By stating that it was 'his feud', Seward has clearly laid the blame for any ill feeling between the two brothers at Richard's door. Seward offers plenty of facts, all sourced, that appear to absolve Richard of any compliance with Clarence's downfall. He writes: 'in the last years of Clarence's stormy career Richard stayed in the north. He now had a family'(16). The implication here is that Richard was now too fully occupied with his wife and son to worry about events at the court, a theme supported by both Mancini and More.
Yet despite his presentation of facts, Seward continues to draw conclusions to the contrary and argues that Richard was behind his brother's demise; he does however modify his attack to that Richard's lack of action. Seward makes great play on Richard's absence from the court, despite the fact that he himself had written of his new family-life and of the way that this new lifestyle fully occupied Richard's time.
In an amazing piece of contradictory writing, he writes, 'The Duke of Gloucester's feelings about George's end are unknown.'(17), this sentence on it's own seems reasonable; but it is followed immediately by, 'Mancini reports he was so overcome by grief that he could not hide it'(18).
This leaves one to ask, were his feelings known or do we accept what Mancini, a writer respected by
Seward, has written? In the chapter, Seward uses a quote from More as a form of sub-title and it is as
follows:
'Some wise men also think his drift, covertly conveyed, lacked not in helping forth his brother of Clarence to his death....But of all this point is there no certainty.'(19)
It is followed by another, this time from Shakespeare’s Henry VI. part III: 'Clarence, beware, thou keep'st me from the light'.(20). These two quotes are used to give the impression that Richard's contemporaries thought that he had a hand in Clarence’s demise. Yet later Seward quotes Mancini '....the whole of England blamed them for the destruction of Clarence'(21), the 'them' being the Woodville’s. At the end of the chapter Seward pulls together his evidence and arrives at the conclusion that 'Gloucester had won his battle with Clarence'(22). This conclusion, for which he offers little concrete evidence, is based almost entirely on hearsay, a form of evidence inadmissible in the English legal system. Seward appears to have built his case against Richard more on what he believes people thought rather than what they actually did and said.
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