Short History Of... - Richard the Third

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

Richard the Third was the last English king to die in battle. A key figure in the Wars of the Roses, he is also prime suspect in the enduring mystery of the Princes in the Tower. Shakespeare’s classic villain, he is immortalized as an anti-hero, cunning and monstrous. But is his reputation fair? What was his route to the throne, and what led to his famous demise on the battlefield? And how did the excavation of an unassuming car park in Leicester see him return to the spotlight after more than 500 years? This is a Short History of Richard the Third. Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Matt Lewis, mediaeval historian and author of Richard the Third, Loyalty Binds Me. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is August 22, 1485, a morning that changes the course of English history. Sitting astride his horse and dressed in full armour, King Richard III of England canters up a hillside overlooking a battlefield near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, the heart of his kingdom. Spread out below, his forces, under the banner of the House of York, are fighting those of the rival House of Lancaster. They have reached that stubborn stage of the battle. The early bravado of cheering and charging has passed. Now there is only a grim will to survive. Every soldier has blood in his eyes.

Richard's task is to destroy the man who would be king, a rival who has just arrived from Brittany, a young Lancastrian named Henry Tudor. But there are three sides in this battle, three armies, and one has chosen not to fight. The troops belonging to Thomas Lord Stanley wait on an adjacent hillside. Stanley is a close ally of Richard, but he's also Henry Tudor's stepfather. So, whose side will he take today? Last night, Richard made the risky move of sending a message to Stanley, threatening to execute one of his sons unless he supported him. The attempt at blackmail received a cold response.

A reply from Stanley saying, I have more sons. Now Richard understands that his ally intends to sit out the worst of the fighting. Rather than making a decisive move, the powerful Northern Baron would rather jump on the winner's bandwagon. Richard is on his own. He snaps down the visor of his helmet and he rejoins his cavalry. Together they charge, cutting a swathe towards the inexperienced Henry Tudor and scattering the ranks. Richard gallops behind enemy lines. He cuts down Henry's standard-bearer with a lance.

Then he draws his sword and hunts for Henry himself, scything through men as he goes. He fights furiously until he senses a change in atmosphere. Distant cheers and the thunder of hooves. Lord Stanley's men are charging down the hillside at last. But then Richard realizes Stanley is riding to Henry's aid. The king is out on a limb, behind enemy lines with four thousand fresh troops coming his way. Though outnumbered, Richard fights on until suddenly his horse

stumbles. Together they fall, crashing down in a tangle of armor onto sodden ground. Unable to right himself, his stricken horse is soon slaughtered. Swords close in on all sides. Richard struggles to his feet in the bog, but a blow knocks him to his knees. His helmet and crown are ripped from his head. Another heavy blow lands from behind. Through the bloody haze, he takes a last look at the blue sky of an English summer's day. He falls onto all fours before a sword strikes from above. King Richard III dies in the mud.

Lord Stanley rides up and leaps from his horse, pushing men aside to let him through. He's interested in only one thing, and, snatching up the crown, he strides away to find Henry Tudor and make him king. A few soldiers remain with Richard while the others watch the impromptu coronation. They relieve the corpse of its armor, pocketing choice valuables. One man unsheathes his dagger and makes his comrades laugh by pretending to fight the dead king, ducking and weaving before jabbing the body between the ribs with his blade. Then Richard's corpse is stripped naked and they flop it onto a pack horse with arms and legs hanging either side, bare backside to the sky.

They intend to parade the body. Everyone must see that the Yorkist king is dead. To send him on his way, a soldier plunges the tip of his sword into the corpse's right buttock. With laughter ringing across Bosworth Field, Richard sets off on his final journey to Leicester. his final journey to Leicester. Richard III is the last English king to die in battle. The victor, Henry Tudor, founds a powerful dynasty that takes his name. But even after he slips into the wings of history, it is Richard III who remains center stage as a major character. He is king for only two years, but his reputation lasts centuries. Not just famous, but infamous. Richard is prime suspect in the enduring mystery of the princes in the tower,

the two young heirs to the throne who vanished and may have been murdered. He is Shakespeare's classic villain, an anti-hero whose desperation in battle makes him cry the immortal line, a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse. But what was his route to the throne and what led to his famous demise on the battlefield? Was he really the monster Shakespeare portrayed him to be? And how did the excavation of an unassuming car park in Leicester see him return to the spotlight after more than 500 years? I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of Richard III.

