Richard III of England

Based on Wikipedia: Richard III of England

On August 22, 1485, something happened that hadn't occurred in England for over three centuries: a king was killed in battle. Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty that had ruled England since 1154, died fighting at Bosworth Field. His body was stripped naked, slung over a horse, and carried to Leicester for a hasty, undignified burial. It would be over five hundred years before anyone found his bones again.

The discovery of Richard's skeleton in 2012—beneath a parking lot in Leicester—captivated the world. But the bones themselves told a story that challenged centuries of assumption. Here was a man whose spine curved dramatically to one side, yet who had fought in the thick of battle until his final breath. His skull showed the brutal evidence of at least eleven wounds, including two that would have been instantly fatal. Richard III died not fleeing, but fighting.

To understand how England's last medieval king came to such an end, we need to go back to one of the most chaotic periods in English history: the Wars of the Roses.

A Kingdom at War with Itself

The name "Wars of the Roses" sounds almost romantic, conjuring images of chivalric combat between houses symbolized by red and white flowers. The reality was far uglier: a decades-long struggle for the English throne between two branches of the royal family, the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. Both descended from King Edward III, and both had claims to the crown that seemed valid enough to fight over.

Richard was born into this chaos on October 2, 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. He was the eleventh of twelve children born to Richard, Duke of York, and Cecily Neville—and one of the few who would survive infancy. His father was not merely a nobleman with royal blood; he was the most powerful lord in England and, in the eyes of many, the rightful heir to the throne occupied by the weak and mentally unstable Henry VI.

Richard was just seven years old when his life was first upended by civil war. In 1459, the Yorkists were forced to flee England after a military setback, and young Richard and his brother George were placed in the custody of relatives. Things got worse the following year. In December 1460, at the Battle of Wakefield, Richard's father and his older brother Edmund were killed. The Duke of York's severed head, crowned mockingly with paper, was displayed on the gates of the city of York.

Richard's mother sent her two youngest sons to the safety of the Low Countries. But the wheel of fortune was already turning. Just months later, the Yorkists won a decisive victory at the Battle of Towton—one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on English soil—and Richard's eldest brother claimed the throne as Edward IV.

Richard was eight years old. He went from being a refugee to being the brother of a king.

The Making of a Medieval Lord

Edward IV moved quickly to secure his position by distributing power and land to those he trusted. His youngest brother Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461, a title that came with vast estates in northern England and Wales. By the time he was eleven, Richard had been appointed sole Commissioner of Array for the Western Counties—a responsibility that, in theory at least, gave him authority over military recruitment across an entire region. By seventeen, he had an independent military command.

But titles and appointments meant little without the skills to back them up. Richard spent several formative years at Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, training under his cousin Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Warwick was one of the most powerful men in England, so instrumental in putting Edward IV on the throne that he would later be called "the Kingmaker" because of his role in the Wars of the Roses. Under Warwick's tutelage, young Richard learned the arts of war, governance, and medieval politics.

It was at Middleham that Richard likely first met Anne Neville, Warwick's younger daughter—the woman who would become his wife. He also formed a lasting friendship with Francis Lovell, who would remain loyal to him until the very end.

This arrangement—a young nobleman being raised in the household of a powerful relative—was standard practice in medieval England. Often it was the precursor to marriage. Warwick had two daughters, and the king had two younger brothers. The arithmetic was simple. But as relations between Warwick and King Edward soured, those potential matches became politically complicated.

Loyalty Tested

In the late 1460s, the Kingmaker turned against the king he had made. Warwick, frustrated by Edward IV's independence and his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, allied himself with the king's own brother George, Duke of Clarence. George married Warwick's elder daughter Isabel without Edward's permission and joined his father-in-law's rebellion.

Richard faced a choice. He could follow his brother George into rebellion against King Edward, or he could remain loyal to the crown.

He chose loyalty.

When Warwick defected entirely to the Lancastrian side in 1470, allying with the former queen Margaret of Anjou and promising to restore Henry VI to the throne, Richard fled to Burgundy with Edward. The story goes that Edward, having left England in such desperate haste that he possessed almost nothing, was forced to pay for their passage with his fur cloak. Richard, for his part, had to borrow three pounds from a local official in Zeeland.

The exile was brief. In 1471, with Burgundian backing, Edward returned to England and fought two decisive battles. At Barnet, Warwick the Kingmaker was killed. At Tewkesbury, the Lancastrian cause was crushed, and the only son of Henry VI was slain. Richard, now eighteen years old, played a crucial role in both victories. His military reputation was established.

