Richard III (2 October 1452 – 22 August 1485) was
King
of
England from 1483 until his
death. He was the last king of the
House
of York and the last of the
Plantagenet dynasty.
His defeat at the
Battle of
Bosworth Field
was the decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, and is sometimes
regarded as the end of the Middle Ages
in England. He is the central character of a well-known
play by
William Shakespeare.
When his brother
Edward IV died
in April 1483, Richard was named as protector of the realm for
Edward's son and successor, the 12-year-old
King Edward V. As the new king travelled
to London from Ludlow, Richard met him and escorted him to London,
where he was lodged in the Tower. Edward V's brother Richard later
joined him there.
A publicity campaign was mounted condemning Edward IV's marriage to
the boys' mother, Elizabeth Woodville, as invalid, and therefore
rendering their children illegitimate and ineligible for the
throne. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed
these claims. The following day, Richard III officially began his
reign. He was crowned in July. The two young princes disappeared in
August, and there were a number of accusations that the boys were
murdered by Richard.
Two large-scale rebellions rose against Richard. The first, in
1483, was led by staunch opponents of Edward IV and, most notably,
Richard's own '
kingmaker',
Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke
of Buckingham.
The revolt collapsed and Buckingham was
executed at Salisbury
, near the Bull's Head Inn. However, in 1485,
another rebellion arose against Richard, headed by
Henry Tudor, 2nd Earl of Richmond
(later King Henry VII) and his uncle
Jasper.
The rebels landed troops and Richard fell in
the Battle of
Bosworth Field, the last English king to die in
battle.
Childhood
Richard
was born at Fotheringhay
Castle
, the eighth and youngest child, and fourth
surviving son of Richard Plantagenet, 3rd
Duke of York (who was a strong claimant to the throne of
King Henry VI) and Cecily Neville. Richard spent several
influential years of his childhood at Middleham Castle
in Wensleydale, under
the tutelage of his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl
of Warwick (known as "The Kingmaker" because of his strong
influence on the course of the Wars of
the Roses). While Richard was at Warwick's estate, he
developed a close friendship with
Francis Lovell, a friendship
that would remain strong for the rest of his life. Another child in
the household was Warwick's daughter
Anne
Neville, whom Richard would later marry.
At the
time of the death of his father and older brother Edmund at the Battle of
Wakefield
, Richard, who was eight years old, was sent by his
mother, the Duchess of York, to the Low Countries, beyond the reach
of Henry VI's vengeful Queen, Margaret
of Anjou. He was accompanied by his elder brother
George .
They
returned to England following the defeat of the Lancastrians at the
Battle of
Towton
, and participated in the coronation of Richard's
eldest brother as King Edward
IV. At this time, Richard was named
Duke of Gloucester as well as being made
a
Knight of the Garter and a
Knight of the Bath.
Richard was then sent
to Warwick's estate at Middleham
for his knightly training. With some
interruptions, Richard stayed at Middleham until early 1465, when
he was 12.
Richard became involved in the rough politics of the Wars of the
Roses at an early age. Edward appointed him the sole Commissioner
of Array for the Western Counties in 1464, when he was 11. By the
age of 17, he had an independent command.
At a second time in his youth Richard was forced to seek refuge in
the
Low Countries which were part of
the realm of the
Duchy of
Burgundy. His sister
Margaret
had become the wife of
Charles the
Bold, Duke of Burgundy in 1468. Richard along with his brother,
the King, fled to
Burgundy in October 1470
after Warwick defected to the side of
Margaret of Anjou.
Only 18 years old,
Richard played crucial roles in two battles which resulted in
Edward's restoration to the throne in spring 1471 — Barnet
and Tewkesbury
.
Reign of Edward IV
During the reign of Edward IV, Richard demonstrated his loyalty and
skill as a military commander. He was rewarded with large estates
in
northern England, and appointed
as Governor of the North, becoming the richest and most powerful
noble in England. In contrast, their other surviving brother,
George
Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence, fell out with Edward and was
executed for
treason.
Richard controlled the north of England until Edward IV's death.
