Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too.
And that makes this a good old-fashioned episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 2 That's right. This is where

Speaker 3 we...

Speaker 2 Well, we don't debate because we don't really do that, but we're going to talk about the merits of Richard III and the people that say that Richard III was a lousy king and terrible person.

Speaker 2 And other people will say, no, that was rewritten by people who didn't like him. And he was actually a pretty great king.

Speaker 3 And we'll get into all that right now. Wow, that's a great intro.

Speaker 3 So, Richard III is the you may, his name may ring a bell if you're not already familiar with him because there's a very, very famous play by Shakespeare called The Tragedy of Richard III.

Speaker 3 And in this play, Richard III has a hunchback. He has a withered arm.

Speaker 3 He has a horrible dark soul at his core. He's a terrible person, a murderer of children, a usurper to the throne.
And because this is Shakespeare, you know Shakespeare,

Speaker 3 that's how everybody's thought of Richard III publicly or popularly for hundreds of years.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like Shakespeare wouldn't do a hit piece on somebody, right?

Speaker 3 No way.

Speaker 3 If there was even one Shakespeare, I was thinking back to our episode on,

Speaker 3 I think it was like, did Shakespeare really write all that stuff?

Speaker 3 That is one of my all-time favorite episodes because I knew nothing about it. And yet there's this huge, rich subculture of people who like talk about this and investigate it and debate it.

Speaker 3 I love that one.

Speaker 2 Totally.

Speaker 3 But Shakespeare did basically write this play, probably

Speaker 3 at least in part to flatter Queen Elizabeth, who was the reigning monarch at the time, and he was a very loyal subject of hers.

Speaker 3 Queen Elizabeth was related to the guy who took over from Richard III after Richard III was killed before that guy's very eyes.

Speaker 2 That's right. And this story will get a little confusing as we go back and go through it because there's a lot of Richards, there's a lot of Edwards.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it's not the hardest thing to keep straight. We're going to do our best.
But in order to talk about Richard III, we have to talk a little bit about the War of the Roses,

Speaker 2 which were these bloody civil wars fought over the 1400s, basically in England, like, hey, who's in control here? Which family has a right to the British throne?

Speaker 2 Most of it was between the House of York and the House of Lancaster,

Speaker 2 whose symbols were the white rose for York and the red rose for Lancaster. There we go.
War of the Roses. White versus red.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 That also explains that movie with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito and Kathleen Turner.

Speaker 2 One of my favorite all-time movies.

Speaker 3 That is a great movie.

Speaker 2 It is great and holds up.

Speaker 3 Does it? I haven't seen it in a while.

Speaker 2 It's still so very funny.

Speaker 3 Okay, so the houses of York and Lancaster were both part of the Plantagenet dynasty, and that dynasty had been ruling England from 1154 up to the point where we pick up our story.

Speaker 3 So, like, it was a big deal that these two houses were warring one another for control.

Speaker 3 And an even bigger deal is we'll see that somebody who was basically unrelated to either one would come in and end the Plantagenet dynasty. Richard III was the last Plantagenet king.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so he was born in 1452. He was Team York.

Speaker 2 His dad, Richard, was the third Duke of York, and it was his dad who was a big player in the early part of the War of the Roses.

Speaker 2 In 1455, he went to dethrone King Henry VI, who was a Lancaster, and that really kicked off the Wars of the Roses.

Speaker 2 I think I've been saying singular, like the Danny DeVito movie, but technically it's the Wars of the Roses.

Speaker 3 I think it's all combined collectively under the umbrella, the War of the Roses, and you could consider each of these skirmishes or battles in it. Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 So we're right and wrong.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so but

Speaker 3 the thing to remember is that these were incredibly vicious, bloody battles being fought by ultimately two different sides of the same large family.

Speaker 3 But, like, the term Machiavellian is just perfectly used in this era.

Speaker 3 Like, these people were like, You're my brother-in-law, and I'm going to cut your head off because I want to get this other guy who's my cousin to the throne so I could take over my brother-in-law's land.

Speaker 3 Like, stuff like that. This was like the War of the Roses.

Speaker 3 And to give you an example of how brutal it was, when Richard III's father, Richard, the third Duke of York, died, he died in battle, and his head was cut off and displayed on a pike, and they put a paper crown on it.

Speaker 3 And he was king at the time. The king had his head cut off and a paper crown put on because the other house had won and now they were the kings.

Speaker 2 So after Richard's father, Richard, once again, died and his head was put on a pike, his big brother Edward, I think he had three kids total,

Speaker 2 took up the mantle to take up the fight. And he defeated the Lancasters at the Battle of Towton, in which I think it's the bloodiest battle in British history, 28,000 deaths,

Speaker 2 which is just remarkable loss of life in any war, much less one in the 15th century.