Richard is born in 1452 in Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire. The stronghold in central England is impressive but also comfortable, as befits a powerful family. His mother is Cecily Neville, from an influential line of nobles. His father is Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of York, who will become a key player in the bloody Wars of the Roses, which are soon to begin. Two rival branches of the House of Plantagenet become locked in a game of thrones. Both want to rule. Richard's family, descending from the House of York, are pitted against the House of Lancaster, headed by King Henry VI.

Civil strife is the backdrop to their lives and will be the cause of most of their deaths. Matt Lewis is a medieval historian and author of the book Richard III, Loyalty Binds Me. He's born into this world where trouble is about to erupt. Hindsight will tell us we're about to move into the Wars of the Roses and his father is right at the forefront of that, of opposition to the Royal House of Lancaster. So yeah, it is a tricky world and he's literally born into war for the first few years of his life. He's brought up as a small child in the family nursery at Fotheringay Castle, the House of York's power base at

Fotheringay in Northamptonshire. But we really see it hitting him when we get to 1459. So he's six years old and the family moved to Ludlow, which is one of York's major fortresses. They move there because it's a much more defensible place to be. They've obviously decided that fathering age just isn't safe anymore, which speaks to how bad things have got. But Richard, we know, passes his seventh birthday, so at the beginning of October 1459, in Ludlow, as York is raising another army. And for a six-year-old boy passing his seventh birthday, surrounded by all of this excitement, I think it must have been incredibly thrilling for him to see all of these armed men pouring into Ludlow Castle, and they're all there for his dad. It speaks to how important his family are.

It speaks to how important his family are. Richard is the fourth surviving son of the Duke of York. But this is a treacherous time. He watches his older brothers, Edward and Edmund, train for combat. A few days after Richard's seventh birthday, he and the third brother, George, are left at the castle when his father's rebel army march out for Ludlow. The troops get as far as Worcester, a day's march away. There they hear that the king's forces are coming. Engaging in battle with the royal army would be an act of treason.

Instead, they decide to live to fight another day. Richard's father and his two older brothers flee into the night. So Richard gets up and all of these impressive, exciting men have gone. And then Henry VI allows the Lancastrian army, the royal army, free reign in Ludlow and the town is set. The chronicles talk about people going wet-shod in wine in the streets. That's a fantastic phrase, but they're obviously all so drunk, they're robbing everything that they can streets. That's a fantastic phrase, but they're obviously all so drunk, they're robbing everything that they can find, they break into the castle, they steal everything from the castle. And, you know, Richard is confronted with this, he's watching this,

doubtless, I'd imagine, holding his mom's hand, wondering what on earth is going on. With Richard's father exiled in Ireland and other family members running to Calais in France, King Henry VI responds with an act of attainder. Richard Senior is stripped of the family's property and titles. His dad is declared a traitor. His brothers are declared traitors. His uncle and cousin are traitors. They lose all of their lands and titles in Parliament.

Richard's mom manages to negotiate an income, a fairly good income, for her and her smaller children as not having offended against the king. They're clearly still viewed at that age as being free from any kind of blame for what their parents have done. So Richard, in the space of a few weeks there, has really seen the turning of fortune. He's enjoyed all of that excitement and then had it torn away from him. And all of a sudden he's a prisoner and his family have fallen from grace. So I think you have to allow for the impact that that will have on a young boy growing up. I think you have to see a man who is aware of just how fragile security can be, how quickly everything that you have can be whipped away from you and can be lost. And so he grew up believing the only one who can provide his own security is him.

In 1460, when Richard is eight, the Lancastrians catch up with his father. But killing him in battle isn't enough. They also cut off his head and hang it on the city wall at York, complete with a paper crown. Richard's brother Edmund is executed too. Young Richard is sent for safety to the Netherlands, but within weeks the eldest brother Edward wins a decisive victory against King Henry's troops at the Battle of Towton. Richard returns for his coronation at Westminster Abbey. He remains for a time in the care of the Archbishop of Canterbury,

and then goes to live in the lavish household of the Earl of Warwick in Yorkshire. Now an adolescent and brother of King Edward IV, Richard trains as a soldier and courtier. He learns hunting and hawking, dancing and diplomacy. He meets Warwick's daughter and heir, Anne Neville, while living at Middleham Castle in Yorkshire. We know that they met during that time in the late 1460s, at the very least once, specifically because we have a seating plan for a feast at which Richard is sitting at the same table as Anne. So you know we can see them there kind of in their mid-teens maybe growing up around each other and it's slightly tempting to then think about you know they fell madly in love

they were teenage sweethearts, childhood first love, all of that kind of thing and that's possible but we have no evidence for that, no proof of it. The conflict between the houses of York and Lancaster sees the crown passed back and forth between Richard's elder brother, Edward IV, and his rival, Henry VI. Anne's father, Earl Warwick, switches allegiance from Edward to support the Lancastrian Henry, and seals the deal by marrying Anne to Henry's son. But a year later, Warwick is killed in battle. Henry VI is deposed once again and dies, probably murdered, in the Tower of London. His son, Anne's husband, also dies by the sword. Suddenly widowed at the age of fourteen, Anne is put under house arrest in London. She's placed with her own sister, Isabel Neville, in a home that ought to be friendly.

