The Plays of Shakespeare

We’ve gotten to know William Shakespeare’s Richard III pretty well by now. But who was the real Richard when he was at home? That question has been raising eyebrows and hackles for at least 400 years.

Just after his violent death in August of 1485, the former Richard Plantagenet was immortalized by an influential  priest and chronicler named John Rous. Much of the portrayal of Richard that we find in Shakespeare’s play can be traced to this source. He is said to have taken two years rather than the usual nine months to emerge from his mother’s womb, finally doing so “with teeth and hair to his shoulders.” He is described as a scuttling hunchback, who lived up to his star sign of Scorpio, in that “like a scorpion he combined a smooth front with a stinging tail.” Rous finds it thoroughly appropriate that he was king of England for three and a half years, the same period of time which the Book of Revelation prophesies for the earthly reign of the Antichrist. “And like the Antichrist to come,” writes Rous, “he was confounded at his moment of greatest pride.” This portrait of Richard is… colorful, shall we say? And yet, being painted by someone who lived through his reign and quite possibly met him personally, it must be fairly definitive, right?

Actually, no, it isn’t definitive at all. Some of what Rous wrote about Richard immediately after his death falls apart upon the most cursory examination. His star sign was Libra, not Scorpio; Rous must have pushed his date of birth three weeks back for the express purpose of making his metaphor work. And Richard’s reign lasted barely two years, not three and a half, so the Biblical comparison is out as well.

Okay, okay, we might say. Perhaps Rous got a bit carried away in his jubilation over the tyrant’s death and altered the data points just slightly to conform with the spirit of his mystically and religiously inclined age. His broader portrait of a ruthless, bloody-minded despot still stands.

But then what are we to make of the different tune that Rous sang while Richard was still alive? In those earlier writings, he described a king who could be stern and unyielding, but only in the cause of justice, never in that of random cruelty or personal aggrandizement.

The most mighty Richard, all avarice set aside, ruled his subjects in his realm full commendably, punishing offenders of his law, especially extortioners and oppressors of the commons, and cherishing those who were virtuous, by which discreet guiding he got great thanks of God and love of all his subjects, rich and poor, and great praise of the people of all other lands about him.

There are many possible explanations for this about-face, none of which seems more or less likely than the others. Was Rous afraid to write the truth while Richard was alive out of fear of that monarch, or was he afraid to write the truth after Richard’s death, out of fear of his deposer and successor, King Henry VII? Or did he honestly believe in a just and righteous King Richard at one time, only to watch that image curdle like milk as Richard’s reign went on? Or was he just a born flatterer, sucking up to whoever was in power, such that we can’t take anything he had to say at any time at face value?

We can’t know for sure, but if I was to hazard a guess, it would be that the truth about Richard falls somewhere between Rous’s two extremes, as truths so often tend to do. There can be no denying that the new Tudor monarchy that followed Richard’s downfall — the same one that still held the throne of England when Shakespeare wrote his play about the man — had a strong motivation to make him into the worst sort of villain, as a way of dodging embarrassing  questions about its own less than ironclad legitimacy. It seems more probable than not that Richard was to one extent or another sinned against by the verdict of history — which doesn’t mean that he himself wasn’t a sinner.

Be that as it may, already by the middle of the sixteenth century, the mainstream take on Richard III had hardened into a Platonic anti-ideal of a tyrant, useful for understanding those strange people in our midst who are willing to do absolutely anything to attain and retain power over others. He has continued in that role to this day. Thanks not least to Shakespeare’s play about him, he occupies today the cultural space of a prototype for Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong. If the scope of the damage he did during his life was limited in comparison to theirs, this was only because the technological instruments of oppression he had to hand were so much less effective.

That said, the fact remains that this portrait of Richard is a literary rather than a historical one. Most professional historians are willing to cut him a little more slack. Some are prepared to go so far as to say that, if Richard wasn’t any better than the power-hungry people around him, he wasn’t much if any worse either.