There,
and especially in the city of York
, he was
regarded with much love and affection. In 1482 Richard
recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed
from the Scots
, and his
administration was regarded as fair and just . Richard and
his wife Anne endowed
universities and
made grants to the church.
Accession to the Throne
On the death of Edward IV, on 9 April 1483, the late King's sons
(Richard's nephews), Edward V, aged 12, and
Richard, Duke of York, aged 9, were
next in the
order of succession.
Richard,
however, had the king's guardians - including Elizabeth's brother
Anthony Woodville,
2nd Earl Rivers - arrested and taken to Pontefract
Castle
, where they were later executed, allegedly for
planning to assassinate Edward
V. He then took Edward and his younger brother
to the Tower of
London
.
On 22
June 1483, outside St. Paul's Cathedral
, a statement was read out on behalf of Richard
declaring that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was
illegitimate and that, in consequence, Richard, not his nephew, was
the rightful king.
Parliament then passed the
Titulus
Regius in support of Richard, on the evidence of a bishop who
testified to having married Edward IV to
Lady Eleanor Butler, who was still
living when Edward married Elizabeth Woodville.
On 6 July 1483,
Richard was crowned at Westminster Abbey
.
The young princes were never seen again. Although Richard III is
widely believed to have killed Edward V and his brother, there is
considerable controversy about the actual circumstances of the
boys' deaths: see
Princes in the
Tower.
Death at the Battle of Bosworth
On 22
August 1485, Richard met the outnumbered Lancastrian forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of
Bosworth Field. He was astride his white courser. The size
of Richard's army has been estimated at 8,000, Henry's at 5,000,
but exact numbers cannot be known. During the battle Richard was
abandoned by Lord
Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of
Derby, Sir
William Stanley, and
Henry Percy, 4th
Earl of Northumberland. The switching of sides by the Stanleys
severely depleted the strength of Richard's army and had a material
effect on the outcome of the battle. Also the death of
John Howard, Duke of Norfolk,
his close companion, appears to have had a demoralising effect on
Richard and his men. Accounts note that Richard fought bravely and
ably during the battle, unhorsing Sir John Cheney, a well-known
champion, killing Henry's standard bearer Sir
William Brandon and nearly
reaching Henry himself before being finally surrounded and killed.
Tradition holds that his final words were "
treason, treason, treason, treason, treason".
Polydore Vergil, Henry Tudor's
official historian, would later record that "King Richard, alone,
was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies".
Richard's
naked body was then exposed, possibly in the collegiate foundation
of the Annunciation of Our Lady, and hanged by Henry Tudor, now
King Henry VII, before being buried at Greyfriars Church, Leicester
. In 1495 Henry VII paid
£50 for a marble and alabaster monument.
According to one
tradition, during the Dissolution of the
Monasteries his body was thrown into the nearby River Soar
, although other evidence suggests that a memorial
stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of
Greyfriars. The exact location is now lost due to over 500
years of subsequent development. There is currently a memorial
plaque on the site of the Cathedral where he may have once been
buried.
According
to another tradition, Richard consulted a seer
in the town of Leicester before the battle who foretold that "where your
spur should strike on the ride into battle, your head shall be
broken on the return." On the ride into battle his spur
struck the bridge stone of the Bow Bridge; legend has it that, as
his corpse was being carried from the battle over the back of a
horse, his head struck the same stone and was broken open.
The Welsh accounts state that Sir Wyllyam Gardynyr killed King
Richard III with a
poleaxe. The Welsh
account reads, "Richard’s horse was trapped in the marsh where he
was slain by one of Rhys Thomas’ men, a commoner named Wyllyam
Gardynyr."
Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle. (Only
one other was so killed,
Harold
Godwinson.)
Henry Tudor succeeded Richard to become Henry VII, and sought to
cement the succession by marrying the Yorkist heiress,
Elizabeth of York,
Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's
niece.
Succession
Following
the decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of
Tewkesbury, Richard had married the younger daughter of the
Earl of Warwick, Anne Neville on 12
July 1472. Anne's first husband had been
Edward of Westminster, son of Henry
VI.
