From a bloody battlefield to a city carpark, the fate of Richard III continues to fascinate.
By late August of 1485, England had been suffering decades of civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses, a conflict named after the emblems of the rival factions: the white Rose of the Yorkists and the red rose of the Lancastrians. The issue at stake was which of the two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty had the most legitimate claim to the English throne.
The murder in 1471 of the last Lancastrian king, the brain-addled Henry VI, put Yorkist Edward IV on the throne but his reign was never a peaceful one. He was plagued by wars with the French and the Scots, and by treacherous nobles at home. Among the latter was his brother, George, Duke of Clarence, whom Edward was obliged to execute for disloyalty. His remaining brother, Richard, had stayed true and was rewarded by being named Lord Protector of the Realm and guardian of Edward’s children in case of the King’s death.
When Edward died in 1483 the throne should have passed to his oldest son, the 12-year-old Edward V, but Richard seized the boy and his brother and threw them into the Tower of London, from which they never emerged alive. Richard then set about making his own claim to the throne by accusing Edward IV of bigamy—which would have meant that Edward V was of illegitimate birth and thus unfit to inherit. He went on to claim that his own mother was an adulteress and that Edward IV himself was also a bastard. Parliament saw fit to accept Richard’s arguments and he was crowned as Richard III in July.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Many Englishmen viewed Richard’s ascent to the throne to be a usurpation and a tyranny. The Duke of Buckingham rose in rebellion, and nobleman Henry Tudor living in exile in France was touted as the heir to the Lancastrian claim. Buckingham was defeated in 1484 but Tudor continued to gather support. He was backed by French money and troops, and by Englishmen who liked his promise to marry Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s daughter, thus uniting the two warring families.
In 1485, Henry Tudor landed on the coast of Wales and marched east. On Aug. 22, his outnumbered forces met an army led by Richard at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire. In the battle, Richard fought bravely but was betrayed by several nobles who took their men over to the Tudor side. He led a charge directly at Henry but he was cut down, killed while “fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies,” as one chronicler said. Richard’s naked body was hastily disposed of in a local church and Henry claimed the English throne by right of conquest. He became Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty—father of Henry VIII, and grandfather of Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I.
History has not been kind to the reputation of Richard III. Shakespeare portrayed him as a murderous hunchback last seen hobbling offstage crying “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Most historians from Sir Thomas More on have attributed the death of the “Princes in the Tower” to him. Small coteries of supporters such as the Richard III Society have long tried to rehabilitate his memory—Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel “The Daughter of Time” is the most entertaining of such attempts—but they have made little headway.
The Greyfriars Church in which Richard was buried was demolished during the reign of Henry VIII and rumours spread that the corpse had been dumped in the river, but in 2012 a marvellous discovery was made. Under a carpark in Leicester, archaeologists discovered a skeleton marked by numerous wounds and with a spinal deformation that might have led to one shoulder being higher than another. The man had been killed by a mortal wound to the skull, likely the result of the blow from a halberd, and his body had been mutilated after death. DNA evidence linked the skeleton to a Canadian woman descended from Richard’s older sister, leading to a solid identification of the body as that of Richard III.
