Third and last.
By AMY MACFARLANE [The Walrus] – “You see that picture of Richard up there?” says Clement Carelse, a scrappy South African expat, pointing at the National Portrait Gallery reproduction that presides over a gathering of the Richard III Society of Canada. He has been recounting the time a distant relative of the fifteenth-century English king found living in London, Ontario, paid the group a visit. “When he walked in the door, it was Richard’s face. Tall man — but that face. Absolutely stunning.” And what did the visitor see when he walked in the door? A dozen men and women of a certain age crowded into the sunroom of an east Toronto home to ponder the intricacies of royal lineage over sausage rolls. He could very easily have written them off as kooks.
But that would have been a mistake. “The amount of DNA that has been passed down?” chides former chair and resident Brit Victoria Moorshead, looking up from her needlepoint. “We’re talking a teacup in the ocean!” In other words, this is no cult of personality; the group isn’t even interested in Richard, per se. It’s interested in what history did to him. Members submit that Shakespeare’s Richard iii, based on historical accounts written under the Tudors (a.k.a. Richard’s vanquishers), miscast the king as a “poisonous hunch-backed toad” who murdered his young nephews, among others, to secure the monarchy. Consequently, he is widely regarded as one of the worst British monarchs of all time, and the only one whose body no one has bothered to locate. As another member — the artfully bearded Garry Marnoch — puts it, Richard is the “poster boy for injustice.”
Continued at The Walrus | More Chronicle & Notices.