The Crooked Back

At some point during his adolescence, Richard developed scoliosis—a sideways curvature of the spine. The cause is unknown. When his skeleton was excavated in 2012, the curvature looked dramatic, bending his spine into an S-shape. But the osteoarchaeologist who examined his remains concluded that it probably caused no major visible deformity. With the right clothing, Richard could have disguised his condition entirely.

This matters because later accounts, particularly those written after his death when his enemies controlled the narrative, portrayed Richard as a twisted hunchback whose outer deformity reflected his inner corruption. Shakespeare, drawing on these hostile sources, gave us the villainous Richard of popular imagination: limping, withered-armed, plotting from birth.

The skeleton told a different story. Richard was slightly built but had well-developed muscles from years of weapons training. His arms were symmetrical. He could fight effectively on horseback—something that would have been impossible with the severe disabilities described in Tudor propaganda. The real Richard was physically imperfect but far from the monster of legend.

Marriage and Money

After the Yorkist victories of 1471, Richard sought to marry Anne Neville, Warwick's younger daughter and now a widow. Anne's first husband, Edward of Westminster, had been killed at Tewkesbury. Her father had died at Barnet. She was young, noble, and—crucially—heir to half of the vast Warwick fortune.

This brought Richard into conflict with his brother George, Duke of Clarence, who had married Anne's sister Isabel. George had no intention of sharing the Warwick inheritance. According to John Paston, a contemporary letter writer, George accepted the marriage grudgingly, on the understanding that "he may well have my Lady his sister-in-law, but they shall part no livelihood." In other words: take the bride, but don't touch the money.

What followed was a bitter family dispute over land and titles. The Countess of Warwick, Anne's mother, was technically still alive and still the legal owner of much of the property in question. But Parliament, at Edward IV's direction, passed an act treating her "as if she were naturally dead"—stripping her of her rights so that her daughters (and their husbands) could inherit immediately.

Richard and Anne married on July 12, 1472. To secure George's consent, Richard gave up considerable property and the powerful office of Great Chamberlain. He kept Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, along with Sheriff Hutton and Penrith. Middleham became his primary residence and the center of his power in the north.

Lord of the North

For the next twelve years, Richard governed northern England as the king's representative. He was effective and popular—or at least respected. He administered justice, defended the border against Scottish incursions, and built a network of loyal supporters. In 1482, he led a successful invasion of Scotland, capturing Edinburgh.

His brother George, meanwhile, continued his descent into disloyalty and delusion. After Isabel died, George sought to marry Mary of Burgundy—a match that would have made him a major European player. Edward IV refused. George's subsequent behavior became erratic enough that he was arrested, tried for treason, and executed in February 1478. The method of execution, according to tradition, was drowning in a barrel of malmsey wine. Whether this actually happened is uncertain, but the story has proved irresistible to historians and dramatists alike.

There is no evidence that Richard played any role in his brother's downfall. Whatever he felt about George's death, he kept to himself.

The Death of a King

On April 9, 1483, Edward IV died unexpectedly. He was forty years old. The cause is uncertain—perhaps pneumonia, perhaps a stroke, perhaps something else entirely. What is certain is that his death threw England into crisis.

Edward's heir was his eldest son, also named Edward, who was just twelve years old. The young king was at Ludlow Castle in Wales with his maternal relatives, the Woodvilles. Richard was in the north. By the terms of Edward IV's will, Richard was named Lord Protector—the man who would govern England until young Edward V came of age.

What happened next has been debated for over five centuries.

Richard intercepted Edward V on his journey to London, arrested the boy's Woodville relatives, and took control of the young king. He was met by another of Edward IV's closest allies, William Hastings, who had been alarmed by the Woodvilles' apparent plans to marginalize Richard and rule through the young king themselves.

For several weeks, preparations continued for Edward V's coronation, scheduled for June 22. Richard appeared to be acting as a loyal protector. Then everything changed.

In early June, Richard accused Hastings of conspiracy and had him executed without trial. Around the same time, a claim emerged that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid—that Edward had been secretly contracted to another woman before his marriage and was therefore a bigamist. If true, this meant that all of Edward's children by Elizabeth were illegitimate and could not inherit the throne.

On June 25, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed this claim and offered Richard the crown. He accepted. He was crowned on July 6, 1483.

The Princes in the Tower

Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, were lodged in the Tower of London—which at that time was a royal residence as well as a fortress and prison. The boys were seen playing in the Tower grounds in the summer of 1483.

And then they vanished.

No reliable contemporary source records their fate. They simply disappeared from public view around August 1483. The assumption, then and now, is that they were murdered. The question is by whom.

Richard III is the most obvious suspect. He had the most to gain from their deaths—as long as the princes lived, they remained potential rallying points for rebellion. But others have been accused as well: Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who later rebelled against Richard; Henry Tudor, who would eventually take the throne; even Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor's mother.