Speaker 2 So after that happened, Henry VI

Speaker 2 goes to Scotland. He's like, I'm out of here.
And Richard's brother was crowned King Edward. So all of a sudden, he's King Edward IV.

Speaker 2 The Yorks are in power. And Richard is second in line at this point behind only his older brother George.

Speaker 3 And George is a great example of what kind of duplicitiousness and

Speaker 3 maneuvering was prominent in this era.

Speaker 3 He was executed under his brother's orders by being drowned in a vat of wine, executed for treason. And this wasn't like saying, I want to take the throne.

Speaker 3 He really was treasonous and plotting against his own brothers. So, like, that was just something that happened in this family at the time during the War of the Roses.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. Um, previous to that, when the Yorks were in power, it was only for a couple of years because in 1469, Henry VI was reinstalled.
He's like, I've been to Scotland for a while.

Speaker 2 I'm coming back because my wife, Margaret of Andrew,

Speaker 2 orchestrated a rebellion that worked. So, thank you for that.
Now, I'm back in charge.

Speaker 2 But then, Edward and both Richard and George, because George is not dead at this point, they came back, defeated Henry VI VI again, and this was basically for good in 1471.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So Edward IV, Richard's brother, is now on the throne.
He has two sons, Edward and Richard.

Speaker 3 We're going to put them to the side for a little bit because it could not get more confusing if you try to bring them in right now. Can we call them Eddie and Rick? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Or Eddie and Dick. How about that?

Speaker 3 Yeah. And Edward IV, this is when he has his brother, George, executed, drowned in a vat of wine.

Speaker 3 And Edward IV died. And I was looking into it.
It's mysterious how he died. He just died suddenly.
It wasn't violently. He died of some sort of illness.

Speaker 3 But in his will, he named his brother Richard, Richard III, lord and protector over Edward's son, Edward, who was going to now become King Edward V.

Speaker 3 He was 12, though. Richard III was 30 at the time.
And Richard III was like, I actually think that I would make a better king.

Speaker 3 Yes, I know that through royal lineage, like Edward V is in line to take the throne. He's 12, and I don't really like his jokes.
He's a terrible joke teller. I tell great jokes.
I should be king.

Speaker 3 So he started to do some maneuvering and kept putting off the coronation, putting off the coronation until he was able to produce a rumor, as we'll see, that said

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 King Edward V, the 12-year-old, was illegitimate.

Speaker 3 His father had not borne him, or his father father was illegitimate, and he didn't have any real claim to the throne, hence Richard III did, and it worked. So Richard III became king.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so he had to do a little bit of other maneuvering to get this done.

Speaker 2 At one point, he met up with two of his deceased brother's closest advisors, a guy named Anthony Woodville and a guy named Richard Gray.

Speaker 2 And this was like, hey, the coronation's coming up for this 12-year-old to be king. And the very next day, he had Richard III had Woodville and Gray arrested on charges of trying to usurp the throne.

Speaker 2 And they were executed very quickly, along with another close friend of his brother's, William Hastings.

Speaker 2 So like he was, you know, if it looks as if it appears to look, Richard III was just kind of cleaning house of anyone from his brother's old team that would have supported the boy king, basically.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and this was basically his. brother's in-laws that he was killing off.

Speaker 3 He didn't want them to try to vie for power because the mom of Edward V, the young 12-year-old, she could have a ton of power and so could her brothers and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 So they were basically like wiping out the other side of the family.

Speaker 3 Remember I said Richard III kept putting off the coronation and putting it off. Well, typically, if you're waiting to be coronated king, you would hang out in the Tower of London.

Speaker 3 And since he was able to keep putting off the coronation, Edward V,

Speaker 3 who the kid who would be Edward V,

Speaker 3 was basically locked away in the Tower of London.

Speaker 3 And like a month or so after he got there, his younger brother, Richard, who was nine at the time, showed up and they were kind of compartmentalized away in the Tower of London out of public view, just held off to the side while Richard was doing his maneuvering.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so while this is going on, these two boys been lying in front of Richard III are basically hidden away in the Tower of London. And all of a sudden, the Church of England says, you know what?

Speaker 2 That marriage wasn't even legitimate. King Edward IV, your older brother, and his wife Elizabeth, it was an illegitimate marriage because Edward,

Speaker 2 I think there were a couple of things. One was Edward had supposedly been engaged to another woman when they married, which would be bigamy at the time.

Speaker 2 But didn't they also say that Elizabeth had a previous marriage or something like that?

Speaker 3 No, they said that Edward IV and Richard III's father

Speaker 3 that he had had an affair that bore Edward IV. Yeah, yeah.
But Richard III was legitimate. So he was saying, like, my brother wasn't even a legitimate king while he was alive.

Speaker 3 So his sons definitely aren't. I am, though, because my parents bore me legitimately.
And so there were two illegitimate rumors that were being bandied about at the time.

