Riccardo III e Anne Neville

As Machiavelli has proved to be both repellent and enticing, the message of his book has often been misinterpreted. The most common misreading is to suggest that Machiavelli advocates the idea that ‘The end justifies the means.’ However, as John Roe has noted, ‘Machiavelli at no point advocates the practice of evil as acceptable in itself – despite what his many detractors then and now have said; he concedes, rather, that evil sometimes has to be used.’ [2] It is in this respect that characters such as Hamlet can be viewed as Machiavellian. Although he is not overtly evil, Hamlet is faced with the task of killing a legitimately elected monarch in order to avenge his father, with no concrete evidence, and only the word of the Ghost for proof. Furthermore, it is an example of how a skilled politician can attain power in the absence of a legal succession. In fact Hamlet would only be following in the footsteps of Claudius who is himself a Machiavellian schemer; and, for at least a portion of the play, a particularly adept one, on the grounds that he achieved a relatively quiet transition into his position of power having committed only one murder. Initially, out of all the characters in the play, only Hamlet complains of his uncle’s succession.

The characters of Edmund and Iago are perhaps more readily identifiable to the reader as Machiavellian because of the way in which they manipulate truth and virtue for their own gain. However, while the temptation is to label them as evil these figures are successful as they engage with the other characters in the way that men act, and not in they way in which they should act. Machiavelli warns that:

A man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must be prepared not to be virtuous, and to make use of this or not according to need. [3]

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But the truth is that Richard was neither Antichrist nor paragon. He was just your average Machiavellian man on the make. The Prince was written 28 years after Richard’s death at Bosworth Field but its recipe for success described Richard to a T. Anyone, Machiavelli wrote, “who considers it necessary in his newly acquired principality to protect himself from his enemies” should “make himself loved and feared by the people, to be followed and revered by his soldiers, wipe out those who can or may do you harm, renovate ancient institutions with new ones, to be both severe and kind, magnanimous and generous, wipe out disloyal troops and create new ones.”
Well, almost. The fear and wiping out bits, Richard was a past master at; magnanimity came harder, although he was fiercely loyal to the friends and allies he made during his 12 years governing the north from York. It was to the northerners that he finally looked to prop him up against those who were revolted by his usurpation, but in the end they were not enough.
The tricky thing about the fear-love calculus is that you need to get it exactly right – and, when his older brother Edward IV died suddenly aged 40 in April 1483 leaving a 12-year-old heir, Richard was presented with a humdinger of a Machiavellian moment. Should he let the kingdom slide back into chaos or should it get the smack of his firm rule?