Richard III: The Maligned King

The Richard III industry has always, to some extent, baffled me. Books which proclaim that Richard was a great man and ruler, and certainly not responsible for the murder of the princes in the tower, or even, it would seem, any ill intent when he usurped the throne, seem to appear at the rate of almost one a year, and the Richard III society has serious popular and financial support, and yet such books always present the debate as if they were a lone voice in the wilderness, against the systematic misrepresentation of the establishment. Whilst it is undoubtedly better researched, argued and footnoted than many of its predecessors, this book recycles many of the same arguments and assumptions. This is not to say that the Tudor demonization is somehow correct, or that Richard was not in many respects a capable man, but that this kind of polemic, which starts from a position of Richard's almost certain innocence and proceeds from there seems to me to be falling into precisely the same pitfalls of pre-judging evidence of which it accuses the accounts of more 'establishment' historians.