And then there is the group which calls itself the Richard III Society, which has a whole different perspective on the man…

“In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake,” states Sayre’s Law, which stretches back in a somewhat attenuated way to the mid-twentieth-century American political scientist William Stanley Sayre. It may not quite be a universal truth — plenty of bloody wars have been fought over issues of real consequence, perhaps almost as many as have been fought over trivialities — but it does have a distinct ring of truthiness, as anyone who has ever planned a neighborhood gathering, asked a group of children to decide what they want on their pizza, or written online articles about videogames (hey, that’s me!) can attest. Another enduring example is the aforementioned Richard III Society, a group of folks who have been striving for more than 100 years now to rehabilitate the reputation of a king who reigned for slightly over two years well over 500 years ago. If it all seems ridiculously out of proportion, it’s also thoroughly human.

Indeed, I find myself agreeing with the Guardian columnist Alex Clark when she writes that “I’ve become slightly more interested in the Richard III Society than I have in the monarch himself — a double bind, because I suspect it’s not at all what the Society would want.” I think that Shakespeare, that eternal student of human nature, would likewise find the Society at least as interesting as the king he once wrote so negatively about. Occupying a liminal space between popular historical nostalgia — it’s not above dressing up in period costumes or reenacting famous battles — and serious historical research, the Society is a throwback to the time before our current Age of the Specialist, when interested amateurs could come into a field and do good, important work. Which is not to say that it’s all musty libraries with crackling fireplaces and polite disagreements over tea and crumpets, as if the twentieth century — much less the 21st — had never come to pass. The Society conducts lectures and discussions over Zoom today, and launched a podcast in 2024.

When it comes to describing its central mission, the Society is all over the place. Its actual mission statement sounds reasonable enough: “In the belief that many features of the traditional accounts of the character and career of Richard III are neither supported by sufficient evidence nor reasonably tenable, the Society aims to promote in every possible way research into the life and times of Richard III, and to secure a reassessment of the material relating to this period, and of the role in English history of this monarch.” This mild-mannered statement serves as the opening to an article by member Lesley Boatwright that purports to clarify “Why We Need a Richard III Society.” But by the time she’s done, she’s given us this elucidation of the categories of people who are unconvinced by the Society’s picture of an innocent Richard.

• Unthinking people with lazy minds who have come across the package, perhaps at school, perhaps by general cultural osmosis, or perhaps in the works of William Shakespeare.
• People who find it satisfying to have the past shaped by storytellers into a moral lesson, following the old Greek idea of natural vengeance lurking at the heart of things; that is, if you disturb the balance of the universe, the pendulum will come back and sock you on the skull. They like to believe that Richard did terrible things, and so inevitably got his comeuppance.
• People with axes to grind. Perhaps they feel that progress is continuous, and that every age improves on what went before, therefore the brilliant “early-modern” Tudor age was better than the nasty Medieval age (there is such a strange power in the word “modern”); perhaps they simply feel that it is a better bandwagon to be anti-Richard.

This is of course as silly as it is mean-spirited and unintentionally revealing. Plenty of people with none of the motivations above, including the vast majority of professional historians of the Wars of the Roses period, have looked hard at all of the evidence to hand and concluded that Richard was not a very nice guy, if maybe not quite as much of a monster as was claimed by the Tudor monarchs who came after him. And as for “axes to grind”… the irony is rich, isn’t it? The Richard III Society has been grinding a singular dubious axe untiringly since the 1920s. Romantic nostalgia for bygone ages is the flip side to the myth of limitless, perpetual human Progress; both are equal impediments to serious historical investigation.

Recently on that other website of mine, I tried the patience of some of my readers with a five-part series about the pseudo-history that surrounds the tiny French village of Rennes-le-Château, in which stories of buried treasure grew in the telling into the myth that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross, that he married Mary Magdalene, and that with her he fathered children whose descendants walk the Earth to this day. Those articles were inspired by Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, a computer game that takes place in Rennes-le-Château and tackles the same set of myths. Even if you don’t know the game, you may recognize the myths as the basis of Dan Brown’s crazily popular novel The Da Vinci Code and its almost equally successful cinematic adaptation. When I started to think about the Richard III Society, my natural instinct was to compare the one strand of pseudo-history with the other.

