The "Sunne in Splendour" refers to the coat-of-arms of Edward IV, brother of Richard III. It's also the title of a delightful historical novel by Sharon Kay Penman that I discovered while browsing in a bookstore in Pennsylvania. (One should never, ever, enter a bookstore while on vacation and in possession of a credit card, unless one has worked out on weight-lifting machines for several weeks beforehand.) Ms. Penman has gone to great lengths to make her novel as historically accurate as possible. She explains in the afterword how she would "not place a scene at Windsor [Castle:] unless my characters were known to be at Windsor on that day, making sure that a Wednesday was actually a Wednesday, that details of medieval life were corroborated by more than one source."
Richard III has not fared well at the hands of other writers - most·notably Shakespeare -and Ms. Penman believes that it was because the Tudors, who won the eventual battle for the throne, rewrote, as victors are wont to do, the history of the participants. She therefore relied most heavily on contemporary sources, or writings committed to paper shortly after the events.
She compensated for the medieval chroniclers' penchant for exaggeration. Richard's supposed deformity is a good case in point. Superstitions common during the middle ages suggested that deformities represented evil and moral depravity. None of Richard's contemporaries ever wrote that Richard had any deformity short of a well-developed shoulder from wielding a heavy sword. Physical descriptions rendered by those who knew him fail to mention anything of the kind. "The first seeds were not sown until after Richard's death~ it was John Rous who contended that Richard's right shoulder was higher than his left. (But then he also claimed that Richard was two years in his mother's womb.)"
Thomas More was another who contributed to this myth, but he reversed the shoulders! He also gave him a withered arm, a characteristic that does not coincide with Richard's prowess on the battlefield. More's motives are clarified· in detail by Paul Murray Kendall in his excellent biography of Richard III, which makes excellent companion reading to Penman's novel. More was writing an "attack on the Realpolitik practiced by the princes of the day," and it was useful for him to portray Richard as thoroughly bad. Shakespeare gave him a withered arm, hunchback and limp.
Penman is also skeptical of the Tudor claims that Richard murdered his nephews -- she makes Buckingham the culprit. Penman rather likes Richard, and he certainly is portrayed sympathetically.
revised 5/8/09
