Seward finally writes about something he is very excited about, and sort of bowls himself over. I wasn't able to get into another recent book of his, but was intrigued by his vehement stance against apologists and defenders of a gray or white legend.
The story is one I know, and though Seward tells it well, I realized that two things were happening. First, he absolutely slams any whiff of a suggestion that Richard may not have been the hunchback psycho of Shakespeare, and he does it in the strongest of terms. According to Seward, any nuance is a stretch, ludicrous, or ridiculous. In my opinion, that very vehemence ends up weakening his argument because it is not so difficult for the average history lover to imagine a different version of the story, and it's not as if we know much for sure about what we now call the Wars of the Roses.
Second, the errors and crimes that Seward accuses Richard of are common among other kings/nobility/soldiers of the time, and Seward himself brings up several instances that do not support the Black Legend hypothesis. Yes, infanticide is horrible, but so is killing an old lady, which Henry VIII would do 40 years later - in the open. Seward says Richard was worse than Henry in ruthlessness.
Seward calls Richard Machiavellian, but yet calls out several "mistakes" Richard made that Machiavelli would have helped him out with - if The Prince would have been written more than 20 years earlier.
Long story short - I got impatient with the strange attitude against anyone who might disagree with the author, though the book was very good.
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