Good King Richard? (1983)

The task this book undertakes is vital. It is also almost impossible.

Let us be clear: Richard III was certainly not the incarnation of evil portrayed by William Shakespeare, who took a piece of near-fiction and further fictionalized it. Neither was Richard III the near-saint found in books such as The Daughter of Time.

To try to learn the truth, we need not only to assess our very limited genuine sources (the Croyland Chronicle, Mancini, etc.) but also the way people have viewed Richard III over the years. We need to know this to be able to sift the evidence and analysis compiled since Richard's own time.

This book sets out to do that. But, sadly, it is compiled by an author who most emphatically belongs to the pro-Richard camp. I can't entirely disagree; I'm mildly pro-Richard myself. But it affects the course of Potter's arguments. The book is useful in many ways. But in the end, it joins the large pile of propagandistic books about Richard (e.g. the twentieth century opposing "biographies" by Paul Murray Kendall and Desmond Seward and the work-of-fiction-labelled-as-biography by Alison Weir) rather than the handful of genuine works of historiography.

It is possible to write good solid books about Richard III -- Charles Ross did it with a mostly anti-Richard volume, and Anthony Cheetham did it with his much kinder biography. If two such scholars had collaborated to edit a volume such as Potter's, it would do the historical world a genuine service. As it is -- this book is worth having, but it isn't going to resolve any of the great issues in Ricardian scholarship. ( )

It was once remarked that it appeared to be de rigeur for politicans to apologise for something. Similar, it seems to be now standard to look upon the brief life & reign of Richard of York in a kinder light than shone that by the Bard.

Written for for the quincentenary of the battle of Bosworth by the then-chairman of the Richard III Society, the book is a name-dropper's dream.Aside from the standard negative Tudor propagandists, Shakespeare & Sir Thomas More, the reader is treated to the wit, wisdom or othewise of Earl Walpole, a recently-exposed political charlatan, Phillipe de Commynes, various well-to-do families like the Pastons and even the odd aristocrat and monarch or two.