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.
