Richard III and the School of Nasty

"Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower.
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes
Whom envy hath immured within your walls!
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones!

                                                              Richard III          (IV, i)



Elizabeth, queen to the just-deceased King Edward IV, finds herself and her two small children at the mercy of Shakespeare's supreme villain, the newly-crowned King Richard III. Richard has oozed to the top of the royal cesspool during the fifteenth century's Wars of the Roses. He has locked up his dead brother Edward's young sons in the Tower of London.

Although both are well beyond their infancy, they are still just children. But Richard sees his own nefarious claim to the throne as threatened by their very existence as rightful heirs, so the two small boys must be made to vanish in the Tower. Shakespeare's Richard enlists his thug du jour James Tyrrel to perform the deed. Historically, the children's ultimate end has remained unclear from that day to this. As has been trumpeted in international headlines and noted in postings below, archaeologists in the UK have only just recently verified their discovery of the bones of Richard III.

Gazing up at the Tower that imprisons her children, Elizabeth's words bear witness to the intensity of love and feelings of endless anxiety that mothers have for their children, made more intense in Shakespeare's age by the high rate of infant and child mortality. The playwright himself was to be shaken just several years after writing Richard III by the death of his only son, Hamnet, at eleven years of age in 1596. Many Shakespearean scholars point to this loss as having a profound influence on some of his best writing, inimitably sounding the depths of the human heart.

Pictured above, displayed in a bedchamber at Agecroft Hall, is an oil-on-canvas portrait of an English infant, Roger Townshend, born Dec. 21, 1628. He was the son and heir to Sir Roger Townshend of Norfolk. His mother Mary was the daughter and co-heiress of Sir Horatio de Vere, Baron Vere of Tilbury. It was at Tilbury that Queen Elizabeth I had delivered her oft-quoted exhortation to English troops awaiting Spanish invaders in the year of the Armada, 1588.

In Tudor and Stuart England, it was quite common for children, whether boys or girls, to be dressed similarly until about age five. During the first year of their lives, they were wrapped in swaddling bands over a shirt and at times wore a "biggin," a kind of delicate cap. After the first year or so, babies typically wore long clothes, as in this portrait. Not surprisingly, a bibbed apron was also a standard item of clothing. In the above portrait, the young Roger's embroidered satin gown with hanging sleeves, his lace-trimmed standing band (collar) and cap indicate the relatively wealthy status of the child's family.

It was common in portraits of young girls for the subject to be seen holding a "tussie mussie," a small, fragrant arrangement of flowers and herbs used to help ward off a variety of less pleasant odors so easily found in the busy streets of London and elsewhere. Many of these flowers also had symbolic meanings, as Ophelia referred to during her madness in Hamlet. Portraits of infant males often portrayed the boys holding teething corals, as young Roger is holding above.

At the age of twenty, Roger met an untimely death in Geneva; his passing meant that his younger brother Horatio inherited the titles and estates of the Townshend family.