In many ways, the Society benefits by the comparison. Its central claim that Richard was actually a good, noble fellow is obviously nowhere near as insane as the idea that demigods are walking among us, just waiting for the right moment to announce their presence and take over; it might even be more or less the truth, although the odds do seem wildly stacked against it. Then, too, the Society has never inflated its hobby horse to apocalyptic proportions and tried to give it urgent, contemporary relevance, as full-blown conspiracy theorists always wind up doing in the end. In fact, the Society is perfectly capable of making genuine contributions to history when its biases and blind spots don’t derail it; we’ll witness the most famous example of it doing so a little further on. The worst one can charge it with is a certain reactionary edge that it shares in common with boosters of the Rennes-le-Château narratives and so many other conspiracy theories, one that is perchance not quite in harmony with the Enlightenment ideals of liberal democracy.

The politics of nostalgia notwithstanding, it’s hard to really hate the Richard III Society in the same way as the fools and knaves behind the profitable cottage industry of full-blown conspiracy theory. Not only is the Society in earnest in a way that so many of those others are patently not, but the stakes are just too low for anyone who isn’t deeply invested in its subject matter, a quantity of people which is vanishingly small at the end of the day, to really give a damn. Its worst sin it that of cluttering up our bookstores and libraries with its idiosyncratic view of Richard; its countless apologias for him threaten to swamp those publications adhering to a more supportable point of view. This is the corollary to Sayle’s Law: when the people who care the most about a particular issue are almost all on one side of that issue, a distorting effect is unavoidable.

But how, you might be wondering, did this oddball collective come to be in the first place?

The Richard III Society was founded in 1924 by Samuel Saxon Barton, a Liverpudlian obstetrician and gynecologist of some note. He had become a ship’s doctor during the First World War, earning membership in the Order of the British Empire and becoming an expert on tropical diseases. A flamboyant and loquacious Renaissance Man with all the trimmings, he painted as well, putting on regular exhibitions of his works, and published three books of poetry. In addition, he was a self-described “amateur antiquarian.”

Barton founded his version of the Society under the more charmingly evocative name of the Fellowship of the White Boar, after the animal found on Richard’s heraldic badge. By no means was he the first iconoclast to take up the cause of Richard’s innocence from wrongdoing. George Buck, King James I’s Master of the Revels, dared to write a defense of him as early as 1619; the writer Horace Walpole, who has gone down in literary history as the inventor of the Gothic novel, did so in 1768; the Polar explorer Clements Markham did so in 1906. Still, it’s hard to avoid the sense that Barton’s Fellowship was at least slightly tongue-in-cheek, a manifestation of the long English tradition of contrarian eccentricity, in keeping with the outsized personality of its founder. There was a lot of that sort of thing going on between the world wars, from the Bauhaus movement to the Surrealists.

Whether earnest or disingenuous, or some combination thereof, the Fellowship pursued their stated cause with some gusto for a while. The worst charge of all against Richard, in the eyes of his contemporaries as well as his posterity, was the cold-blooded murder of “the princes in the Tower,” who as the two male children of his deceased brother King Edward IV stood in front of him in line to the throne by any normal reckoning. Right from the start, the “Ricardians,” as his defenders called and still call themselves (I kid you not!), were therefore obsessed with acquitting Richard of this crime. For if they could absolve him of guilt in this incident — the most telling sign of all of his fundamentally evil nature in the eyes of most of his condemners — then the whole standard history of his reign would already be on the verge of falling apart. The question was, just how do you crack a five-century-old cold case?

There were actually more leads than you might expect. In 1674, during the reign of King Charles II, some workmen had come across a box of bones while doing foundation repairs inside the Tower of London. Among the bones were the skulls of two children. It was immediately assumed that these were the mortal remains of the murdered King Edward V and Prince Richard, Duke of York, recovered at long last. By order of King Charles, the bones were interred with considerable pomp and circumstance in Westminster Abbey — more specifically, in the chapel of their royal avenger, King Henry VII, in an inscribed urn designed by none other than Sir Christopher Wren, the most celebrated architect in English history.

Here lie the relics of Edward V, King of England, and Richard, Duke of York. These brothers being confined in the Tower of London, and there stifled with pillows, were privately and meanly buried, by the order of their perfidious uncle Richard the Usurper; whose bones, long enquired after and wished for, after 191 years in the rubbish of the stairs (those lately leading to the Chapel of the White Tower) were on the 17th day of July 1674, by undoubted proofs discovered, being buried deep in that place. Charles II, a most compassionate prince, pitying their severe fate, ordered these unhappy Princes to be laid amongst the monuments of their predecessors in 1678, in the 30th year of his reign.

