Was Richard the III really that evil?

Question

He was said to of murdered his Nephews and kill a suspected traitor without trail, etc, etc.
But is any of that true, or is it all made up by William Shakespeare?

Answer 1

The age of the War of the Roses was harsh. The York side likely committed many atrocities also. Most of Shakespeare's writing was done during the Tudor dynasty and was likely to reflect their propaganda. Not necessarily fabricated, but slanted or spun in a way complimentary to the reigning monarch's ancestors.



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Answer 2

Was he that evil? Probably not?

Was he evil? He most certainly was.

The only thing not fairly obvious about 1483 is whether Richard desired the crown from the start.

He probably had to get the Woodvilles before they got him.

The knowledge that Edward V resented their deaths meant that Richard would have been in danger as protector, and even as king without their the prince's deaths. Remember that Edward III overthrew the protector Mortimer at the age of 17. Hence the ridiculous illegitimacy charges, hence dragging Lord Hastings out of a council meeting to a quick beheading, hence the usurpation and the deaths of the princes.



One more point: when his wife Anne was in her last sickness in 1485, he avoided visiting her out of concern for his own health. That's a dead giveaway for a bad man, then and now.



Ricardians are delusional eccentrics. For years they were saying Richard was a fine straight-bodied man. Then as soon as they dug up this skeleton with scoliosis, they all said 'It's Richard!' I once had a boss with it and there's not much between it and a hunched back.



As for the sources, it is simply anachronistic to view them as like 20th-century propagandists. Polydore Vergil annoyed the English with his scepticism about their legendary origins, while More went to his death for what he believed truth - treating them as Josef Goebbels figures just because they say something you don't like is a bit ridiculous.

Answer 3

was Richard III really that evil?

yes,

king Richard was the last Yorkist king of England.The age of the War of the Roses was harsh and this was the war he died in at the age of 32!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. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty.

Richard was known as evil because when his wife was ill he did not care, so he chose to stay away from her out of his concern for his own death, also he had his nephews ordered to be murdered so that he would still have the thrown.

Answer 4

"by the style, the Ricardians were telling us for years that Richard replace right into a fantastic without delay-limbed guy, yet as quickly as this skeleton with scoliosis, extreme curvature of the backbone which provides a 'criminal-backed' visual attraction, replace into discovered, all of them chorused 'that's Richard!' this shows they knew that they were deluded by potential of wishful questioning all alongside." approximately 4 in a hundred human beings have Scoliosis, and in all danger the main standard guy with this concern is Usain Bolt, rarely some form of hunchback dragging one leg at the back of him. i'm no Ricardian, in spite of the undeniable fact that that's obvious that the Tudors smeared him. He wasn't precisely a saint the two. in fact, he replace into no greater suitable or worse than the different ruler of the time. that's unusual that Richard III is remembered and reviled for the killing of the Princes in the Tower, which he might or won't have performed. yet there is not any shred of doubt that William I finished a scorched earth coverage on Northern England which bring about the homicide of a few a hundred,000 human beings, and condemned destiny generations to starvation. this is particularly remembered, and William I infrequently seems to be reviled by potential of any historians over it.

Answer 5

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Answer 6

1

Answer 7

"trial", not "trail"



It's hard to tell what was true about Richard III and what was made up or exaggerated by his supplanter's public relations people (Bernard Andre, Polydore Vergil). The Crowland Abbey Continuation and the Rous Roll may or may not have written with the intent to show Henry VII that they were loyal subjects, but they also depicted Richard as an evil king. Thomas More, whose "History of Richard the Third" was one of the main sources and inspirations for Shakespeare's play, was five years old when Richard took the throne and seven when he lost it. He spent his adolecence serving in the household of Cardinal John Morton, who was one of Henry's backers. What Morton may have told him, or what he overheard while serving his master's supper, would have been very anti-Richard and pro-Henry. I suspect More was very interested in the princes, who were 8 and 5 years older than him - practically his contemporaries - and his father was lawyer for the Mercers Guild, a City of London guild that King Edward IV, the princes' father, had a close relationship with. He named his two younger daughters after King Edward's eldest two daughters (Margaret was probably named after Henry's daughter Margaret, who became wife and Queen of James IV of Scotland when Meg More was born.)



