Richard III bashing thread.

That hump... ew.

DrewDad, then if we are going to bash RichardIII, we should NOT read this:

http://www.r3.org/bookcase/misc/wigram01.html

Nor should we read To Prove a Villain by Robert Rea.

Bullshit . . . that was just propaganda by Shakespeare, who wanted to suck up to the Tudors.

I'M SO DAMNED SICK OF ALL THESE CENTURIES OF GROSS SLANDER OF AN INNOCENT MAN ! ! !

There . . . i feel all better now . . .

as Lady Macbeth once said "Y'all have a nice day now, y'hear"

dys, A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse. Do you still ride?

Go start a Bard bashing thread, you evil bastard.

He is evil but right, DrewDad.


Richard, crowned King of England on 6 July 1483, is seen by many as one of England's most maligned kings. His historical profile is certainly due in no small part to Shakespeare's portrayal of him as an evil, conniving hunchback. However, debate and controversy still surround the claim that Richard killed the Princes in the Tower, and certainly, he was not a hunchback.

It is known that Richard visited Leicester at least twice. In October 1483 he spent several days at the Castle, and he returned in 1485 on his fateful march to Bosworth.

If you look at Shakespeare's "King" plays, it is easy to see what his purpose was. King John obviously has nothing to do with the other "King" plays, and the same goes for King Lear. But, basically, the "King" plays all tend toward glorifying the Lancastrian/Tudor faction. All of them (except Lear, which cannot be seen as an "historical" play) are about Plantagenets, except Henry VIII, and the pro-Tudor propaganda involved asserting the legitimacy of "descent in the right line." He writes plays only about the Lancastrians, and then one play about a Tudor. The Wars of the Roses were fought between the Lancastrian and the Yorkist factions, seven members of whom in the late 15th century could lay claim to the throne, on more or less legitimate bases.

Shakespeare writes about Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI and Henry VIII, but he writes only one play about a non-Lancastrian, which is Richard III. The play Richard III is so obviously a hatchet job, that you don't need to know the history to see that it is propaganda. Richard II seeks to justify the usurpation of the throne by Henry Bolingbroke--Henry IV. Henry Bolingbroke was the son of John of Gaunt, who was regent during the minority of Richard II, and Henry was therefore first cousin to Richard. Henry's usurpation didn't really bother most of the influential men of England, most of whom had despised and feared John of Gaunt, but who would rather see John of Gaunt's son on the throne than an ineffectual and easily lead Richard II, who was giving the store away to his sycophantic cronies. When Henry successfully took the throne away from Richard, Richard was imprisoned, and died in prison under mysterious circumstances--which is significant when one comes to the condemnation of the Yorkists for the same circumstance.

Henry IV had the problem that he had inherited the Hundred Years War. England appeared to be in a good position, but it was chimerical, because Richard had squandered what little revenue reserve had been left fighting in Ireland. Henry had little resource to fight the war in France again, and the crown was not getting the revenues it expected and needed from France. Henry's son, Henry V, was to become famous, not simply in Shakespeare's plays, for a campaign in which he came damned close to destruction and oblivion. But as his starving army stumbled toward Calais, after a disasterous march from Harfleur, he was forced to turn to face a much larger French army, and the French demonstrated that they took a back seat to no one in hubristic arrogance and incompetence, and at Agincourt in 1415, Henry V won the victory with which his name would always be associated. His subsequent campaign in 1417 is not important here, what is important is that the near civil war conditions in France the mad king Charles VI of France willingly placed himself in Henry's power. He agreed to recognize Henry as regent during his lifetime, and King of France after his death. Henry married his daughter, Catherine de Valois, and then died (probably of a camp disease) two years later. His son, Henry VI, was still an infant, and Henry V named his brother, John the Duke of Bedford to be regent to his son when he (Henry V) knew he was dying.

Henry VI was not much of a King, and he managed to lose almost all of France to the French, resurgent under the Bastard of Orleans, Jean Dunois, and inspired by Jeanne d'Arc. Richard, Duke of York, was of the party which criticized the King for losing France because the army was not paid and supplied properly. Richard of York attempted a coup d'etat 1451, but he was premature, and he more or less reconciled with Henry (it was actually Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou, who ran the government, which undercut his support, since only those who profited directly from land grants and offices were genuine supporters, and they were viewed with a jaundiced eye by the rest of England). He made another such attempt in 1452, but protesting that he did not seek the throne, but only reform. Civil war broke out in earnest, and have become known as the Wars of the Roses, as the symbols of York and Lancaster were a white and a red rose respectively.

