Richard III

The youngest son of Richard, duke of York (b. 1411–b. 1460) and his duchess, Cecily Neville (b. 1415–1495), was born on 2 October 1452, and named after his father: see Reference Works. York’s dynastic claim to the throne of England can be traced in Overviews and was made good by another son, who became King Edward IV in 1461, with Richard being made duke of Gloucester later that year. The duke married his maternal kinswoman Anne Neville (b. 1456–d. 1485), who gave birth to his only legitimate child, Edward of Middleham, at an unknown date. He distinguished himself as a soldier, principally in the Scottish campaign of 1482. Edward IV’s death on 9 April 1483 left the twelve-year-old Edward V as king and power in the hands of his maternal Woodville kinsmen. With the support of his brother-in-law Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Gloucester engineered a coup, destroying the Woodville interest. In late June popular support was gained for the argument that neither Edward V nor his brother Richard, duke of York, were of legitimate birth, and that Gloucester, the only adult male of the ruling house, should assume the throne. He was crowned on 6 July. The fate of the two boys remained unknown while opposition to Richard III’s usurpation mounted, though the duke of Buckingham’s rebellion was quashed. The Contemporary Sources are frustratingly patchy, with rumor and speculation filling the gaps. Richard’s opponents regrouped around the little-known exile Henry Tudor (see the Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation article “Henry VII”), whose invasion in 1485 resulted in Richard’s defeat and death at Bosworth Field on 22 August. The king’s Disputed Reputation saw him cast as a consummate villain in the 15th and 16th Centuries, with a dramatic reassessment following in the 17th–20th Centuries. There are numerous Modern Biographies of Richard and his family, but relatively few that need be employed for academic purposes. As with Overviews, the Journals section of this article features the work of the Richard III Society, while Collections of Papers are the preserve of academic historians. Domestic politics appears here as The King and His Subjects, Religion and Culture is self-explanatory, and Popes and Princes deals with international relations. The popularity and versatility of Shakespeare’s play means that a further section is devoted to Richard III in Popular Culture, and the posthumous history would have ended there had the king’s bones not been discovered in 2012 and reburied “with dignity and honour” three years later, so that archaeological discoveries are brought together from both Bosworth and Leicester.

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