Richard III of England

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard III was born on the 2nd of October 1452 at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the youngest of twelve children to survive infancy, and he died on the 22nd of August 1485 with sword wounds so severe that his helmet was driven into his skull. Those thirty-two years contained a civil war, a usurped throne, two vanished princes, and a dynasty's final chapter. He ruled England for just over two years, from the 26th of June 1483 until that last day at the Battle of Bosworth Field. He was the last Plantagenet king, the last English king to die in combat, and for centuries one of the most reviled figures in the national story. Yet the men and women who knew him in the north of England wept openly when they heard he was dead. How do we make sense of that gap? What kind of man was Richard, really, and how did the image that Shakespeare burned into Western memory come to replace the person who actually lived? The answers run through a childhood in the shadow of civil war, a career forged in loyalty and then shattered by a single act of seizure, a brief reign packed with surprisingly progressive legislation, and a skeleton discovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012 that forced historians to look at all of it again.

• 2. A Childhood in Conflict

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  Fotheringhay Castle stood in Northamptonshire when Richard came into the world, the eleventh of twelve siblings, during the opening phase of what historians would call the Wars of the Roses. His father, Richard, 3rd Duke of York, was a leading opponent of King Henry VI and a potential claimant to the throne himself. When Richard was seven years old, in 1459, his father and the Yorkist faction were forced to flee England entirely. Richard and his older brother George were placed in the custody of their aunt Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham, and possibly also of Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The following year, their father and their brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on the 30th of December 1460. Their mother sent the two boys to the Low Countries. They came back only after Yorkist forces prevailed at the Battle of Towton. When their eldest brother was crowned as King Edward IV on the 28th of June 1461, Richard was made Duke of Gloucester, Knight of the Garter, and Knight of the Bath all at once, at the age of eight. Edward appointed him the sole Commissioner of Array for the Western Counties in 1464, when Richard was eleven. By seventeen, he held an independent military command. His formative years were spent at Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, under the tutelage of his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, known to history as the Kingmaker. In the autumn of 1465, Edward IV granted Warwick one thousand pounds specifically for the expenses of his younger brother's instruction. It was almost certainly at Middleham that Richard first met Francis Lovell, who would become one of his firmest supporters, and Warwick's younger daughter Anne, whom he would eventually marry. During this same period of adolescence, for reasons that remain unknown, Richard developed scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine that would follow him the rest of his life and define much of his posthumous reputation.

• 3. Loyal Commander

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  Edward IV reclaimed his throne in the spring of 1471 through two decisive battles, and the eighteen-year-old Richard played a crucial role in both. At the Battle of Barnet on the 14th of April 1471, Richard is believed to have led the vanguard and outflanked the wing commanded by Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter. That his own household sustained losses places him squarely in the fighting. A contemporary source is explicit that he held the vanguard at Tewkesbury on the 4th of May, this time against the Lancastrian force under Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset. Two days after Tewkesbury, Richard sat as Constable of England alongside John Howard as Earl Marshal, presiding over the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured in the battle. In 1475, when Edward IV launched an invasion of France, Richard brought the largest private contingent in the army. He was publicly opposed to the treaty Edward eventually signed with Louis XI at Picquigny, and though he received gifts from Louis during a visit to the French king at Amiens, he refused the pensions that others accepted, joined in that refusal only by Cardinal Bourchier. In the war with Scotland that consumed much of the late 1470s and early 1480s, Richard served as Warden of the West March and was appointed Lieutenant-General of the North when fears of a Scottish invasion grew. When the king formally declared war in November 1480, Richard was granted ten thousand pounds for wages. In August 1482, he recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Kingdom of Scotland, the last time that town would change hands between the two kingdoms. Throughout Edward's reign, Richard governed the north with enough competence and fairness that the City of York regarded him with genuine warmth, a regard that would prove conspicuous at his death.

