The release of Stephen Frears’ film The Lost King once more focuses attention on one of the most controversial figures in English history: King Richard III. The film is a compelling account of the struggle of a woman called Philippa Langley to find the grave of the 15th-century king, which was eventually discovered under a car park in Leicester.
Why does a king who died more than half a millennium ago continue to attract such interest? And why does this story of an (extra)ordinary woman’s quest to recover his remains – overcoming the massed battalions of academic orthodoxy on the way – hold such a fascination for us? To understand, we need to know something of late medieval history and more about modern Britain.
Richard III sat on the throne for just two years, but it was a controversial reign which remains fixed in the public consciousness for one main reason: he seized the crown from his young nephew Edward V. Denounced as illegitimate shortly after coming to the throne in 1483, Edward and his brother Richard – the “princes in the tower” – disappeared soon afterwards.
Richard’s guilt or innocence in the fate of the princes – arguably the greatest missing persons case in British history – is particularly important here. This is the area that my latest research examines.
The first person to allocate specific responsibility for the disappearance – and death – of the two princes was the prominent lawyer, philosopher, politician and Roman Catholic saint, Sir Thomas More. More’s account, written around 30 years after Richard’s death, has been treated with varying degrees of scepticism over the last 150 years.
Richard’s defenders have denounced it as “Tudor propaganda”, contrived years after the event to blacken the reputation of a king. Others have focused on the political philosophy in More’s work as an essentially metaphorical warning about tyranny and its dangers.
On one level, Frears’ film is about a passion for the past and for defending those cruelly maligned by the official historical record – a role which Richard fulfils well. There are those who believe that the king, who died fighting bravely for his cause against Henry Tudor during the War of the Roses, was falsely accused of the murder of the young princes. There is something peculiarly and touchingly British about this concern for the underdog in history.
Looking at the evidence
My research reinforces the importance of More’s “orthodox” account of Richard’s guilt, which was subsequently propagated powerfully by William Shakespeare a century after the king’s death.
Focusing on the connections and continuities between More’s world and the England of 1483 about which he writes, my research demonstrates he was writing not just great literature and political philosophy, but about real people.
More’s history provides precise circumstantial detail for the focal point of the succession crisis of 1483. It is striking because central to it were several individuals who were still alive at the time of writing – survivors of the episode and their immediate families. So the account deserves to be treated more seriously as history rather than propaganda, imagination or theory.
Frears’ film represents an important contemporary tension between amateurs and enthusiasts on one hand, and professional expertise on the other. The film delivers an appealing message that ordinary members of the public can confound academic experts and overturn orthodoxy.
Richard is an unusual king. He may be accused of murder and tyranny, but he is also one of the few monarchs to have a society dedicated to enhancing his reputation. The Richard III Society has more than 3,200 members and 30 groups in the UK, as well as branches in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the US.
The challenges of history
But what’s the attraction, and why the determination to acquit him of the alleged misdeeds? Some of the explanation lies in the fact that Richard’s death at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 effectively marked the end of the War of the Roses – when power changed hands – and is often taken to mark a key transition between the medieval and modern periods.
So Richard represents the last flourishing of the middle ages, which from the late 18th century have been increasingly mythologised and admired, whether in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the art and craft of William Morris, the architecture of Augustus Pugin or the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.
His time in the north of England before he came to the throne, and his ostentatious celebration of those connections once he became king, also make him, for some, a champion of the north against the south – an increasingly prominent theme in contemporary debate across the 20th century and today.
It is no surprise that so many contributions to the study of Richard’s life and reign have occurred in a dialogue between people inside and outside the conventional bounds of medieval history.
A key example is Elizabeth MacKintosh’s enduringly popular 1951 novel, The Daughter of Time (written as Josephine Tey), which sees a police inspector working through a sequence of historical “clues” to exonerate Richard as chief suspect in the disappearance of the princes. The author had also enjoyed great success with her play Richard of Bordeaux in 1932.
In the 1950s, Laurence Olivier’s still-celebrated film version of Shakespeare’s Richard III went out of its way in a prologue to identify its narrative as legend, strongly implying that the play’s condemnation of Richard should not be treated as a truthful picture of the real king. Like Mackintosh/Tey, those behind the film did not come from the conventional historical establishment.
The Lost King celebrates another example of this creative dialogue. As always, Richard’s appeal is energised by his connection to the central mystery of his reign and the fate of the princes in the tower. Insights into that mystery carry the potent attraction of hidden knowledge and access to long-concealed truths. This appeal was seen very clearly in the popularity of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.
It is an essential feature of this phenomenon that the “truth” is more likely to be accessed by the research of working outside conventional orthodoxies and perhaps by the ordinary man or woman in the street, as seen in The Lost King. And so, even as archival research, archaeology and forensic science open up more avenues to our understanding of Richard and his times, he will remain the most controversial monarch in our history.