Richard III: The Self-Made King marks the culmination of Michael Hicks's work on the fifteenth century, and more particularly on Richard III, over the years. It is a tour de force: immensely learned and detailed—just occasionally too much so for easy reading, as in the rather dry itemization of the tenure of Richard's landed possessions, but the technical detail is generally, as in this case, not just an end in itself but is being used to build up a sense of Richard's motives and personality. The latter, of course, has to be at the center of any discussion of the reign. The pendulum has swung dramatically over the years, with Shakespearian villain at one extreme and the impassioned defense by some of his modern biographers at the other. Current academic opinion has largely settled somewhere in the middle, with Richard usually accepted as responsible for the death of his nephews but generally recognized, too, as desirous of maintaining his brother Edward's achievements (if only in his own interests). Hicks's own evaluation of him is unsparing: “how formidable . . . vigorous, intense, egotistical, ambitious, aggressive, ruthless and uncompromising he had been away from court . . . capable, cunning and dangerous” (246). This assessment is made initially on the basis of Richard's activity as duke of Gloucester and in the context of his seizure of power in 1483. It is not quite clear how far these attributes were to be tempered, if at all, by the progressive attacks on his authority as king. In the aftermath of the rebellions against him in autumn 1483, he was willing to offer pardon, on terms, to some of those involved, but on balance, it seems likely that his aggression and ruthlessness remained intact.

The biography is unusual in giving more space to Richard as duke than to his reign as king, but the richness of the material offered, much of which may be unfamiliar to many readers, deserves it. The volume and quality of Hicks's research also allows the focus to stay very securely on Richard himself; the huge cast of other characters is set firmly in context and never allowed to shoulder their way into discussion beyond that. The structure of the work is broadly chronological, but its centerpiece—the period from 1471 to 1483—is dealt with in a series of thematic, chronologically overlapping chapters. These consider different facets of Richard's activity: as the king's servant (chapter 4), as “lord of the north” (chapter 6) and as “good lord” (chapter 7). A recurrent theme is the insistence that, as both duke and king, Richard was working from a strategic plan. While still a duke, his overriding goal was to enhance his power base, in terms of both office and of land—a predictable aim, but one that he pursued with unusual single-mindedness from the beginning. One marked characteristic was his unwillingness to lose track of land he had once held or might be able to claim in future. His surviving cartulary, deployed to good effect by Hicks, shows the duke carefully recording rescinded as well as current grants against the day when they might be reclaimed. He was also ruthless in pursuing his ends; his treatment of the dowager countesses of Oxford and Warwick is revisited here, for example, and placed in a broader context of his tenurial appropriations. Hicks is also under no doubt that Richard benefited from the fall of his brother Clarence, for whom he seems to have had very little fraternal sympathy.

At times, the picture of the duke emerging here begins to seem positively Shakespearian, although without the imputation of long-term plotting for the throne. Hicks indeed suggests that even after Edward IV's death it could have been as much as twelve weeks before usurpation became Richard's objective, although the likelihood is that it was sooner than that. Overall this is a more unsympathetic picture of Richard than has been common in the last two or three decades. Richard's marriage to Anne Neville, which secured him his share of the Neville inheritance, has generally been accepted, as Hicks does here, to have been a marriage of convenience. But Hicks points out that the marriage was technically invalid (the papal dispensation was in the third and fourth degrees only, not the also-required second) and that Richard seems simply to have hoped no one would notice. Hicks also floats the possibility that when his only child died in 1484, Richard may have toyed with the idea of divorcing Anne on the grounds of consanguinity to enable his remarriage. Where Hicks's image of the king parts decisively from Shakespeare's is that the former is not a Machiavellian plotter. This Richard was more martially minded, evidenced in his waging a sort of private war in Wales in 1469 and by his campaigning in Scotland. Hicks points out that, tellingly, Richard was never used in Edward IV's diplomacy. But it is clear from this account that he was never just a simple soldier man, either, but had a shrewd and well-informed awareness of what would be to his own advantage and how best to secure it at law. Inevitably, perhaps, the closing chapters on Richard's kingship have less that is new to say. The sources for this period have been well trodden over the last thirty years or so, and the majority are in print. The portrait of the king and his actions here also departs less radically from the picture painted in other recent works than does Hicks's portrayal of the duke, who, on the whole, has been given a much gentler ride by recent writers than he gets here. Richard's more vehement defenders are likely to find some of this unpalatable, but it is persuasive, and the book as a whole is outstandingly well documented. It is the best treatment of Richard's life to date and a must-read for anyone interested in the fifteenth century.