No English king has so divided opinion both during his reign and in the centuries since more
than Richard III. He was loathed in his own time for the never-confirmed murder of his young
nephews the Princes in the Tower and died fighting his own subjects on the battlefield. This
is the vision of Richard we have inherited from Shakespeare. Equally he inspired great loyalty
in his followers. In this enlightening even-handed study Rosemary Horrox builds a complex
picture of a king who by any standard failed as a monarch. He was killed after only two years
on the throne without an heir and brought such a decisive end to the House of York that Henry
Tudor was able to seize the throne despite his extremely tenuous claim. Whether Richard was
undone by his own fierce ambitions or by the legacy of a Yorkist dynasty which was already
profoundly dysfunctional the end result was the same: Richard III destroyed the very dynasty
that he had spent his life so passionately defending.
