Richard III of England

Richard III (1452 - 1485) was king of England from 1483 to 1485. Richard was born at Fotheringay Castle, the fourth son of the Duke of York who had been a strong claimant to the throne of King Henry VI. He was involved in ongoing battles between different alliances of the House of Lancaster and the House of York factions during the last half of the 1400s.

During the reign of his elder brother, Edward IV, Richard had demonstrated his loyalty and had been rewarded with the title Duke of Gloucester and the position of Governor of the North. It was from northern England that he always drew his greatest support, having spent much of his childhood at Middleham Castle, where he later made his married home. Following the decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard married the widowed Anne Neville, daughter of the late Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known to history as "The Kingmaker" because of his strong influence on the course of the Wars of the Roses. They had one son, Edward, who died in 1484 at the age of ten. Anne also died before her husband.

On the death of his brother the king, Richard was entrusted with the role of protector to his young nephews, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, but accepted the throne himself a little more than two months after Edward IV's death in 1483, after Parliament declared the princes illegitimate and Richard the rightful heir in Titulus Regius.

Lord Hastings, who had been a regular visitor to the young Edward V at the Tower and who, with dowager queen Elizabeth Woodville, was a leading member of the Lancastrian faction at court, was charged with treason, convicted, and executed. Jane, or Elizabeth, Shore, who had been mistress of King Edward IV, and then of his older step-son Thomas Grey, and was now Hastings's mistress, was convicted of lesser offenses and was made to do public penance and then imprisoned, until King Richard had her released.

When the members of Parliament met on June 25 (although there was no king to convene a formal session), it heard the evidence of Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid, so their children were bastards. No records of that meeting survive, because Henry VII ordered them destroyed as soon as he came to power two years later, but some of the language is believed to survive in Titulus Regius, which Parliament issued some months later explaining why it made that ruling and of which a single copy escaped destruction.

That made Richard the rightful heir, because his brothers were all dead, and their children were either attainted (George, Duke of Clarence's) or illegitimate (King Edward IV's). He accepted the crown Parliament offered him and became Richard III.

Richard was the last Yorkist king. By the time of his last stand against the Lancastrians, he was a widower without a legitimate son. After his son's death, he had initially named his nephew, Edward, Earl of Warwick, a mere boy and of questionable mental ability, as his heir. After the death of his wife, however, he named John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as his heir. Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485, by Lancastrian forces led by Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, and who was to cement the succession by marrying the Yorkist heir, Elizabeth of York.

King Richard III was buried at Greyfriars Church, Leicester, England. According to one tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries his body was thrown into the nearby River Soar, although other evidence suggests that this may not be the case and that his burial site may currently be under a car park in Leicester. There is currently a memorial plaque in the Cathedral where he may have once been buried.

A lasting mystery surrounding the accession of Richard was the disappearance and presumed death of Richard's nephews, known as the Princes in the Tower. One of the most readable accounts of the evidence on all sides of the question is Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. For a review of all the suspects in the case of Richard III, see "Whodunit?" in the online library at the American Branch of the Richard III Society, :http://www.r3.org/bookcase/whodunit.html (external link). If you prefer a version where Richard is the villain, it would be hard to beat the 1939 film Tower of London, where Basil Rathbone is Richard and Boris Karloff his evil henchman; it is available on videotape.

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).

Richard appears in the 2002 List of "100 Great Britons" (sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public), alongside such other greats as David Beckham, Aleister Crowley, and Johnny Rotten. The BBC History Magazine lists him under "doubtful entrants, based on special interest lobbying or 'cult' status", and comments: "On the list due to the Ricardian lobby, but a minor monarch".

Non-fiction books about Richard III:

• Good King Richard? by Jeremy Potter {ISBN 0094646309}
• The Princes in the Tower by Alison Weir {ISBN 0345391780}
• Richard III: England's Black Legend by Desmond Seward {ISBN 0140266348}
• Richard III: The Great Debate edited by Paul Murray Kendall {ISBN 0393003108}
• Richard the Third by Paul Murray Kendall {ISBN 0393007855}
• Royal Blood by Bertram Fields {ISBN 006039269X}

External Links:

Richard III Society, headquartered in London, England

Richard III Society, American Branch -- includes links to online editions of many primary texts and secondary sources

Richard III article at dmoz.org

Preceded by: (Edward V)

List of British monarchs

Succeeded by: Henry VII

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For the play Richard III by William Shakespeare, see Richard III (play)