Ever since Shakespeare wrote his tragedy on Richard III the world has thought of him as an evil king with a shriveled soul. But is that actually unjust?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who were the hosts of this episode and what is their background?
Listen to A Slight Change of Plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and that makes this a good old-fashioned episode of Stuff You Should Know.
That's right. This is where we don't debate because we don't really do that. We're going to talk about the merits of Richard III and the people that say that Richard III was a lousy king and terrible person. And other people will say, no, that was rewritten by people who didn't like him. And he was actually a pretty great king.
And we'll get into all that right now. Wow, that's a great intro. So Richard III, his name may ring a bell if you're not already familiar with him because there's a very, very famous play by Shakespeare called The Tragedy of Richard III. And in this play, Richard III has a hunchback. He has a withered arm. He has a... Horrible, dark soul at his core.
He's a terrible person, a murderer of children, a usurper to the throne. And because this is Shakespeare, you know Shakespeare, that's how everybody's thought of Richard III publicly or popularly for hundreds of years. Yeah. Yeah, like Shakespeare wouldn't do a hit piece on somebody, right? No way. If there was even one Shakespeare.
I was thinking back to our episode on... I think it was like, did Shakespeare really write all that stuff? That is one of my all-time favorite episodes because I knew nothing about it, and yet there's this huge, rich subculture of people who like... talk about this and investigate it and debate it. I love that one.
Totally.
But Shakespeare did basically write this play probably at least in part to flatter Queen Elizabeth, who was the reigning monarch at the time, and he was a very loyal subject of hers. Queen Elizabeth was related to the guy who took over from Richard III after Richard III was killed before that guy's very eyes.
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Chapter 2: What is the War of the Roses and how does it relate to Richard III?
which were these bloody civil wars fought over the 1400s, basically in England, like, hey, who's in control here? Which family has a right to the British throne? Most of it was between the House of York and the House of Lancaster, whose symbols were the white rose for York and the red rose for Lancaster. There we go. War of the Roses, white versus red.
Yes. That also explains that movie with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito and Kathleen Turner.
One of my favorite all-time movies.
That is a great movie.
It is great and holds up.
Does it? I haven't seen it in a while.
It's still so very funny.
Okay, so the houses of York and Lancaster were both part of the Plantagenet dynasty, and that dynasty had been ruling England from 1154 up to the point where we pick up our story. So, like, it was a big deal that these two houses were warring one another for control.
And an even bigger deal is we'll see that somebody who was basically unrelated to either one would come in and end the Plantagenet dynasty. Richard III was the last Plantagenet king.
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Chapter 3: How did Richard III come to power and what were the controversies?
And the very next day, he had Richard III had Woodville and Gray arrested on charges of trying to usurp the throne. And they were executed very quickly, along with another close friend of his brother's, William Hastings.
So like he was, you know, if it looks as if it appears to look, Richard III was just kind of cleaning house of anyone from his brother's old team that would have supported the boy king, basically.
Yeah, and this was basically his brother's in-laws that he was killing off. He didn't want them to try to vie for power because the mom of Edward V, the young 12-year-old, she could have a ton of power and so could her brothers and all that kind of stuff. So they were basically like wiping out the other side of the family.
Remember I said Richard III kept putting off the coronation and putting it off? Well, typically, if you're waiting to be coronated king, you would hang out in the Tower of London. And since he was able to keep putting off the coronation, Edward V, the kid who would be Edward V... was basically locked away in the Tower of London.
And like a month or so after he got there, his younger brother, Richard, who was nine at the time, showed up and they were kind of compartmentalized away in the Tower of London out of public view, just held off to the side while Richard was doing his maneuvering.
Yeah, so while this is going on, these two boys in line in front of Richard III are basically hidden away in the Tower of London. And all of a sudden, the Church of England says, you know what? That marriage wasn't even legitimate. King Edward IV, your older brother, and his wife Elizabeth, It was an illegitimate marriage because Edward, I think there were a couple of things.
One was Edward had supposedly been engaged to another woman when they married, which would be bigamy at the time. But didn't they also say that Elizabeth had a previous marriage or something like that?
No, they said that Edward IV and Richard III's father, that he had had an affair that bore Edward IV, but Richard III was legitimate. So he was saying, like, my brother wasn't even a legitimate king while he was alive, so his sons definitely aren't. I am, though. Right. Because my parents bore me legitimately. And so there were two illegitimate rumors that were being bandied about at the time.
And I guess one of them got picked up on by the pope, I believe, who said, yeah, we're cool with this. And an act of parliament was passed that basically said Richard III has gone now from Lord Protector. He's now king because he's the legitimate heir to the throne.
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Chapter 4: What happened to the Princes in the Tower and why is it a mystery?
Yeah, and we should say Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of Richard III about 100 years after Richard died. And the idea that Richard III murdered directly, because if they were murdered, he almost certainly did it himself, a lot of people argue. Other people say, yes, Sir James Turrell probably had somebody do it. And the idea is that they were smothered with pillows.
But this idea doesn't pop up in writing until after Richard's death. And the whole idea is that he had really great motive to kill these kids because even if they were illegitimate, they could go off, grow up, train. There would probably be a montage of some sort as they're training. Right. And they could come back and try to topple him from the throne through battles and violence.
And he was just wiping out this, you know, future challenge to his rule. He was not the only one who had that motive. There were a handful of other people around at the time who had just as good a motive of wiping those two kids out for the exact same reason. So that alone is not that's not like the most damning evidence.
Yeah, I could see the montage.
Was that two princes?
