Richard III: the search for the last Plantagenet king

This article was originally published in Current Archaeology issue 272. He has become one of our most celebrated literary villains: a power-crazed child-killer, struck down by bloody nemesis at Bosworth. Shakespeare’s Richard III is a murderous hunchback, twisted both inside and out by the deformity that repels his peers. But while this spectacular character assassination plays fast and loose with historical events, Shakespeare’s monster is merely the fullest flowering of a Tudor drive to discredit the last Plantagenet king. This victor’s history has proven so effective that controversy rages to this day about almost every aspect of the man behind the myth, right down to the true na