Richard III: Villain or Hero?

By Sandra Worth

Much has been written about Richard III and readers are familiar with Shakespeare’s portrayal of him as England's most reviled and villainous monarch. What is not as widely known is that Richard III gave us a body of laws that forms the foundation of modern Western society. His legacy includes bail, the presumption of innocence, the protections in the jury system against bribery and tainted verdicts, and ‘Blind Justice’ -the concept that all men should be seen as equal in the eyes of the law.

Such ideas were revolutionary in the fifteenth century. They alienated many in the nobility and the Church and played no small part in Richard’s ultimate fate. Two hundred years later, when it was safe to do so, men questioned the traditional view of Richard bequeathed to them by the Tudors and found themselves unable to reconcile the justician with the villain, the man with the myth. In the early twentieth century, such men came together to form the Richard III Society.

Two of Richard’s most well known contemporary critics, Alison Weir and Desmond Seward, subscribe to Shakespeare's depiction of him as a hunchbacked serial killer. In his book Royal Blood: The Mystery of the Princes In the Tower, Bertram Fields, a prominent U.S. attorney and author, examines the school of thought represented by Weir and exposes the inconsistencies and deficiencies of the traditional view.

Richard III caught my imagination when I first saw his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Then I read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. This compelling mystery inspired me to consume whatever I could find on Richard and to make several research trips to England in search of the true Richard. It was in Paul Murray Kendall’s RICHARD THE THIRD that I finally found him. Kendall, a Shakespearean scholar and professor of English Literature, provides a most convincing and illuminating portrayal of Richard and his times, and it is his interpretation of events that is reflected in this book.

While Shakespeare was a great dramatist, he never claimed to be a historian. In an age of torture and beheadings, he wrote to please the Tudors. The authority Shakespeare drew on was Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, a derisive account of the last Plantagenet king which More never finished. One of history’s enduring mysteries is why More broke off in mid-sentence and mid-dialogue to hide his manuscript. Fifteen years after his death, it was found by his nephew, translated from the Latin, and published. Had Sir Thomas More discovered the dangerous truth that the true villain was not Richard III, but the first of the Tudors, Henry VII?

The question remains, and the debate continues.

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