeeded by important descendants. The ‘Crowland’ chronicler was shrewd in refusing to bring his history too far up to date. The three earliest editions of the Anglica Historia, like other sixteenth-century publications, show small alterations as the climate of official opinion changed; for instance the discreet omission of the characterization of Thomas Boleyn as ‘adolescen[s] corpore pariter atque animo floren[s]’.⁷ Vergil's coverage of Richard's reign can therefore be expected to show such minor omissions and distortions as might be found in a modern business history or ‘official’ biography, where people familiar with the subject may see between the lines things tactfully veiled from the general reader.

In this way, Vergil avoided giving the impression that Richard's accession met with any sort of general acceptance. Not only does he say ‘Thus Richard, without assent of the commonalty, by might and will of certain noblemen of his faction enjoined the realm, contrary to the law of God and man’,⁸ but he seems even to slur over the fact that the council appointed him Protector, with the words ‘then did Duke Richard assume the government wholly’.⁹ Similarly, it is possible that more explicit details about the opposition of Hastings, Morton, and Rotherham were current than it was expedient to put in print, just because (although the legal position was rather tricky) Richard as Protector had undoubtedly been entitled to allegiance. Although a Tudor historian might be expected to extol the participants in a courageous act of rebellion against an enemy of the Tudors, it was really safe to praise sedition only when the rebel was the successful Earl of Richmond. In June 1483 Hastings and his friends were not acting on Henry's behalf, and it would not have been wise for Vergil or other Tudor writers, remembering Perkin Warbeck, Lambert Simnel, and the de la Pole family, to praise such conspiracy against lawfully constituted authority. Hence, perhaps, some ambiguity about Hastings in Vergil's account: he was an innocent victim of Richard who perished for his inconvenient loyalty to Edward V, but his death was also divine retribution for his part in murdering the heir of Henry VI¹⁰ (an aspect of the matter that does not seem to have occurred to Mancini's contemporaries).

Where Vergil does seem deliberately to lie (or at any rate prevaricate) is in his vehement attempt to refute persistent stories that the bastardy of Edward's children was alleged as grounds for Richard's accession. His rebuttal is distinctly disingenuous. He says that ‘there is a common report that in Sha's sermon Edward's children were called bastards, and not King Edward himself, which is devoid of any truth’ because there are men still alive who remember the Duchess of York's indignation at being labelled an adulteress.¹¹ Mancini agrees that the sermon cast aspersions on the chastity of the duchess.¹² But Vergil then fails to mention what Mancini¹³ and the Crowland chronicler¹⁴ (backed by the Rolls of Parliament) say respectively—that Buckingham's speech at the Guildhall and the petition from the quasi-parliamentary assembly of 25 June alleged a precontract of some kind that illegitimized Edward's children. … [Discussion] of this alleged precontract was not encouraged by Henry VII, since it affected the title of his wife. Vergil could not suppress all reference to the matter, but he played it down as much as he could with a refutation that neatly sidestepped the real point at issue.

III THE SOURCES

VERGIL'S TREATMENT OF EVIDENCE

While Fabyan and his fellow writers might sometimes indicate some doubts about a story, Vergil's stature as a historian is clearly shown by his handling of conflicting interpretations. In discussing the events of the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III he will characteristically rehearse a variety of opinions; some ascribed to ‘men worthy of credit’ or to current belief (whether written or otherwise is not always clear), others to rumour. He usually tries to evaluate these views, castigating some as popular nonsense, and offering corroborative evidence for others. For instance, a tale that Edward abused Warwick's hospitality by molesting a woman of his house is plausible, he concludes, in view of Edward's reputation.¹⁵ He also makes his own deductions: Edward's reproach that no man begged mercy for Clarence both corroborates his repentance and suggests that Edward himself must have blamed the Duke's death on the envy of the nobility.¹⁶

Vergil's methods can be seen in his treatment of the relations between Buckingham and Gloucester. After the death of Edward IV, Richard met Henry Duke of Buckingham at Northampton ‘with whom the Duke of Gloucester had long conference, in so much that, as is commonly believed, he even then discovered to Henry his intent of usurping the kingdom [the ground for which belief was especially] for because the Duke following afterwards his humour, whether it were for fear or for obedience, held ever with him’.¹⁷ After Richard's coronation the first cause of discord between Buckingham and Richard was Buckingham's demand for the Earl of Hereford's patrimony, which Richard rejected in angry and insulting terms. Buckingham went to Wales and partly smarting from this rebuff, partly repenting his hand in Richard's wicked enterprises, conspired with Bishop Morton, and explained to him his scheme for uniting the houses of York and Lancaster in the persons of Elizabeth of York and Henry Earl of Richmond.

This truly was the matter for the which dissension sprang betwixt the King and the Duke, and whereupon conspiracy was made against him.¹⁸ But the common report was otherwise, for the multitude said that the Duke did the less dissuade King Richard from usurping the kingdom by mean of so many mischievous deeds, upon that intent that he afterward, being hated both of God and man, might be expelled from the same, and so himself [i.e. Buckingham] be called by the commons to that dignity, whereunto he aspired by all means possible, and that therefore he had at the last stirred up war against King Richard.¹⁹

The last, ‘common report’, Vergil apparently adds as an example of the far-fetched explanations of which popular opinion is fond. It is common practice among sixteenth-century historians to attribute stories current in their own day to people contemporary with the event described (compare, for example, Rastell as quoted above, p. 104).²⁰