Speaker 3 And I guess one of them got picked up on by the Pope, I believe, who said, yeah,

Speaker 3 we're cool with this. And an act of parliament was passed that basically said, Richard III has gone now from Lord Protector.
He's now king because he's the legitimate heir to the throne.

Speaker 2 Right. And that was June 26, 1483.

Speaker 2 And maybe we'll take a break and talk about what happened to these boys.

Speaker 3 Yeah?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I need to take a breath.

Speaker 2 All right. We're going to figure all these dicks and eddies out, and we're going to come back and talk about it right after this.

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Speaker 3 So, Chuck, you asked before we left what happened to the two princes. That is one of the greatest mysteries, one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in English history.

Speaker 3 Still today, we don't know what happened to them. And there's a lot of great answers, and there's evidence that suggests one way or the other, but there's nothing definitive.

Speaker 3 So we can't really say what happened.

Speaker 3 But all we know is that while he was sequestered, that was the word I was groping for earlier, while he was sequestered away, or while they were, Edward V and his younger brother Richard,

Speaker 3 they

Speaker 3 like they were seen increasingly less in public, usually walking around the grounds of the Tower of London because they were basically being held hostage until I think in the fall of 1485, they just disappeared.

Speaker 3 from public view. No one ever heard of them again as far as the historical record is concerned.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, the Spin Doctors Doctors even wrote a song about it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, and they gave some pretty great advice.

Speaker 2 I agree.

Speaker 2 Oh, now that stupid song is going to be in my head.

Speaker 3 It's been in my head for a while.

Speaker 2 Has it really?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because of this episode?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 Oh, I didn't even think about it until two seconds ago. So you were on that already.

Speaker 3 For a long time, yes. A few days.

Speaker 2 So, like you said, they were last seen summer of 1483.

Speaker 2 Of course, there are the, you know, we'll just call them Team Auntie Richard.

Speaker 2 They were the ones that were saying, like, this guy clearly murdered these boys, and everybody knows it. He got his henchman, Sir James Tyrell,

Speaker 2 to do so in Shakespeare's play. He whispers to that henchman, come to me, Tyrell, soon at after supper, and thou shalt tell the process of their death.
So Shakespeare certainly bought that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and we should say Shakespeare wrote the tragedy of Richard III about a hundred years after Richard died.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the idea that Richard III murdered directly, because

Speaker 3 if they were murdered, he almost certainly did it himself, a lot of people argue. Other people say, yes, Sir James Terrell probably had somebody do it.

Speaker 3 And the idea is that they were smothered with pillows. But this idea doesn't pop up in writing until after Richard's death.
And the whole idea is that he had really great motive to kill these kids

Speaker 3 because they even if they were illegitimate, they could go off, grow up, train.

Speaker 3 There would probably be a montage of some sort as their training, and they could come back and try to topple him from the throne through battles and violence.

Speaker 3 And he was just wiping out this future challenge to his rule. He was not the only one who had that motive.

Speaker 3 There were a handful of other people around at the time who had just as good a motive of wiping those two kids out for the exact same reason.

Speaker 3 So that alone is not, that's not like the most damning evidence.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I could see the montage.

Speaker 3 Was that two princes?

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know that one part where he's kind of scatting.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that was good, actually.

Speaker 2 So the montage could have happened for sure. If you are Team Richard, they will likely say, man, there's no way he would have been fool enough to do that.
He didn't kill those guys.

Speaker 2 Maybe he moved them up to the north and hid them away because he wanted them to be safe or something.

Speaker 2 But Richard never said anything about it. There was no evidence for centuries, like literal evidence tying anything there.

Speaker 2 But fairly recently, there was a British TV historian that discovered a will that included a necklace that belonged to Edward V, the boy who would be king.

Speaker 2 This will was drawn up 33 years after he disappeared, and it belonged to a wealthy London widow named Margaret Capel, who just so happened to be the sister-in-law of that henchman, James Terrell.

Speaker 2 So the man who either possibly murdered those two guys or at least was in on the plot ended up with this necklace that was given to his wife 33 years later.

Speaker 2 So it's not like, hey, this is literal evidence, but it's pretty shady.

Speaker 3 It is, especially if you combine it with other evidence people have generated over the years.

Speaker 3 But can we talk for a second about why we don't know any of this, from the murder mystery to whether they were legitimate or not?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, one reason is just that history wasn't recorded the same, and there's just a lot of stuff that wasn't noted at the time, right?

Speaker 3 Yes, that's part of it. I read also that the Tudors, when they took over after killing Richard III, destroyed a lot of the platagenate

Speaker 3 documents in England.

Speaker 3 And then also, there's not a lot of historians working at the time. Luckily, there were a couple of chronicles that were created.
One was by a monk named Dominic Mancini or Mancini.

Speaker 3 He happened to be in England at the time while this was going on and went back to Italy and wrote about it. So he had a pretty good, in what you would think, impartial chronicle of the whole thing.

