RICHARD THE THIRD Richard was the eleventh child and eighth and youngest son of Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, and Lady Cicely Nevill. He was born at Fotheringhay Castle on 2 October 1452. Fotheringhay is also famous for being the venue for the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots. Richard was only eight years old when his brother Edward IV was proclaimed king in March 1461, and he was created Duke of Gloucester on the eve of Edward’s coronation. He proved himself a loyal and loving brother and fought bravely in the later stages of the civil war culminating in the battle of Tewkesbury. The deaths of Edward, Prince of Wales, and Henry VI have both been laid at his door, but the evidence is circumstantial and like everything else to Richard’s discredit highly coloured by the Tudor propagandists, Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More. In 1472 Richard married Anne Nevill, the younger daughter of Warwick ‘the King-maker’. Her elder sister, Isabel, had married Richard’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, three years earlier. These marriages caused a rift between the brothers as George was desirous of retaining all the Warwick estates for himself. Richard was suspected of being implicated in Clarence’s death in the Tower in 1478 but the charge remains unproven. Edward IV’s death made Richard Lord High Protector of the Realm for his nephew Edward V, and he set out from York to meet Edward, who was coming from Ludlow, and proceeded to London. Edward was conducted by his maternal uncle Earl Rivers and his half-brother Lord Richard Grey. When the parties met up at Stony Stratford, these two were seized by Richard, who did not trust the Woodville faction, and he took charge of the young king. On entering London, Richard presented Edward to the Lord Mayor and citizens as their king and declared his complete loyalty to his brother’s son. The Woodville party was overthrown and Lord Hastings – who had previously supported Richard – grew apprehensive as he gained power and sought, with some members of the Council, to wrest Edward from Richard’s control. Apprised of their intentions, Richard had Hastings and his fellow plotters arrested at a meeting of the Council and they were summarily beheaded on 13 June 1483. Their executions were followed twelve days later by those of Rivers and Grey, also without trial. On 22 June 1483 Richard was offered the crown by Parliament and proclaimed king on 26 June. Ten days later Richard and Anne were crowned in Westminster Abbey by Cardinal Bouchier. A great sorrow was the death of Richard’s only legitimate son, another Edward, Prince of Wales, who sickly life of ten years ended at Middleham Castle in Yorkshire on 9 April 1484, and was followed a year later by that of Queen Anne. Richard then designated his nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as his heir-presumptive. He was the eldest son of Richard’s second sister, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. Meanwhile the Lancastrians were being rallied under the leadership of Henry Tudor, who had landed at Milford Haven on 7 August 1484 and traveled through Wales gathering support. Richard was in the north and proceeded to Leicester with his army. On 21 August he rode out to meet Henry who was encamped near Market Bosworth. Battle was joined on the morning of 22nd August. The King’s army was twice the size of Henry’s, but the turning point of the battle came when Lord Stanley and his 7000 men deserted Richard and went over to Henry. Richard fought bravely to the last. He could have escaped, but proudly declared “ I will die King of England”. And so he did. The crest crown from his helmet fell or was hacked off and rolled away under a Hawthorn bush, where Stanley picked it up and placed it n the head of the victorious Henry. The battle had only lasted 2 hours. Richard’s body, stripped of its armour, was laid across the back of a pack-horse and a sad little procession wended its way back to Leicester, arriving at nightfall. He was buried in Grey friars Abbey in Leicester, but it proved to be a temporary resting place for at the Reformation Richard’s bones were dug up And thrown into the River Soar. That Richard has gone down in history as the archetype ‘wicked uncle’ and an evil monster is due to the hatchet job carried out by Tudor propagandists in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII and perfected by Shakespeare in the reign of Elizabeth I. Richard had to wait nearly 300 years for his first apologist and found a doughty champion in Horace Walpole, who in 1768 published his Historic Doubts on Richard III. A flourishing Richard III Society under the patronage of another Richard , Duke of Gloucester, holds regular meetings and lectures top promote the cause and enthusiastically visits Ricardian sites.
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