The members of the Fellowship of the White Boar were thrilled when, following extensive lobbying, the Westminster Abbey authorities agreed to allow the bones to be examined by a forensic team in 1933.

Alas, the results were inconclusive. The urn really did contain two skulls, which the examiners believed to belong to male children of roughly the right ages. But there were messy aspects as well. The bones proved not to be two intact human skeletons, but rather a jumble of wildly divergent provenance, many of them stemming from animals. Some of the rhetoric of the examiners left one wondering how serious an inquiry this really was. For example, the Dean of Westminster claimed that the tear ducts of the skulls were engorged — surely from all the weeping the boys had done during their unhappy last few months of life! When the examination was judged complete, the bones were shut back up in their urn and returned to the chapel. They have never been taken out since, despite repeated requests, not least from a later incarnation of the Richard III Society.

Just one year later, more new evidence surfaced, only to likewise fail to provide a smoking gun for either side. A heretofore unknown manuscript by an Italian friar named Dominic Mancini, who had been visiting London when Richard became king, was found in a French library. Duly authenticated, it complicated more than it clarified. On the one hand, Mancini said of the new king that “the good reputation of his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers.” On the other, writing of the boy who had briefly been King Edward V, he reported that “already there was a suspicion that he had been done away with. By what manner of death, so far I have not discovered.”

A reasonable conclusion to draw from such contradictions is that history itself is messy, what with it being made by equally messy human beings. It is perfectly possible that Richard seized the throne by underhanded means and had his child rivals ruthlessly murdered to prevent them from becoming a temptation to rebel against his rule, all at the same time that he had admirable plans for his kingdom and conducted himself well in other areas of his life. (It perhaps bears reminding at this point that Adolf Hitler was a tee-totaling vegetarian who adored his dogs and loved playing the kindly uncle to visiting children.) But the Fellowship of the White Boar didn’t wish to replace a comprehensively monstrous Richard with a flawed, contradictory one. They sought a hero. In that same year of 1934, they gifted an ornate stained-glass window of a noble King Richard and his queen to the Church of Saint Akelda in Middleham, England, once an important power base of the Neville family, with whom Richard allied himself through his marriage to Anne Neville.

These events marked the high point of the original Fellowship of the White Boar. The organization fell into abeyance thereafter as the shadow of another cataclysmic war — not one of those that are fought over trivialities — settled across Europe.

The case for an innocent King Richard came roaring back after the war was over, thanks to, of all things, a mystery novel. Published in 1951, The Daughter of Time was the fifth of six books by Josephine Tey to star Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant. It’s definitely the most unusual of the lot. As it begins, Grant is laid up in bed with a broken leg. Bored out of his mind, he stumbles across the cold case of the princes in the Tower. He proceeds to work his way step by step through the historical sources. In the end, he concludes that Richard is not guilty, based largely on his portrait; Grant, who accounts himself an expert in human physiognomy, does not see a cold-blooded killer there. He does see one, however, in a portrait of Henry Tudor — so there’s your perpetrator, playing four-dimensional chess from France to arrange his own eventual ascension to the throne.

“They have no talent for the likelihood of any situation,” Grant says of the professional historians who will not find his conclusions convincing. “They see history like a peepshow, with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.” Reading these words, I immediately thought of the strikingly similar ones of Henry Lincoln, who was until his death in 2022 the most indefatigable of all promulgators of the conspiracy theories which swirl around Rennes-le-Château. Writing of the reception of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the most popular book on these subjects prior to Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, Lincoln and his co-authors stated with their usual complete obliviousness to irony that

it was significant, and not just coincidental, that the most sympathetic responses to our book seemed to come from literary figures — from important novelists like Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell, and Peter Vansittart. For, unlike the professional historian, the novelist is accustomed to an approach such as ours. He is accustomed to synthesizing diverse material, to making connections more elusive than those explicitly preserved in documents. He recognizes that truth may not be confined only to recorded facts but often lies in more intangible domains — in cultural achievements, in myths, legends, and traditions; in the psychic life of both individuals and entire peoples. For the novelist knowledge is not subdivided into rigid compartments, and there are no taboos, no “disreputable” subjects. History is not for him something frozen, something petrified into periods, each of which can be isolated and subjected to a controlled laboratory experiment. On the contrary it is for him a fluid organic and dynamic process wherein psychology, sociology, politics, art, and tradition are interwoven in a single seamless fabric. It was with a vision akin to that of the novelist that we created our book.