Speaker 3 He didn't really have a dog in the fight.

Speaker 3 And then there was something else called the Crowlin Chronicle, which was a chronicle that had been added to over hundreds of years by some local monks at a nearby abbey.

Speaker 3 And these two don't always agree. Sometimes they contradict each other.
Sometimes one talks about an event, the other one doesn't mention it. So you can kind of piece it together.

Speaker 3 But like, if you take Edward IV's will, for example, where he made Richard III Lord Protector, that will is gone. We don't know if Richard made that up.
We don't know what the deal is.

Speaker 3 Without firsthand evidence and sources, primary sources, all of this is essentially conjecture and up for debate.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. And that's, you know, that's why people still debate this stuff today.
And there's, you know, pro-Richard team and anti-Richard team.

Speaker 2 As far as his rule, he only ruled for a couple of years from 1483 to 1485.

Speaker 2 And this is, again, where people will debate what kind of king he is, because some people will say that he, you know, he fought for the rights of the poor.

Speaker 2 He only convened one parliament that he used to pursue like some pretty progressive

Speaker 2 agendas for the time, like Presumption of Innocence was created under his watch.

Speaker 3 And universal pre-K.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 A lot of his rule was pretty tragic, though. There was a lot of war.

Speaker 2 One of his closest allies ended up turning against him, the Duke of Buckingham, switched over and aligned with the Tudors, Henry Tudor specifically.

Speaker 2 They were a different family who had this, you know, they had a, they said they had a claim to an ancestral line that was, I guess, to our modern eye, seems fairly vague, but back then it seemed important enough to go to war over.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the Lancasters were basically like looking anywhere for somebody who had a legitimate claim.

Speaker 3 So they went to like a cousin's cousin's next-door neighbor's friend's dog's brother to find Henry Tudor, who you could connect the dots to the throne. So he did have a legitimate claim.

Speaker 3 But he was, like you said, essentially a different family. He was just barely a Lancaster.
He was a Tudor.

Speaker 3 But this is who they brought to bear. as a claim to the throne to challenge the Yorks in the form of Richard III for this throne.

Speaker 3 And his former friend, the Duke of Buckingham, they staged the Buckingham Rebellion, and it just got squashed almost immediately.

Speaker 3 So within months of being coronated, his rule was challenged right away.

Speaker 3 But he managed to get rid of that and, I think, another one and hang in there for a couple of years before fortune turned against him.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you know, he also had personal tragedy. A few months after that, his only child, Edward,

Speaker 2 died. His wife died not long after that.

Speaker 2 And then Henry Tudor comes and knocking again. He goes, You might have stopped me once, but you're not going to stop me again.
And on August 22nd, 1485,

Speaker 2 they went to battle again at Bosworth Field outside of Leicester. And this is where Richard, as king,

Speaker 2 fought and was killed in battle. I think the last English king to actually die on the battlefield, right?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 But he was the last king, and he,

Speaker 2 by all accounts, died in a pretty brutal way. If you consider like, you know, blunt force trauma and head damage to be a brutal way to go.
And I do.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So as we'll see, they found his skull and

Speaker 3 they examined it and found that he had not one, but two potential death blows delivered to his head. One was a sword thrust.

Speaker 3 So imagine sticking a sword into somebody's head through their skull and into their brain. That happened to him.

Speaker 3 And then somebody came up with a pike pike or a halberd, which is a very sharp axe on one side and a point, very sharp point on the other, opposite the axe blade.

Speaker 3 And apparently a pikeman came up and cut off essentially the lower part of his skull and took a big chunk of his brainstem with it.

Speaker 3 So either one of those, whichever one happened first, killed him virtually instantly. That was not the end of the

Speaker 3 torment to his poor body, though.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 he didn't get the head on a pike with a paper crown. They instead stripped him down nude and paraded him through town on a horse.

Speaker 2 And apparently people were like, you know, jabbing and stabbing at his body on the horse. And he literally had stab wounds in his butt.

Speaker 2 He was buried,

Speaker 2 historically speaking, he was buried in a place called Grey Friars, a Franciscan church in Leicester. And other people say, no,

Speaker 2 he was exhumed by a mob. They threw him into a river.
And that was sort of,

Speaker 2 we'll get to that, but it was, I guess, we've already ruined the fact that it's not a mystery anymore, but it was a mystery for a while.

Speaker 3 It was. And we should say when he was buried at Greyfriars, too, it was hastily.

Speaker 3 There was, like, I saw that he was basically put in a shallow grave that his legs were sticking out of when they finished, so they had to break his legs to put him in there.

Speaker 3 Like, it wasn't, it was the kind of grave that could very easily be lost to history. So, um, uh, Richard III is dead, he just died in battle.

Speaker 3 Apparently, Henry Tudor is crowned King Henry VII on the battlefield. They took the crown off of Richard's dead body and put it onto Henry.