As Professor Hay has pointed out,²¹ it is sometimes difficult to judge whether Vergil's source is oral tradition or written evidence, and one might add that, with Vergil as with More, it is possible that fiction has sometimes been disguised as historical relation. Thus, was Vergil told that after Ralph Sha's sermon Richard hung back, although his friends ‘urged him to utter himself plainly and to dispatch at once that which remained’,²² and did he really know that after the murder of the princes Richard was popularly blamed for any storm that arose?²³ Either is the sort of thing an author might add for artistic reasons, and equally such rather vague or irrelevant but vivid details are just what occur in the reminiscences of the elderly. There is no difficulty in believing that Vergil's concluding description of Richard²⁴ came, in its essentials, from people who had known him; and the anecdote, for example, that Edward IV would advert to Clarence's fate when anyone pleaded for his intercession,²⁵ sounds authentic. So may be Vergil's information that Richard was himself lodged in the Tower when both princes were there after 16 June,²⁶ since this is implied by Mancini.²⁷ (Vergil was wrong, however, in saying that Edward V was not moved there until 16 June.²⁸) Vergil's assertion that Gloucester, Clarence, and Hastings killed Prince Edward after Tewkesbury²⁹ may, on the other hand, be either general gossip or artistic enlargement on a deduction from earlier written sources.

Much has been said about the people who could have given Thomas More information for his Richard III. Partly, perhaps, because it was earlier thought that Vergil's work was composed after More's, less has been written on Vergil's possible contacts with men who had played a part at Richard's court, though this is a question of still greater moment. Bernard André, writing about 1502, explained that he could obtain no certain details about the Battle of Bosworth.³⁰ Evidently Vergil was more successful in gathering information, at least about the affairs of Henry and his supporters. It is generally agreed that he obtained first-hand accounts about these from witnesses to whom he would have ready access like Bishop Fox, Reginald Bray, and Christopher Urswick. It should not be forgotten either that papal servants like Vergil's patron Adriano Castelli wrote diplomatic reports on happenings in England.³¹ Vergil himself states that when he approached contemporary events and could obtain no written annals, ‘I betook myself to every man of age who was pointed out to me as having been formerly occupied in important and public affairs, and from all such I obtained information about events up to the year 1500.’³² On the question of the final breach between the Duke of Clarence and Edward IV he claims specifically to have consulted surviving prominent members of Edward's circle: ‘As touching the cause of his death, though I have inquired of many who were not of least authority amongst the king's council [read, rather, ‘court’] at that time, yet have I no certainty thereof to leave in memory.’³³ One would like very much to have the names of the persons he consulted. Of Edward's known council in 1477, very few, at least of the senior members, were still alive when Vergil came to England in 1502.³⁴ Curiously enough, the account of Clarence's downfall which Vergil does adopt is indeed that furnished by a man alleged to have been one of Edward's councillors—the author of the ‘second continuation’ of the Crowland Chronicle—but Vergil has taken it from a written, not an oral, source.

Specific informants can be suggested for one or two of Vergil's statements about the usurpation. Vergil, alone among chroniclers, mentions that after his arrest Rotherham was committed to the care of Sir James Tyrrell (whom he later blames for the murder of the princes),³⁵ and he also says that after his release, Rotherham, ‘a grave and good man’,³⁶ received Richard's confidences about his distress at being childless, whereupon Rotherham spread it about (‘foreshadowed … to divers his friends’) that Richard's queen was unlikely to live much longer.³⁷ These two matters suggest that although Rotherham had died in 1500, Vergil might have obtained information from one of his intimates, since these are not details that anyone would bother to make up. Archbishop Rotherham was also in a good position to furnish a description of the scene at the Tower when he was arrested along with Bishop Morton and Lord Hastings. Vergil's report is very detailed, introducing for the first time Richard's accusation of witchcraft and giving (in the manuscript but not the printed editions) the names of his concealed supporters.³⁸ The possibility that this account derived from first-hand information must therefore be carefully considered, but unhappily the issue is very difficult to decide on the available evidence. Vergil was not writing ‘scientific’ history, and a dramatic scene required dialogue, which he could have supplied from his own imagination. Mancini had heard only that Hastings was accused of ‘plotting within the Tower’.³⁹ It is quite possible, however, that a detailed account of the affair was not made public until long after Mancini had left England, for there must have been numerous people present who later felt free to talk. It has been widely assumed (without substantive proof) that John Morton did so, and I have suggested another possible informant in Rotherham. Unlike these two, Thomas Lord Stanley was still alive when Vergil first came to England. He had also been a councillor of Edward IV in 1477 and was therefore an obvious person for Vergil to have consulted about Clarence. Did he give Vergil information about the arrests at the Tower? And if so, was it reliable? Such hypothetical questions are worth raising because it is clear from ‘The Song of the Lady Bessy’ that the Stanley family later created for themselves a kind of private historical apotheosis which bears little resemblance to fact,⁴⁰ and because at three points in the story Vergil assigns to Lord Stanley a role which is not confirmed by evidence. The first occasion is the arrest of councillors at the Tower on 20 June 1483. As I have mentioned, Vergil's statement that Lord Stanley was one of those seized occurs first in Rous and some of the group of ‘city’ chronicles: there is nothing to support it in Mancini, the Crowland Chronicle, or the contemporary Stonor and Cely letters.⁴¹ But it is true that Vergil refers to Stanley rather as an afterthought, and (unlike More) does not include the Great Chronicle's detail that he was wounded in the scuffle. It is perhaps unlikely, therefore, that his new details about Richard's accusations came from a Stanleyite source.

