Richard III

Richard III is remembered as both the king whose death at Bosworth Field ended the Yorkist family’s hold on the throne and the uncle who recognized Edward Plantagenet as his heir. Though his actions are recalled through Margaret Pole and other characters rather than shown directly, his legacy shapes the family’s understanding of its identity, its danger under Tudor rule, and the recurring idea of a curse against royal succession.

Identity and Dynastic Position

Margaret Pole identifies Richard III as one of her royal uncles and places him within the close-knit House of York family from which she and her brother descended. In the family’s former standing, Edward Plantagenet and Margaret were not merely noble children: they were heirs whose cause commanded loyalty across much of England. Richard’s naming of Edward as heir gave that claim a particular force. Even after Richard’s death, Edward’s name and title could not be erased by marriage or obscurity, and the White Rose of York remained a rallying emblem for those who might support him.

The novel sets this family position against the abrupt reversal that followed Richard’s death. Margaret recalls that she and her brother went overnight from heirs to pretenders and survivors of the old royal family. The House of Tudor’s answer, as she understands it, was to marry the Yorkist heirs into obscurity. Richard therefore marks both the family’s remembered height and the political rupture that reduced its members’ power and security.

Kinship, Loyalty, and Reputation

Margaret’s account gives Richard a deeply personal place in the family’s story. She describes him as devoted to his brother and insists that he would have laid down his life for his nephews. In her view, his hostility toward their mother and his seizure of the throne do not make him capable of harming the boys. She regards the suggestion that he killed them as absurd, noting that even his political enemies stop short of directly accusing him of a crime they know he would not have committed. Her defense distinguishes political ambition from the particular charge of violence against his nephews.

This account also makes Richard a measure of kinship loyalty. Margaret’s confidence in him rests not on an idealized claim that he was free of political conflict, but on her conviction that his attachment to his brother and nephews was stronger than any motive to harm them. The novel leaves the allegation unresolved as a question of history, while clearly presenting Margaret’s certainty about the man she believes Richard to have been.

Death and the Tudor Aftermath

Richard’s death at Bosworth Field is the dividing point in Margaret’s recollection: after it, the family’s status changes, and the House of Tudor occupies the throne. Margaret later remembers the indignity of Richard’s treatment after the battle: his body, she says, was taken from the mud, stripped, carried over his own saddle, and placed in an unmarked grave. The remembered handling of his body gives physical form to the political defeat. The king who had named an heir is reduced, in Margaret’s account, to an unmarked resting place, while his surviving relatives are made vulnerable to Tudor power.

Richard’s fall also reverberates through the next generation of Plantagenet claimants. Edmund de la Pole’s position at court appears to offer a way for a Plantagenet to serve a Tudor king and signal coexistence between the houses; his arrest makes that accommodation look precarious. Margaret’s wider picture of interwoven Plantagenet cousins and kinsmen likewise shows how a large family network could be treated as a political threat. Richard’s death does not end the struggle over Yorkist identity: it begins the precarious aftermath in which that identity is at once remembered, concealed, and feared.

The Curse and the Vulnerable King

The novel links Richard’s death and the loss of Yorkist heirs to a curse motif that extends beyond his own generation. Margaret recalls the deaths of Richard and his son while considering the fate of the princes who disappeared in Richard’s keeping. She rejects the claim that Richard killed them, yet entertains the possibility that a later ruler ordered their deaths. The possibility remains a fearful suspicion, not an established fact, and it shows how the unresolved past continues to shape judgments of both Yorkist and Tudor kings.

The curse motif returns when Henry VIII grieves for Henry FitzRoy and interprets the loss of those he loves as evidence that a curse has been set against him. The contrast is political as well as personal: Henry has made himself the sole ruler of England and claims the imperial style of Majesty, yet grief leaves him dependent on attendants to lift him into bed. Against that vulnerable body stands the continuing force of royal succession—the question of heirs, family survival, and dynastic legitimacy that Richard’s story first makes urgent. In this structure, Richard is not simply a defeated king of the past; he is the remembered point of origin for a family’s dispossession and for the novel’s uneasy association between royal power, death, and inheritance.