Speaker 3 So there's now a new, entirely new family running the show, the Tudors.

Speaker 3 And almost immediately,

Speaker 3 they started a propaganda campaign against Richard III.

Speaker 3 That culminated later on in Shakespeare. Like I said, Elizabeth was a relative,

Speaker 3 like granddaughter, I think, of King Henry VIII.

Speaker 3 So he was trying to basically curry favor, show appreciation for her. But long before him, I mean, basically overnight, they started slamming Richard III, I think is what it's called, slamming him.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the earliest historical records we really have on Richard III are from that Tudor period. They are not flattering at all.

Speaker 2 One guy named John Rouse, he was a guy, and this is kind of pretty decent evidence that it was a smear campaign. He was a historian who wrote about him before and after his death.

Speaker 2 While he was alive, he was saying, great leader.

Speaker 2 He helped the rich and the poor up with King Richard.

Speaker 2 After Henry VII and the Tudors take over, he's like, no, actually, he was a monster and like maybe a literal monster because he was born. at two years old.
He spent two years in the womb.

Speaker 2 He came out with a full set of teeth. He had hair down to his shoulders.
He was excessively cruel. He's basically the Antichrist.
And he actually used that word.

Speaker 2 Then a guy named Sir Thomas More picked up where Rouse left off.

Speaker 2 He was alive when Richard died. He was only eight years old, though, but he was a close advisor to Henry VII, that Tudor king.

Speaker 2 And he wrote that Richard was a malicious, wrathful, envious person from before his death, ever perverse.

Speaker 2 Said he was, and this is where you get the idea of him being deformed or something,

Speaker 2 what we would now call, you know, like a body-physical difference.

Speaker 2 He was little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crooked-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favored in appearance.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and also, so if you're like, well, why are they picking on this guy's appearance? At the time, physical differences were equated with moral failings, right?

Speaker 3 So if you had a hunched back and a withered arm, it meant you were really dark on the inside, like your outside reflected your inner self.

Speaker 3 And Shakespeare relied very heavily on Thomas More's account.

Speaker 3 But Chuck, I think the fact that the tutors found it necessary to launch a smear campaign immediately against Richard III, to me, strongly suggests that he was not hated and feared and considered a cruel monster while he was alive.

Speaker 2 I agree, because otherwise they'd be like, hey, we're good. Everyone hated that guy.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 2 I was just thinking how awful it would have been.

Speaker 2 I mean, up until recently, really, but back then, if you had some sort of physical difference, you were just born a certain way for people to think like, that means they're like an evil, awful person on the inside as well.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. Good lord.
Until like the 1990s, basically, it was like that.

Speaker 2 I did want to mention quickly, I saw the Goodbye Girl the other day, the Richard Dreyfus movie, the Neil Simon movie.

Speaker 3 Okay, whose movie was it?

Speaker 2 Well, Richard Dreyfus starred and Neil Simon wrote it. Okay.
Marsha Mason was in it, too.

Speaker 2 It's just a classic film, but Richard Dreyfus, very famously, is in New York to play Richard III and is trying to do this very, very strange,

Speaker 2 or he's sort of forced into doing this very strange

Speaker 2 portrayal of Richard III after he was ready to play it straight as an already weird Richard III.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, I've got to see that then. That sounds great.
Neil Simon's wonderful.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's such a classic film. I love it.
Back when somebody like Richard Dreyfus could be a leading man in Hollywood.

Speaker 3 Another movie I have not seen, but I want to is a documentary that Al Pacino made because he's apparently a huge Shakespearean and was basically obsessed with the tragedy of Richard III so much so that he made a documentary about Richard III.

Speaker 3 Have you seen it?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, I saw it in the theater. That's when I was living in New York or New Jersey.
So I saw it in New York.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's good.

Speaker 2 Very good.

Speaker 3 I will see it then. If Chuck says it's very good, everybody, that means see it.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 2 Shakespeare's play, like you said, was hugely popular. So this was really the image that we were stuck with.

Speaker 2 Maybe we should take our second break?

Speaker 3 Let's do it.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, we're going to come back and talk about people that tried to redo that redo right after this.

Speaker 2 Attention, parents and grandparents.

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Speaker 2 All right, so I mentioned that people came to redo the redo of Richard III's reputation.

Speaker 2 They are called Ricardians. And this happened in 1924, where a group of people finally stood up and said, you know what? We're tired of this rewriting of history.

Speaker 2 We're going to form an actual society called the Richard III Society.

Speaker 2 And our goal is to redeem his reputation

Speaker 2 to, quote, strip away the spin, the unfair innuendo, tutor artistic shaping and the lazy acquiescence of later ages and get at the truth, end quote.

Speaker 3 But you have to imagine a 1920s British aristocrat saying,

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, that was my best job.

Speaker 3 This group is known as Ricardians informally.

