Richard III

A Brief Introductory

Richard III was born in 1452,the youngest son of Richard Plantagenet,Duke of York,who was the heir to the senior line of descent of Edward III.He became King of England in 1483 following the death of his brother Edward IV.He reigned for only two years,during which he introduced many reforms and bettered the liberties and the living standards of the common people.However he was surrounded by hate and intrigue, and was defeated and overthrown at the Battle of Redmore* in 1485.

In order to understand just how he came to the Throne, we must go back almost a hundred years further.....

Edward I,II and III had all been undoubted Kings of England in lineal descent.Richard II,the next Heir,who succeeded Edward III in 1377,found himself at the head of a Plantagenet family which comprised of his own senior line,a junior line called the House of York,and a very junior line called the House of Lancaster.

Most alarmingly, in 1399,the very junior line of Lancaster stole the crown and murdered the childless Richard II, thus ending both him and his line. This House of Lancaster then actually managed to hang on to the Throne through three generations,Henry IV,V and VI. However,during Henry VI's reign the new rightful Heirs,the House of York,began to fight to recover their crown.This episode of our history is known as the Wars of the Roses,because the emblems of York and Lancaster were a white and red rose respectively.

The heir of York, Richard Plantagenet, had four sons,Edward (later Edward IV),Edmund, George and Richard (later Richard III). In 1460,at the Battle of Wakefield,Richard Plantagenet and one of his sons,Edmund,were killed,leaving now only the three brothers,Edward,George and Richard, as the new heirs of York.

Soon afterwards Edward at last won back his family's crown from the Lancastrians, and became Edward IV. The Lancastrian Henry VI was deposed,and ,justice finally having been done,peace at last descended upon the realm.

But the seeds of destruction were once again not long in the sowing,when in 1464 Edward married a widow called Elizabeth Wydevill. The marriage was arguably made in a profane place,certainly without the assent of the Lords, and it seems that Edward was also probably engaged to somebody else at the time.

There were principally two sons and a daughter of this marriage.The daughter was called Elizabeth of York.The sons were Edward and Richard,afterwards famous as the Princes in the Tower.

Well Edward IV reigned,despite many turbulences,and the Wydevill family,a distasteful bunch of upstarts if ever there was one,became more and more powerful by the day. The middle brother George,Duke of Clarence, fell victim to them in 1478 when Elizabeth Wydevill pressured Edward into executing him for treason,an act which made the youngest brother, Richard of Gloucester,swear vengeance against the upstarts,however long it took,and whatever the cost.

Then,in 1483, Edward IV died. On his deathbed he named his last surviving brother,Richard of Gloucester,Lord Protector of England.Richard at once took possession of the new king,Edwards son the young 12-year-old Edward V,and the Wydevills predictably fled ,variously abroad and into sanctuary.

Strangely however,despite his position at this point, Richard also found himself between a rock and a hard place.His life had changed overnight.He had been unquestionably devoted to his big brother,and had followed him bravely and loyally through many crises and into many battles. But now,he saw the new young king to be a spoilt little brat brought up behind his mothers skirts and a Wydevill through and through.Worse,the old Nobility hated the Wydevills --and in those days it was the Nobility who raised the armies....

Richard's predicament was that if he remained loyal to the new Edward V, then the Nobility might not go along with him and in any case the Wydevills themselves would,sooner rather than later, have him for breakfast anyway.If he did not remain loyal,on the other hand, then he could only realistically seek  the crown for himself ; with all the perils which that might entail,at least it would afford him his only realistic means of securing his preservation from the Wydevills.**

Fortunately at this point,the Law reared its head. We may remember, that Edward IV had married in a profane place, without the assent of the Lords,and probably whilst being engaged to somebody else.On any one of these counts, the marriage was  invalid, and therefore the children of it were illegitimate and debarred from inheriting the crown..

This actually made Richard the next legal heir,allowing for the fact that George's children had been attainted by Edward IV,and so Parliament petitioned him to accept the crown.No doubt with the Wydevills principally in mind,he accepted, and on June 20,1483,less than three months after Edward IV's death,he became Richard III. The Princes, Edward V and his brother Richard,were confined at the Tower.

