History
teaches us many things. One of them is that it goes on for a very long time. Sometimes
nothing much happens for a lot of that long time and occasionally all sorts of
things pile on top of each other. It doesn’t stop. One event unfolds into the
next and carries on doing so until somebody comes along and tries to make sense
of it all.
Shakespeare
had a shot at this in his history plays. Although not written in chronological
order, the earliest of his kings was John (1199-1216) and the last Henry VIII
(1509-1547). The cycle thus recounts almost three hundred and fifty years of English
history and covers, amongst other things, foreign wars, civil war, regicide,
infanticide, fratricide and much else. In other words, quite a lot of stuff.
But
Shakespeare was writing plays, not history books, inevitably altering events
for dramatic effect. Henry VI’s widow, Margaret, for example, left for exile in
France following his death and never returned to England. She died in 1482. Yet
in Richard III she returns to
Edward’s court to heap curses on all around her, and pops up again after
Richard has become king in 1483 to trade laments with two other widowed queens,
a year after her demise.
As
it happens, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard has only recently been
reassessed, since for centuries it was assumed his depiction as a hunchback was
part of Tudor propaganda to discredit the Plantagenets and affirm their
legitimacy. Yet when Richard’s body was found beneath a car park in Leicester
last year it revealed pronounced curvature of the spine.
Of
all Shakespeare’s Histories, I am
best acquainted with Richard III having
spent about nine months working on a comic book version in 2007. When it was
summarily removed from the list of three texts to be studied for the Key Stage
3 SATs exam early in 2008, the project was abandoned. Later in the year the KS
3 SATs were abolished altogether, but that is another story.
Having
worked on Henry V in the lead up to
the Iraq war in 2003, I was at work on Richard
III at the height of the Iraq insurgency which raged worst between 2006 and
2008. And as there had been parallels between the sophistries used to justify
Henry’s invasion of France and the US led invasion of Iraq, so there seemed unsettling
symmetries between the slaughter and turmoil of Shakespeare’s history plays and
the insurgency several hundred years later.
Richard’s
defeat at Bosworth brought to an end the Wars of the Roses that had seen
bloodshed and mayhem in almost all parts of England. Although intermittent, the
civil war lasted for more than thirty years and involved extremes of violence - the Battle of Towton being the bloodiest ever fought on English soil. It
took place in a snowstorm on 29 March 1461. After hours of savage fighting, 28,000
men had been killed, more even than on the first day of the Somme in 1916, the
single worst day in British military history.
After
the Lancastrian defeat at Towton, Henry VI retreated to Scotland. It was one of
a series of battles which saw power change hands and allegiances shift - shifts
made all the more confusing because so many of the protagonists were called
either Richard or Edward. Explanation is
thus required when in RIII Act 4 Scene 4 Margaret
rebukes Elizabeth,
‘Thy
Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward;
Thy
other Edward dead, to quit my Edward.’
Elizabeth’s
Edward was Edward IV, son of Richard Duke of York, who had been captured and
murdered after the battle of Wakefield, stabbed to death by Margaret and
Clifford after they had earlier murdered Edward’s brother, Rutland. Richard’s
death was avenged by his son Edward at the Battle of Towton, where he was
supported by Richard, Earl of Warwick. Warwick later fell out with Edward and
joined the Lancastrians, but he was killed at the Battle of Barnet in 1471 at
which Margaret’s husband, Henry VI, was captured. He died shortly after,
believed murdered by Edward’s brother Clarence.
Margaret’s
Edward was Edward, Prince of Wales, killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471
by Edward VI. Elizabeth’s other Edward had been Edward Prince of Wales, but on
Edward VI’s death had became Edward V before being murdered along with his
younger brother, Richard, by his uncle, Richard, who was now Richard III. After
becoming king, Richard married Anne, daughter of Richard, Earl of Warwick. She
had previously been engaged to Edward, Prince of Wales (Margaret’s son, not
Elizabeth’s). She and Richard had a son, Edward, another Prince of Wales, but
he predeceased them. Richard was then killed at Bosworth by Henry VII, who
promptly married Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth, thus uniting the Houses of
York and Lancaster. All pretty clear, I think.
The
situation in Iraq in 2007 seemed no less bewildering with the country split
between Sunni and Shia factions such as Ansa al Sunna and militias like the
Mahdi Army led by Muqtada al-Sadr. For a time it looked either as though the
country would separate into independent states; or that after years of
instability a single figure would seize power and unify the country under an
authoritarian regime of repression and torture. Much like Saddam Hussein, in
fact – and not unlike Henry VII who ruled by repression and fear and nearly bankrupted his barons and merchants - periods of
anarchy often being followed by autocracy.
Figures
are unclear about how many civilians were killed as a consequence of the Iraq war,
but in 2006 the Lancet Journal estimated them to be 654,000. These deaths were our
responsibility. Of the many stupid mistakes made by the Coalition, perhaps the
grossest was its assumption that the war would be over quickly with a grateful
Iraqi population so delighted to be free of Saddam it would spontaneously
sprout democratic institutions. The de-Ba’athification of the civil service and
disbanding of the army were aspects of this miscalculation, resulting in social
breakdown and widespread looting.
Tony
Blair has insisted that ordinary Iraqis are now better off than they were under
Saddam. This is certainly true if they happen to be a Kurd or Marsh Arab. But
for many, perhaps most citizens, life remains considerably worse. Some of their
voices were heard in a series of programmes on Radio 4 to mark the tenth
anniversary of the war. One said, ‘They brought chaos and violence and left
rubble.’ Another commented, ‘Then we had only one dictator. Now we have
hundreds.’
It
is perhaps facile to equate Blair with Richard III, though tempting. For all
his toothy smiles and ‘Call me Tony… I’m a pretty straight sort of guy’ charm,
he was ruthless in pursuit of power and determined to hold onto it once
achieved. You don’t win three elections in a row by accident, even against a
discredited Conservative party. He was also an arch manipulator, the Commons
vote in favour of war allegedly won through a combination of flattery, bribery,
intimidation and deceit. In other words, parliamentary business as usual.
If
it’s not quite fair to see Blair as Richard, it is only too easy to see Richard
as a master of what would now be called spin. His words could soften his
bitterest enemies, except perhaps Margaret, and in Act 1 Scene 2 he woos Anne - despite the fact that she is a Lancastrian and that as a Yorkist he was part
responsible for the brutal deaths of her father, fiancé and his father. Reader,
she marries him.
He’s
equally good at working a crowd and in Act 3 Scene 7 he appears before the
people of London reading a prayer book, between two clerics. He’s supported by
Buckingham, his spin doctor. Together they persuade the populace that Richard
is pious and humble and reluctant to become king. Having done so, Richard then
goes off to arrange the murder of his nephews.
It’s
not subtle, but the play itself is a form of spin, a Tudor fabrication to blast
Richard and justify Henry’s usurpation of power. Spin isn’t new, but Tony Blair
and Alastair Campbell refined it to lethal effect. Richard and Buckingham fell
out and Buckingham had his head chopped off. He returns late in Act 5 to haunt
Richard, which must have been some consolation.
Blair
and Campbell have had no such falling out. They remain defiant in defence of
the actions which led Britain to war. The war cost the US at least $802bn. Some
economists put the true figure at $3trillion. It cost the British tax payer
£9.24bn. It cost the lives of tens of thousands of people, with millions more
displaced and damaged.
And
it is not over. April 2013 saw the largest number of violent deaths in Iraq for
more than five years. Figures for May are likely to be worse. It could be many
years before peace unfolds and the country is finally allowed to heal.