Vergil's descriptions of Lord Stanley's actions before and just after Bosworth are open to still more doubt. His anecdote that after the battle Lord Stanley placed Richard's crown on the head of the new king⁴² may reflect the story in the Great Chronicle which ascribes the action to Thomas's brother Sir William. Sir William Stanley had been executed for treason against Henry in 1495, and it could have seemed politic to Vergil or his source to transfer the role. Vergil also states unequivocally that before his army met Richard's Henry paid a secret visit to both Stanleys at their camp at Atherstone and discussed strategy.⁴³ In 1963 K. B. McFarlane drew attention to testimony from Lord Stanley himself which directly contradicts both these stories.⁴⁴ It appears from papal records that on 16 January 1486 Stanley (by then Earl of Derby) testified before the Bishops of Worcester and London that he had known Henry since 24 August 1485: that is, that he first met him two days after Bosworth. Professor Chrimes has recently discounted this sworn evidence for the reasons that ‘it is inconceivable that Henry did not meet Lord Stanley until the second day after the battle’⁴⁵ and that everyone concerned must have known that Stanley's statement was untrue.⁴⁶ Sir John Weston, Prior of the Hospitallers, similarly deposed that he had known Henry for the same period: ‘a vicesimo quarto die Augusti ultimo preterito’. This evidence Chrimes tries to discredit on the odd ground that there is no way of controverting it.⁴⁷ I suggest that it is perverse to prefer a chronicler's account, written from hearsay twenty-nine years later, to evidence given on oath before a papal commission only five months after the event, when the deponents had no discernible reason to lie; and that in three cases Vergil was misled about Lord Stanley's part in events. It seems possible that after Henry's accession the Stanleys took pains to write themselves into the record of opposition to Richard from an early stage, and that their claims were accepted by some English chroniclers. It is not clear, however, whether Vergil's information came directly from the Earl of Derby (or one of his household), or reached him from some popular source.

WRITTEN SOURCES

For the reigns of Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III, two of Vergil's written sources seem to have been some version of the city chronicles that are now represented most elaborately by the Great Chronicle, and a version of what we know as the ‘second continuation’ of the Crowland Chronicle. From the city tradition he could most notably have taken the general outlines of such incidents as Sha's sermon, Sha's death shortly after, and Buckingham's speech at the Guildhall. It is probable that he took his chronology from such a source: he dates Buckingham's speech ‘about the thirteenth kalends of June’,⁴⁸ i.e. 20 May, no doubt a slip for 19 June, which is in line with the tradition that dated the events of 20-26 June a week too early. From a city chronicle he would take, with mis-spellings, the names of the mayor and sheriffs whom Richard summoned to the Guildhall to approve his accession⁴⁹ (but he got those of the wrong year), and from similar confusion of mayoral and calendar years he probably derived the error by which he dates Edward IV's death correctly in 1483, but Richard's coronation in 1484 and the battle of Bosworth in 1486.

The Crowland Chronicle has never been suggested as a possible analogue, presumably because it has not previously been hypothesized that it is based on an account which circulated beyond the abbey.⁵⁰ The parallels are sometimes extremely close, both for extended passages and in shorter echoes. Compare, for example, the description in the Crowland Chronicle of how Buckingham (having repented) and Morton sent for Henry: ‘To this end a message was sent by the said Duke of Buckingham, on the advice of the Bishop of Ely … that [Henry] should hasten into England with all the speed he could muster and take in marriage Elizabeth, eldest daughter of the dead king, and along with her possession of the whole kingdom’;⁵¹ with Vergil's ‘[Henry was to be] sent for in all haste possible, and assisted with all that they might do, so that he would promise before by solemn oath that after he had once obtained the kingdom he would take to wife Elizabeth, King Edward's eldest daughter.’⁵² (Tactfully, Vergil does not give Crowland's explanation that Buckingham and the other English conspirators only bethought themselves of Henry when they were persuaded that Edward V and his brother were dead.) Particular incidents in Vergil, like the alliance between Hastings, Richard, and Buckingham before the coup at Stony Stratford.⁵³ Richard's soothing letters to Queen Elizabeth,⁵⁴ his division of the council before the arrest of Hastings,⁵⁵ and his dream on the eve of Bosworth,⁵⁶ may also derive from the same source as the Crowland Chronicle, that is the ur-account possibly written by Russell.

Vergil's attitude towards this authority is, however, curiously ambivalent. In the matter of the final quarrel between Edward IV and Clarence, his summary of the view which he approves follows the Crowland Chronicle with fidelity, though Vergil relates the story in a rather cursory, or oblique, fashion. The Crowland chronicler fills in the details:

After the death of Charles the Bold it was commonly said that his widow, the Duchess Margaret, who always favoured her brother the Duke of Clarence above all the rest of her family, was working strenuously for a marriage between Charles's only daughter and heiress, Mary, and Clarence, whose wife had recently died. The king did not care to contemplate such grand prospects for his disaffected brother, and he did his best to raise impediments, so that nothing should come of the proposal. Instead he supported the marriage between Mary and Maximilian, son of the emperor, which in fact took place.

