1485 The scene is familiar from Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third (written 1591, published 1597). The wicked king starts the day badly, having spent a sleepless night haunted by the ghosts of his victims, who have ‘struck more terror to the soul of Richard / Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers’. During the battle, key allies like Lord Thomas Stanley and his brother Sir William Stanley change sides. Richard is unhorsed (‘My kingdom for a horse!’) and killed. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, is crowned Henry VII on the spot.
Did Shakespeare get it right? How would Mary McCarthy (see 7 September) assess the facts in this fiction? Richmond’s claim to the throne he seized from Richard was shaky. His lineage descended through his mother, the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt and his mistress. If he was going to be presented to the world as the founder of a great dynasty, he would need to hire some good spin doctors.
Step forward, Polydore Vergil, an Italian cleric on the make. Henry VII hired him to write the ‘official’ history of England up to his reign. The best way to promote the Tudors was to denigrate the man they replaced. So in Vergil’s Anglica Historia (first edition, 1534) Richard becomes ‘deformyd of body, th[e] one showlder being higher than th[e] other, a short and sowre cowntenance, which semyd to savor of mischief’.
Not only that, but he ‘was woont to be ever with his right hand pulling out of the sheath to the myddest, and putting in agane, the dagger which he did alway were’. And Vergil’s Richard conspires against Lord Hastings and (ultimately) the Duke of Buckingham, and has the two princes murdered in the Tower of London.
Shakespeare goes one further than Vergil by having Richard order that the Duke of Clarence be drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine, and by turning Richard into an old-fashioned villain of a medieval morality play – taking the audience into his confidence, hence co-opting them in his wicked plans, manipulating events, finally getting his just deserts.
Even the battle itself still arouses controversy. Did it really happen at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, or eight miles away on the Warwickshire border? New archaeological finds, including part of a sword and a silver-gilt badge showing a boar (Richard’s personal symbol, worn only by his closest retainers), places the climax of the battle, and probably the king’s death, in a field four miles south-west of Market Bosworth, with the village of Shenton to the north and Stoke Golding to the east.