‘AS THE FAME RUNNETH… ’

While Thomas More did not invent the myth of Richard's deformity, his account elaborated it and fixed it in popular historical consciousness. There is no evidence contemporary with Richard to suggest disability. No existing portraits can be dated unquestionably from within Richard's lifetime, let alone be known to have been painted from life. In the earliest, which belonged to the Paston family, there is no hint of deformity, and Richard is placing a ring on the finger which at this time represented marriage, so the picture may well be designed to commemorate his marriage to Anne. The slightly later picture, the source of the most familiar image of the historical Richard, shows him fiddling with a ring on his little finger, which in the way images of the ‘guilty’ Richard have been read (the way in which we try to interpret the most trivial behaviour of those in the dock for major crimes) has been interpreted as nervousness, even guilt. X-rays made in preparation for the exhibition on Richard organized for the National Portrait Gallery by Pamela Tudor-Craig revealed that this image had been doctored in order to add in the requisite hump:

Yet another picture, showing Richard with a broken sword was altered with the opposite aim of regularizing Richard's looks when, in the seventeenth century, the counter-process of revisionary history had begun.

More's physical description of Richard, quoted at the start of the previous chapter (p. 20), builds a structure of qualification around the apparently crude presentation of Richard as monster.