No doubt this increased Clarence's displeasure still further, and each began to regard the other with unbrotherly eyes. … But the arrest of the duke to force him to answer charges against him happened like this. A certain Master John Stacy, called astronomer but also known to be a great necromancer, in league with a certain gentleman of the duke's household called [Thomas] Burdet, was accused of many charges, including the moulding of leaden images and so forth to destroy Richard, Lord Beauchamp, at the behest of his adulterous wife. Being examined under torture about his practice of the accursed art, he confessed a great deal which implicated both himself and the said Thomas. Both were arrested, and eventually, in the King's Bench at Westminster, before the judges and nearly all the temporal peers, sentence of death was passed upon each. They were drawn to the gallows at Tyburn and being allowed to make a short statement before death, they declared their innocence; Stacy feebly enough, but Burdet with spirit and at great length, so that he concluded like Susanna: ‘Behold, I die, but I did none of these things.’⁵⁷

The next day the Duke of Clarence came to the council chamber at Westminster, bringing with him Master William Godard,⁵⁸ a famous doctor of the order of Friars Minor, in order to read this declaration of innocence before the lords in council, which he did and retired again. The king was at Windsor at this time. When he subsequently heard about the affair he was very angry and recalled to mind the evidence of his brother's activities against him which he had long stored up in his breast. The duke was summoned to appear on a certain day in the king's palace of Westminster, in the presence of the mayor and aldermen of London, and the king proceeded with his own lips to enlarge upon this action of the duke's, among others, as contempt of court and an insufferable menace to the king's judges and jury. What can one add? The duke was placed under arrest and never regained his freedom from that day till his death. [In parliament the king then secured his condemnation on dubious grounds, but execution was delayed until the speaker came to the upper house with his fellows and requested that the matter should be concluded. Consequently, a few days later, whatever the means employed, the duke was privately put to death in the Tower.]⁵⁹

To this account Vergil adds only a story of Edward's heartbroken reproaches, and gives the date ‘1480: 19 Edward IV’, where present texts of the Crowland Chronicle have correctly ‘1478:18 Edward IV’.⁶⁰ Vergil starts by rehearsing the popular story that Edward was alarmed by a prophecy that G. should follow E., but then goes on:

But others give a different cause for his death, after this style. At that time, when old hatreds were swelling between the two brothers (and nothing is more intense), the duke, who had lost his wife, sought by means of his sister Margaret to marry Mary, only daughter of Charles, Duke of Burgundy. Edward prevented that connection through jealousy of his brother's prosperity. Then, when the quarrel had been thus renewed, an official of the duke's was convicted of sorcery and executed. In the face of this, the duke could not contain himself, but burst out angrily, and the king, greatly annoyed, sent him to prison. Not long after he was condemned of treason, legally or illegally, and put to death. But it can be proved that Edward soon repented this deed, for they say that whenever anyone interceded for the life of a condemned man, he used to exclaim ‘O unhappy brother, for whose reprieve there was no man at all to plead’, so that clearly he ascribed his death to the envy of the nobles. … This happened in 1480, that is in the nineteenth year of Edward's reign.

And so, secure from the wars and domestic seditions which had been a danger before, the king began to take unusually severe notice of offences among the nobility, and to pay keener attention to amassing money.⁶¹ For this reason, many were persuaded that he was turning into a hard ruler, for after the death of his brother he realized that he was feared by all, and he himself was now in fear of no man [propter quod multi persuasum sibi habebant, illum deinceps evasurum durum principem, cum post mortem fratris, se a cunctis timeri animadverteret, et ipse iam timeret neminem].⁶²

In the Crowland Chronicle the parallel to the last paragraph runs:

After this action many acquiesced in Edward's persuasion that he could rule the whole kingdom at his will [ab hoc actu multi Regem Edwardum persuasum relinquebant, quod ad libitum dominari posset super totum regnum], now that he had removed those general idols on whom the people, ever anxious for change, had fixed their gaze in time past. They regarded as idols of this sort the Earl of Warwick, the Duke of Clarence, and any other magnate who might withdraw from the royal circle. Although, as I judge, the king often inwardly repented the deed, for the rest he performed his office so grandly that he seemed feared by all his subjects, while he himself was afraid of no one [ita magnifice tamen de cetero fecit officium suum, ut ab omnibus incolis formidari, neminem ille metuere videretur]. For he distributed his more trustworthy servants through all the realm, as keepers of castles, manors, forests, and parks, so that no man, however high-ranking and treacherous, could have made any attempt in any part of the kingdom without facing immediate resistance.⁶³

On other occasions, Vergil appears to quote the Crowland source (again without attribution), only to dismiss its conclusions in scornful terms. The Crowland Chronicle says that Warwick allowed Edward to escape from Middleham ‘in an almost miraculous manner’⁶⁴ (a similar story is told in greater detail by Hall⁶⁵). Vergil says a rumour was spread to this effect, but argues that it is not credible.⁶⁶ Earlier he had asserted that Edward's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in place of Bona of Savoy (incongruously called ‘Lady Bone’ in the English translation) was either the ground of the quarrel between Edward and Warwick, or inflamed an existing enmity.⁶⁷

On the other hand:

A story even now circulates among the populace, which alleges that the reason for their quarrel was that the earl tried to dissuade the king from marrying his sister Margaret to Charles, son of Philip Duke of Burgundy, whom he hated worse than any other mortal [quem ipse peius quam mortalem quempiam odisset]. And because Edward would not listen to his advice, this great hostility arose between them. As though to say that such a small thing could, or should, estrange the earl from his prince. But this is a mere fairy-tale of the common people.⁶⁸

This ‘mere fairy-tale’ is argued by the Crowland author with a scrupulosity worthy of Vergil himself:

I now come to the sixth year of the reign, when Elizabeth, the king's eldest daughter by this marriage, was born in February [1466]. At this period, ambassadors came from Flanders to England to seek the Lady Margaret, sister of King Edward, in marriage to Charles, eldest son of Philip Duke of Burgundy (for his father was then alive). The marriage was solemnized in July of the next year, that is 1467. Richard Nevyl, Earl of Warwick, who had tried for some years to promote French interests at the expense of the Burgundians, was extremely annoyed about this.⁶⁹ He would have preferred to arrange a different marriage for Margaret, in the kingdom of France, to encourage a friendly understanding between the kings of these countries, rather than allow Charles, now Duke of Burgundy, to enjoy any influence with England. For he regarded that man with deadly hatred [odio enim capitali prosecutus est hominem illum].⁷⁰