Except Anne and Isabel are also rivals, equal heirs to their dead father's fortune. The Earl of Warwick was an extremely rich man, owning castles, estates, and land. But that inheritance can only be claimed by a married sister. The estate must be held by a male spouse. With Anne widowed, the entire fortune will be awarded to Isabel's husband. By the incestuous nature of nobility, that husband is George, Richard's older brother. If Anne were to marry again, then half the Warwick inheritance would be hers, or at least her new husband's. It's not clear if Richard is motivated by affection or greed, but he secures

Anne's release from his brother and her sister. Then he requests permission from the king to marry the young heiress. She's a young widow. She's vulnerable. Some of the sources talk about her being imprisoned by George and Isabel to stop anyone marrying her, to stop them getting her half of the inheritance kind of thing. So some of the sources talk about Richard rescuing this damsel in distress, which is quite at odds with the reputation that he then has later on. The Crowland Chronicle tells this story that George and Isabella are keeping Anne effectively prisoner in a house in London and that Richard kind of breaks her out. And then he puts her in the church at St. Martin's-le-Grand. So he's not kind of whisking her away and forcing her to marry him. He puts her in a church with rites of sanctuary and it's almost like he's

allowing her then to make up her own mind. So what people don't often allow for is the possibility that Anne approached Richard with the idea of marriage. Because if she's looking for a way to protect herself in this New Yorkist England, her sister is married to the king's brother and they're trying to keep her away from her inheritance. Who is married to the king's brother and they're trying to keep her away from her inheritance. Who could possibly rival the king's brother, if not the other king's brother, you know, the king's younger brother? So there is a strong imperative for Anne to want to marry Richard too. And so I think what we can say about this is it's a mutually beneficial match and it's politically an incredibly successful marriage. We can't really talk about did they love each other,

did they really get on with each other. What we can say is that they worked together incredibly well and were politically very, very successful in the north of England. The couple marry at Westminster Abbey in the summer of 1472. Very few details of the ceremony are recorded, including an exact date. Richard is a few months shy of 20. Anne is 16. It is said they walk barefoot through the streets of London on a ribbon of red cloth. Now the two York brothers, Richard and George, are married to the two Neville sisters, Anne and Isabel. George later claims that Anne was

forced into the marriage. If true, that would invalidate their union, meaning that he, George, would keep the entire Warwick inheritance. But it is not proven. The true nature of Richard and Anne's relationship remains mysterious. Anne in herself is frustratingly absent from the sources. We just don't have anything that really talks about her. We don't know her views on everything that happened in 1470 and 71 when she's married to the Lancastrian Prince of Wales and then widowed young and then marries Richard. We don't know whether she wanted that. We don't know whether that was pushed upon Richard. We don't know whether she wanted that.

We don't know whether that was pushed upon her. We don't know whether that was her only option to get some security. Throughout the 1470s, we don't really see any sense of her personality. We just don't know who she is. And even when she becomes queen and Richard is king, we don't know how she feels about that. Did she want to be queen? Was it exciting? Was it terrifying? don't know how she feels about that. Did she want to be queen? Was it exciting? Was it terrifying? As a reward for his loyalty, the king appoints Richard to be Lord of the North. He grants him land belonging to Earl Warwick, including Middleham Castle, where he first met Anne. Richard expands his estates in the North by sacrificing his southern holdings. his estates in the North by sacrificing his southern holdings.