This is a standard trope among pseudo-historians: that professional historians are sad, unimaginative, one-dimensional thinkers, who are so caught up with the letter of what is written in their source documents that they can’t grasp the deeper implications. We can see some of the same contempt leaking through Leslley Boatwright’s description of the nature of anti-Ricardians. It’s convenient to fall back on when the evidence for the pseudo-historians’ preferred version of what was is lacking, forcing them to rely on what what might have been, if all of the pieces can be arranged just so. This condemns skeptics to the exhausting and unrewarding task of having to constantly prove the negative of their ever-shifting theories.

In a piece written for The New Yorker, Sarah Polsky noted how The Daughter of Time “made research seem romantic, even noble, and made the quest to clear a man’s name seem possible for anyone with a library card or willing friends. Grant, after all, spends the entire book in bed.” This same spirit is all over The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, was the key to its mass appeal. It’s not unreasonable to hold The Daughter of Time up as a hidden pioneer of the cottage industry in pseudo-history that would follow in later decades.

Indeed, there’s an extra-textual, postmodern quality to almost everything about The Daughter of Time. The research that Alan Grant conducts duplicates that of Josephine Tey herself, who had first attempted to turn Richard’s life into a play to challenge Shakespeare’s own theatrical interpretation, then dressed it up as a mystery novel when the play’s funding fell through. At the end of the novel, the protagonist and his research assistant commiserate that they probably won’t be able to sell many copies of any book they should write, what with all of the other people who have already tried to vindicate Richard. “If you can’t be a pioneer, what’s wrong with leading a crusade?” asks Grant. “There’s that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone.” This could be a more honest mission statement of the Richard III Society as we know it today…

The most bizarre aspect of this thoroughly bizarre mystery novel is that it became a significant popular success, enough so that it was turned into a radio serial by the BBC just a year after its publication. These events led in turn to the rebirth of the Fellowship of the White Boar as a more earnest and fussy sort of organization. For the book and the radio show were devoured by a daughter of the English peerage named Isolde Wigram — a name and a character straight out of Central Casting, absolutely perfect for her role. The energetic Ms. Wigram made contact with Samuel Saxon Barton and the rump of the old Fellowship through the letters page in Radio Times magazine. One thing led to another, and she was allowed to become Barton’s anointed successor.

It isn’t clear how much of an organization was left for her to inherit (nor for that matter how much of one there had been even in its prewar heyday). Regardless, Wigram took the ball and ran with it (to use a metaphor she would doubtless abhor), changing the name as one of her first official acts. Her efforts were aided by a major new biography of Richard by the American historian Paul Murray Kendall which appeared in 1955; it wasn’t quite a full-blown Ricardian whitewashing, but it was more sympathetic to its subject than most such books, proposing that the murder of the princes in the Tower could easily have been planned and carried out by Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, acting either completely alone or with the new king’s tacit consent only, in a “I leave you to do what you feel is necessary” sort of way. Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film of Shakespeare’s Richard III helped to drum up interest as well. Samuel Saxon Barton died in a car accident in 1957; Isolde Wigram didn’t die until 2009, at age 89, leaving behind the Richard III Society which she had for all intents and purposes created. The keynote address at its annual conference is known today as the Isolde Wigram Lecture.

Now I have to tell you about the most amazing story involving the Society: its supreme moment of triumph, when it captured worldwide headlines and made even the fuddy-duddy professional historians pull their heads out of their dusty documents and pay attention. This story is almost enough to make you see the Richard III Society as another Royal Society. If you squint just right, that is…

It begins shortly after the turn of the millennium with a true believer in the Ricardian cause named Philippa Langley, the founder of the Richard III Society’s Scottish branch. (There are also branches in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Northern Ireland today, in addition to sub-chapters all across England.) To put it bluntly, Langley was — and still is — in love with Richard, a man who had died almost 500 years before she was born. Or rather she is in love with her cherished version of the man.

