The History
of King Richard the Third
By
Thomas More
and Richard Grafton
The
recent discovery of the body of King Richard III of England has renewed interest in the
earliest biography of him by Thomas More. More left it unfinished, but a
continuation was added in the first publication in 1543. Here we have the
source of much of Shakespeare's play, and of the
subsequent popular image of Richard as one of history's leading scoundrels. It
describes a career based on treachery and ruthlessness, prominent crimes being
the massacre of his opponents upon seizing power and the murder of the Princes
in the Tower (who were his nephews). He is even credited with a plan to
buttress his claim to the throne by an incestuous marriage with his niece
Elizabeth, sister of the murdered princes. After a couple of tyrannical years,
he was overthrown by Henry Tudor to popular rejoicing. A man, in short,
deformed in both body and soul.
Subsequent historians have proposed that he was not as black as he was painted,
and that the biography was a work of Tudor propaganda. It has even been
suggested that the princes were murdered on the orders of Henry Tudor, however
the evidence for this is conjectural at best. A more balanced judgement (ours)
is that all the protagonists had the morality of drug traffickers warring over
territory. Still,
good or bad, handsome or
ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now
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