He moves up to the North then, and he lives the next decade or so of his life, sort of ruling the North for Edward. So you've got this region which is quite a distance from London, quite remote from the authority of the king. For Edward, it's quite nice to have someone there who he can clearly trust. And I think what we see in that 10 years is Richard, he clearly builds on what he learned from Warwick. He knows some of those connections. He knows how important it is to build those networks of power throughout these families in the North. You see lots of people who were in Warwick service continuing in Richard's service. And that 10 years is really the building of an absolutely incredible relationship between Richard and the North. An immense reputation for Richard was widely respected, bordering on loved, had championed law and order and equity

and championed the cause of the common man, often against their social superiors. We see lots of instances of Richard doing that. So he really crafts this incredible relationship as a good lord, a good medieval nobleman. By now, Richard must be aware of a physical condition that affects his back. He has scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, which will eventually cause one shoulder to be higher than the other. He is often described as slight because of his stoop. often described as slight because of his stoop. Also, he seems small in comparison to his brother, Edward IV, who is six foot four, England's tallest king. But the scoliosis never stops Richard training, riding, and fighting. And we know that he hides it quite well throughout his life. There is no reference to it while he's still alive. Nobody talks about it.

But Richard has to grow up thinking, what will people think of me if they know I've got scoliosis? Maybe he feels he needs to prove himself more than most people. Richard and Anne have one child who survives infancy. A son, another Edward, is born in 1473, or perhaps as late as 1476. He is a sickly boy, who stays in the safety of Middleham Castle. Though Richard has two illegitimate children, both born before his marriage to Anne, Edward is his only rightful heir. Although popular in the North, Richard's growing influence in London creates many enemies. But Richard's troubles are overshadowed by those of his third brother, George. In 1477, George's wife, Isabel, dies shortly after childbirth.

He is convinced she was poisoned and accuses one of her ladies in waiting. He performs a sham trial and executes the woman for murder. Except only the king has the power to hold a trial. George should have taken his case to the sheriff. Edward accuses his younger brother of l'es-majesté, assuming the power of a king. That's treason. George has long been a thorn in Edward's side. He has traded allegiances and maneuvered to seize the throne. So now Edward locks him in the tower.

Richard's role in this conflict between his elder brothers is disputed. Richard and George grew up together, plus their wives are sisters. Some say Richard orchestrates the campaign to bring down George. Others claim that Richard was powerless to stop it, that George had been plotting against the King's family and it may have been the Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, who orders him to be dealt with once and for all. Either way, on February 18, 1478, George is executed. In the great game of succession, there are now only two of the four York brothers left.

The eldest, King Edward IV, and the youngest, Richard. But just as George's excesses of behavior caught up with him, so too do Edward's. A giant of a man, to many he must seem invincible. But in March 1483, Edward falls ill during a fishing trip. Ten days later he's dead, at the age of forty. The cause is never confirmed, but chroniclers suggest malaria, stroke, or appendicitis, or even poisoning by imported French wine. Centuries later, the politician and historian Sir Winston Churchill puts the king's demise down to debauchery. Edward was a heavy drinker, a glutton, and a womanizer,

which may have taken a toll on his health. His death is as sudden as it is shocking. His eldest son and heir is only 12 years old. The boy, also called Edward, is being raised in the footsteps of his father at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire. The moment his father dies, he becomes Edward V, England's latest king. In his will, the dead king named his brother, Richard, as Lord Protector, essentially an interim head of state until the child is old enough to rule. But the young king lives with his uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, the brother of the widowed Queen Elizabeth Woodville. The Woodvilles play the game of thrones like chess masters. There are rumors they will not cede power to Richard, but attempt to keep it with the queen's young son as puppet

king. But to do this, they'd need to remove the Lord Protector from the playing board. Richard is at his base in York when his brother the King dies. There are whispers that the Woodvilles purposely delay the news being delivered to Richard to allow them more time to prepare a checkmate. It is April, 1483. A column of horses and wagons stretches for miles along Country Lane. In front, knights are clad in armor and carry swords. One rider holds aloft the king's banner, a bright blue and red flag with gold lions and fleur-de-lis. They can be heard coming for miles. Local people run to the roadside to witness the sight.

For most commoners, this may be the first and last chance to see their monarch. But though they'd expected a parade, this looks more like an invasion. The procession comprises some two thousand soldiers and cartloads of weapons. And it is solemn. Riding a pony and dwarfed by his guard, twelve-year-old King Edward V is en route to his father's funeral, and, sometime after that, his coronation. But it will be a week-long journey from Ludlow to London. Meanwhile, on another unremarkable country lane, Richard is riding hard. He has travelled down 150 miles from York to rendezvous with the king in

Northampton, north of London. It was only a short distance away, at Fotheringay Castle, that Richard spent his own early childhood. It feels apt that this is where he will take care of his young nephew. But after hours in the saddle, when Richard arrives in Northampton, a messenger greets him with bad news. The boy is not here as agreed. Richard sent instructions to Earl Rivers to meet here, but the retinue has gathered instead near a village called Stoney Stratford. Richard is furious.