I consider this a better reason for the dissension between the king and the Earl of Warwick than the one adduced above, that is the king's marriage to Queen Elizabeth. The earl had certainly inveighed against that union, since he had been working for a marriage between the king and the widowed queen of Scotland; but he, and all the bishops and chief noblemen of the realm, had long since formally sanctioned and approved it, at Reading. And the earl continued to countenance the queen's relations until they promoted this other marriage. …⁷¹

Vergil's furor scholasticus in this case matches the vehemence with which he dismisses allegations about the bastardy of Edward's children as ‘a rumour of the people … which is totally devoid of any truth’. (The Crowland chronicler rehearses the latter, not in connection with Sha's sermon, but (quite truthfully) as occurring in the petition to Richard to take the throne.⁷²) The Crowland reason for Warwick's disgust—that Edward had spurned Warwick's advice—is really not so silly as Vergil makes out. The author's real crime may have been that he failed to mention the celebrated Bona, who was (although Vergil does not say so) a convenient straw figure to explain stories about Edward's precontract.⁷³ In this case Vergil's evaluation of his source was not free from prejudice.

A more complicated problem is raised by the parallels between Vergil and the Crowland chronicler's account of events between the death of Edward IV and the coronation of Richard III. For much of the period they are very close. They both have Richard's oath of fealty to Edward V at York, his letters to Elizabeth Woodville, Hastings's letters to Richard and Buckingham, the meeting of Buckingham and Richard at Northampton and their arrest of Rivers at or near Stony Stratford, the queen and her party taking sanctuary on receipt of the news, and another party forming under Hastings (though there is here the striking difference that while the Crowland Chronicle refers generally to ‘great doubts’ about the imprisonment of the Woodvilles, Vergil has an implausible story that Hastings was immediately conscience-stricken about it). There is then the story about the division of the council, with oddities in both texts. Vergil was plainly not dependent exclusively on the Crowland account. In particular his description of the arrests and execution at the Tower introduces entirely new elements: Richard's claim to have been bewitched by the queen, his pretended proof of ill health, and then his sudden turning on Hastings, the names of other people present, the fact that Rotherham was committed to Tyrrell's custody, the arrest of Stanley and his release through fear of his son, Lord Strange, and the fact that Hastings was barely given time for confession. The two last additions are also in the city chronicles, as are Sha's sermon and Buckingham's Guildhall speech, which are not in the Crowland Chronicle. Apart from these, however, the general outlines are very similar. The correspondence could have arisen because Vergil and the Crowland Chronicle in its present form used the same source, or because basically both give an authentic account. Two independent accounts of the same series of events, both equally ‘authentic’, are seldom so close, however. Mancini's ‘authentic’ relation of these affairs is very different in arrangement and emphasis from that in the Crowland Chronicle and Vergil.

We come here again to the difficulty of reconstructing the ur-text behind the Crowland Chronicle from the (possibly abbreviated) version produced by a redactor, and have the added problem that if Vergil used a related version of the ur-text, it may not have been identical with the text adapted for Crowland. The relations between Vergil and the Crowland Chronicle at this point are therefore discussed in greater detail in the excursus to this chapter.

There is, however, one clear example of an error in Vergil which seems to stem from a version of the Crowland Chronicle account. Immediately after his description of the murder of the princes and their mother's anguished reaction, Vergil says⁷⁴ that Richard and his queen went crowned in a general procession at York, and that shortly afterwards a parliament was called, which created Richard's son Prince of Wales, Sir John Howard Duke of Norfolk, and Thomas Howard Earl of Surrey. Richard also then appointed northerners to his council. But Prince Edward died ‘the third month after he had been made Prince of Wales’, and after that Buckingham rose in rebellion. This is all grossly confused. The Buckingham rebellion occurred in October 1483; Parliament met in January 1484; and Howard had been created Duke of Norfolk before the coronation, on 28 June 1483, an elevation that had nothing to do with parliament. The Crowland Chronicle gives an accurate account of these various events, but it does it in a way that could have led to Vergil's misunderstandings, especially since there is evidence that Vergil sometimes relied on jotted notes from his sources.⁷⁵ According to the Crowland Chronicle, Richard went to York immediately after his coronation at Westminster, and at York he re-enacted his coronation and created his son Prince of Wales.⁷⁶ Next year, after the Buckingham rebellion had been put down, the chronicle relates that parliament met (at London) in January, and Richard obtained much property from attainted rebels, which he bestowed on the northern supporters whom he established in offices throughout the kingdom.⁷⁷ In February there was administered an unusual oath of allegiance to the Prince of Wales, at which ceremony John Howard, ‘who had lately been created by the king Duke of Norfolk’, played a prominent part.⁷⁸ Next April the prince died suddenly.

Vergil has evidently telescoped these two separate accounts of Richard's creation of the Prince of Wales at York and the oath of loyalty taken to him the following year at Westminster, and therefore put the parliamentary session, the creation of the Duke of Norfolk, and the death of the Prince of Wales all together in the summer of 1483 (or 1484, by his erroneous chronology; but in any case before the Buckingham rebellion). It is difficult to account for this series of blunders except on the assumption that he used a version of the Crowland Chronicle—no other source would be likely to have the precise wording which could occasion Vergil's impression that parliament had, in 1484, conferred on Howard the title of Duke of Norfolk.