Henry Bolingbroke had been the Earl of Lancaster, and had incorporated the title in the throne--hence, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI were all also the Dukes of Lancaster, and descended from John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III. Richard, Duke of York, was also descended from Edward III, his father Edmund being a brother of John of Gaunt. Therefore, the two factions were Lancaster and York.

After the death of Henry V, the English tried to put Catherine de Valois in a convent, to get her out of the way, and because powerful and outspoken women annoyed them. They succeeded about as well as Henry II had succeeded with Eleanor of Acquitaine, whom he was eventually obliged to imprison. Catherine ran off with her lover, a Welshman named Owen Tudor, to whom she might have been secretly married. Their son, Edmund Tudor, was the father of Henry Tudor, who became the second Earl of Richmond, succeeding his father. Henry's mother, Margaret de Beaufort, was one of the many Lancastrians, and therefore, after 1461, when the Yorkist Edward made himself King Edward IV, he was at least notionally a rival for the throne (he was only four years old at the time).

When Edward, son of Richard of York, made himself king, he fought a civil war with Margaret of Anjou, who was the actual power which was publicly represented by Henry VI. Edward captured Henry in 1465. Margaret got the important support of the Earl of Warwick, and in 1470 Edward was obliged to abandon his captive, Henry VI, and he fled to Holland. Warwick's head grew too big for his shoulders, then, though, and he threatened the Duke of Burgundy, who was by then the most powerful ruler west of the Rhine. Burgundy provided Edward with the money and troops he needed to land again in England, and Edward quickly regained his throne, and this time when Henry was imprisoned, he was quickly judicially murdered (probably strangled in his cell).

When Warwick had paraded Henry in the streets of London in 1470, he was a shadow of his former unimpressive self. In contrast to the young and vigorous Edward IV, he was far from a prepossessing image. Warwick could not take the throne in his own right, and Margaret of Anjou was unpopular with the nobility for a host of good reasons, and it had been easy to discredit her with the English people, who were prone to suspect and distrust French princesses. It looked as though not only was Edward now secure on his throne, but that he would succeed in founding a Yorkist dynasty.

Edward was the eldest son of Richard of York, and Richard's youngest son was also Richard of York, who was to become King Richard III. When Edward IV died in 1483, he should have been succeeded by his son, Edward V. Edward and his brothers never got along that well, as it seemed that they all possessed that additional measure of ambition which their father had lacked, and they all aspired to be King. Shakespeare would have us believe that Richard (the younger son) drowned his brother George in a vat of wine--in fact, George had plotted against his brother, Edward IV, and was executed after being convicted. George was a heavy drinker, and the story about having been drowned in a vat of wine probably was originally a joke based on his drinking. What is certain is that he was convicted of treason and executed five years before Edward IV died.

If Richard was guilty of any murder to clear his way to the throne, it would have been the murder of Edward V, and his brother. He was sent to the tower after only two months as king, while his uncle, Richard, was regent. Edward V and his brother simply disappeared, and it was believed (chiefly by the Lancastrian opponents) that Richard had them murdered, but there is no clear evidence of this. Richard became King Richard III, and two years later, in 1485, Henry Tudor landed in Wales, and defeated Richard at Bosworth, after which he made himself King Henry VII.

All of Shakespeare's "King" plays(not including Lear and John) concern themselves with the Lancastrian kings, except for Richard III, which was, as i pointed out, a hack job. Henry Tudor was on very thin ice claiming the throne in his own right, even as a Lancastrian. He was quick to marry Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, and to therefore supposedly end the strife by combining the houses of Lancaster and York. In 1487, a pretender landed near York with an army of about 2000 German mercenaries, but Henry was able quickly to dispose of this threat, and the pretender was imprisoned in the Tower, where he lingered on until he was executed in 1499. He was a poor choice as a pretender, and fooled no one, being the obvious cat's paw of Richard III's son.

Henry VII quickly took sound measures to assure his place on the throne, but the Tudors were always to sit a shaky and uncertain throne. Shakespeare's propaganda plays in favor of the House of Lancaster were popular with those who benefited from the Tudor dynasty, and were a good way to suck up to Elizabeth, who was clearly not someone you wanted to piss off. All of the "King" plays in the series praise their titular subjects, except for Richard II, which seeks to justify the usurpation of Henry Bolingbroke (Duke of Lancaster), and Richard III, which seeks to justify the seizure of the throne by Henry Tudor.

The entire story of Richard III as enshrined since Shakespeare's play was a hatchet job.