PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

Summary

FOR writing such a book as the present I have no other excuse to offer than that the subject is one which has interested me for very many years. It is a good quarter of a century since I first read Walpole's ‘Historic Doubts’; and they certainly exercised upon me, in a very strong degree, the influence which I perceive they have had on many other minds. I began to doubt whether Richard III. was really a tyrant at all. I more than doubted that principal crime of which he is so generally reputed guilty; and as for everything else laid to his charge, it was easy to show that the evidence was still more unsatisfactory. The slenderness and insufficiency of the original testimony could hardly be denied; and if it were only admitted that the prejudices of Lancastrian writers might have perverted facts, which the policy of the Tudors would not have allowed other writers to state fairly, a very plausible case might have been established for a more favourable reading of Richard's character.

It was the opinion of the late Mr Buckle that a certain skeptical tendency—a predisposition to doubt all commonly received opinions until they were found to stand the test of argument—was the first essential to the discovery of new truth.