(no subject)

[madbaker]

We watched a PBS show last night that had the amateur historian who co-discovered Richard III's grave. She's clearly a committed Ricardian, and this show was her showing primary source evidence to a lawyer for him to judge her belief that the revolts against Henry VII were in fact led by escaped Princes from the Tower, and not by frauds Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

(I lean somewhat Ricardian myself, if only out of contrariness against the dominant Tudor propaganda. But... it seems to me that the most likely scenario is that Richard had the princes killed - he had the most to benefit.)

The thing that annoyed me about the show was that the lawyer consulted experts to judge if the documents were plausibly real. He judged that they were. (And one was incredibly cool - a document in Dutch archives with an attached royal seal for Richard, the younger prince. Wow.) And thus the show determined that her story was plausibly true.

I would agree that the documents are plausibly not forgeries. But that doesn't mean that the young men in question were actually the princes; the show completely ignored any hint that people behind the rebellions had anything to gain if either had gained the English throne. Just because a document from the court of Maximilian shows that he gave money to "Richard IV" doesn't mean that the person was actually Richard! It means that Maximilian used that reason, and he clearly would have benefited with supporting an English king taking his throne.

Or the argument that Perkin Warbeck charged with treason means that he was truly Richard, because Warbeck was supposedly Dutch, and treason only applies to English subjects. That's cheap legalistic linguistics. He was charged with treason because he led a revolt against the Crown.

Then there's the line they used in the opening teaser: "This has the potential to change history." No it bloody does not. Time travel has the potential to change history. Her story has the potential to change our stories and interpretation, but history is going to stay unchanged, thank you very much.

Chalk this show down to propaganda. Agitprop bugs the hell out of me, even if I am sympathetic to its views.

Comments

[beanolc]

I have no patience for this kind of "documentary".

[tshuma]

I dislike the trend of “everything must be *gasp* dramatic” because engagement and eyeballs, and history alone is clearly boring. If I’m watching a historical documentary, I’m already engaged and curious, and this kind of breathless language just makes me want to watch anything else.