Richard III
-Chrissie
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Richard III was the youngest son of Richard, the Third Duke of York. He was born just as the conflict over the capacity of King Henry VI was about to begin, and just nine years old when those conflicts seemed to be decided by the coronation of his eldest brother as King Edward IV. He had just come of age when his brother was (temporarily) forced of the throne by the return of Henry VI and played a crucial role in Edward IV’s restoration six months later. The king granted Richard control over the northern parts of England and named him Lord Protector should Edward IV die before his son was an adult.
Edward IV died on 9 April 1483 and was succeeded by his 12-year-old son, now King Edward V. On hearing of his brother’s death, Richard travelled to London to take up his position as regent. In this position, he immediately came into conflict with Anthony, Lord Rivers, the brother of Dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville. Richard accused Rivers and some of his associates of plotting to prevent him from taking up the Lord Protectorship and/or kill him. They were imprisoned, then executed at the end of June. In the meantime, the king was housed in the Tower, the traditional temporary lodging for a king awaiting coronation. He was later joined there by his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury.
Early in the summer, Lord Protector Richard came into information that put his brother’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville into question: Edward IV had a previous contract which had not been dissolved, making his marriage to Elizabeth bigamous and therefore illegitimate, a status that was carried to their children. This played into a longstanding dislike by most of the nobility for the Woodville family; Parliament’s decision to remove young Edward V and crown Richard in his place was an easy one. Richard was crowned on 6 July 1483.
We now come to one of the things for which Richard is best-known: the murder of the Princes in the Tower. While the boys’ deaths were certainly to his advantage, we do not have direct evidence it was done on his orders. The most prominent accusers of Richard are Thomas More and William Shakespeare, two men who relied on patronage from the Tudor family, who had a distinct interest in making Richard III look as bad as possible. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the boys were not seen after the summer of 1483. At the time, it was generally believed that Richard bore responsibility for the boys’ deaths, whether it was through direct involvement or negligence.
A short-lived rebellion was led by Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, seemingly in favor of Edward V. On learning of the boys’ deaths, his focus shifted to Henry Tudor, whose claim to the throne derived from his mother’s descent from John of Gaunt. Buckingham and Richard fought one battle, during which Buckingham was captured, later to be executed. Henry Tudor had collected an army in Brittany, but a storm prevented him from joining the battle. This greatly benefitted Henry, as he was able to adjust his own rebellious plans and use the time to gain more support.
In August 1485, Henry Tudor crossed the Channel with a small army, and met an army led by Richard personally at Bosworth Field on 22 August. Richard went into the battle with the intention of meeting Henry personally in combat. He pushed his way into the Tudor forces and was within a few feet of Henry when he was killed. Though his skeleton shows evidence of several injuries, the direct cause of Richard’s death was a blow to the head. His body was stripped and paraded through the battleground, allowing for desecration of the body through humiliation wounds before being buried in an unmarked grave. He was the last English king to be killed in battle. Henry Tudor asserted his claim and was crowned Henry VII, thereby beginning a new dynasty.
The coda to Richard’s life is, perhaps, more interesting than the life itself. He is presented by Shakespeare as an ugly man, inside and out: hunch-backed, ill-tempered, and sufficiently evil as to murder his nephews to assure his place on the throne. The power of this portrayal is shown in the fact that this is the Richard III generally known. This is, however, a very carefully crafted depiction, designed to cast the man in the worst possible light. His hunch-backed nature was long disputed among historians—no contemporary description includes this feature—leading many to believe that Shakespeare added this as a physical manifestation of his internal evil. This was, until recently, an unanswerable question, as the location of Richard’s burial was lost to time. All of this changed when his grave was found during construction work in Leicester in 2012. The skeleton shows evidence of scoliosis, perhaps not so much that it would have caused him to appear hunch-backed, but enough to indicate the description was not an invention. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.