IV VERGIL'S INFLUENCE

The main disadvantages of Vergil's account of Richard III for a modern historian are the fact that he so seldom indicates any source for his information, and his frequent vagueness about the course of events. The second may sometimes be due to policy, sometimes to a multiplicity of sources and the need to reconcile conflicting statements, sometimes to sheer lack of information rather than too much, and sometimes to a humanistic sense that it was more artistic not to be highly specific. Like Mancini, Vergil has bridge passages between the main events of his narrative where the chronology becomes rather uncertain. But Vergil is particularly unhelpful in discussing Richard's actions after obtaining the young Duke of York, and then after the execution of Hastings. In the first case he seems to suggest that Richard desired to usurp the throne but was deterred by his conscience, so that he tried to bribe both the people and his enemies with rewards and promises, and inveigled most of the noblemen by crafty and subtle discussion, ‘so many matters did he so often propound, and so few explain, according as a guilty conscience is wont to be of many minds’.⁷⁹ It may be true that Richard was not at all clear about his future course at this point, and certainly it is one of the attractive things about Vergil that he conveys the sense that human choices are involved in history, whereas the older chronicles are so often ‘the record of inevitable events’. But all this padding and references to the working of a guilty conscience do not amount to much in the way of evidence or convincing argument. Rather than a statement that Richard tantalized the people by ‘staying and tarrying’ over announcing a date for the coronation,⁸⁰ we would like, for instance, some concrete information. But Vergil was not a modern journalist trained to ask ‘Who, what, why, when, where, and how’,⁸¹ and if he had been, it is unlikely that he could have obtained many answers to these questions. On many points of fact, Vergil probably knew less than we do. It is possible, for example, that he did not know the exact date of Rivers's execution, since it occurred in the north and is not dated by the chronicles. At the same time, Vergil was engaged on an extensive work, and could not afford to expatiate on minor incidents within his total framework. Comparison of his account of Clarence's downfall with that of the Crowland Chronicle shows how much he may abridge.

For Vergil's contemporaries, the great merit—and novelty—of the Anglica Historia was that it treated history as literature. (It is quite absurd to confer on More the title of ‘father of modern English history’, unless Vergil is to be disqualified as an Italian who wrote in Latin.) In the classical manner, Vergil related his story with all the refinements of the stylist, from elevated rhetoric to the homely proverb; introduced imaginary orations and arguments (e.g. Richard's arguments to the council for taking York from sanctuary); dramatized established incidents (Sha's sermon and the audience's reaction; the battle of Bosworth); graphically described new ones (Queen Elizabeth's grief on hearing of the death of her sons, and the symptoms of Richard's guilty conscience); and attempted to deduce and explain motivations. Very soon after it appeared in print, English chroniclers paid Vergil the compliment of plagiarizing his book on a large scale. Richard Grafton used a close translation of Vergil's books on Edward IV and Henry VII, and the concluding part of his book on Richard III, for his continuation of John Hardyng's rhymed chronicle, first published in 1543,⁸² and Edward Hall based himself rather more loosely on the same source for his Union of the Two Noble Families, which Grafton published in 1548. Both writers fall strictly outside the period selected for this study, but it happens that some brief consideration of their treatment of Vergil's work is relevant to the later discussion of More's History in the Appendix. A comparison of Vergil's passage about Clarence (quoted in translation above, pp. 137-8) with the equivalent in Grafton (from his first edition, S.T.C. 12768, with additions from the second edition, S.T.C. 12767, in square brackets)⁸³ and Hall (second edition) shows the differences.

Vergil:

Inde redintegrata simultate, quidam ducis administer eodem tempore veneficii damnatus afficitur supplicio. Contra id factum, cum dux non potuisset se tenere, quin vehementer reclamaret, rex ob eam querimoniam valde commotus, ducem in carcerem detrusit, ac non multo post iure sive iniuria perduellionem iudicatum morte affecit. …

Ita posita bellorum et domesticarum seditionum quae accidere antea potuissent, omni[a] cura, rex severius solito nobilitatis crimina notare, et avidius pecuniae conciliandae studium habere coepit, propter quod multi persuasum sibi habebant, illum deinceps evasurum durum principem, cum post mortem fratris, se a cunctis timeri animadverteret, et ipse iam timeret neminem. Sed per brevitatem vitae nam biennio [sic] post mortem obiit, id fieri non licuit.⁸⁴

Grafton:

After that, they both bearing in their minds mortal hatred, one of the said duke his servants was accused of witchcraft and charming, for which offence he was put to death. The duke, seeing that, could not but speak and resist against the king his commandment [variant reading: against that doing, as he thought, injurious], and therefore was committed to prison, and there being was killed, and proclaimed after as a traitor to the king [and attainted by parliament]. …

And two years then after following the king died; before the which years he began to be very hard and covetous in getting money, and also very diligent in marking and attaching his lords that did offend. [But now he left that and fell to gentleness.]⁸⁵

Hall:

This privy displeasure was openly appeased, but not inwardly forgotten nor outwardly forgiven, for that notwithstanding, a servant of the duke's was suddenly accused (I cannot say of truth, or untruly suspected by the duke's enemies) of poisoning,⁸⁶ sorcery or enchantment, and thereof condemned, and put to taste the pains of death. The duke, which might not suffer the wrongful condemnation of his man (as he in his conscience adjudged) nor yet forbear nor patiently suffer the unjust handling of his trusty servant, daily did oppugne and with ill words murmur at the doing thereof. The king, much grieved and troubled with his brother's daily querimony and continual exclamation, caused him to be apprehended and cast into the Tower, where he being was adjudged for a traitor, and was privily drowned in a butt of Malvesey. …