We will probably never know the truth. In 1674, workmen in the Tower discovered a box containing the bones of two children. These were assumed to be the remains of the princes and were interred in Westminster Abbey. Modern requests to examine the bones using DNA analysis have been refused.

The mystery endures.

A Short and Troubled Reign

Richard III ruled for just over two years, and both of those years were marked by rebellion and instability.

The first serious challenge came in October 1483, led by an unlikely figure: Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who had been one of Richard's chief supporters in the seizure of power. Buckingham's motives remain unclear—perhaps he felt insufficiently rewarded, perhaps he had always intended to make his own play for the crown, perhaps he was simply opportunistic. Whatever his reasoning, his rebellion failed. Buckingham was captured and executed.

But the failed rebellion had one significant consequence: it brought Henry Tudor into play. Henry was a minor Welsh nobleman with a tenuous claim to the throne through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, who descended from John of Gaunt, son of Edward III. Before 1483, Henry had been an exile of no particular importance. Now, with Richard on the throne and the Yorkist princes presumably dead, Henry became the best hope for everyone who opposed Richard.

Richard tried to consolidate his position. He made a royal progress through his kingdom, displayed himself as a generous and just ruler, and distributed patronage to those who supported him. But support remained thin outside his northern heartland. Many of Edward IV's former allies refused to serve Richard. The specter of the vanished princes hung over everything.

In August 1485, Henry Tudor landed in Wales with a small force of French troops and began marching east, gathering support as he went. Richard moved to intercept him.

Bosworth Field

The two armies met near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire on August 22, 1485. Richard had the larger force, but his support was unreliable. Lord Stanley and his brother William Stanley commanded a large contingent that had not committed to either side. Their stepson was Henry Tudor; their king was Richard III. They waited to see which way the battle would turn.

The details of the battle are disputed. What seems clear is that at some point Richard saw an opportunity—or became desperate—and led a cavalry charge directly at Henry Tudor's position. It was a bold gamble, the kind of decisive action that had won battles before.

It almost worked. Richard killed Henry's standard-bearer and came close to Henry himself. But the Stanleys finally committed their forces—against Richard. Surrounded and overwhelmed, Richard fought on until he was killed.

According to tradition, his crown was found on the battlefield and placed on Henry Tudor's head, making him King Henry VII.

Afterlife of a King

Richard's body was stripped and abused, then carried to Leicester for burial in the church of the Grey Friars. He received no tomb or monument—at least not initially. His remains lay there for decades until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, when the friary was demolished. For centuries, it was believed that Richard's bones had been dug up and thrown into the River Soar.

The truth was more prosaic. The bones had simply been forgotten, buried beneath layers of later construction.

In 2012, a team led by Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society launched an archaeological excavation on the site of the former Grey Friars Priory—now a parking lot in central Leicester. On the first day of digging, they found a skeleton. Analysis confirmed it was Richard III. The evidence was overwhelming: the scoliosis matched contemporary descriptions, the bones showed wounds consistent with death in battle, and mitochondrial DNA matched that of known descendants of Richard's sister Anne.

Richard was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015, 530 years after his death. This time, he got a proper tomb.

The Tudor Myth

The Richard III we think we know—the villainous hunchback, the murderer of the princes, the last gasp of medieval tyranny before Tudor enlightenment—is largely a creation of the dynasty that replaced him. Henry VII needed to justify his seizure of the throne, and that meant portraying Richard as a monster.

This narrative reached its apotheosis in Shakespeare's Richard III, written over a century after the events it depicts. Shakespeare's Richard is magnificently evil, a gleeful villain who seduces women over the coffins of men he murdered, who kills his way through the House of York, who revels in his own wickedness. It's one of the great roles in English drama. It's also propaganda.

Was Richard a murderer? Almost certainly. Medieval politics was a bloody business, and Richard ordered or sanctioned killings throughout his career. Did he murder the princes in the Tower? Probably, though we cannot be certain. Was he the twisted monster of Tudor legend? Almost certainly not.

The evidence suggests a capable administrator, a loyal brother (until he wasn't), a skilled military commander, and an effective ruler of northern England. His seizure of the throne was ruthless but not unprecedented—other English kings had taken the crown through similarly dubious means. His reign was too short and too troubled to judge fairly.

What we can say with certainty is that Richard III was the last English king to die in battle, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, and the end of the Middle Ages in England. When Henry Tudor placed that crown on his head at Bosworth Field, a new era began. The Tudors would rule for over a century, and they would write the history books.

The losers rarely get to tell their own stories.