He is Lord Protector. It is his right to know the king's whereabouts. This is a slight to his authority. He flings aside the refreshments offered to him and curses the devious Woodvilles. If they seize control, he will certainly lose influence, and possibly his head. The next morning, Richard rides into Stoney Stratford to meet Earl Rivers, but the boy is still not there. Before Rivers can make more excuses, Richard accuses him of risking the safety of the king. His orders were to protect the boy. He has 2,000 guards at his disposal for this sole purpose, and yet he has split them up, leaving the King vulnerable. Richard orders Rivers and his closest allies to be arrested.

Then he moves on to find the boy. A few days later, when the Lord Protector rides into London beside King Edward V, it is a show of unity. But the reunion of uncle and nephew is not to last long. Earl Rivers is taken to Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, where he will later be executed. But in London, Richard faces growing disquiet. Edward obviously viewed Richard as someone who would come down from the North and solve problems. Hindsight will tell us that isn't how it played out.

But in the heat of those moments in April, May, June 1483, there was already fighting and disruption in the streets of London before Richard had even left the North. He was coming south to stop what was already going on. He doesn't cause problems in London. He's seen as the solution. And so then everything that plays out afterwards depends entirely on your view of Richard, what you think he's up to and what's motivating him at various stages. And all I would say is that he's a 30-year-old man at this point. We know a lot about the first 30 years of his life. We know a lot about the last 10 years of his rule in the North. And nowhere do I see a man who is underhanded, deceitful, vicious, nasty, who reacts violently to problems. You just

don't see that anywhere in those 30 years. Again, it's possible to see a Richard who is thinking he's fending off a threat and doing the right thing. It's possible to see a Richard who is grabbing at every little thread of power he needs to make himself king. to see a Richard who is grabbing at every little thread of power he needs to make himself king. Richard accompanies 12-year-old Edward V to the Tower of London. At this time, the Tower is a royal residence, a palace, as much as a prison. The boy is housed here to prepare for his coronation, which is due to take place in May. But the boy king's mother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, is concerned enough by the turn of events to take sanctuary at Westminster Abbey with her

other children. Richard says he is busy planning the coronation, but then announces a delay. In June, the Archbishop of Canterbury persuades Elizabeth to allow her second son, nine-year-old Richard of Shrewsbury, to join his older brother. Now there are two princes in the Tower. Then a bombshell drops. The Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral claims that the recently deceased king, Edward IV, had been betrothed to another woman before he married Elizabeth Woodville. A pre-contract, even one made in the height of passion,

perhaps to persuade a woman into bed, is still legally binding. It means that in the eyes of the Church, the union between the late Edward and Elizabeth is void. Their offspring are illegitimate. Their eldest son, Edward V, no longer has a right to the throne. His coronation is called off, and ten days later, Richard himself is crowned. Richard's coronation was incredibly successful, incredibly well attended. So I think there was lots of hope around Richard's coronation was incredibly successful, incredibly well attended. So I think there was lots of hope

around Richard's coronation. Again, with hindsight, we will know that that won't play out. It won't turn out to be the case. But nevertheless, if you were there on the 6th of July, 1483, it must have felt like a moment that was full of promise. Richard's coronation was the first time that the monarch gave their oath in English. It started off being given in Latin. And for the hundred or so years before Richard III's coronation, it was given in French. But Richard gives his oath in English. It started off being given in Latin and for the hundred or so years before Richard III's coronation, it was given in French. But Richard gives his oath in English and then throughout his reign, there are several instances where we see him referring back to the oath that he made at his coronation. So he clearly took that seriously and he clearly did it in English because he wanted people to be able to understand the monarch's oath is where they promise to rule

with justice and with mercy and to protect the rights of the church and to protect the rights of the people. But the former queen, Elizabeth Woodville, does not attend. She will never see her two sons again. The last confirmed sighting of the princes in the tower is in June 1483, when they're outside playing with bows and arrows in the grounds beside the River Thames. What happens next is one of the greatest mysteries of history. It is widely assumed that the princes were murdered, but under whose orders? Fingers point to Richard because he was the immediate beneficiary. He has access to the tower, allies and servants who could have got to the boys,

and crucially, the influence to silence any witnesses. Richard would almost certainly have known what happened to the princes, whether that was that they were murdered, whether that was that they were moved to different places to keep them safe. There will have been a core of people who knew. I would argue if he killed the princes to prevent them being a threat, the best way he could have done that was to show their bodies, to prove that they were dead. Yes, it's distasteful to show the bodies of two young children, but it's what was done at this time. You know, Warwick's body was displayed, his brother's body was displayed, Edward IV's body had been displayed. That's how you prove that this person is 100% dead and then not coming back.

