Richard III - Habeas Corpus

I am very excited, perhaps more than I should be, that it looks as if some archaeologists have found the body of Richard III. It is because this somehow connects the myth with the reality.

If they do find his mortal coil there is bound to be a massive resurgence of interest in the monarch. The Richard III Society has been around for sometime and seeks to redress the bad press:

We are a society of people who prefer that history should be based on ascertained facts rather than on intuition, propaganda and spin.

According to them the main accusations against Richard are:

• he was a nasty hunchback who plotted and schemed his way to the throne;
• he killed Henry VI’s son Edward;
• he killed Henry VI (a sweet, innocent saint);
• he got his brother, the duke of Clarence, executed;
• he killed the Princes in the Tower (sweet, innocent children);
• he killed his wife Anne because he wanted to marry his niece Elizabeth;
• he was a bad king;
• and so it was lucky that Good King Henry Tudor got rid of him for us.
  
  

 They disagree, obviously,but they are not hysterical about it, they merely attempt to redress some of the biased reporting given out by people long ago. 

What seems so fascinating about the prospectus of the RIII Soc. is that they seek to place Richard very much in the context of his time. I was intrigued to read:

Nowadays, too, the terms of the debate are shifting somewhat.  It is not so much about Richard III as about the period of Richard III.  As Sean Cunningham says, ‘Richard has been put back into the context of an aggressive society riven by feuding over land and influence.’  Sharon Turner in the nineteenth century had already set Richard against the background of his violent times, saying, ‘[he] did not live in an age of modern moral sensibility’.  Moreover, the more interesting debates are now following Paul Murray Kendall into the more sensitive and imaginative regions, and asking, not ‘Did Richard III have the Princes killed?’ but ‘What was it like to be Richard III?’  Was he, or would he have been, given longer on the throne, a ‘good king’? – and what is a good king anyway?  

All these questions are good for applying to our times, so for that reason I shall be interested to learn more.

(For American readers: "Richard", "Richard II" and "Richard III - Habeas Corpus" are all available as movie downloads from Amazon,)