So More probably believed Richard was evil. Andre and Vergil possibly believed it (Vergil wasn't English born) and they were paid by Henry to write their 'histories'. Crowland and Rous made sure they were not making trouble for themselves. No smoke without fire, but we don't know that Richard killed his nephews, only that they weren't seen after he became King in 1483 and that there was at least one attempt to put the elder prince back on the throne.



Suggest you read a few biographies of Richard and decide for yourself.

Answer 8

What happened to the Princes is still unproven. Although they would possibly have had been some threat to Richard, a number of other individuals had a vested interest in killing them as well, some more than Richard. (Many books have been written on this subject.) The bones that were found in the Tower and seemed to imply they were murderd there have never been examined in modern times and in fact, from old records, seem to have qualities that indicate they are NOT the boys. They may even been ancient skeletons (bones going back to pre-Roman times have been found around the Tower!)

Richard wasn't a hunchback but had scoliosis, which gave a bend to his spine. The bendy bit was more in the lower back so the head/neck would have been held completely normally. The curve did mean his natural height of 5ft 8 (above average for a medieval man) shrank to about 5ft 4 OR 5. He probably had some back pain. There is no sign he had anything like a withered arm, though this was mentioned in some records...maybe this was some temporary malady such as 'frozen shoulder' or rotator cuff injury.

The times were brutal and most medieval kings could be cruel. You play the Games of Thrones... I don't think he was any more brutal than the rest and his reputation was definitely sullied or exaggerated by the Tudors and their minions.

Remember who Shakespeare's patrons were. You sure weren't going to se him writing plays about bloated King Henry VIII, a gross porker with oozing leg ulcers and a penchant for chopping off wives' heads (and other peoples as well) or about 'Boody Mary', sister to Elizabeth, with her oppressions/executions and the swollen tumour in her belly that was mistaken for pregnancy...

Answer 9

the Tudors took the throne from him and were still ruling England at the time of Shakespeare they of course didn't approve of Richard and his claim to the throne why they couldn't afford his body a place

of honour after his death he was disliked and rumours spread and weren't discouraged so of course

Shakespeare would please the throne in his play by painting the picture of an evil man but it was

rumour nothing was proved the Tudors had just as much to gain from the princes deaths all the rulers

were capable of disposing of opposition to their claim to the throne so they were all the same Richard

only reigned for two years hardly a reign of terror

Answer 10

William Shakespeare didn't do King Richard the 3rd any favours. He made him out to be a hunchback. It is generally accepted that he had two princes murdered, although there is no proof. There is a society that is trying to redress the balance and they suggest he was not the tyrant many people said he was. He only had a few years on the throne before the Welsh usurper King Henry the 7th wrestled the throne from him after the Battle of Bosworth. So we shouldn't pass judgement on him until all the facts are known.

Answer 11

Have you not seen any of that RIII discovery stuff lately in the news?

Answer 12

Not really. Yes, William did exaggerate a bit for his Tudor audiences, but the very fact that Richard the Third set aside his nephews claim to the throne and imprisoned them does make him quite a bit of a turd. That said, there is much to recommend him. He was a great warrior, even when Richard was in his early teens men gladly accepted his leadership and valued his leadership over his older brother George. In fact older brother Edward trusted Richard much more than he did George.



Richard was ambitious and the times did encourage ruthless ambition. The best book about Richard the Third is dangerously seductive.

http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Third-Paul-Murray-Kendall/dp/0393007855/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361447176&sr=1-1&keywords=richard+iii+biography



The odd thing about Richard the Third is that whether one loves him or hates him he is that rarest of English Kings, one who died heroically on the field of battle.