• 4. The Seizure of the Crown

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  Edward IV died on the 9th of April 1483, and his twelve-year-old son became Edward V, with Richard named Lord Protector. What followed, across fewer than three months, transformed Richard from loyal guardian into king. On the 29th of April, Richard and his cousin Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, met Queen Elizabeth's brother Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, at Northampton. Rivers was escorting the young king to London with an armed escort of two thousand men; Richard and Buckingham had six hundred. Richard had Rivers arrested along with the king's half-nephew Richard Grey and an associate named Thomas Vaughan. All three were taken to Pontefract Castle, where they were executed on the 25th of June on a charge of treason. After securing Edward V, Richard moved him first to the Bishop's apartments and then, on Buckingham's suggestion, to the royal apartments of the Tower of London, where kings customarily waited before their coronation. At a council meeting on the 13th of June at the Tower, Richard accused William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, of conspiring against him with the Woodvilles. According to Thomas More, Hastings was taken from the council chamber and summarily executed in the courtyard. The mechanism for Richard's claim to the throne came from Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who reportedly informed Richard that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of an earlier union with Eleanor Butler. On the 22nd of June, a sermon preached outside Old St. Paul's Cathedral declared Edward IV's children illegitimate and Richard the rightful king. On the 25th of June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to that effect. Richard accepted the crown on the 26th of June and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the 6th of July 1483. Parliament confirmed his title in January 1484 by the document known as Titulus Regius. Edward V and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, the so-called Princes in the Tower, disappeared from sight around August 1483 and were never seen again.

• 5. A King Who Reformed the Law

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  Richard's reign lasted only twenty-six months, yet Parliament under his governance enacted an unusually concentrated series of legal reforms. In December 1483, he instituted what would later be known as the Court of Requests, a tribunal specifically designed so that poor people who could not afford legal representation could bring their grievances before the crown. In January 1484, he improved the rules governing bail, shielding suspected felons from imprisonment before trial and protecting their property from seizure during that period. He founded the College of Arms in 1484 and banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books. He ordered that the written laws and statutes be translated from traditional French into English, making them accessible to those without a legal education in the old language. Parliament during his reign ended the arbitrary practice of benevolence, a device Edward IV had used to extract funds. It required that land sales be published, laid down property qualifications for jurors, restricted abusive commercial courts, and prohibited the sale of wine and oil in fraudulent measure. His Council of the North, established after his accession, had a budget of two thousand marks per annum, met at least every three months, acted on land disputes, and kept the peace. Based at Sandal Castle in Wakefield under the presidency of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, it was described later as his most enduring institutional legacy and survived unchanged until 1641. William Camden, writing in 1605, noted that Richard, though regarded as having lived wickedly, "yet made good laws". Francis Bacon similarly credited him as "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". Even in 1525, when Cardinal Wolsey tried to browbeat the Mayor and aldermen of London into compliance, they replied by citing a statute of Richard's, saying that "although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made."

• 6. Bosworth and Its Aftermath

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  Henry Tudor landed in Wales in August 1485 with his uncle Jasper Tudor and a contingent of French troops supplied by the French regent Anne of Beaujeu, marching through Pembrokeshire and gathering soldiers as he went. On the 22nd of August 1485, the two forces met near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard rode a white courser. His army has been estimated at around eight thousand men; Henry's at around five thousand. The traditional account holds that Baron Stanley, Sir William Stanley, and Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland, either withheld support or actively switched sides. When the course of the battle turned against him, Richard led a cavalry charge deep into the enemy ranks, trying to end the fight by reaching Henry Tudor directly. He unhorsed Sir John Cheyne, a well-known jousting champion. He killed Henry's standard bearer, Sir William Brandon. He came within a sword's length of Henry himself before Sir William Stanley's men surrounded and killed him. Henry VII's own historian, Polydore Vergil, recorded that Richard died "alone... fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet reported that the killing blow came from a Welshman wielding a halberd while the king's horse was mired in marshy ground. The skeleton identified in 2013 carried eleven wounds, eight of them to the skull. Professor Guy Rutty of the University of Leicester concluded that two injuries to the base of the skull were the most likely to have caused death, one from a large sharp force weapon such as a sword or halberd and one a penetrating thrust from the tip of an edged weapon. His body was carried back to Leicester naked and tied to a horse and displayed at the collegiate Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke before being hastily buried in the choir of Greyfriars Church. In 1495, Henry VII paid fifty pounds for a marble and alabaster monument. The exact location of the grave was then lost for more than four hundred years.