He could have blamed natural causes, he could have blamed somebody else. There are other suspects. Some say the Lancastrians had a motive to remove the two York heirs. It is possible that another noble, Margaret Beaufort, wanted the princes out of the way in order to clear a path for her son, Henry Tudor, to take the throne. Also there is the Duke of Buckingham, an ally of Richard with his own claim to the throne. But whoever is behind it, no bodies are found. The boys simply vanish. It has every element of a fairy

tale. It's really Hansel and Gretel. It's the wicked uncle and the two young innocent children. It's a real trope from stories. But having studied Richard for those first 30 years of his life, I just don't see a man whose first response to a moment of crisis is to think, well, crikey, the only way I can fix this is to murder two children. The consensus is if they were killed, it was probably around September 1483. So by this point, Richard is already king, he's being crowned. He doesn't need them to be dead because Parliament declares them illegitimate and he's now the rightful king and he's being crowned and you can't undo a coronation. And I think, to some extent, we almost need to approach this idea of the boys go missing.

So we're talking missing persons case, really, rather than a definite murder case. Over the years, there are stories that the princes survived in exile. In 1487, Yorkists claimed that a man named Lambert Simnel is Edward V, now aged 18. Later, in 1490, someone called Perkin Warbeck claims to be the younger prince, Richard of Shrewsbury. But Warbeck is exposed as an imposter and hanged. There are also theories that Richard is involved in the disappearance of the two princes, but not as a killer. He has to deal with these two boys, but that doesn't mean he has to kill them.

I would think the obvious thing to do is to send Edward V north to the Council of the North that Richard establishes. And there are vague hints in the paperwork for this that there are some children talked about being there at breakfast. And there are vague hints in the paperwork for this that there are some children talked about being there at breakfast. Richard has had 10 years of building these networks of loyalty to him. He has castles packed with men who are utterly loyal to him. So you keep it secret where they are. And that kind of explains why we don't have loads of records of them being moved around. I think he had plenty of options. So to think that his immediate first thought is I'll murder my nephews, the sons of my brother who I loved, the man who I thought of as a father figure, who was responsible for years of my security, I'll repay that by murdering his small children. I just don't buy it. I don't see that in Richard. But it becomes a historical

truism that Richard III murdered the two princes. So where did that belief come from? It starts in the early 1500s when the author and politician Sir Thomas More begins to write about the scandal. He abandons his text but his nephew completes the account and publishes it posthumously under his uncle's name. That story is then picked up by another writer, William Shakespeare. The story kind of builds. Every time you rewrite it, you've got to add something. Otherwise, why is anyone going to read it? It's got to get a bit more salacious, a bit more dirty and gory, and Richard's got to be a bit more horrible.

And that's just what reaches its pinnacle in Shakespeare at the end of that century. Richard, by then, is the absolute epitome of the Machiavellian evil prince who is just determined to make himself powerful. But that's just really the culmination of 100 years of story building around Richard. I mean, I should say, I absolutely love Shakespeare's Richard III. I think it's a brilliant play. Richard as the kind of anti-hero.

But I think watching Shakespeare and treating it as factual history is like watching Downton Abbey and saying now I understand everything that happened in the 1920s and 30s in England. It was a piece of entertainment for the theatre. Some historians argue that Shakespeare is guilty of propaganda, depicting the last Plantagenet king, Richard, as history's ultimate villain in order to win favour with the current Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I. Others claim that his Richard III is a thinly veiled satire on contemporary politics. When the play is written, around 1591, Queen Elizabeth is ailing and has no heir. There is insecurity about who will be the next monarch.

Amid this potential power vacuum, a statesman named Robert Cecil is gaining power and influence in Westminster. And what we know about Robert Cecil is that not a lot of people liked him. And what we know about Robert Cecil is that not a lot of people liked him. We know that he had kyphosis. So the forward hunch of the spine, what Shakespeare calls a bunchback. Richard has the scoliosis, sideways curvature. But when you think about Shakespeare's villain, it's with that forward hunch of his back. Robert Cecil had kyphosis documented. So he's considered a fairly scheming man who suffers

from a physical disability and is plotting the accession of someone that Shakespeare might have considered not to be the right king. I mean, that is just the plot of Richard III, isn't it? I think Shakespeare would have expected a contemporary Elizabethan audience who went to the theatre to watch this brand new play, to see his Richard III kind of shuffle and limp onto stage and be kind of nudging each other and going, hey, it's Robert Cecil. That's Robert Cecil. I just don't think that villain is really Richard III. But the damage to Richard's reputation outlives the politics of the Elizabethan age. Back in his own time, soon after Richard III's coronation in 1483, the whispers of dissent are starting up again.

