The New Murrey and Blue blog

‘He [Richard III] contents the people wherever he goes better than ever did any prince, for many a poor man that has suffered wrong many days has been relieved and helped by him…God hath sent him to us for the welfare of us all.’

So wrote J B Sheppard (ed), Christ Church Letters: A Volume of Medieval Letters Relating to the Affairs of the Priory of Christ Church Canterbury, Camden Society (1877), p 46.

The above extract is taken from the following link https://richardiii.net/richard-iii-his-world/reputation/a-man-of-the-people-richard-iii-the-pursuit-of-justice/ in which some of the good deeds of Richard, Duke of Gloucester/Richard III are described. The article by Dr David Johnson will be an astonishing revelation for anyone who has hitherto been duped by the monstrous creation of William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More et al.

No doubt, Richard’s enemies will condemn his action as heartless and deceitful, because after leading the unfortunate woman into thinking he was helping her, he’d take pleasure in punishing her for getting in his way! Or some other such cruelty. It’s par for the Tudorite course. Richard has to be blackened at all costs.

Do I exaggerate? Some of you may think so, but after centuries of Richard’s honour being impugned at every opportunity, it’s surely time that he was exonerated. I’m not saying he was a sweet little cherub, because he wasn’t. Someone has recently pointed out that he could be ruthless. Of course he could, because in those days one had to be in order to survive. Be soft and you’d be taken advantage of pdq….and probably disposed of even more pdq!

That’s what the Woodvilles—the maternal family of the new boy-king—believed they could do to Richard when Edward IV died suddenly in April 1483. They thought they could keep Richard—far away in the North—in the dark until it was too late for him to do anything. They tried to get the boy king to London from his residence in Ludlow before Richard—far away in the North and to be Lord Protector—knew anything about it. They wanted the boy crowned and under their complete control before Richard could make a move! With them in charge it would soon be bye-bye to the inconvenient and sole remaining paternal royal uncle.

But Richard found out what they were up to and was able to travel south, encountering the boy’s cavalcade at Stony Stratford. The Woodville’s duplicity soon became only too clear, and Richard removed his nephew from their clutches. Yes, he executed a few of them. And so he should. Let them live and they’d execute him! He then escorted the boy to London himself, with every intention of seeing him crowned Edward V.

Other Woodvilles and enemies of Richard scattered in all directions, mostly to join Henry Tudor in exile. This when Richard still intended to have young Edward crowned! But then new developments got in the way. Edward V was found to be illegitimate because his parents’ marriage was illegal! This meant that Richard himself was now his late brother’s trueborn heir.

Those who bad-mouth Richard as a matter of course seem to think he should have pretended the boy was legitimate, crowned him anyway, and overseen the reign of a bastard king. Oh, really? Forget what can happen regarding inheritance today, this is the 15th-century royal family. We’re talking the crown of England.

Would you stand idly by if you were the legitimate heir to the throne but was expected to watch someone illegitimate inherit the kingdom? Would you oversee the coronation without a single squeak of protest? On top of that, you’d be throwing away your own son’s future. Oh, I’m sure you’d shuffle away meekly, bowing, scraping and murmuring polite platitudes!

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had every right to ascend the throne; his now-baseborn nephew did not. Did that make Richard ruthless? Make up your own minds.

As for murdering both of his nephews….that requires proof of a murder. There isn’t any. But there is now a lot of evidence that the boys survived longer than Richard himself! See https://richardiii.net/the-princes-in-the-tower-the-new-evidence/. Richard, the Wicked Uncle? Nope. Henry Tudor, the Wicked Brother-in-Law? Yep. Henry had far more reason to be rid of the boys than Richard. Henry had married Elizabeth of York, the boys’ eldest sister, and had reversed Richard’s legal claim. Henry had made the boys legitimate again, and therefore given them a far greater right to the throne than his own. Now, you tell me if he had a motive or not?

But was Richard ever unnecessarily ruthless? Did he go around despatching people to the hereafter without a second thought? No, he didn’t. But the Tudors did. The wild figure of 57,000 is often given as Henry VIII’s final toll of executions. Do we hear the orchestrated chorus of horrified gasps that would accompany this figure if it were Richard III’s doing? No, we don’t. The 57,000 passes by without much comment….except, perhaps, that Henry VIII was probably justified. It’s all so ridiculously biased that those of us who believe in Richard can scarce credit the idiocy/gullibility of the anti-Richards.

Can you imagine for a moment that the unnatural, murderous fiend of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard III would bother with a roadside beggar….except perhaps to kick him/her aside into a ditch? Yet Thomas Langton, Bishop of St David’s, who accompanied Richard on his royal progress in the late summer of 1483, wrote a private letter to a friend of the new king’s manifest concern for justice:

“….The new king, upholding the strictures of the coronation oath, continued to provide the poor with justice and mercy. In September 1483, during Richard’s royal progress to the north, the King gave 3s 4d (£115 today) to an impoverished woman of Doncaster found begging at the road side….” Harley 433, vol ii, p 25.

Richard always had the welfare of the people in mind, and during his short reign did all he could to lessen their burden. He used the law to this end, and did not discriminate in his friends’ or servants’ favour. He made sure that all guilty parties were brought to account. If the treachery of Bosworth hadn’t robbed us of him, he’d have been a truly great king.

If Richard III had been really ruthless he’d have rid the world of the two-faced lowlifes who slithered from beneath their respective stones to conspire against him. He eliminated his two-faced cousin the Duke of Buckingham (https://murreyandblue.org/2017/10/18/just-why-did-buckingham-think-he-could-cross-the-flooded-severn/) swiftly enough when the latter stirred up rebellion during Richard’s royal progress of 1483. If he’d done that to the rest of them, they’d all have gone well before Bosworth. In fact, perhaps there wouldn’t have even been a Bosworth! Instead they were able to plot to betray and murder him on the battlefield….and be rewarded by that lying, cold-hearted creep Henry Tudor, first of our “glorious” Tudor monarchs.

So don’t tell me Richard was ruthless. Am I mad as hell as I write this? You betcha!  😠