On this day in 1485, England's King Richard III died, sword in hand on the bloody turf of Boswell Field, desperately looking for a horse to speed him from the rout of his army - which serves as an excellent example to us all to always have a backup.
Richard's great tragedy was not that he was a mediocre King, nor that he had his moments of ruthlessness and intellectuality. Many monarchs of that Scepter'd Isle shared those defects. No, Richard has gone down in history as uniquely bad - worse even than bad old King John who was so bad that no other English sovereign has borne that name these thousand years. There's quite a simple explanation for that, really.
Richard's opponent was Henry Tudor, who had William Shakespeare write the history. It'd take a powerful PR campaign to top that.
Mysteriously, Dick Cheney does not make an appearance in Shakespeare's play, unless it's maybe the behind the scenes guy who strangles the little Princes and eats their bodies to dispose of them. Sounds like something Cheney would do and hey - does he have an alibi for where he was in 1483? I'm not making an accusation, mind, just raising a legitimate question. Like Mitt Romney's taxes.
I mean, people wouldn't be talking about it if there weren't something to it, right?
2 comments:
Minor nitpick. Boswell was Samuel Johnson's biographer. The decisive battle in the Wars of the Roses was at BosWORTH Field.
Cheers
PM
Check out The Daughter of Time, a mystery by Josephine Tey (pseudonym): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daughter_of_Time
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