“People simply refused to believe what was happening…”

Finished The Brothers York by Thomas Penn. Some more quotes, substitutions, archeological curiosities, and final thoughts (and what comes next).

Quotes
“Late that summer, Sir George Brown wrote a brief message to his nephew John Paston the younger. Brown was a Yorkist loyalist; his stepfather was the late king’s recently executed chamber treasurer Sir Thomas Vaughan. One of Edward IV’s close chamber servants, Brown had been knighted on the battlefield of Tewkesbury back in 1471; following the king’s death that April, he had carried the banner of St George at his funeral and was among the household men keeping watch over his body the night before its burial. Now, Brown’s message to Paston read, simply, ‘Loyalté Aymé’. It shall never come out for me.’ Scrawling a variation on Richard III’s new royal motto, Brown dismissed it out of hand. There was no way that Richard’s idea of loyalty would work for Brown: he didn’t trust the new king an inch.”

“The idea of putting the earl at the head of royal networks in the north seemed exceptionally unwise. Like their detested rivals the Nevilles, the Percies had historically proved themselves dangerously independent-minded: a challenge, rather than a support to royal authority.”

“Meanwhile, in an act of political penance and reconciliation, Richard ordered the remains of the Lancastrian king Henry VI to be disinterred from their sequestered location at Chertsey Abbey, and royally reburied in the choir of the near-completed chapel of St George at Windsor, close to the body of the man who had destroyed him and his family, Edward IV. Edward, of course, had designed the chapel specifically as the last resting place of the Yorkist kings. The symbolism of Richard’s gesture was lost on no one: in death, at least, the houses of Lancaster and York were to be unified. Perhaps, Richard hoped, some of the Lancastrian king’s saintliness would rub off on him by association. And, as a flood of pilgrims descended on Windsor to venerate the bones of the saintly Lancastrian king, Richard redoubled his efforts to get hold of this rather more troublesome living descendent, Henry Tudor.”

Substitutions
“There was an increasingly prevailing view that, far from governing for the common weal, Richard [Biden] was ruling for a privileged clique.”

“This pension was paid, not in recognition of a lifetime of service on Forest’s part — rewards for ‘good service’ tended to be recognized explicitly as such — but ‘for diverse causes and considerations us moving’, a formula kings habitually used when referring to confidential business carried out on their behalf. It was impossible to say for sure what ‘diverse causes and considerations’ might have moved Richard. But whatever Forest had done for him, it merited an exceptional royal response.”

Here are some names to substitute- Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Alexander Vindman, Michael Byrd, James Comey, Christine Blasey Ford, and Anthony Fauci.

Archeological Curiosities
“At the festivities, the king [Richard III] presented the mayor with a fine gold cup encrusted with pearls and lapis.”

“Around this time, Richard acquired a book of hours. Designed for personal, everyday use, this prayer book was small, its illuminations – initials, sprays of foliage, the occasional illustration picked out in pink, blue and warm orange, with gold leaf – simple and practical, designed to guide the reader around the text in the course of their devotions.”

Richard III’s Book of Hours (Medievalists.net)
Lambeth Palace Library: The National Library & Archive of the Church of England

Final Thoughts
It was difficult to find any redeeming figures in this historical recount. I would add Miles Forest, John Dighton, and James Tyrell to my list of historical footnotes whose lives, after their heinous crimes, deserve immortalization in poems and literature if only as parables to the emptiness of worldly ambitions. Just like the knights who killed Thomas Becket, these three altered history for probably thirty pieces of silver.

Related
Inward and Outward by Fr. Paul D. Scalia (The Catholic Thing)

“Such superficiality keeps us from knowing our real longings and desires. We limit them to the here-and-now, to the worldly, and even the carnal. The Psalmist shows us the true path: O God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is. (Ps 63:1) When we allow these words to shape our minds (as Saint Benedict counsels), then we break through the surface, into a deeper awareness of the real longing that we typically anesthetize. Then, as legitimate as our temporal needs may be, we realize the deeper need within us.”