In May of 2004, she made a pilgrimage to Bosworth Field and to the nearby city of Leicester, where Richard had stayed on August 20, 1485, the penultimate night before the battle that ended his reign and his life. It was written in some documents that Richard’s body had been interred after the Battle of Bosworth Field in an unmarked tomb in the Church of the Greyfriars in Leicester. This same church had been demolished just half a century later, in the chaos surrounding England’s transition from Catholicism to Protestantism. Now the area where it was believed have stood was filled by a parking lot. (How is that for a sign of the modern condition?) Here is Philippa Langley’s account of what happened on that bright spring day:

New Street car park is a tarmacked expanse of wasteland accommodating a hundred or so vehicles. That warm afternoon it lay almost empty and quiet, giving me the opportunity to walk its length and ponder what might lie beneath the unpromising surface. As I approached the parking attendant’s hut by an old beech tree, I could see the section of Medieval stonework lodged in the wall. I tried to get a feel for what it would have been like in Richard’s day, how it might have looked, but nothing remained here of the past. I felt no resonance with Richard’s life, or death.

Leaving New Street to head home, I spotted another car park almost directly opposite. I hadn’t noticed it before, but I’d been so intent on getting to the first car park that I must have walked straight past it. This one had high green gates with a barrier over the entrance and a sign marked “Private.” I was going to move on but experienced an overwhelming urge to enter. I slid around the barrier and into the car park which, again, was pretty much deserted apart from a few scattered vehicles. It was a large open space for seventy or more vehicles, surrounded by Georgian buildings with a large red-brick Victorian wall running north to south straight ahead of me. I found myself drawn to this wall and, as I walked towards it, I was aware of a strange sensation. My heart was pounding and my mouth was dry — it was a feeling of raw excitement tinged with fear. As I got near the wall, I had to stop, I felt so odd. I had goose-bumps, so much so that even in the sunshine I felt cold to my bones. And I knew in my innermost being that Richard’s body lay here. Moreover I was certain that I was standing right on top of his grave.

Needless to say, this was not what a professional archaeologist or historian might consider a promising start, but it would lead to unexpected places.

As it happened, in the summer of 2007 the University of Leicester conducted a dig under that first parking lot, the one where Langley had “felt no resonance,” which was thought to be the most probable site of the church. But no church was found.

Feeling validated by this failure, Langley called upon the expertise of the Richard III Society, which was real enough on matters that didn’t touch too directly upon its cherished view of its titular king. She and her fellow members delved deep into maps and other documents from the late Middle Ages. This research confirmed her in her belief that the professionals had dug in the wrong place, at the same time that it pointed to the church having been situated in precisely the spot where she had experienced that shivery feeling. It is of course possible and even likely that said feeling was written into the story retroactively. But be that as it may, Langley started a public campaign, the Looking for Richard Project, to dig in her alternative location, winning the backing of the Leicester City Council and eventually, in the face of much understandable skepticism, the University of Leicester; despite all of the red flags in her backstory, the evidence she presented really was that compelling. Even with this institutional backing, more than half of the funding for the dig ended up coming from individual members of the Richard III Society, who demonstrated their usual, almost fetishistic attitude toward their favorite king: “Search for him. Honor him.”

The dig finally began on August 25, 2012. It was a strange confluence of folks out there in the parking lot. Sober-minded, serious archaeologists wove their way between Wars of the Roses reenactors in full battle regalia and a film crew, both there at the behest of the publicity-minded Philippa Langley, who had arranged for a television documentary to be shot on the site. Traces of flooring and hallways surfaced as time went on. Ten days in, the archaeologists felt confident enough to officially inform the Leicester City Council that they had found the demolished remains of the Church of the Greyfriars.

