Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?

26:29That culminated later on in Shakespeare. Like I said, Elizabeth was a relative, a granddaughter, I think, of King Henry VII. So he was trying to basically curry favor, show appreciation for her. But long before him, I mean, basically overnight, they started slamming Richard III, I think is what it's called, slamming him. Yeah. The earliest, like, historical records we really have on Richard III are from that Tudor period. They are not flattering at all. One guy named John Rouse, he was a guy, and this is kind of pretty decent evidence that it was a smear campaign. He was a historian who wrote about him before and after his death.

27:13While he was alive, he was saying, great leader. He helped the rich and the poor, up with King Richard. After Henry VII and the Tudors take over, he's like, no, actually, he was a monster. And like maybe a literal monster because he was born at two years old. He spent two years in the womb. He came out with a full set of teeth. He had hair down to his shoulders. He was excessively cruel. He's basically the Antichrist. And he actually used that word. Then a guy named Sir Thomas Moore picked up where Rouse left off. He was alive when Richard died. He was only eight years old, though, but he was a close advisor to Henry VII, that Tudor king.

27:51And he wrote that Richard was a malicious, wrathful, envious person from before his death, ever perverse, said he was. and this is where you get the idea of him being, you know, deformed or something, what we would now call, you know, like a body physical difference. He was little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crooked, backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favored in appearance. Yeah, and also, so if you're like, well, I really picking on this guy's appearance. At the time, physical differences were equated with moral failings, right? So if you had a hunchback and a withered arm, it meant you were really dark on the inside, like your outside reflected your inner self.

28:34And Shakespeare relied very heavily on Thomas More's account. But, Chuck, I think the fact that the Tudors found it necessary to launch a smear campaign immediately against Richard III, to me, strongly suggests that he was not hated and feared and considered a cruel monster while he was alive. I agree, because otherwise they'd be like, hey, we're good. Everyone hated that guy. Exactly. I was just thinking how awful it would have been. I mean, up until recently, really. But back then, if you had some sort of physical difference, you were just born a certain way for people to think like, that means they're like an evil, awful person on the inside as well.

29:13Yeah, exactly. Good Lord. Until like the 1990s, basically, it was like that. I did want to mention quickly, I saw The Goodbye Girl the other day, the Richard Dreyfuss movie, the Neil Simon movie. Okay, whose movie was it? Well, Richard Dreyfuss starred, and Neil Simon wrote it. Marsha Mason was in it, too. It's just a classic film. But Richard Dreyfuss, very famously, is in New York to play Richard III and is trying to do this very, very strange, or he's sort of forced into doing this very strange portrayal of Richard III after he was ready to play it straight as an already weird Richard III. Oh, yeah, I've got to see that then.

29:53That sounds great. Neil Simon's wonderful. It's such a classic film. I love it. Back when somebody like Richard Dreyfuss could be a leading man in Hollywood. Another movie I have not seen but I want to is a documentary that Al Pacino made because he's apparently a huge Shakespearean and was basically obsessed with the tragedy of Richard III so much so that he made a documentary about Richard III. Have you seen it? Oh, yeah. I saw it in the theater. That's when I was living in New York or New Jersey. So I saw it in New York. Yeah, it's good. Very good. I will see it then. And if Chuck says very good, everybody, that means see it.

30:28So Shakespeare's play, like you said, was hugely popular. So this was really the image that we were stuck with. Maybe we should take our second break. Let's do it. All right. Well, we're going to come back and talk about people that tried to redo that redo right after this.

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33:37All right. So I mentioned that people came to redo the redo of Richard III's reputation. They are called Ricardians. And this happened in 1924, where a group of people finally stood up and said, you know what? We're tired of this rewriting of history. We're going to form an actual society called the Richard III Society. And our goal is to redeem his reputation, to, quote, strip away the spin, the unfair innuendo, tutor artistic shaping and the lazy acquiescence of later ages, and get at the truth, end quote. But you have to imagine a 1920s British aristocrat saying that. Well, yeah, that was my best job.