Speaker 3 This group has chapters all over the world, particularly in parts of the world that England has touched, like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and of course in the UK, there's plenty of them.

Speaker 3 But they are really dedicated to this. If you go on their website,

Speaker 3 the essays and the articles that they have are really detailed, so much so that I would almost advise them to maybe

Speaker 3 dial it back just a little bit for the average person.

Speaker 3 It's a lot because they're so intensely into it. And this era was so intensely complicated and complex.

Speaker 3 But they are very much dedicated to reforming his image. Apparently, they'll hand out pamphlets that are critical of the tragedy of Richard III at performances of the tragedy of Richard III.

Speaker 3 they're, they're rabble-rousers when it comes to Richard III's reputation.

Speaker 2 You know, it would be funny is if you went to the website and it was like one of those early aughts.

Speaker 2 It's like black background with like shaking pink letters and it's got the Spin Doctor's flame in the background.

Speaker 3 With comic sans, of course.

Speaker 2 So that went mainstream in the 1950s because of a book.

Speaker 2 It was a very popular detective novel called A Daughter of Time, in which they reimagine the disappearance of the two princes as a modern murder mystery where Scotland Yard gets involved.

Speaker 2 And Scotland Yard says Henry VII was the guy who murdered these two boys. It wasn't Richard III.
It was a very big book, bestseller, in fact.

Speaker 2 And it kind of helped shape the narrative starting or reshape the narrative, I guess, starting in the 1950s by saying, stick it, Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was really critical of received wisdom in general.

Speaker 3 Like this Scotland Yard inspector who's laid up in the hospital and is just amusing himself by solving this cold case mystery comes to the conclusion that he can't show at all that Richard III was responsible.

Speaker 3 And in fact, he thinks it might have been Henry VII and/or his mother who killed these kids. Because remember, I said a lot of people had a reason to off them or get them out of the way.

Speaker 3 And along the way, this detective is very critical of historians and how they just basically will rely on rumor and unsubstantiated stuff as fact, and that becomes history.

Speaker 3 And this really changed people's views about historians and history, but also especially about Richard III. And that was the thing that really kind of turned the tide for him somewhat.

Speaker 2 Yeah, somewhat. The other interesting thing, and this is where...

Speaker 2 Like, again, we sort of gave it away, but there was a mystery for a long time of what actually happened to Richard III. Was that body really buried? Was it tossed into the river?

Speaker 2 When a really well-balanced biography came out in the 1950s from Paul Murray Kendall

Speaker 2 called Richard III,

Speaker 2 a woman named Philippa Langley read it and got very interested. She's a historian and a screenwriter, obviously a Ricardian.
And she was like, I want to figure out what happened to this body.

Speaker 2 That's still the mystery of what happened to Richard III. And so I'm going to get on the case and sort of mount an amateur, which turned into, you know, sort of a professional investigation.

Speaker 3 She's going to sniff them off the case.

Speaker 2 Sniff them off the case.

Speaker 3 I still, after all these years, do not know how to use that correctly in a sentence.

Speaker 2 It's always correct. That's the beauty of the phrase.

Speaker 3 Oh, oh, good, good. I love it even more now.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So her whole thing was to basically use like cold case investigative methods like the fictional detective did in A Daughter of Time

Speaker 3 to finding where Richard III's body was. And by this time, historians have basically narrowed it down to a handful of blocks in the downtown part of Leicester.

Speaker 3 Like they knew Grey Friars was a real place. There was a really good chance that he was in fact buried at Grey Friars after his death.
And

Speaker 3 even though Grey Friars had been demolished like 50 years after Richard died, there were still historical recordings that it was generally in this area of downtown Leicester.

Speaker 3 One of the areas was under an apartment building. It just so happened that that apartment building was demolished at some point, I think in the early 2000s, 2007.

Speaker 3 And they were able to excavate beneath it and found no evidence of grave fires. So basically, attention turned to the parking lot.

Speaker 3 And when they turned to the parking lot, they found Philippa Langley standing there saying, I've been telling you for two years now that this is where this guy's buried. I just know it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, she had been there in 2004 and 2005, and I guess just had a feeling like he's under this friggin parking lot, I'm telling you. Except she didn't say friggin' because she's from England.

Speaker 3 She said

Speaker 3 fracking.

Speaker 2 Fracking, that's right.

Speaker 2 So she approached the University of Leicester and said, hey, how about this? I think Richard III's over in that parking lot,

Speaker 2 under that parking lot. Why don't we excavate that thing at great cost?

Speaker 2 And it's going to be expensive and it's in the middle of a big city and probably won't find him, but I feel pretty sure that we will. But other people are saying that there's no way.

Speaker 2 And the University of Leicester said, sure. I think she was pretty doggedly persistent.

Speaker 2 Took a few years and a lot of calls and a lot of meetings, but finally she got the permissions.