Two days later, they struck pay dirt. In front of the rolling cameras, they unearthed an intact skeleton that appeared to have been interred with deliberate ceremony beneath the church’s central choir. The skull had been cloven with a spear or an axe; clearly this person had died a violent death. Most tellingly of all, the spine was bent. Everyone high-fived and laughed, hardly able to believe their good fortune. But, characteristically, Langley was left reeling by the curvature of the spine, a sign that her beloved king hadn’t been the upright man of honor she had envisioned — not physically, at any rate. If this really was Richard, then William Shakespeare had gotten at least one thing right in the course of his character assassination. “The hunchback stigma, if confirmed,” she thought, “will allow modern historians with their reputations tied to Tudor propaganda to claim their chosen sources have been validated. Any hope of revealing the man behind the myths will be lost and the cardboard-cutout caricature held up as incontestable.” She was suddenly desperate not to believe rather than the opposite.

The next step was to have the skeleton scientifically analyzed, which took a few months. Still thinking of her film, Langley insisted that she be told the verdict for the first time before the rolling cameras on December 6, so as to capture her authentic, spontaneous reaction. The news was good — or bad, depending on how you looked at it. The skeleton was that of a person of about the right age. Carbon-14 dating gave a 95 percent probability that it stemmed from a time between 1450 and 1540; Richard had died, you’ll remember, in 1485. It had also been learned that the person in question had had a high-protein, meat- and marine-based diet, indicating that he had been a member of the upper classes; peasants subsisted on largely vegetarian fare. Signs of various other battlefield injuries had been found on the skeleton, further confirming that this was a man — it was hard to imagine it being a woman, in view of the nature of the injuries — who had lived and died violently.

The medical examiners placated Langley by telling her that the skeleton showed evidence of scoliosis, not the more extreme curvature of the spine known as kyphosis. The former is “a condition, not a disability, and doesn’t rule out an active lifestyle. He could fight, it seems, as the records said he did, but his right shoulder may have been higher than the left.” Further, there was no sign of the “withered arm” that some vintage reports of Richard added to complete the picture of a hunchbacked cripple. Langley decided that she could reconcile this picture of Richard with the good, stalwart king she believed him to have been.

There was one final way to put the skeleton to the test, which would take another couple of months. Philippa Langley was in contact with one Michael Ibsen, a Canadian citizen living in England whose painstakingly researched family tree showed that he was Richard III’s nephew, seventeen generations removed. If a DNA test confirmed a genetic match between him and the skeleton, it would truly be case closed. The result came back on February 3, 2013: it was a match. The university held a press conference and put out an official statement the next day: “It is the academic conclusion of the University of Leicester that the individual exhumed is King Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England.” Channel Four ran the documentary, entitled Richard III: The King in the Car Park, that very evening. The recovered skeleton was all over the international news the next day.

It’s a little mean-spirited to poke fun at Phillipa Langley for her fan-girl reactions to all of this, but it’s also kind of hard to resist. She tells us that she “shed quiet tears of despair” at the prospect of “displaying Richard’s remains.” She was overcome when she saw a forensic artist’s reconstruction of Richard’s head and face: “I searched in vain for the tyrant. I can’t describe the joy I felt. I was face to face with the real Richard III.” Had Shakespeare lived in this mass-media age of ours, perhaps he would have given us a play about this odd tendency of some of us to fall in love with people whom they will never meet, people who will never, ever be able to love them back.

All told, The Looking for Richard Project was an extraordinary stitch-up of academics and amateurs, made all the more miraculous because it actually succeeded in its objective. What were the odds? Who would have predicted that Langley might actually be right when she told the professionals where to dig? But right she was. She joined Samuel Saxon Barton as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2015, shortly after the love of her life Richard Plantagenet had been reburied in Leicester Cathedral.

By then, though, the stitch-up had already pretty thoroughly unraveled. Langley complained that she felt “sidelined” when the University of Leicester announced its conclusions to the world. A war of words in the press followed, as did legal threats. The latest tussle has been over The Lost King, a scripted dramatic film from 2022 that purports to tell the story of the Looking for Richard Project, very much from the point of view of its founder. Although it was well-reviewed by critics, the University of Leicester took public exception to its depiction of the academic archaeologists as sexist, arrogant elitists who attempted to steal the credit for the find. A leading participant on the dig named Richard Taylor, who was given a particularly bad treatment by the script, sued the makers of the film for character defamation and was awarded a substantial settlement.

