This is the text of this morning's Thought for the Day on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:
Having lived for nine years in Leicestershire and now living in Yorkshire, I feel like I inhabit the tension around the final burial place of King Richard III.
His bones will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral, less than a hundred yards from the hole in the city centre car park that I found myself looking into 2 years ago. Their symbolic journey has of course been much longer.
But, who was he? Was Richard a megalomaniac psychopathic child killer who was as lousy a monarch as he was a warrior? Or was he a sick victim of someone else's arrows of misfortune, caught up in the political intrigues and power plays of his day? Shakespeare hasn't necessarily helped us in his portrayal of the desperate king who, despite not winning very much at all, at least developed a good line in rhetoric.
What interests me in the Richard conundrum is this not insignificant matter of reputation. Once the mud has been thrown, it is difficult to wipe it off. And, 500 years after his violent – and apparently humiliating – death in battle, here we are doing a balancing act between honouring his short-lived status as an English monarch and creating a battleground of judgements on his inability or otherwise to live up to his calling.
Reputations are hard won, but easily lost. And in the culture of blame and scapegoating that we seem to have developed today, it is especially hard for a lost reputation to be regained. Where there is smoke there must be fire – even if the evidence denies this. Just ask people who have been wrongly accused of crimes or dishonourable behaviour.
Shakespeare himself writes in Richard II: “The purest treasure mortal times afford / Is spotless reputation/ … / Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; / Take honour from me, and my life is done.” But, it didn't stop him having a go at the next Richard in such an elegant way that the king has never quite recovered, did it?
A problem for many people is getting trapped in a reputation from which you simply cannot escape. Once a crook, always a crook; one moral failure, always damned. Yet, one of the scandals of Jesus of Nazareth was his anti-social insistence on setting people free from the prisons of their past – offering the possibility of hope, of new life, and of freedom. According to him, redemption is always on offer – even when self-righteous people resent the fact. Remember the prodigal son, the father who waits in hope for him to return, and the elder brother who resents generosity, forgiveness and new life. According to this way of seeing people and their purpose, to fail is not necessarily to be a failure. The story can never be said to have ended.
Perhaps Richard's bones can now rest in peace… and his re-burial invite us to be as merciful to him as we would wish history to be to us.
March 23, 2015 at 8:54 am
Reblogged this on Davidsja's Blog and commented:
Reputation hard won – easily destroyed..
March 23, 2015 at 9:07 am
Richard III died bravely in battle and was later mutilated I gather. It would have been more respectful for him to be buried in York.
March 23, 2015 at 3:58 pm
Back to Richard III. Not an historian, nor British, but I read Josephine Tey’s “The Daughter of Time” recently which, if based on research, opens a lot of questions about his life and motives.
Lovely to connect that to our faith.
March 24, 2015 at 11:56 am
Fascinating character based at Middleham for much of reign. Perhaps Middleham could investigate a reciprocally beneficial twinning with Leicester Cathedral? I’m sure there are new perspectives on the story to emerge. Liked the thoughts on reputation too – Anne Boleyn also springs to mind.
March 25, 2015 at 8:40 am
Not much mention here of those neglected but distinguished people who spend years examining the evidence and reading the texts – the medieval historians. David Starkey’s view that Shakespeare’s portrait of Richard III is broadly right is very interesting but like the bishop fails to consider the essential difference between the imperatives of writing a vivid drama and analysing historical evidence. What might be interesting if we are moving from history to morality is to discuss how we are to reconcile views on sin and judgment as between the Jesus of the Gospels and the thought in Hamlet that a man with one vicious mole of nature in him “shall in the Generall censure take corruption from that particular fault”. Chilling stuff. Cardinal Newman believed a man could live a rogue’s life and be redeemed by one profound act of repentance before the moment of death.
March 26, 2015 at 5:26 pm
[…] thought Nick Baines put it really well in his BBC Thought for the Day on the reinterment of the remains of Richard III, […]
March 26, 2015 at 5:43 pm
Reblogged this on hungarywolf.
March 29, 2015 at 1:57 pm
[…] Nick Baines: The reputation of Richard III. Was Richard a megalomaniac psychopathic child killer who was as lousy a monarch as he was a […]
March 30, 2015 at 11:11 am
Peter, there’s a limit to what you can cover in a 500 word script for oral delivery in this context. But, point taken.