Introducing Richard III: England’s Most Controversial King

Jane Orton
May 6
9 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Meet Richard III, Shakespeare’s greatest villain, anti-hero of the legendary Wars of the Roses, possible murderer, miracle-working corpse and loser of the second most important battle in English history! In the first of our three part mini-series on Richard III, Dr. Orton introduces one of England’s most controversial kings!

If you’re an A Level History student, this is a summary of one of the main topics you will need for your exams. For university-level scholars or independent researchers, we’ve included clickable links to useful literature, primary sources and canonical scholarship you’ll need to know. For other interested learners, read on!

My relationship with Richard III began early. I grew up near Bosworth Battlefield, where Richard lost his life, celebrated the discovery of his body in a car park in Leicester hundreds of years after his death and joined thousands of others in pilgrimage to his grave to thank him for his role in Leicester City’s magical Premier league victory in 2016! Richard’s legacy and miracle-working relics have been interwoven with the story of Leicester in recent years, and the reassessment of his character has been gathering momentum in academic debates. Before we dive in to these topics, let’s acquaint ourselves with Richard’s life and times.

The White Rose

Richard came to power at the end of the Wars of the Roses (1455 and 1485), a series of civil wars for the throne of England between the House of York (the white rose) and the House of Lancaster (the red rose). Both houses were members of the royal Plantagenet family. When Henry Tudor defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth, this began the Tudor dynasty.

Richard was born in 1452 at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire to the Duke and Duchess of York. His father was the most senior noble in England and the richest man after the king. Both his mother and father were descended from Edward III. His father was a cousin to the reigning king, Henry VI, and was considered the heir to the throne while Henry remained childless. However, when Yorkists captured King Henry VI in 1460, the Act of Accord made York and his descendants the heirs to Henry’s throne regardless.

Richard’s father was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460. Richard’s older brother Edward defeated the Lancastrians at the Battle of Towton in 1461, and won the crown. This made Richard second in line to the throne. He was knighted, and made Duke of Gloucester.

In 1470, Warwick (Richard’s cousin and one-time mentor) rebelled against Edward, who was forced into exile in Burgundy. The Yorkists killed Warwick at the Battle of Barnet and the throne of England reverted back to Edward York. Richard was given the northern share of the Warwick inheritance.

Edward IV died unexpectedly in April 1483. However, Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage was declared bigamous, and Richard was asked to take the throne. He was crowned Richard III in July 1483.

The Princes in the Tower

One of the most controversial questions regarding Richard’s character is that of whether he murdered his nephews. Edward V was 12 in 1483; his brother Richard was 9. They were definitely in the Tower of London for three or four months that summer, awaiting Edward’s planned coronation on the 22nd June.

However, Parliament was told that Edward IV was already married when he married the Princes’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville, making the boys illegitimate. Richard (then Duke of Gloucester) therefore became King Richard III.

The Princes were last seen alive in the autumn of 1483. The question is, were they moved for their own safety, or did Richard have them killed?

In 1674, builders at the tower found two bodies buried at the foot of a staircase. These were declared to be the bones of the princes and reinterred in Westminster Abbey. The bones were examined in 1933, but since then, permission has not been granted for anyone to examine the bones.

For some, Richard is the most likely suspect, as he took the throne for himself. Popular historian Alison Weir, in her book The Princes in the Tower, concludes, “…only one man could have been responsible for their deaths: Richard III.” Weir argues that Henry VII never accused Richard of murdering the Princes because he could not prove they were dead and did not have their bodies.

There were certainly rumours in London at the time that the Princes had been killed. Dominic Mancini, an Italian visitor to England, expressed fears that the boys were dead, as did the Croyland Chronicler.

Richard did put to death some of his opponents when he came to power: for example, Lord Hastings and Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham.

There were also rumours that he had had a hand in the deaths of his brother George and Henry VI. Could he have put to death his small nephews, too?

Shakespeare’s version is that Sir James Tyrell killed the Princes on Richard’s orders. In Act IV.3 of Richard III, Shakespeare has Tyrell admit, “The tyrannous and bloody act is done/The most arch deed of piteous massacre…”

Tyrell is alleged by Sir Thomas More to have confessed to the murder. Professor of History Tim Thornton argues that evidence that Tyrell killed the princes on Richard’s orders can be found in the will of Margaret Capel. Written 33 years after the princes disappeared, the will mentions a royal chain of office belonging to Edward V. Capel was the sister-in-law of Sir James Tyrell and Professor Thornton thinks that this is evidence that Tyrell got was involved in the murder of the Princes. Click the link for a video of Professor Thornton discussing the will in the documentary, Princes in the Tower: A Damning Discovery. However, the Richard III society points out that there is no evidence that the chain came into Capel’s possession in this way.

According to the Richard III Society, “…had Richard’s security depended on killing the Princes, he would have achieved it only by proclaiming their demise due to sickness or misadventure. Instead, Richard took the secret of their fate to his grave. As you would expect if their safety depended on silence.”