Richard and Anne had one son,
Edward
of Middleham, who died not long after being created
Prince of Wales. Richard also had a number
of illegitimate children, including
John of Gloucester, executed by King
Henry VII, and a daughter named Katharine (d. 1487) who married
William Herbert,
2nd Earl of Pembroke. It has been thought that their mother may
have been one Katherine Haute, who is mentioned in household
records. Both of these children survived Richard. It is not known
whether or not they left any descendants. The mysterious
Richard
Plantagenet is also a possible offspring of Richard III as is
Richard the Master- Builder .
At the time of his last stand against the Lancastrians, Richard was
a widower without a legitimate son. After his son's death, he had
initially named his nephew,
Edward, Earl of Warwick, Clarence's
young son and the nephew of Queen Anne Neville, as his heir. After
Anne's death, however, Richard named as his heir another nephew,
John de la Pole, Earl
of Lincoln, the son of his older sister
Elizabeth.
Legacy
Richard's death at Bosworth resulted in the end of the
Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England
since the succession of
Henry II
in 1154. The last male Plantagenet,
Edward, Earl of
Warwick (son of Richard III's brother Clarence) was executed by
Henry VII in 1499.
Richard's
Council of the North greatly
improved conditions for Northern
England, as commoners of that region
were formerly without any substantial economic activity independent
of London
. Its
descendant position was
Secretary of
State for the Northern Department.
Controversy and reputation
Much that was previously considered fact about Richard III has been
rejected by modern historians. For example, Richard was represented
by Tudor writers as being physically deformed, which was regarded
as evidence of an evil character. However, the withered arm, limp
and crooked back of legend are nowadays believed to be
fabrications; the questionable history attributed to
Thomas More made a deep impression upon
William Shakespeare, and was long taken
as the authoritative history of events. Shakespeare made Richard
the subject of his play
Richard
III, which portrayed him negatively.
The
Richard III Society was
established in the 20th century and has gathered considerable
research material about his life and reign. Its aim is summed up by
its patron, the present
Richard, Duke of
Gloucester:
"… the purpose and indeed the strength of the Richard
III Society derive from the belief that the truth is more powerful
than lies - a faith that even after all these centuries the truth
is important.
It is proof of our sense of civilised values that
something as esoteric and as fragile as reputation is worth
campaigning for."
The Society
of Friends of King Richard III was also set up in the 20th
century in order to rehabilitate Richard's reputation and to honour
his memory.
The society is based in the city of York, where
following his death in 1485 it was proclaimed, "King Richard, late
reigning mercifully over us, was.... piteously slain and murdered,
to the great heaviness of this city."
Richard
III was found not guilty in a mock trial presided over by three
justices of the United States Supreme Court
in 1997. Chief Justice
William H. Rehnquist and Associate Justices
Ruth Bader Ginsberg and
Stephen G. Breyer, in a 3-0 decision, ruled that the
prosecution had not met the
burden of
proof that "it was more likely than not" that the Princes in
the Tower had been murdered; that the bones found in 1674 in the
Tower were those of the princes; or that Richard III had ordered or
was complicit in their deaths.
Popular culture
Novelists
Horace Walpole,
Josephine Tey and
Valerie Anand are among writers who have
argued that Richard III was innocent of death of the Princes.
Sharon Kay Penman, in her
historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, also
portrays Richard III as a just and honest ruler and attributes the
death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery
novel
The Murders of Richard III by
Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot
revolves around the debate whether Richard III was guilty of these
as well as other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal of Richard III is
given in
The Founding, the first volume in
The Morland Dynasty, a series of
historical novels by author
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
Perhaps the best known film adaptation of Shakespeare's play
Richard III is the
1955 version directed and
produced by Sir
Laurence Olivier,
who also played the lead role. Also notable is the
1995 film version starring Sir
Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s
fascist England, and
Looking for Richard, a 1996
documentary film directed by
Al Pacino,
who plays the title character as well as himself. In the
BBC series based on Shakespeare's history plays,
An Age of Kings, Paul
Daneman plays Richard.
In spite of having died at the age of 32, Richard is often depicted
as being considerably older.
