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Indelibly
associated with the House of York we
have to take a special care to locate
Richard III in his place, Yorkshire,
rather than the Midlands where he was
born.
Richard spent the better part of
his life in the North. He was sent
to Middleham at the age of 9 to acquire
Knightly skills, and so began his love
affair with Yorkshire, and in particular
the City of York, which he referred
to as "my fair City". The admiration
was mutual, York dearly loved it's "good
King Richard", which is quite something
in itself; York was initially loyal
to the house of Lancaster, Richard's
bitter enemies.
After his betrayal and death, and
at great personal risk, the Aldermen
of York officially posted in the City
records of the "great heaviness of the
City" at Richard being "piteously slain
and murdered". Such was the hatred towards
him that it was almost a year before
the usurper King Henry Tudor dare set
foot in York, a prospect that also terrified
the treacherous Earl of Northumberland,
who met justice when furious Yorkists
finally caught up with him at Thirsk,
4 years after Richard's death.
In 1471, when he was just 19, Richard
became his brother Edward IV's Lieutenant,
and as Lord of the North he become popular
as a "good and just administrator",
with a reputation for dispensing justice
to both rich and poor alike in a fair
but no-nonsense Yorkshire "right strait
manner".
The English kings had for centuries
seen the North as a wild and untameable
wilderness, populated by rebellious
barbarians, but through his good deeds
Richard won the people over, and after
12 years in the North formed a formidable
power base in Yorkshire with his castles
at Middleham, Sheriff Hutton and Pontefract.
When Richard took the crown he was seen
by the people of the North as their
king, and a way to finally shift the
balance of power away from the South
towards the impoverished North.
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The new king did not let his people
down - Richard was unashamedly favourable
towards his loyal supporters from the
North - during his reign six out of seven
vacancies in the order of the garter were
filled by Northerners. All three vacant
bishoprics in the same period went to
Northerners. Richard's loyalty towards
his Northern supporters did not exactly
go down too well with the Southern nobles,
who were, it must be said, collectively
terrified of an "invasion" of "foreigners"
from the North, and the resulting loss
of power, prestige and wealth.
They made their move in October 1483.
Just 4 months after his coronation Richard
was faced with the so-called Buckingham
Rebellion. The rebellion was soon quashed,
and Richard once again rewarded his
Northern followers and stoked the fires
of anti-Northern resentment by confiscating
the estates of Southern rebels and giving
them to Northerners.
So what about Shakespeare's villain,
the withered armed hunchback, shuffling
across a stage with all the grace of
a supermarket trolley with a sticky
wheel, en route to slit the throats
of his nephews? All fabrication, pure
and simple. The tyrannical child-murdering
freak was quite simply the invention
of the Southern based Tudor junta and
their historians, playwrights and other
supporters, who sought to legitimise
their regime's brutal coup d'etat by
portraying themselves as England's saviours
from an evil Northern monster.
As it ground to a bloody conclusion
at Bosworth Field in 1485 the War of
the Roses was no longer Lancaster against
York, but just another chapter in the
continuing Saga of North against South.
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