In Richard III, Shakespeare dramatises the climax of a tumultuous period in British history.
Playing courtier was a dangerous game as the political ground was fraught with powerful factions. Nobles would stop at nothing for their own advancement, making survival at court a far more subtle skill than success on the battlefield.
On 28 June 1461, Edward IV was crowned king of England. His father, Richard, Duke of York, a descendent of both Edward III’s third and fifth sons, had begun the fight against King Henry VI of the House of Lancaster. Edward thought he had finished it.
However, what followed was a further 30 years of bitter conflict between the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York. From the First Battle of St Albans in 1455 to the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the nobility were constantly forced to adapt their colours as the English crown passed regularly between the leading characters on the royal stage.
Henry VI had been a direct descendent of John of Gaunt, and Henry V, and had married the formidable Margaret of Anjou (Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret).
Their son, Prince Edward, married Lady Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker and the woman Richard woos in the second scene of the play.
As a king, it was expected that Edward IV would marry another foreign princess to solidify strategic connections abroad.
Edward, however, was a law unto himself and announced at the Council of Reading on 14 September 1464 that he had been secretly married for four months to the Lady Elizabeth Grey, née Woodville, the widow of a staunch Lancastrian. The nobility of England were shocked and appalled both by her previous marriage and her relatively lowly birth. Elizabeth quickly made many enemies at court as she and her relatives rose above their perceived station. As Shakespeare’s play reveals, her brother, the Earl Rivers, and her son by her first marriage, the Marquess of Dorset, were bitter enemies of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, William, Lord Hastings and many others. King Edward and Queen Elizabeth had many daughters and two sons: another Prince Edward and Richard, Duke of York, destined to gain unfortunate fame as The Princes in the Tower.
Shakespeare’s Richard III begins in 1471, under the rule of Yorkist Edward IV. Henry VI has been murdered in the tower, and his son, Prince Edward, has been slain in the Battle of Tewksbury.
Yorkist victory is solid and indisputable. But Richard, Duke of Gloucester is plotting in the shadows…