King Edward in the 19 year of his reign, forgetting as well all exterior invasions as civil war and intestine trouble, which before that time he had abundantly tasted, and more than he was willing, had both felt and had in continual experience, began first more than he was before accustomed, to search out the penal offences, as well of the chief of his nobility as of other gentlemen being proprietories of great possessions, or abundantly furnished in goods, beside merchants and other inferior persons. By the reason whereof, it was of all men adjudged, more than doubted, considering his new fame of riches and his greedy appetite of money and treasure, that he would prove hereafter a sore and an extreme prince amongst his subjects, and this imagination in especial wandered through the heads of all men, that after his brother the Duke of Clarence was put to death, he should say that all men should stand and live in fear of him, and he to be unbridled and in doubt of no man.⁸⁷

Grafton gives rather a bare rendering of his source, with occasional omissions and alterations (and some editorial corrections and additions in the second of his two editions). Hall (whose excessive length is due to his determination never to use one word where two will do) reproduces Vergil's phrasing very closely at times, but at others freely interpolates his own comments: Vergil says nothing about Burdet's guilt or innocence, or Clarence's conscience, or ‘daily’ complaints. Nor does he say that the king prosecuted his wealthy subjects in order to reap fines, and clearly this was not the meaning of the source that lay behind Vergil. … Hall also contrives to twist the final remarks about Edward's supremacy. Since it is quite certain that Vergil was the source for both Grafton and Hall at this point (and since the translations of Grafton and Hall seem to have been made independently), the passage furnishes a useful object lesson in the way in which a record can be distorted by an over-zealous redactor.⁸⁸

Both Grafton and Hall deserted Vergil in favour of Sir Thomas More when they came to the history of Richard's usurpation. No doubt, like Gairdner, they found More's much fuller account more satisfying, both aesthetically and as history. In making their choice, Grafton and Hall were probably no more aware than their successors have been that such historical validity as More's narrative possesses is due very largely to Polydore Vergil. I have also to suggest in the next chapter that Vergil's new historical methods were at once the inspiration and the butt of More's History. The arguments about More's use of Vergil have not been systematically pursued; partly because it was thought until comparatively recently that More's work antedated Vergil's, or that each wrote independently at about the same period.⁸⁹ Vergil's completion of his first draft has now been dated to 1513 or 1514, and More's work has been put back to somewhere about 1516-18 (though there is little firm evidence on the point). R. S. Sylvester⁹⁰ suggests that Vergil could ‘have had More as one of his oral informants’, but admits that ‘we cannot completely preclude the possibility that More himself had either seen Polydore's manuscript or had talked with him about the details of various events that are common to both narratives’. He objects, however, that there is very little verbal correspondence between the Latin of the two writers. This, I think, rests on a misapprehension about More's methods, and an erroneous view that More initially composed part of his work in Latin. The question is not susceptible of proof either way, but in my opinion More used Vergil in much the same fashion as Vergil used a version of the Crowland Chronicle (and not at all in the way in which Hall used Vergil).⁹¹ That is, More and Vergil adopted material selectively as it suited their individual purposes; they treated the works of others less as ‘authorities’ than as sources to be used or rejected at will, and above all as furnishing a useful framework. Sir Thomas, especially, transmuted what he chose to borrow beyond the range of mere verbal similarity.

Notes

1. It is not clear whether, when Vergil went back to Italy on a visit in the spring of 1514, he had with him a completed MS. of the whole work, or only a draft and notes which he then wrote up at Urbino. Nor is it certain that he had completed his account of Richard III before embarking on the reign of Henry VII. For the dating, see Denys Hay, ‘The Manuscript of Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia’, E.H.R. LIV (1939), 241-3, and Anglica Historia 1485-1537 (1950), pp. xiii-xvi, and Cecil H. Clough, ‘Federigo Veterani, Polydore Vergil's “Anglica Historia”, and Baldassare Castiglione's “Epistola … ad Henricum Angliae Regem”’, E.H.R. LXXXII (1967), 772-8.

2. Polydori Vergili Urbinatis Anglicae Historiae Libri XXVI (Basle, 1534). ‘As one would expect’ because historians seldom keep a finished work private for twenty years. There is a reference in the Dialogi de Prodigiis which suggests that Vergil's History was well known by at least 1526: Hay, Polydore Vergil (1952), p. 82.

3. Cf. especially Polydore Vergil and the introduction to Anglica Historia 1485-1537 (1950).

4. The Welsh were furious.

5. Nor was he uncritical of Henry VII: he states (after Henry's death) that Bray and Morton exerted a restraining influence on Henry (Ang. Hist. (1950), pp. 128*-9*).

6. To the Plantagenets as much as the Tudors.

7. Hay, Polydore Vergil, pp. 82-4 and Appendix II; Ang. Hist. (1950), p. 94 and n.

8. Ed. Ellis (Camden, 1844), p. 187.

9. Ibid., p. 176.

10. p. 181.

11. pp. 184-5.

12. Ed. Armstrong, p. 94.

13. Ibid., p. 96.

14. p. 567.

15. (1844), p. 117.

16. p. 168.

17. p. 174.

18. In Vergil's MS. (Hay, Polydore Vergil, p. 197), he says he learnt this true story of the quarrel ‘a fide dignis viris’ (‘men worthy of credit’).

19. (1844), p. 195.

20. But in the other direction, cf. Vergil's description of a story apparently taken from the Crowland Chron. as ‘even now current’ ([Hanham, Alison. “Polydore Vergil, The Second Italian.” In Richard III and His Early Historians, 1483-1535. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.], p. 139).

21. Polydore Vergil, p. 92.

22. (1844), p. 185.

23. p. 191.

24. pp. 126-7.

25. p. 168.

26. p. 179.

27. p. 90.

28. [Hanham], p. 35.

29. (1844), p. 152.

30. [Hanham], p. 53.

