When archaeologists digging beneath a Leicester car park in 2012 uncovered the battered skeleton of King Richard III, it made headlines around the world. The discovery was hailed as the most exciting archaeological find since the unearthing of the boy king Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Now England’s most notorious king is back in the news.
The woman behind the dig that discovered the missing monarch, an amateur historian called Philippa Langley, has come up with new evidence that the crime for which Richard is generally held responsible by history, the murders of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, never happened at all. The theory goes that the boys survived into adulthood to lead separate invasions of England.
This nonsense appears to have been swallowed whole by Channel 4, which is screening a documentary tomorrow night – The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence – in which Langley sets out anew her bizarre belief that the much maligned monarch was a near saintly figure, rather than the misshapen murderer portrayed by Shakespeare.
Pursuing their long campaign to vindicate their flawed hero, the Ricardians formed their own society
But there are a few problems with rejecting Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard.
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