I liked Richard, I just wish he had come up with a better way to deal with his nephews.



Peace/////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Answer 13

Almost certainly not as evil as the Tudor "spin doctor" William Shakespeare would have us believe.

Much of our understanding of Richard's evil doing comes from the Tudor period. Henry Tudor's claim to the throne was nowhere near as strong as Richard's so he enforced his own claim over Richard's by battle, killing Richard at the Battle of Bosworth. So Henry Tudor and his descendants had their own reasons for manipulating public opinion against Richard to justify their own position. Some of the Tudor claims, such as he spent 2 years in his mother's womb are clearly ridiculous. Because there is no claim amongst his contemporaries to support such accusations, we can also be quite sure that the Tudor claims that he poisoned his wife and son are based on nothing more than malicious propaganda, and that they in fact probably died of tuberculosis.

The record shows, in fact, that Richard was a wise and just ruler, courageous in battle, energetic in his endeavours and before the death of his brother (Edward IV) a loyal brother.

A loyal brother, a king who introduced a bail system in court to make the legal system fairer, a king who abolished benevolences (compulsory gifts that had to be made to the monarch). We must wonder if these really are the actions of an evil king.

That he moved rapidly upon his brother's death to take the two princes (his nephews) into his care and to usurp the throne is beyond doubt. But that action does not neccesarily make him evil. We can find motives other than a selfish desire for personal power for his actions.

By moving quickly to remove the princes from their escort party as they were travelling from Ludlow to London, Richard removed them from the influence of his brother's "in-laws" the Woodville family who themselves were using the princes for their own dynastic ambitions.

By taking them to the Tower of London, and accomodating them in the Royal Apartments there, it could well be that Richard was keeping them in a place of safety, not a place of imprisonment. Richard was after all their protector. And there are at least two other candidates for the heinous crime of their murder, although we cannot even be certain if they were murdered.



So, the one undisputable act that he committed that makes us question his morality is the fact that he usurped the throne from his nephew. What would drive a seemingly loyal brother, and just ruler to commit such an act.

To look for a possible motive we must consider the unenlightened times in which he was living.

It was brought to his attention that the the two princes were illegitimate. His brother (Edward IV) married Elizabeth Woodville who was the mother of the two boys. However at the time of his marriage it seems that Edward was betrothed to Lady Eleanor Butler. In those days a betrothal was as strong a commitment as marriage, and thus made the sons of his marriage to Elizabeth illegitimate. An illegitimate king would have been seen as unthinkable as this would bring down the wrath of God on the kingdom. You could argue then that as a loyal English nobleman he could not contemplate even the slightest possibility of one of the princes becoming King. Against all his natural inhibitions as their uncle and protector, Richard may have felt it was his inescapable duty to England to prevent the prince becoming King by usurping the throne himself.

To muddy the water's even further, recent documents found in Rouen cathedral, which was headquarters for the English army during their campaiging in France during Edward IV's reign, indicate that Edward IV was away on a campaign at the time that his first son (Edward V) was conceived. This would seem to suggest that the young prince was not even of royal blood, but was in fact (it is suggested) the son of an archer in Edward's army.

So, the one indisputable act of his that could suggest he was an evil man, in fact could have a noble explanation, given the unenlightened times he was living in.

It is quite possible that by keeping the princes, firstly in the Tower, and perhaps later by moving them to his own lands in the North of England, he was keeping them safely out of harms way.

If this hypothesis is correct, then the princes may well have lived out the rest of their lives in anonymity. However if Henry Tudor (VII) happened to discover them after his victory at Bosworth, he would without a doubt have wanted them murdered, and there is one of the prime suspects for their murder, if Richard is innocent and the princes were actually murdered.

There are a few "ifs" in this hypothesis, but there is probably as much (if not more) evidence for this hypothosis as there is for the Tudor version. And even if this hypothesis is correct, it does not rule out the possibility that Richard still committed the murder of his nephews, but his motive far from being personal were for what he perceived as being for the good of the realm.