Speaker 2 She won the support of the city council even, those Ricardians, the Richard III Society chipped in thousands of pounds to make this happen.

Speaker 2 University of Leicester also pitched in a little bit. They finally had enough money, 5,000 pounds to rent a ground-penetrating radar system to survey that parking lot.

Speaker 2 And they went, something's down there, you guys.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 There's somebody wearing a t-shirt that says Grey Friars, so I think this is the place.

Speaker 2 I fought in the War of Roses, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Speaker 3 I don't want to gloss over what Philippa Langley contributed. She really got this thing going.

Speaker 3 She's the one. I don't think the University of Leicester would have done this ever had it not been for her.
She obtained permits to do this dig.

Speaker 3 She she really went to town, but she wasn't an archaeologist, the University of Leicester had an archaeologist.

Speaker 3 After that ground-penetrating radar, she was like, I'm telling you, I told you guys, let's dig here. So then on August 25th, 2012, they started that dig.

Speaker 3 And this was, it's a, you know, a car park, a parking lot. It's big enough that if you're excavating it with brushes like toothbrushes and dental picks, it's going to take you a while.

Speaker 3 The longer it takes, the more expensive expensive it's going to be. So they dug in for a really long dig.
Within hours, they discovered Richard III.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Or, you know, they just discovered a skeleton and they excavated the rest of the area.
They found, all right, this is definitely beneath the former Grey Friars Church here.

Speaker 2 And so everyone's getting pretty excited at this point.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 A few weeks later, September 12th, they finally call a press conference and they say, everybody, we have a skeleton that's an adult male in his 30s. Richard died at 32.

Speaker 2 It's got severe curvature of the spine that looks like scoliosis, which, you know, is consistent with maybe one shoulder being higher than the other.

Speaker 2 Had some serious head trauma. It looks like a death blow to the head.
And

Speaker 2 the date, you know, matches the historical record. So we are pretty sure we have Richard III here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was a big deal. There's a good movie that came out in 2022 called The Lost King.
It's about Philippa Langley and this.

Speaker 2 Oh, I didn't know about that.

Speaker 3 It's really good. Steve Coogan plays her husband.

Speaker 3 It's a great movie.

Speaker 3 But it's definitely, it's based on her book,

Speaker 3 that's based on her project, The Looking for Richard project. So it's very sympathetic to her and it's very critical of the University of Leicester.

Speaker 3 And it really kind of became prominent in the movie, at least at this press conference, where she showed up expecting to be part of this whole thing.

Speaker 3 And she was just sidelined from that point on on by the university, who held this huge press conference, really well-done press conference. And they announced this to the world.

Speaker 3 This was an enormous deal, especially in the UK, obviously.

Speaker 3 And then I think just a couple of weeks after that, or within the next several months, they did some more tests. These were DNA tests, and they were like, they held another press conference.

Speaker 3 They're like, this is definitely Richard III.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it was one of those 99.9%

Speaker 2 certainties, basically, through DNA.

Speaker 2 They got him. They found him.

Speaker 2 Some people say they called it the luckiest archaeological dig in history, which to me sells it like,

Speaker 2 sells her a little short because she did a lot of good work. It didn't seem like luck to me.
She literally found the place and said, dig there.

Speaker 3 That's not luck.

Speaker 2 That's like good work, I think.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 2 I mean, they did say it was like a one in a million thing, but again, I don't know. Call it a great discovery.
But when someone says, I think he's buried under this and he is, that's not luck.

Speaker 3 That's right. That's guidance.

Speaker 2 That's selling her short.

Speaker 3 Who played her in the movie?

Speaker 3 Sally Hawkins, I think.

Speaker 3 I'm pretty sure that was her name.

Speaker 2 I love Sally Hawkins.

Speaker 3 Oh, good. Then that's who it was.

Speaker 3 Wasn't she the Shape of Water, that weird movie? I did not see that movie.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, it won the Oscar, and it was a little weird. But yeah, that's Sally Hawkins.
I love her. She's great.

Speaker 3 Okay, well, then you would like this movie even more now because she is great in it.

Speaker 2 She was in the Paddington movies, which are fantastic if you haven't seen them.

Speaker 3 I saw the first one in the theater.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the second one's even better.

Speaker 3 Oh, really? Yeah. I was not expecting that, Chuck.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was, it's like one of the sequels out did the first kind of things. Like,

Speaker 2 well, there's not many, but yeah.

Speaker 3 So you may be sitting there, especially if you're genealogically minded, and be like, well, how did they know? How did they do a DNA test on the skeleton?

Speaker 3 Like, did they swap its tooth and then its toe and compare them? No. There was a group of genealogists who got to to work tracking down descendants of Richard III.
His only son died long before he

Speaker 3 could have had kids, so he had no heirs whatsoever. So this was a bit of work, and they tracked down two different people.

