Richard III
England's Most Controversial King
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From acclaimed historian Chris Skidmore comes the authoritative biography of Richard III, England’s most controversial king, a man alternately praised as a saint and cursed as a villain.
Richard III is one of English history’s best known and least understood monarchs. Immortalized by Shakespeare as a hunchbacked murderer, the discovery in 2012 of his skeleton in a Leicester parking lot re-ignited debate over the true character of England’s most controversial king.
Richard was born into an age of brutality, when civil war gripped the land and the Yorkist dynasty clung to the crown with their fingertips. Was he really a power-crazed monster who killed his nephews, or the victim of the first political smear campaign conducted by the Tudors?
In the first full biography of Richard III for fifty years, Chris Skidmore draws on new manuscript evidence to reassess Richard’s life and times. Richard III examines in intense detail Richard’s inner nature and his complex relations with those around him to unravel the mystery of the last English monarch to die on the battlefield.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Skidmore (Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors) successfully creates a balanced biography of the famously complicated last king of the Yorkist line. This well-researched chronological narrative searches for something close to the objective truth, navigating between the subsequent Tudor dynasty's once widely accepted disparagement of Richard as a deceitful, murderous man, and the smaller but fervently devoted Richard III Society's defense of him as pious and kind. Richard's sense of loyalty receives full attention; first to his brother and predecessor, Edward IV, and then to his supporters in the north of England. Notably, the recent finding and exhumation of Richard's body allows Skidmore to buttress his argument that, contrary to Shakespeare's version, the king spent his final hours fighting bravely, without hope of victory, against the forces of the man who took the throne from him, the future Henry VII. However, unlike some full-fledged Richard III apologists, Skidmore does not discount the possibility that Richard, during his reign, murdered his young nephews, Edward V and Prince Richard. While the label of "most controversial king" remains arguable, this carefully researched biography effectively captures Richard's turbulent reign and intense personality up to the violent end.