Yeah, you know that one part where he's kind of scatting?
That was good, actually.
So the montage could have happened for sure. If you are Team Richard, they will likely say, man, there's no way he would have been fool enough to do that. He didn't kill those guys. Maybe he moved them up to the north and hid them away because he wanted them to be safe or something. But Richard never said anything about it.
There was no evidence for centuries, like literal evidence tying anything there. But fairly recently, there was a British TV historian that discovered a will that included a necklace that belonged to Edward V, the boy who would be king.
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Chapter 5: Did Richard III murder the princes and what evidence exists?
A lot of his rule was pretty tragic, though. There was a lot of war. One of his closest allies ended up turning against him. The Duke of Buckingham switched over in a line with the Tudors, Henry Tudor specifically. They were a different family who had this, you know, they had a they said they had a claim to an ancestral line that was, I guess, to our modern eye seems fairly vague.
But back then it seemed important enough to go to war over.
Yeah, the Lancasters were basically like looking anywhere for somebody who had a legitimate claim. So they went to like a cousin's cousin's next door neighbor's friend's dog's brother to find Henry Tudor, who you could connect the dots to the throne. So he did have a legitimate claim. But he was, like you said, essentially a different family. He was just barely a Lancaster. He was a Tudor.
But this is who they brought to bear as a claim to the throne to challenge the Yorks in the form of Richard III for this throne. And his former friend, the Duke of Buckingham, they staged the Buckingham Rebellion and it just got squashed almost immediately. So within months of being coronated, his rule was challenged right away.
But he managed to get rid of that and I think another one and hang in there for a couple of years before fortune turned against him.
Yeah. And, you know, he also had personal tragedy. A few months after that, his only child, Edward, died. His wife died not long after that. And then Henry Tudor comes to knock in again. He goes, you might have stopped me once, but you're not going to stop me again. And on August 22nd, 1485, They went to battle again at Bosworth Field outside of Leicester.
And this is where Richard, as king, fought and was killed in battle. I think the last English king to actually die on the battlefield, right? Yes. But he was the last king and he, by all accounts, died in a pretty brutal way. If you consider like, you know, blunt force trauma and head damage to be a brutal way to go. And I do.
Yeah, so as we'll see, they found his skull and they examined it and found that he had not one but two potential death blows delivered to his head. One was a sword thrust. So imagine sticking a sword into somebody's head through their skull and into their brain. That happened to him. And then somebody came up with a pike.
or a halberd, which is a very sharp axe on one side and a point, very sharp point on the other opposite the axe blade. And apparently a pikeman came up and cut off essentially the lower part of his skull and took a big chunk of his brainstem with it. So either one of those, whichever one happened first, killed him virtually instantly. That was not the end of the torment to his poor body, though.
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Chapter 6: What are the historical challenges in understanding Richard III’s legacy?
I agree, because otherwise they'd be like, hey, we're good. Everyone hated that guy. Exactly. I was just thinking how awful it would have been. I mean, up until recently, really. But back then, if you had some sort of physical difference, you were just born a certain way for people to think like, that means they're like an evil, awful person on the inside as well.
Yeah, exactly.
Good Lord.
Until like the 1990s, basically, it was like that.
I did want to mention quickly, I saw The Goodbye Girl the other day, the Richard Dreyfuss movie, the Neil Simon movie. Okay, whose movie was it? Well, Richard Dreyfuss starred and Neil Simon wrote it. Okay. Marsha Mason was in it too. It's just a classic film.
But Richard Dreyfuss very famously is in New York to play Richard III and is trying to do this very, very strange – or he's sort of forced into doing this very strange portrayal of Richard III after he was ready to play it straight as an already weird Richard III.
Oh, yeah. I've got to see that then. That sounds great. Neil Simon's wonderful.
It's such a classic film. I love it. Back when somebody like Richard Dreyfuss could be a leading man in Hollywood.
Another movie I have not seen, but I want to, is a documentary that Al Pacino made because he's apparently a huge Shakespearean and was basically obsessed with the tragedy of Richard III so much so that he made a documentary about Richard III. Have you seen it?
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Chapter 7: What kind of king was Richard III and how was his reign challenged?
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Chapter 8: How did Richard III die and what happened after his death?
Yeah, it was really critical of received wisdom in general. Like this Scotland Yard inspector who's laid up in the hospital and is just amusing himself by solving this cold case mystery comes to the conclusion that he can't show at all that Richard III was responsible. And in fact, he thinks it might have been Henry VII and or his mother who killed these kids.
Because remember, I said a lot of people had a reason to off them. or get them out of the way. And along the way, this detective is very critical of historians and how they just basically will rely on rumor and unsubstantiated stuff as fact. And that becomes history. And this really changed people's views about historians and history, but also especially about Richard III.
And that was the thing that really kind of turned the tide for him somewhat.
Yeah, somewhat. The other interesting thing, and this is where, like, again, we sort of gave it away, but there was a mystery for a long time of what actually happened to Richard III. Was that body really buried? Was it tossed into the river? When a really well-balanced biography came out in the 1950s from Paul Murray Kindle,
called Richard the third a woman named Philippa Langley read it and got very interested she's a historian and a screenwriter obviously a Ricardian and she was like I want to figure out what happened to this body that's still the mystery of what happened to Richard the third and so I'm gonna get on the case and sort of mountain amateur which turned into you know sort of a professional investigation
She's going to sniff them off the case?
Sniff them off the case.
I still, after all these years, do not know how to use that correctly in a sentence.
It's always correct. That's the beauty of the phrase.
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