Richard III was King of England from 1452 to 1485. Richard was the fourth son of the Duke of York, who had been a strong claimant to the throne of King Henry VI. He was involved in ongoing battles between different alliances of the House of Lancaster and the House of York factions during the last half of the 1400s.
During the reign of his elder brother, Edward IV, Richard had demonstrated his loyalty, and had been rewarded with the title, Duke of Gloucester, and the position of Governor of the North. It was from northern England that he always drew his greatest support, having spent much of his childhood at Middleham Castle, where he later made his married home. Following the decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard married Anne Neville, daughter of the late Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known to history as "The Kingmaker" because of his strong influence on the course of the Wars of the Roses. They had one son, Edward, who died in 1484 at the age of ten. Anne also died before her husband.
On the death of his brother, the king, Richard was entrusted with the role of protector to his young nephews, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, but seized the throne for himself a little more than two months after Edward IV's death in 1483, having declared his nephews illegitimate on the grounds of Edward's alleged marriage to another woman before Queen Elizabeth Woodville. Richard's other brothers, Edmund and George, Duke of Clarence, had both died before Edward, leaving Richard as the strongest adult claimant to the throne. He now created his own son Prince of Wales.
Richard was the last Yorkist king. By the time of his last stand against the Lancastrians, he was a widower without a legitimate heir, and accordingly he named John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as the Yorkist heir. He was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, and who was to cement the Lancastrian succession.
One of the mysteries surrounding the accession of Richard was the life and death of two young prisoners in the Tower of London -- possibly Edward V and his younger brother -- known as the Princes in the Tower.
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Richard III is also the name of a play by William Shakespeare, in which the monarch is unflatteringly depicted, since the ruling monarch of Shakespeare's time, Elizabeth I, was a descendant of the Lancastrian Henry VII. Shakespeare's main source for his play was Thomas More, who was a protege of John Morton, one of Richard III's implacable enemies.