Richard's Council of the North, described as his "one major institutional innovation", derived from his ducal council following his own viceregal appointment by Edward IV; when Richard himself became king, he maintained the same conciliar structure in his absence. It officially became part of the royal council machinery under the presidency of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln in April 1484, based at
Sandal Castle in
Wakefield. It is considered to have greatly improved conditions for northern England, as it was intended to keep the peace and punish lawbreakers, as well as resolve land disputes. Bringing regional governance directly under the control of central government, it has been described as the king's "most enduring monument", surviving unchanged until 1641. In December 1483, Richard instituted what later became known as the
Court of Requests, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard. He also improved bail in January 1484, to protect suspected felons from imprisonment before trial and to protect their property from seizure during that time. He founded the
College of Arms in 1484, and he ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English. During his reign, Parliament ended the arbitrary
benevolence (a device by which
Edward IV raised funds), made it punishable to conceal from a buyer of land that a part of the property had already been disposed of to somebody else, required that land sales be published, laid down property qualifications for jurors, restricted the abusive
Courts of Piepowders, regulated cloth sales, instituted certain forms of trade protectionism, prohibited the sale of wine and oil in fraudulent measure, and prohibited fraudulent collection of clergy dues, among others. Churchill implies he improved the law of trusts. Richard's death at Bosworth marked the end of the
Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England since the succession of
Henry II in 1154. The last legitimate male Plantagenet, Richard's nephew
Edward, Earl of Warwick (son of his brother George, Duke of Clarence), was executed by Henry VII in 1499.
Reputation ) There are numerous contemporary, or near-contemporary, sources of information about the reign of Richard III. These include the
Croyland Chronicle, Commines'
Mémoires, the report of
Dominic Mancini, the
Paston Letters, the Chronicles of Robert Fabyan and numerous court and official records, including a few letters by Richard himself. However, the debate about Richard's true character and motives continues, both because of the subjectivity of many of the written sources, reflecting the generally partisan nature of writers of this period, and because none was written by men with an intimate knowledge of Richard. During Richard's reign, the historian
John Rous praised him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons", adding that he had "a great heart". In 1483, the Italian observer Mancini reported that Richard enjoyed a good reputation and that both "his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers". His bond to the City of York, in particular, was such that on hearing of Richard's demise at the battle of Bosworth the City Council officially deplored the king's death, at the risk of facing the victor's wrath. During his lifetime he was the subject of some attacks. Even in the North in 1482, a man was prosecuted for offences against the Duke of Gloucester, saying he did "nothing but grin at" the city of York. In 1484, attempts to discredit him took the form of hostile placards, the only surviving one being
William Collingbourne's lampoon of July 1484 "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, all rule England under a Hog" which was pinned to the door of
St. Paul's Cathedral and referred to Richard himself (the Hog) and his most trusted councillors
William Catesby,
Richard Ratcliffe and Francis, Viscount Lovell. On 30 March 1485 Richard felt forced to summon the Lords and London City Councillors to publicly deny the rumours that he had poisoned Queen Anne and that he had planned marriage to his niece Elizabeth, at the same time ordering the Sheriff of London to imprison anyone spreading such slanders. The same orders were issued throughout the realm, including York where the royal pronouncement recorded in the City Records dates 5 April 1485 and carries specific instructions to suppress seditious talk and remove and destroy evidently hostile placards unread. As for Richard's physical appearance, most contemporary descriptions bear out the evidence that aside from having one shoulder higher than the other (with chronicler Rous not able to correctly remember which one, as slight as the difference was), Richard had no other noticeable bodily deformity.
John Stow talked to old men who, remembering him, said "that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature" and a German traveller, Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent ten days in Richard's household in May 1484, describes him as "three fingers taller than himself...much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart." Six years after Richard's death, in 1491, a schoolmaster named William Burton, on hearing a defence of Richard, launched into a
diatribe, accusing the dead king of being "a hypocrite and a crookback...who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog." Richard's death encouraged the furtherance of this later negative image by his Tudor successors due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The
Richard III Society contends that this means that "a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building." The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play
Richard III as a physically deformed,
Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own
Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself in his
History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength". Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife. Jeremy Potter, a former Chair of the Richard III Society, claims that "At the bar of history Richard III continues to be guilty because it is impossible to prove him innocent. The Tudors ride high in popular esteem."