Speaker 3 One guy was in Canada, and they said, you are definitely a direct descendant of Richard III. Can we stick this cotton swab in your mouth and swirl it around for 30 seconds?

Speaker 2 And he's like, do I get anything else? Like, can I be king?

Speaker 3 They're like, we've brought this Richard III tote bag as a thank you gift. And he said, what's in it? And they're like, nothing.
It's just the tote bag.

Speaker 2 Yeah, with a swab.

Speaker 3 Put that in your mouth.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 yeah. I mean,

Speaker 2 they tracked down a relative and made that certainty certain, which is just remarkable. I mean, that's

Speaker 2 DNA changed, was just such a game changer for everything. There was always so much guesswork before, like, hey, we're pretty sure.
But now with 99.9% certainty, like they found their guy.

Speaker 3 Even without it, I'm not quite sure what they found that was incontrovertible evidence that it was Greyfriars.

Speaker 3 But if they had found Greyfriars and then they found this skeleton

Speaker 3 killed in battle, obviously. Scoliosis.
Spine who had scoliosis, who was the right age, like I think we would still all be like, yeah, that was Richard III.

Speaker 3 But yeah, the DNA definitely seals it for sure.

Speaker 2 They were able to... to give him like a burial fit for a king eventually.
They had a big, he was reinterred at Leicester Cathedral. Benedict Cumberbatch was there.
The queen was there.

Speaker 2 Cumberbatch read an original poem that he did not write, but like it was a lot of fanfare.

Speaker 2 It didn't really, I mean, it proved that he wasn't like a quote-unquote hunchback. He may have had scoliosis, but he wasn't some like deformed monster.

Speaker 2 It did not answer anything, obviously, about what happened to the two princes. It's not like he, they buried him with a, you know, a confessional scroll that he had written down or anything like that.

Speaker 3 Right. I didn't do it.
I was framed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I think when the remains were found, one of the headlines of the papers in England,

Speaker 3 Philippa Langley read, said, referred to Richard III as a child killer. And so she was like, you know what? I think I need to come up with another project now that the last one was successful.

Speaker 3 So she's got the Two Princes project. Now she's trying to figure out or prove that he did not kill the Two Princes and or who did.

Speaker 3 I I think she published a book claiming that it was solved and everyone's like, this isn't actually solved, but she did come up with some pretty good evidence that suggests that those princes made it out of the tower outside of England and managed to grow up and were not killed by Richard III.

Speaker 3 That's her new jam.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but Chris Barron hit him with a cease and desist and shut it all down. Who?

Speaker 3 Oh, is that the Spin Doctor's guy? Yeah. How do you know his name?

Speaker 2 I looked it up.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 But that is the weird kind of musical stuff that I remember. I just didn't remember that.
Emily's always like, how do you remember the bass player from Poison or whatever?

Speaker 3 Ricky Rouse.

Speaker 2 That was Ricky Rocket guitar player. Bobby Dahl was a bass player.

Speaker 3 Okay. Thanks.

Speaker 3 You got anything else on Richard III, Chuck? I got nothing else.

Speaker 2 This is a fun one. If you can keep track of all the Edwards and the Richards, it's actually not the hardest thing to follow and super interesting.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it is. I love this one too.

Speaker 3 Well, since we both love this episode, I think everybody, that means it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 2 And you know what? This is another rare shout out because we want to honor a Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout. And this is from Rebecca Joyner.

Speaker 2 Hey guys, my son John just achieved rank of Eagle Scout, and we'd like for you guys to come to his court of honor in Michigan this June.

Speaker 2 It's a tradition in the Boy Scouts to invite some of their scouts' favorite celebrities to their court of honor. John is 16 years old, part of the troop,

Speaker 2 told him I wouldn't say the troop on the air, but part of a troop here in Michigan.

Speaker 2 He has served in the Honor Guard twice, spent a week at the Scout Ranch, and started a 5K to support type 1 diabetes in honor of his brother Bo.

Speaker 2 His Eagle Scout project was to retire over 6,000 flags from the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans and Cemetery. He also cleaned and organized their outbuilding to protect future flags.

Speaker 2 We listen to you guys as a family at least once a week. And between you and Joe Rogan, I feel like he's getting at least a somewhat balanced view of the world.
Please, guys, just let me believe that.

Speaker 2 So thanks again. That's from Rebecca Joyner.
And Rebecca, we just wanted to give a big shout out to John. Congratulations, buddy, on the achieving the rank of Eagle Scout.

Speaker 2 That is quite an achievement. And all the work you've done, all the volunteer stuff you've done is just awesome.
And I'm sure you're just headed toward great things in life.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it sounds like it. Congratulations, John.
Thanks for listening to us. We appreciate you.

Speaker 3 If you want to be like, what's John's mom's name? Rebecca.

Speaker 3 Rebecca, and send us an email about your kid or somebody you know and love in your life who's just great, we love to hear those kinds of things.

Speaker 3 You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

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