He comes as a grown man with an heir. Everything looks like it's going to be fine now for years to come. So then when his only son dies, when Edward dies in 1484, it creates this huge vacuum, lots of questions around what does this mean? Who is the heir to the throne now? What happens when Richard dies? And it's never a great position to be in for a king, for people to start thinking about what's going to happen when you've died. You want them to be thinking about the great things that you're doing while you're alive and all of the stuff that you're going to achieve. So dynastically, he's then in a mess, a real pickle.

And this, I think, is also food for his enemies. a mess, a real pickle. And this, I think, is also food for his enemies. Though some hoped Richard's reign would bring stability to the realm, the Wars of the Roses rumble on. In 1484, widowed and without an heir, he sets out once again into battle. The Lancastrian Henry Tudor has returned from Brittany with an army of French mercenaries. Richard must stop him. So he doesn't know where Henry Tudor is going to come from. When he hears that Henry Tudor has landed in West Wales, he begins gathering men to him. So Henry marches up the west coast of Wales, cuts across inland, gets to Shrewsbury.

And it's pretty clear to me that what Henry is trying to do is march on London. Because if you get to London, you hold the capital, you hold power. Richard is forced to march out before he's mustered all of his forces to cut Henry off at Bosworth. Bosworth is quite an odd battle in the sense that there are effectively three armies there, because you've got the Stanleys, who are an incredibly powerful faction led by Thomas Lord Stanley who is Henry Tudor's stepfather. He's married to Margaret Beaufort. Stanley is hedging his bets. Effectively if you take the Stanleys out of the equation Richard has almost the same number of men as Henry Tudor. The king is reliant on Lord Stanley. A fellow northerner Stanley had the honour of carrying the Great Mace at Richard's coronation,

while his wife, Margaret Beaufort, held Queen Anne's train. But a lot can change in two years. Margaret Beaufort's son is Henry Tudor, Richard's opponent at Bosworth. There's a source that talks about Richard being really excited to get to the battle, and I wonder whether there's a sense that he almost rushed there, believing that he was going to win, and miscalculating perhaps the amount of men that had joined Tudor on his march but also the way that the Stanleys were going to behave on the day of Bosworth. It's quite unusual in the story of Richard given that everyone believes he was this evil cruel man that there is absolute

unanimity in the sources that he was the last man standing, he died fighting bravely alone in the thickest press of his enemies, as Polydor Virgil puts it. There is no hint of a coward about him at all. I think sometimes people read The Horse, A Horse, My Kingdom for a Horse as Richard desperately wanting to get away from the fight. It isn't that in Shakespeare, and it certainly isn't that in any of the sources. Richard fights bravely to the very end and goes down as a chivalric prince and a famed warrior, really. It's almost an odd closure to his story

that even those who paint him as the worst kind of tyrannical child-murdering monster allow him this moment at the end in which he is heroic. The crown is placed, still warm from Richard, on the head of Henry Tudor. And in that moment, a new dynasty begins. Left behind in Bosworth, the body of Richard is stripped and defiled, stabbed and jabbed with blades. After a parade to Leicester, his broken remains are hastily buried at the city's Greyfriars Monastery,

in a rough grave under the choir of the church. Ten years later, Henry VII pays for a tomb to mark the burial site. But that too is lost in 1538, when the next Tudor king, his descendant Henry VIII, instructs the dissolution of the monasteries. Greyfriars in Leicester, along with 900 religious sites around the country,

is torn down. Nothing but the boundary wall survives. The town develops over the course of 500 years. Buildings are razed and removed as architectural fashions and human needs change. In the 20th century, a school, offices and a car park are built on the site. The burial place of Richard III is lost to time. No more than a legend. A myth. Until the summer of 2012. Philippa Langley is walking along a pavement in Leicester,

one of England's oldest cities. It's a hot day in August. The route leads her along Peacock Lane, to a road called New Street. Here, she enters a car park. It serves the nearby Department of Social Services, housed in an unremarkable 1960s office block. Vehicles are lined up in bays alongside a brick wall that looks much older than the surrounding buildings.