• 7. Reputation and the Tudor Shadow

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  During his own lifetime, the Italian observer Dominic Mancini reported in 1483 that Richard enjoyed a good reputation and that both his private life and public conduct attracted genuine esteem. The historian John Rous, writing during Richard's reign, praised him as a good lord who punished oppressors of the commons and possessed a great heart. When word of his death reached the City of York, the City Council officially deplored it at the risk of facing the new king's anger. The shift came quickly. Rous, writing under Henry VII, reversed himself and portrayed Richard as a freakish individual born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after two years in the womb, with a stunted and distorted body. Thomas More described him as little of stature, crook-backed, and hard-favoured of visage. Polydore Vergil said he was deformed, with one shoulder higher than the right, and devious in character. Shakespeare's Richard III, which drew on More and Vergil, fixed that image in place for centuries: a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain murdering his way to power. One July 1484 lampoon, William Collingbourne's "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, all rule England under a Hog", was pinned to the door of St. Paul's Cathedral and referred to Richard as the Hog and three of his most trusted councillors as his creatures. On the 30th of March 1485, Richard summoned lords and London city councillors to publicly deny rumours that he had poisoned Queen Anne and planned to marry his niece Elizabeth of York. Defenders appeared over the centuries, including Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts of 1768, and Clements Markham in his 1906 biography, who argued that Henry VII, not Richard, killed the princes. The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 originally as The Fellowship of the White Boar, has worked to separate verifiable fact from what it describes as Tudor propaganda and myth-building. Some late twentieth-century historians adopted a less moralistic frame, noting that the latter fifteenth century was a ruthless and violent age for the upper ranks of English society, and that Richard acted within the norms of his time. The physical evidence recovered in 2012 confirmed that his scoliosis, while real, was unlikely to have caused any deformity that could not be concealed by clothing, according to osteoarchaeologist Dr. Jo Appleby of the University of Leicester.

• 8. The Dig Under the Car Park

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  In August 2012, the University of Leicester, Leicester City Council, and the Richard III Society announced a search for the lost remains of the king. The project was managed by Philippa Langley of the Society's Looking for Richard Project, with archaeological work carried out by the University of Leicester Archaeological Services. The Greyfriars Church where Richard was buried had been demolished during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, and more than four hundred years of urban development had buried the site. By comparing fixed points between historical maps, the team located the church's foundations beneath a modern city centre car park. The excavators found the church by the 5th of September 2012, and two days later announced they had found the garden of Robert Herrick, where a memorial to Richard had stood in the early seventeenth century. A human skeleton lay beneath the choir of the church. On the 12th of September, the team announced that the skeleton might be that of Richard III, citing the adult male body, its position beneath the choir, and severe scoliosis of the spine. There were also perimortem wounds to the skull: a shallow orifice probably from a rondel dagger, a scooping depression probably inflicted by a sword, and a gaping hole at the base of the skull from a halberd blow. A blade had penetrated to a depth of 10.5 cm inside the skull. British historian John Ashdown-Hill had traced in 2004 a matrilineal line of descent from Richard's elder sister Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, locating Joy Ibsen, a British-born woman who had emigrated to Canada, as a sixteenth-generation great-niece. Joy Ibsen died in 2008. Her son Michael Ibsen gave a mouth-swab sample on the 24th of August 2012. On the 4th of February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that the skeleton was Richard III, based on mitochondrial DNA, soil analysis, dental evidence, and the physical characteristics of the remains. Richard III thus became the first ancient person of known historical identity whose full genome was sequenced. After a legal challenge by fifteen collateral descendants who sought reburial in York rather than Leicester, a court ruled in May 2014 that there were no grounds to interfere. His remains were carried in procession to Leicester Cathedral on the 22nd of March 2015 and reinterred on the 26th of March, in a ceremony attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, and representatives of the British royal family. The outer coffin was crafted by Michael Ibsen himself, a direct descendant of Richard's sister Anne, closing a lineage that stretched across more than five centuries.