Basil Rathbone
and Peter Cook were both 46 when they
played him, Laurence Olivier was 48
(in his 1955 film), Vincent Price was
51, Ian McKellen was 56, and Pacino also 56, in his 1996 film
(although Pacino was 39 when he played him on Broadway
in 1979 and Olivier was 37 when he played him
on-stage in 1944).
In a
play within a play in
Neil Simon's 1977 film
The Goodbye Girl,
Richard Dreyfuss reluctantly portrays
Richard as overtly
homosexual at the
insistence of an
avant-garde director.
Dreyfuss' performance won him the 1978
Academy Award for Best
Actor.
In the television comedy series
The
Black Adder, Richard III is portrayed by
Peter Cook in an alternative version of history
as a doting, kindly man who treats the princes in the tower with
affection. He is unintentionally killed by
Edmund, the titular "Black Adder"
(
Rowan Atkinson). His death leads,
not to the crowning of Henry Tudor, but to the rule of
Richard IV, who in the television
series has grown up to be Edmund's father.
In March-April 2002, actor-director
Kenneth Branagh starred at the Crucible
Theatre, Sheffield as Richard III.
Titles, styles, honours and arms
Arms
As Duke of Gloucester, Richard had use of the coat of arms of the
kingdom, differenced by a
label argent of three points ermine,
on each point canton gules. As sovereign, he had use of the
arms of the kingdom undifferenced. His motto was "Loyaulte me lie,"
"Loyalty binds me."Image:Thomas of Lancaster Arms.svg|
Shield as
Duke of GloucesterImage:England Arms
1405.svg|Shield as King
Ancestry
See also
Bibliography
Source material on all aspects of Richard's reign is neatly and
impartially brought together by Keith Dockray in
Richard III: A
Reader in History (Sutton, 1988).
- The Trial of Richard III by Richard Drewett & Mark Redhead (Sutton, 1984) (ISBN 0-8...)
- Royal Blood: Richard III and the mystery of the
princes by Bertram Fields
(HarperCollins, ©1998) (ISBN 0-06-039269-X)
- Richard III: The Road to Bosworth Field by Peter W. Hammond & Anne
Sutton ( Constable, 1985) (ISBN 0-09-466160-X)
- Richard the Third by Michael
Hicks (Tempus, 2001) (ISBN 0-7524-2302-9)
- Richard III: A Study in Service by Rosemary Horrox (Cambridge University Press,
1991) (ISBN 0-521-40726-5)
- Richard III and the North edited by Rosemary Horrox
(University of Hull, 1986) (ISBN 0-8...)
- Bosworth 1485 by Michael
K. Jones (Tempus Publishing,
2002) (ISBN 0-7524-2334-7) [4366]
- Richard III: The Great Debate edited by Paul Murray Kendall (W.W. Norton, 1992)
(ISBN 0-3...)
- Richard the
Third by Paul Murray
Kendall (W.W. Norton, 1956) (ISBN 0-393-00785-5)
- The Betrayal of Richard III by V.B. Lamb (A. Sutton,
1991) (ISBN 0-86299-778-X)
- Richard III and the Princes in the Tower by A.J. Pollard (St
Martin's Press, 1991) (ISBN 0-3...)
- Good King Richard? by Jeremy
Potter (Constable, 1983) (ISBN 0-09-464630-9)
- Richard III by Charles Ross (Methuen, 1981) (ISBN
0-413-...)
- Richard III: England's Black Legend by Desmond Seward (Penguin Books, 1997) (ISBN
0-1...)
- The Coronation of Richard III: The Extant Documents by
Anne Sutton & Peter W. Hammond (St Martin's Press, 1984) (ISBN
0312169795)
- Richard III's Books by Anne Sutton & Livia Visser-Fuchs (Sutton Pub, 1997)
(ISBN 0-7...)
- The Princes in the Tower by Alison Weir (Ballantine, 1995) (ISBN
0-3...)
- Joan of Arc and Richard III: sex, saints, and government in
the Middle Ages by Charles Wood
(Oxford University Press)
(ISBN 0-19-506951-X)
References
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