The Mythology of Richard III by John Ashdown-Hill

Author:John Ashdown-Hill [Ashdown-Hill, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2015-04-14T21:00:00+00:00

10

The White Horse and the Sleepless Night

Saddle white Surrey [Syrie] for the field tomorrow.

Shakespeare, Richard III, act 5, scene 3

Hall’s sixteenth-century chronicle reports that in August 1485, when Richard III arrived in Leicester, he was ‘mounted on a great white courser’. Such a white horse is depicted as bearing the king in the painting showing Richard in front of the Blue Boar Inn, recently presented by the University of Leicester to the Richard III Visitor Centre, and mentioned in the previous chapter. Unfortunately, however, as with the story of the inn – and indeed, with many of the stories relating to Richard III, particularly those which relate to his final days – no source dating from earlier than the sixteenth century appears to survive to support Hall’s account of the white horse.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare later picked up the white horse story. The playwright assumed that Richard III took the same steed with him when he departed from Leicester, for in Shakespeare’s play Richard III it figures as the king’s steed on 22 August, at the battle of Bosworth. Indeed, Shakespeare also recorded a name for the horse, either ‘White Surrey’ or ‘White Syrie’.1 Syria was at that period a significant source for high quality horses of what would nowadays be referred to as ‘arab stock’.

Among modern horse experts there is some reservation regarding the use of the term ‘white’ to describe a horse. Most horses which look white have an outer coat of white hair, but their underlying skin is dark in colour, as are their eyes. Nowadays such horses are therefore normally described as ‘grey’. However, there are a few true ‘white’ horses. These have not only the white coat of hair, but also a pink skin underneath. They also usually have blue eyes. Naturally there is now no way of knowing whether ‘White Surrey’ or ‘White Syrie’ really existed. Nor is it possible to guess whether such a steed would have been described by modern experts as ‘white’ or ‘grey’.

At one time it was believed that a horse called ‘White Syrie’ was actually listed among King Richard’s horses in a surviving fifteenth-century manuscript.2 However, this ultimately proved to be due to a misreading of the manuscript in question. There is therefore no surviving fifteenth-century evidence of the name of the horse that Richard rode into his last battle. There is also no real evidence for Shakespeare’s belief that Richard used in the battle the same white (or grey) horse which he had reportedly ridden into and out of Leicester on the preceding days.

On the other hand, evidence does exist that some late fifteenth-century horses bore names which referred to their colour. Such horses are recorded both in the stable of Richard III and in the stable of his distant cousin John Howard, Duke of Norfolk.3 The surviving list of Richard III’s horses includes twenty named mounts which were either grey (liard, lyard or gray) or white (whit). These included a ‘gret gray … being at Harmet at Nottingham’. Given

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