The 2013 book of the same name on which this film is to some extent based is an unusual one, being partially written by Philippa Langley and partially by a more credible co-author, a historian of the Wars of the Roses period with real credentials by the name of Michael Jones, who has a more clear-eyed perspective on Richard than Langley does. They make no secret of their disagreement over the murderer of the princes in the Tower. In an appendix, Langley presents the best case she can for Richard’s innocence and Henry Tudor’s guilt, pointing to such iffy circumstantial signs as the “surprising sluggishness” of Henry’s investigation after he became king and leaning heavily on a pair of “psychological profiles” of Richard which she herself commissioned. Jones is left to make the more straightforward argument that, while we can never know for sure, the preponderance of what we do know points directly at Richard. Langley, on the other hand, wishes to “apply the principle of innocent until proven guilty, rather than convicting him on a balance of probabilities.” But if historians operated by the same principles as a court of law, they would never be able to say much of anything. Muddying the waters in these ways benefits no one — except possibly those who are emotionally committed to alternative versions of history.

Nonetheless, in 2015 Philippa Langley launched a “Missing Princes Project” as a successor to the Looking for Richard Project. Its goal was to find out once and for all what had become of the two little boys, which it called “the greatest cold case in British history.” (A disreputable fellow known as Jack the Ripper might wish to have a word with Langley…) The not-so-hidden motive, of course, was to absolve Richard of guilt for the princes’ deaths. From the start, it was a more ephemeral if not quixotic quest than its predecessor, involving digging in thousands of documents instead of one innocuous-looking parking lot and trying to synthesize a conclusion from this mass of data; this sort of thing was even less in Langley’s wheelhouse.

Undaunted, she announced her conclusion in a book in 2023, followed by a Channel Four documentary the following year. To no one’s surprise, she found that Richard was completely innocent of wrongdoing. In the process, she left any semblance of serious historical inquiry behind, jumping the shark into full-blown conspiracy theory. She claimed that the princes escaped the Tower of London to become Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. These names would have been perfect for members of the Richard III Society, but the two men had actually led brief-lived rebellions against the Tudor dynasty at widely separated points in time whilst claiming to be the long-lost sons of King Edward IV. Their claims are universally dismissed by serious historians — but not by Philippa Langley. Her book is as confused as it is single-minded: contradicting itself, cherry-picking evidence, taking documents as gospel truth when they are convenient to her position, dismissing those very same documents as lies or forgeries when they are not. And when all else fails, there are always shadowy cabals with vaguely defined reasons for suppressing the truth. Channel Four should be ashamed for platforming this nonsense.

Then again, Phillipa Langley’s ability to get her ideas taken seriously is surely her uncanny superpower, just as it was Henry Lincoln’s before her. She is an avatar of the Richard III Society itself, this collection of dowdy revolutionaries seeking to upend our views of the Wars of the Roses between breakfast and high tea. They can do good or great work when the circumstances are right, but they can’t get beyond the blind spot that is their very reason for existing.

Having surveyed the Society’s existence as an organization, the question we’re still left with is why? Even if we accept the dubious premise that Richard was profoundly wronged by history, why the obsessive attention to this wronged king, whose tenure was so short, so ultimately inconsequential in the grand arc of time? I’ve come up with two answers, each of which may provide a part of the explanation.

One has to do with the timing of Richard’s reign. He is commonly called England’s last Medieval king, his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field marking the country’s exact point of transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Age. For those who are uncomfortable with modernity, then — those who suspect in their hearts of hearts that more may have been lost than gained in that transition — his is a natural cause to take up. I do wonder whether this is the real impulse behind not just the current Richard III Society but most of the more determined attempts to rehabilitate Richard’s reputation down through the centuries. Certainly there are a lot of nostalgic barnacles clinging to the Society’s ship of state, notwithstanding its embrace of digital media. Its website trumpets the patronage of the current Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, 32nd in line for the British throne, an utter irrelevancy to most modern Britons — but not to these ones. One intuits that republicans are no more welcome than accusers of Richard III among their ranks.

The other answer is the simple fact that William Shakespeare chose to write about this king, imbuing him with the same aura which has rubbed off on everything the playwright touched with his pen. Had Shakespeare never written a play called Richard III, I highly doubt that there would be a Richard III Society today. Whatever else it may be, then, the Society is just one more star in the constellation of dreamers, lovers, eccentrics, and true believers who swirl around the Bard.

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)