Richard III Marriage Quotes

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‘Hurt and humbled, brave Richard reigns again.’ Ben Macintyre, The Australian, February 6, 2013, p.8. Adapted for the purposes of this exam paper. The king had an ‘unusually slender, almost feminine build’ but he fought manfully to the end; his body was hacked and abused as he was dragged from the battlefield by his triumphant enemies, and then England’s last Plantagenet monarch was tossed into an unmarked grave to lie there unnoticed for five hundred years. Richard III’s bones – which were confirmed as his on Monday night following their discovery in Leicester, England – cannot tell us whether he was a good king, or the evil monarch of legend and Shakespeare’s imagination. However, they have revealed an astonishing amount about…show more content…
Richard’s resting place was not a formal grave but a hole in the ground – although one that was near the high altar of Grey Friars church – and there is no evidence of a shroud or coffin. After his death, Tudor propagandists continued to vilify him, depicting him as a brute and a murderer due to the rumour that he had ordered his two nephews executed – the ‘foul, hunch-backed ape’ of Shakespeare’s play. But the bones tell a different story. Richard charged into battle and went down fighting. As one account of the battle put it: ‘Slight in body and weak in strength ... to his last breath he held himself nobly’. ‘Last hours of the hunchback king.’ David Leafe, The Advertiser, February 6, 2013, p.21. Adapted for the purposes of this exam paper. With the sun glinting off their swords and their giant horses ready to charge down the Leicestershire hillside and into battle, King Richard III’s troops must have looked a terrifying sight indeed. They outnumbered by two to one the forces of Henry Tudor, gathered in the valley below them, on that August morning in 1485. However, the King still seemed unduly troubled as he prepared to defend his crown in

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