In the summer of 1483 the 12 year old uncrowned king of England Edward V and his 9 year old brother Richard vanished. They were last seen in the Tower of London and the common theory is that they were murdered by their blood lusting and ambitious uncle Richard III. They were not the first English princes with a claim to the throne to vanish mysteriously. When Richard I died he did not have a legitimate heir. He named his nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, as heir to the kingdom. Richard's brother John took the throne and after putting down a rebellion led by Arthur the recently turned 16 year old prince disappeared. 

 

The Princes in the Tower, as they came to be known, were declared illegitimate by Parliament because their father Edward IV had already had a betrothal contract with another woman when he married their mother. Richard III, then Duke of Gloucester, was Protector of the Realm for his underage nephew. Parliament offered Richard the throne after his nephews were disinherited and after pretending to be reluctant he accepted. That's all good but what happened? There wasn't any proof at the time that Richard murdered his nephews. That accusation came to light in Shakespeare's Richard III. Now why would Shakespeare talk trash about Richard when he had praised other kings in his plays? It was all about money and endorsement  . Shakespeare rose to prominence during the reign of the fifth Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I. Her grandfather Henry VII, the victor at Bosworth Fields, had done everything in his power to ruin Richard's reputation. Richard only ruled for two years and two months and yet the propaganda under the Tudors destroyed the image of a king who actually accomplished a lot it such a short amount of time. A few months after his coronation Richard created the Court of Requests, a court designed for poor people who could not afford to pay to be represented. He introduced the concept of bail into the English court system to protect the accused   and in 1484 created the College of Arms, a complex organization that to this day grants new coat of arms, genealogy research and recording of pedigrees. To finish off the list he banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books, ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English, and put down a full fledged rebellion in 1483. 

Not too shabby, eh? Richard III did a relatively good job as king compared to a few of England's monarch before and since. For example Richard I spent the entirety of the English treasury funding a mercenary army  to fight his hated enemy the French, to fight in the Holy Land, John lost all of England's possessions in France, Edward II lost his kingdom to his wife and her lover because he refused to give up his male favorites and was not brave enough to take action, poor Henry VI went through periods of madness and walked around in bed clothes, Henry VIII had six wives and murdered two of them, Bloody Mary  tried to force Catholicism on newly Protestant England and burned hundreds at the stake, Charles I lost his kingdom (and his head) because he decided to rule without ever calling a Parliament into order, as King of Great Britain George I could not speak English, George III lost the entire American colonies and went completely mad, Edward VIII gave up the throne so he could marry a divorced American woman.... the list goes on and on! Every single on other these monarchs ruled longer than Richard and yet Richard III is easily the most hated. I will continue to investigate this in my next post by looking through paintings and Tudor propaganda for the lies told about Richard.