The bustle of everyday life proceeds as she walks to the north end of the car park. Eight years of work have brought her here. Eight years of work have brought her here, poring over maps and texts, raising thousands of pounds in funding, masterminding the project called Finding Richard. Now, a team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester has permission to dig up this car park and search for a lost king. But where is he? The exact location is forgotten Not only the grave, but the entire church In the 1950s, an excavation in nearby Greyfriars Street found nothing But after more detective work, Philippa is sure they were looking too far to the east The ancient Greyfriars precinct was large And she thinks its church was more likely to be in the north.

Philippa stops in her tracks. Ahead, marked on the tarmac, is a large letter R. She looks around. There are no other letters. Only one letter R, in white paint, in front of a parking bay. A chill runs up her spine. A whisper from the past. A sign, perhaps. R for Richard. When diggers arrive on the 25th of August 2012, she directs them to this spot. Within hours, they find the foundations of the lost church.

Then they find a bone, a lower leg, with its foot missing. Soon it is identified as a grave. As the excavation progresses, a skeleton is revealed. There is no coffin. The male body seems to have been flung into the hole, lying with its neck cricked against the side. Its hands are crossed over one hip, as though the wrists were tied together. The spine is malformed, twisted to the right so that one shoulder sits higher than the other. The skull is smashed at the base of the neck by a blow that would have been powerful enough to kill.

All the historical clues are present. The historians will need a DNA test to confirm what the circumstantial evidence suggests. They have found the king. It falls to me as lead archaeologist in the search for Richard III to announce the conclusion we have reached concerning the identity of the Greyfriars skeleton. Ladies and gentlemen, it is the academic conclusion of the University of Leicester that the individual exhumed at Greyfriars is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE King of England. News that a long-lost King has been found under a car park makes headlines around the world. Further analysis proves that Richard had scoliosis and died of violent head injuries. Nicks on the bone show how his body was defiled after death, stabbed in the ribs and buttocks. The discovery of the ruined remains prompts a new sympathy for Shakespeare's supervillain. It's one of those odd things because it kind of does speak to our belief in some of the myths and stories around Richard III.

Lots of people believed his bones were thrown in the River Soar because that's a story that had been told for centuries, but clearly it's not true. Lots of people believed he didn't have the scoliosis or the kind of bunchback that Shakespeare gives him, based on the fact that lots of the portraiture that you can see on x-rays, that the raised shoulder was added after the portrait was originally done. So it was thought that that was just propaganda to work against Richard. But we know now he did have scoliosis. So it's incredible how we kind of rely on some parts of this story that are myth that can be disproven with fact. And I would say the idea that Richard murdered his nephews is just that. It may be true.

We simply don't know. We can't have conviction that the princes in the tower died at Richard's hands in 1483. And I think his rediscovery, it's a reminder as well that we can go back and we can question some of this kind of received wisdom and understood history. And we can go back to the sources and actually find that there is a different truth behind all of that. In March 2015, the remains of Richard III are reburied in Leicester Cathedral. The ceremony is a remarkable end to a 500-year-old story. But some mysteries remain. What happened to the princes in the tower?

And what kind of man was Richard? Was he Shakespeare's monstrous villain? Or a loyal brother and husband? A rightful king? A man whose determination to rule epitomized the spirit of his age? There is a case here to be investigated. I don't know for certain whether Richard did the things that he was accused of or not, but what I'm interested in is getting as close to the truth as I can to try and understand it better. And I feel like the closer I get, the less I believe Richard was a monster. I think some people probably have the opposite experience,

that the more they think about it and study it, the more they think Richard probably was a monster. And I think that's so typical of this argument. It produces really polar opposite opinions. Some of the evidence that survives is so unclear and ambiguous that you and I could read exactly the same passage from a chronicle and I could say, well, there you go, that proves Richard was innocent. And you go, no, hang on. If you read that this way, it proves he's guilty.

And it's that inability to get to a final answer, I think, that keeps the debate alive and keeps us guessing. It's like the murder mystery, but the last page has been ripped out. mystery of the princes in the tower, we've got a bonus episode available now for Noisa Plus subscribers to enjoy. To find out more about Noisa Plus and sign up for a seven-day free trial, head to noisa.com slash subscriptions or email us at info at noisa.com. Short History of continues to be available for free every Monday. Next week, we'll bring you a short history of the French resistance. The first resistors who came together feeling the need

to do something, to act and to encourage others really wanted to get the word out. People started to dress in red, white and blue. They wore little badges. They took small, almost unnoticeable steps

to show that they didn't accept the status quo of the occupation. And of course, it was in the northern zone where the Germans were present. This was a very dangerous move. They could risk arrest and death. That's next time.