12 Reasons You're Wrong About King Richard III

King Richard III of England has been rescued from his makeshift grave under a car park and will instead be reinterred at Leicester Cathedral - but does this monarch deserve his reputation as a notorious and Machiavellian tyrant? William Shakespeare's play "Richard III" depicts the former king as a deformed and hunched schemer and killer who would stop at nothing to be crowned King of England - including murdering the "Princes In The Tower", King Henry VI and the 17-year-old Edward of Lancaster. But, if all of this is true, why are the British public willing to have this deceased monarch honourably reburied? In actual fact, King Richard III (who reigned between June 1483 and August 1485) has received unsubstantiated bad press - although certainly no saint, he has been the victim of a Tudor and Lancastrian propaganda campaign to tarnish the reputation of the former House of York following the denouement of the Wars of the Roses in 1487. For this was actually a man who was exceedingly loyal to his brother King Edward IV, who passed some of the most liberal and enlightened laws in Europe during the 15th Century, and who did not suffer from the extreme physical deformities which Shakespeare would have the world believe. So here are 12 reasons why you are wrong in your perceptions of King Richard III.