Shakespeare, and the Tudor chroniclers who influenced him, had an interest in portraying the defeat of the Plantagenet House of York by the House of Tudor as good conquering evil. Loyalty to the new regime required that the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, be depicted as a villain.[34] The historical inaccuracies in the play can be attributed partly to Shakespeare's sources, such as Holinshed's Chronicles,[35] the writings of John Rous, Polydore Vergil and Thomas More, and partly to artistic licence.[36] Some of these inaccuracies are listed below in the order in which they either appear or are referred to in the play.
There is no evidence to suggest that Richard was personally responsible for the death of his wife's first husband, Edward of Westminster (the son of Henry VI), nor that of her father, the Earl of Warwick (and in Henry VI, Part 3 Richard is not portrayed as being responsible for Warwick's death). Richard, then eighteen, took part in the battles in which Edward and Warwick were killed.[37][38] Shakespeare's sources do not identify Richard as being involved in the death of Henry VI, who was probably murdered on the orders of Edward IV.[39] Richard and his wife, Anne Neville, had known each other for a long time before they married, having spent much of their childhood in the same household.[37] Henry VI's widow, Queen Margaret, was not at court in the period covered by this play; she became Edward IV's prisoner and returned to France in 1475.[40] Richard's elder brother, Clarence (George, Duke of Clarence), was not on good terms with Richard,[41] but was imprisoned by Edward IV and was executed for treason in 1478, when Richard was in the North of England, where he continued to live until Edward IV died five years later.[37]
Richard returned from the North to fulfil Edward IV's wish that he rule as Lord Protector.[42] It was the Plantagenet tradition that a future king (in this case Edward V, the elder of the "princes in the tower") would stay in the royal apartments at the Tower of London while awaiting his coronation.[43] No one knows why the "princes in the tower" disappeared or what happened to them. Richard took the throne by an Act of Parliament,[44] on the basis of testimony claiming that Edward IV's marriage to Queen Elizabeth (Elizabeth Woodville) had been bigamous.[45] Contemporary rumours that Richard had murdered his own wife appear baseless;[46] she is thought to have died of tuberculosis. There is no surviving evidence to suggest that he planned to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, although rumours about this plan did circulate.[46] At the time he was also negotiating a marriage for Elizabeth with a Portuguese prince, Manuel, Duke of Beja (later Manuel I of Portugal).[47]
At the Battle of Bosworth there was no single combat between Richard and Richmond (Henry Tudor).[48] Richard spotted Richmond in his rearguard surrounded by French pikemen and led a cavalry charge against him.[48] Richard was steered away from Richmond by Sir Rhys ap Thomas.[49] The Stanleys (Thomas, Lord Stanley, and his younger brother, Sir William Stanley) entered the fray in support of Richmond when they saw that Richard was vulnerable;[50][51] when he saw this, Richard cried "Treason".[43] Richard fell from his horse after it lost its footing in a marshy area; he was offered a new horse but declined.[48]
The only contemporary reference to Richard having any deformities was the observation that his right shoulder was slightly higher than his left, which is now known to have been caused by his scoliosis of the spine. After the discovery of Richard's remains in 2012 it became clear that he might have been slightly hunched, though the degree and direction of the curvature was not as serious as that of what is now known as spinal kyphosis.[52][53][54]