31. Cf. Hay, Polydore Vergil, p. 6.

32. May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age, p. 100, quoting F. A. Gasquet, ‘Polydore Vergil’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., N.S. XVI (1902), 11.

33. (1844), p. 167. ‘Causam autem necis licet ipse de multis qui id temporis inter aulicos, non mediocris autoritatis erant, quaesierim, nullam tamen certam habco tradere’, Basle, 1534, p. 530. Aulicos suggests ‘household’ rather than ‘council’.

34. Cf. the lists in J. R. Lander, ‘Council and Administration’. Among them were Thomas Lord Stanley (cr. Earl of Derby in 1485, d. 1504), and Sir Thomas Tyrrell, councillor in 1474, d. 1510.

35. (1844), p. 182.

36. p. 211.

37. p. 226.

38. See [Hanham], pp. 167-8.

39. p. 90.

40. For versions of this see Gairdner, Richard III, pp. 345-62, and Kingsford, English Hist. Lit., pp. 250-2.

41. [Hanham], pp. 41, 42.

42. p. 226.

43. p. 221.

44. Reviewing Cal. of Entries in the Papal Registers, XIV (1960), in E.H.R. LXXVIII (1963), 771-2.

45. S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII, pp. 44-5 and note.

46. Ibid., p. 331.

47. Ibid.

48. p. 185.

49. Ibid.

50. It is, of course, possible that Vergil consulted the abbey's own version, but I have noted no correspondences between his work and the ‘first continuation’, which was apparently written in the same volume as the second.

51. p. 568.

52. p. 194.

53. pp. 173, 174.

54. p. 173.

55. p. 180.

56. Crowland Chron., p. 574: ‘As it was reported, that night he experienced a terrifying dream, as though he had been surrounded by a host of demons, and this he testified in the morning. As a result, his face, always wasted, looked still more deathly pale.’ Compare Vergil (Basle, 1534, p. 555): ‘It is related that the same night a terrible dream came to Richard. In his sleep he seemed to see shapes, as it were of horrifying demons, watching about him, and they would not let him rest. Lest, when he appeared before the host so downcast, they should say he was overcome by fear, he related his dream to many people in the morning.’

57. They were convicted of conspiring, not the death of Lord Beauchamp, but those of Edward IV and his heir, by highly devious means: Third Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, App. II, pp. 213-14.

58. Read, probably, John Godard.

59. p. 561.

60. In another place he does, unlike the Crowland chronicler, mention the butt of malmsey.

61. Edward's increasing wealth is mentioned earlier in the Crowland Chron.

62. Basle, 1534, p. 530. For the Latin of the rest, see below, pp. 144-5.

63. p. 562.

64. p. 551.

65. Hall's Chronicle (1809), p. 275.

66. (1844), p. 124. The whole affair was puzzling to contemporaries themselves. In October 1469 John Paston II wrote that the king had come to London accompanied by the Archbishop, who had escorted him from York, and ‘the king himself hath good language [i.e. speaks well] of the Lords of Clarence, of Warwick, and of my Lords of York [and] of Oxford, saying they be his best friends. But his household men have other language, so what shall hastily fall I cannot say’ (ed. Davis, no. 245). Professor Davis has kindly informed me that the reading ‘paue other langage’ in this edition was a printer's error which occurred after proof was finally passed.

67. pp. 116-17.

68. Basle, 1534, p. 507; cf. (1844), p. 118.

69. He was, nevertheless, charged with the negotiations: Rymer, Foedera, XI. 564.

70. It is noteworthy that here and in the passage on Clarence, Vergil's apparent borrowings will change the context and connotations of words. Crowland's ‘mortal hatred’ becomes ‘mortal man’, and where in the Crowland Chron. ‘many people left Edward undisturbed in his persuasion’, in Vergil ‘many persuaded themselves that he would prove a hard ruler.’ This is a recognized phenomenon in literary borrowings.

71. p. 551.

72. p. 567.

73. Vergil muddles his own story on the subject by dating Edward's marriage, and Warwick's discomfiture, 1467 instead of 1464; i.e. he attaches Crowland's date for the quarrel to a different incident that occurred three years before.

74. (1844) pp. 187-8, 190-2.

75. Hay, Polydore Vergil, Appendix III, E.

76. p. 567.

77. p. 570.

78. pp. 570-1.

79. pp. 178-9.

80. p. 179.

81. This formula had already been devised, but it was used to instruct businessmen, not historians.

82. The work is dated January 1543, and it seems that Grafton started the year on 1 Jan., not 25 Mar.

83. For the order, see App., p. 202 n. 3.

84. Basle, 1534, p. 530.

85. f. xxviii^v.

86. Poisoning seems to be Hall's alternative translation of veneficii.

87. Sig. I. ii (Edward IV, ff. l^v, lij^v).

88. Hall also conceals Vergil's unwontedly specific statement about consulting the intimates of Edward IV with the phrase ‘to men that have thereof made large inquisition of such as were of no small authority in those days, the certainty thereof was hid.’

89. e.g. Kendall, Richard III, p. 404 (disregarding Professor Hay's researches), ‘Both men were seeking information at about the same time. More wrote his account in 1513; Vergil was completing his story of Richard's reign about 1517-18.’

90. Yale Works, II. lxxvi.

91. Note for instance how More (ibid., p. 7) could be summarizing Vergil's summary of the Crowland account of Clarence's death: ‘At the leastwise heinous treason was there laid to his charge, and finally, were he fauty were he faultless, attainted was he by parliament and judged to the death, and thereupon hastily drowned in a butt of Malmsey. Whose death King Edward (albeit he commanded it) when he wist it was done, piteously bewailed and sorrowfully repented.’