Was Richard III a Bad King?
Traditionally depicted as a child-murderer, usurper, and arch-villain, have efforts to redeem Richard III succeeded, or is he still one of history’s worst kings?
‘Richard resolved to be a good king and even a reformer’
Michael Hicks, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Winchester and author of Richard III: The Self-Made King (Yale University Press, 2019)
For 500 years Richard III was a usurper and a wicked uncle, the murderer of his little nephews, the Princes in the Tower. He rightly suffered defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth (1485). Strenuous efforts since the 1930s have sought to rehabilitate him as the victim of libellous Tudor propaganda. In 2015 his bones were royally reinterred within a splendid table-tomb at Leicester Cathedral.
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