Meanwhile,back in the realms of Wrong itself, the Lancastrians were scattered to the four winds. A wretched man called Henry Tudor was the nearest thing remotely pertaining to Royalty that they had. Further,he wasn't even the Lancastrians' lawful heir--the Lancastrians had originally attempted to validate their claim to the crown by pleading the ancient "Salic Law"--never adopted in England-- that the crown must pass from male to male in unbroken succession.. But Tudor's claim actually came to him through his mother. (??!!).Further, as if this wasn't enough,his entire line of descent was also cut off from the Succession by an Illegitimacy.

Moreover, --and this must come as a most cruel twist of Fate for the Lancastrians--if we were to apply their own Salic Law to the letter,we see from the Royal family tree that the heir of Lancaster was in fact none other than....Richard III,---for in addition to his being descended through Edward III's senior heirs (House of York) which included females, he was also descended from Edward III from male to male in unbroken succession and with no illegitimacies through Edward III's son Edmund of Langley (Salic Law).

I terms of Overall Principle,therefore,it cannot be seriously and legitimately contended that these Lancastrians were anything but hypocritical juniors who simply aspired to what was just not theirs.

Now King Richard was a Northerner. He loved the North,had been brought up there,had settled there in his adulthood, and was northern by blood.And plainly and simply,he didn't like southerners and he didn't trust them.He began to replace the sheriffs and officials in southern towns by northern ones,and the southerners resented him for that.He allowed the North to rule itself from a Council,and generally,he was beloved in the North. The south,on the other hand,was ruled directly by him, didn't know him,didn't like him,and didn't trust him. A rebellion broke out in the south.....

Well that came to nothing,but at length,in 1485,the Lancastrian remnants,gathered together by Henry Tudor, decided to try their luck,and they landed in Wales.Now Tudor realised that he had no chance just off his own bat. So,craftily, he promised to marry Elizabeth of York,Edward IV's daughter, and so unite the two Houses.This idea was very popular among the people; for them,putting the Wars to an end was more important, than Richard's ideal that a junior party (the Lancastrians) who had no right to what was not theirs should not be allowed to get even half of it just to stop them whingeing.

Well, the two armies met at Redmore,in Leicestershire, and, more through crooked conspiracy among a few Lords than anything else, Richard was defeated and killed. Henry Tudor, the first man in history to guide his army from the rear,had looked on from his position of relative safety while King Richard went down in the thick of the fray trying to get to him.

And so,the two Houses united under Henry VII,and the people,who should have followed Richard's ideal, found themselves in a new Dark Age. Serves them right. Richard passed into history,the last king of the Middle Ages,the last of the Plantagenet Kings,the last king to die fighting in battle, and,at just 32,the youngest of our actual reigning monarchs at the time of his death.So afraid were the Tudors of his memory, and of his heirs' vastly superior royal title to the crown,that they blackened his name at every opportunity,turning him at length,once peoples memories had adequately faded, into the hunch-backed murdering monster of legend.

However, a possible twist to this element of the story,which has captivated our imagination for centuries, lies in the fact that the two sons of Edward IV, the young Edward V and his brother,the famous 'Princes in the Tower',mysteriously drop out of the story,and disappear from history altogether,somewhere during the turbulent years between Richard's brief reign and the demise of Perkin Warbeck.***

The mystery of what on earth happened to them, has formed both the focus for countless intriguing theories down through the centuries, and our individual opinions of Richard III,this Northern Heathcliff who tried and failed to hang on to life in the aftermath of the death of his big brother.

-- Michael  Marshall

* Later renamed Bosworth Field.

**The probable origin of this animosity is that George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester both knew that Edward IV's children were illegitimate, and Elizabeth Wydevill knew that they knew. If she could persuade Edward IV to destroy Clarence, then she could also persuade her own son Edward V to destroy Gloucester. Gloucester knew all this well enough.

*** In the late 1490s,in the middle of Henry Tudor's reign and almost 15 years after Richard's death, a Pretender named Perkin Warbeck rose up in rebellion against Tudor. He claimed to be the Yorkist Prince Richard, youngest of the Princes in the Tower. He probably wasn't, but nobody knows for sure. The rebellion failed.

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