11 quotes
Being thought to be untrustworthy is no better – indeed in political terms much worse – than actually being untrustworthy.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
Richard’s will was sovereign, and yet it could not be trusted not to change. He had demonstrated that he would erase history, change the statutes of the realm, rather than remit his desires.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
It took a particular genius and a great deal of luck to make war pay, and Richard had neither.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
The Londoners’ faithful love and their money were both important to Richard; unfortunately he sought the latter at the expense of the former, while imagining them to be the same thing.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
This kind of moral analysis is characteristic of medieval thought: the aim is to condemn where condemnation is due, but to salvage from the criticism the ideals which animate and support society.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
Here and throughout the reign, the tendency was to focus criticism on particular individuals charged with corruption, rather than to address the structures which made such corruption endemic.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
Richard understood his own reign through the distorting lens of the court he made for himself; he could not understand why the regality he regarded as his right was denied to him on the broader stage.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
Once again, the viewer is made to recognize the sheer glory of kingship, its otherworldly status, and Richard’s distance from his subjects. This majesty is revealed by the actual events of Richard’s life and death to have been empty at its heart.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
This is no Henry VIII to command obedience by sheer force of personality; rather, Richard’s image enacts kingship itself, around a curious void. As an individual, he is absent from the portrait; as king, he is presented for our veneration.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
The long story of the medieval cult of chivalry, from its emergence in the twelfth century to its belated glories in the court of the young Henry VIII, is punctuated by the ongoing conflict between knighthood’s idealistic claims to virtue and divine favour, and the Church’s condemnation of all chivalric values as empty and worthless.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)
Richard’s difficulties were many, but the essence of his personal feelings seems to have lain in the confluence of these two great ideas – the divinity of kingship and the perfection of peace – because for Richard, ‘peace’ in the sense that he valued it meant the complete obedience of every subject to the will of the king.
Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)