Polydore Vergil and
Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage". Vergil also says he was "deformed of body ... one shoulder higher than the right". Both emphasise that Richard was devious and flattering, while planning the downfall of both his enemies and supposed friends. Richard's good qualities were his intelligence and bravery. All these characteristics are repeated by Shakespeare, who portrays him as having a hunch, a limp and a withered arm. With regard to the "hunch", the
second quarto edition of
Richard III (1598) used the term "hunched-backed" but in the
First Folio edition (1623) it became "bunch-backed". Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however.
William Camden in his
Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, yet made good laws".
Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey upbraided the aldermen and Mayor of London for relying on a statute of Richard to avoid paying an extorted tax (benevolence) but received the reply "although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made." Richard was a practising Catholic, as shown by his personal
Book of Hours, surviving in the
Lambeth Palace library. As well as conventional aristocratic devotional texts, the book contains a Collect of
Saint Ninian, referencing a saint popular in the Anglo-Scottish Borders. Despite this, the image of Richard as a ruthless tyrant remained dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 18th-century philosopher and historian
David Hume described him as a man who used dissimulation to conceal "his fierce and savage nature" and who had "abandoned all principles of honour and humanity". Hume acknowledged that some historians have argued "that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown", but he dismissed this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability. The most important late 19th century biographer of the king was
James Gairdner, who also wrote the entry on Richard in the
Dictionary of National Biography. Gairdner stated that he had begun to study Richard with a neutral viewpoint, but became convinced that Shakespeare and More were essentially correct in their view of the king, despite some exaggerations. Richard was not without his defenders, the first of whom was Sir
George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, who completed
The history of King Richard the Third in 1619. The authoritative Buck text was published only in 1979, though a corrupted version was published by Buck's great-nephew in 1646. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including Richard's alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the
Titulus Regius, but also claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth of York, according to which Elizabeth sought to marry the king. Elizabeth's supposed letter was never produced. Documents which later emerged from the Portuguese royal archives show that after Queen Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king's sister Joanna, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joanna's cousin
Manuel, Duke of Viseu (later King of Portugal). Significant among Richard's defenders was
Horace Walpole. In
Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted his views in 1793 after
the Terror, stating he now believed that Richard could have committed the crimes he was charged with, although Pollard observes that this retraction is frequently overlooked by later admirers of Richard. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer
Clements Markham, whose
Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) replied to the work of Gairdner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that the bulk of evidence against Richard was nothing more than Tudor propaganda. An intermediate view was provided by Alfred Legge in
The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others. Some 20th-century historians have been less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. In the words of
Charles Ross, "the later fifteenth century in England is now seen as a ruthless and violent age as concerns the upper ranks of society, full of private feuds, intimidation, land-hunger, and litigiousness, and consideration of Richard's life and career against this background has tended to remove him from the lonely pinnacle of Villainy Incarnate on which Shakespeare had placed him. Like most men, he was conditioned by the standards of his age." The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several
Ricardian groups dedicated to improving his reputation. Other historians still describe him as a "power-hungry and ruthless politician" who was most probably "ultimately responsible for the murder of his nephews."
In culture of the anonymous play,
The True Tragedy of Richard III. Richard III is the protagonist of
Richard III, one of
William Shakespeare's history/tragedy plays. Apart from Shakespeare, he appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama
Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by
Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play
The True Tragedy of Richard III (), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the
True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" and "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way.
Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play
Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king.
Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel
Dickon set the trend for pro-
Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was
The Daughter of Time (1951) by
Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as
Valerie Anand in the novel
Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them.
Sharon Kay Penman, in her
historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel
The Murders of Richard III by
Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal is given in
The Founding (1980), the first volume in
The Morland Dynasty series by
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play
Richard III is the
1955 version directed and produced by
Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the
1995 film version starring
Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and
Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by
Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions. ==Discovery of remains==