Other suspects in the murder case include: Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham, who supported Richard’s coup when Edward IV died and whom Richard had killed months later for his leading role in the failed Buckingham’s Rebellion; Henry VII, who might have seen the survival of the princes as a threat or Henry’s mother Margaret Beaufort, in an attempt was determined to secure the throne for her son. The problem with each of these theories is that it isn’t clear that the suspects had access to the Princes at the time they were supposedly killed.

A final theory is that nobody killed the Princes in the tower; rather, the boys survived. Some people think that the so-called “pretenders” to the throne in Henry VII’s time, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, were actually the Princes.

Philippa Langley argues on The Missing Princes Project that “We now know that both sons of Edward IV survived to fight for the English throne against Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. Henry attempted to cast the Yorkist Princes as impostors by giving them false names and reverse-engineering their stories: Edward V became a 10 year-old boy called ‘Lambert Simnel’, the son of a joiner, tailor, barber, baker, organ-maker or shoemaker, and Richard, Duke of York became ‘Perkin Warbeck’…the son of a French boatman.”

In his The Survival of the Princes in the Tower, historian Matthew Lewis set out the idea that both of the Princes survived. He later became convinced that the 1487 Lambert Simnel Affair was not an uprising in favour of Edward, Earl of Warwick (as had originally been claimed), but a revolt in support of Edward V, who Lewis thinks had survived the tower.

In The Princes in the Tower, Philippa Langley suggests that Edward was crowned King in Dublin, and challenged Henry VII unsuccessfully at the Battle of Stoke in 1487. Evidence for this claim is based on a receipt issued to King Maximilian (King of the Romans/East Francia), who, along with Richard III’s sister, Margaret of Burgundy, supported Edward in Battle. This identifies the recent claimant as King Edward’s son. The Tudor explanation for this was that this was a pretender called Lambert Simnel.

*The Tudor Rose from the Pelican Portrait of Elizabeth I*

The Perkin Warbeck theory is that Margaret and Maximilian supported a second attempt to dethrone Henry, but the figurehead of this campaign was executed. Before his execution, the man confessed to being Perkin Warbeck (or Piers Osbeck), son of a boatman from Belgium. Some historians claim that this was really Richard of Shrewsbury, Edward IV’s younger son. A document supposed to be written by Richard himself has emerged, describing the Princes’ removal from the Tower, Richard’s early years, and his alliance with Margaret and Maximilian in Burgundy. Having said this, medieval historian Michael Hicks warns, “While useful additions to the continental plots against Henry VII, these new evidences do not prove that either prince lived beyond the reign of Richard III.”

The Battle of Bosworth

After his controversial path to the throne, Richard only reigned for two years. Henry Tudor, heir to the House of Lancaster had a weaker claim to the throne through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, great-granddaughter to John of Gaunt (son of King Edward III). However, Henry swore at Rennes Cathedral on Christmas Day 1483 to take Richard’s throne and marry Edward IV’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth of York.

Henry landed in Milford Haven in Wales in August 1485, bringing with him a French-backed army of around 2,000 troops. By the time Henry reached Bosworth in Leicestershire, his army had grown to at least 5,000 men – but Richard’s army was at least twice as large. Henry and his men camped around Atherstone on the Leicestershire/Warwickshire border. Meanwhile, Richard had travelled from Nottingham to Leicester, and prepared to meet Henry in battle.

Richard slept badly the night before battle. Polydore Vergil tells us that Richard was plagued by a terrible dream. The next morning, Henry’s men were seen to be on the move and Richard’s army stretched out in a single line. In the end, Richard was betrayed by Thomas, Lord Stanley, Henry Tudor’s stepfather, and his brother William, who had been watching the battle unfold until an opportune moment to join.

Richard was killed in what historian Thomas Penn describes as “a miraculous, God-given victory” for Henry VII. In Shakespeare’s iconic depiction of the battle in Richard III Act V.4, Richard famously cries out, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

Once Richard was dead, Henry Tudor became King Henry VII of England, ending the Wars of the Roses and beginning the Tudor dynasty. The Tudor Rose emblem combines the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York in the hope that the country would finally unite. Henry declared Richard to be a usurper, took his body to Leicester and put it on public display.

In fact, Richard’s last charge was very brave. He could have saved himself by fleeing, but, as Polydore Vergil tells us, he vowed “that that very day he wold make end ether of warre or lyfe.”

My own childhood memories are tangled with the places that played a big role in Richard’s last days. I went to school in Market Bosworth and summer holidays were spent cycling around Sutton Cheney, where Richard’s soldiers camped before the battle, Dadlington, where many killed in the battle are buried, and past Fenn Lane Farm - the closest place to where Richard III is thought to have died.

Richard certainly shaped our national history – but was he a heroic warrior king whose throne was violently taken from him by a usurper, or does he deserve his Tudor reputation as a dastardly villain? Come back soon for my next post, in which I explore the historiography of Richard III.

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