English King, Richard III

RICHARD III
Richard III (2 October 1452 – 22 August 1485) was King of England from 1483 until his death in 1485, at the age of 32, in the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Richard III

 He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty.

His defeat at Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the subject of the historical play Richard III by William Shakespeare.

When his brother King Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the realm for Edward's son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V.

As the young king travelled to London from Ludlow, Richard met and escorted him to lodgings in the Tower of London, where Edward V's own brother Richard of Shrewsbury joined him shortly afterwards. Arrangements were made for Edward's coronation on 22 June 1483; but, before the young king could be crowned, his father's marriage to his mother Elizabeth Woodville was declared invalid, making their children illegitimate and ineligible for the throne.

Detail from the Rous Roll (1483) showing Richard with a sword in his right hand, an orb and cross in his left, a white boar (his heraldic badge) at his feet, framed by the crests and helms of England, Ireland, Wales, Gascony-Guyenne, France and St Edward

On 25 June, an assembly of Lords and commoners endorsed the claims. The following day, Richard III began his reign, and he was crowned on 6 July 1483. The young princes were not seen in public after August, and accusations circulated that the boys had been murdered on Richard's orders, giving rise to the legend of the Princes in the Tower.

There were two major rebellions against Richard. The first, in October 1483, was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham; but the revolt collapsed.

In August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, led a second rebellion. Henry Tudor landed in southern Wales with a small contingent of French troops and marched through his birthplace, Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's force engaged Richard's army and defeated it at the Battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire. Richard was struck down in the conflict, making him the last English king to die in battle on home soil and the first since Harold II was killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Henry then ascended to the throne as Henry VII.

Richard III

After the battle Richard's corpse was taken to Leicester and buried without pomp. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the Reformation, and his remains were lost for more than five centuries, believed to have been thrown into the River Soar. In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on a city council car park on the site once occupied by Greyfriars Priory Church.

The University of Leicester identified the skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of Richard III's eldest sister, Anne of York. Richard's remains were reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.

Silver groat of Richard III (York Museums Trust)

That his personal household sustained losses indicates he was in the thick of the fighting. A contemporary source is clear about his holding the vanguard for Edward at Tewkesbury, deployed against the Lancastrian vanguard under the Duke of Somerset on 4 May 1471, and his role two days later, as Constable of England, sitting alongside John Howard as Earl Marshal, in the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured after the battle.

Contemporary illumination (Rous Roll, 1483) of Richard III, his queen Anne Neville whom he married in 1472, and their son Edward the Prince of Wales

At least in part resentful of the French king's previous support of his Lancastrian opponents, and possibly in support of his brother-in-law Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, Edward went to parliament in October 1472 for funding a military campaign, and eventually landed in Calais on 4 July 1475. Gloucester's was the largest private contingent of his army. Although well known to have publicly been against the eventual treaty signed with Louis XI at Picquigny (and absent from the negotiations, in which one of his rank would have been expected to take a leading role), he acted as Edward's witness when the king instructed his delegates to the French court, and received 'some very fine presents' from Louis on a visit to the French king at Amiens.

In refusing other gifts, which included 'pensions' in the guise of 'tribute', he was joined only by Cardinal Bourchier. He supposedly disapproved of Edward's policy of personally benefiting—politically and financially—from a campaign paid for out of a parliamentary grant, and hence out of public funds. Any military prowess was therefore not to be revealed further until the last years of Edward's reign.

According to another tradition, Richard consulted a seer in Leicester before the battle who foretold that "where your spur should strike on the ride into battle, your head shall be broken on the return". On the ride into battle, his spur struck the bridge stone of Bow Bridge in the city; legend states that as his corpse was carried from the battle over the back of a horse, his head struck the same stone and was broken open. Henry Tudor succeeded Richard to become Henry VII and sought to cement the succession by marrying the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's niece.