34:14This group is known as Ricardians informally. This group has chapters all over the world, particularly in parts of the world that England has touched, like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand. And, of course, in the U.K., there's plenty of them. But they are really dedicated to this. If you go on their website, the essays and the articles that they have are really detailed, so much so that I would almost advise them to maybe dial it back just a little bit. For the average person, it's a lot because they're so intensely into it. And this era was so intensely complicated and complex.

34:57But they are very much dedicated to reforming his image. apparently they'll hand out pamphlets that are critical of the tragedy of Richard III at performances of the tragedy of Richard III. Like they're rabble-rousers when it comes to Richard III's reputation. You know what would be funny is if you went to the website and it was like one of those early aughts. It's like black background with like shaking pink letters and it's got the spin doctors playing in the background. With Comic Sans, of course. So that went mainstream in the 1950s because of a book. It was a very popular detective novel called A Daughter of Time, in which they reimagine the disappearance of the two princes as a modern murder mystery where Scotland Yard gets involved.

35:46And Scotland Yard says Henry VII was the guy who murdered these two boys. It wasn't Richard III. It was a very big book, a bestseller, in fact. and it kind of helped shape the narrative starting or reshape the narrative, I guess, starting in the 1950s by saying, stick it, Shakespeare. Yeah, it was really critical of received wisdom in general, like this Scotland Yard inspector who's laid up in the hospital and is just amusing himself by solving this cold case mystery comes to the conclusion that he can't show at all that Richard III was responsible. And in fact, he thinks it might have been Henry VII and or his mother who killed these kids.

36:23because remember I said a lot of people had a reason to off them or get them out of the way. And along the way, this detective is very critical of historians and how they just basically will rely on rumor and unsubstantiated stuff as fact, and that becomes history. And this really changed people's views about historians and history, but also especially about Richard III. And that was the thing that really kind of turned the tide for him somewhat. Yeah, somewhat. The other interesting thing, and this is where, like, again, we sort of gave it away, but there was a mystery for a long time of what actually happened to Richard III.

37:05Was that body really buried? Was it tossed into the river? When a really well-balanced biography came out in the 1950s from Paul Murray Kendall, called Richard III. A woman named Philippa Langley read it and got very interested. She's a historian and a screenwriter, obviously a Ricardian. And she was like, I want to figure out what happened to this body. That's still the mystery of what happened to Richard III. And so I'm going to get on the case and sort of mountain amateur, which turned into, you know, sort of a professional investigation. She's going to sniff him off the case? Sniff them off the case.

37:44I still, after all these years, do not know how to use that correctly in a sentence. It's always correct. That's the beauty of the phrase. Oh, oh, good, good. I love it even more now. Yeah. So her whole thing was to basically use like cold case investigative methods like the fictional detective did in A Daughter of Time to finding where Richard III's body was. And by this time, historians have basically narrowed it down to a handful of blocks in the downtown part of Leicester. Like they knew Greyfriars was a real place. There was a really good chance that he was, in fact, buried at Greyfriars after his death.

38:24And even though grave fires had been demolished like 50 years after Richard died, there were still historical recordings that it was generally in this area of downtown Leicester. One of the areas was under an apartment building. It just so happened that that apartment building was demolished at some point, I think in the early 2000s, 2007. And they were able to excavate beneath it and found no evidence of grave fires. So basically, attention turned to the parking lot. And when they turned to the parking lot, they found Philippa Langley standing there saying, I've been telling you for two years now that this is where this guy's buried.

39:04I just know it. Yeah. I mean, she had been there in 2004 and 2005. And I guess just had a feeling like he's under this friggin' parking lot, I'm telling you. Yeah. Except she didn't say friggin' because she's from England. She said frackin'. Frackin', that's right. So she approached the University of Leicester and said, hey, how about this? I think Richard III is over in that parking lot, under that parking lot. Why don't we excavate that thing at great cost? And it's going to be expensive, and it's in the middle of a big city, and probably won't find it, but I feel pretty sure that we will. But other people are saying that there's no way.

39:41And the University of Leicester said, sure. I think she was pretty doggedly persistent. Yeah. Took a few years and a lot of calls and a lot of meetings. But finally, she got the permissions. She won the support of the city council, even those Ricardians. The Richard III Society chipped in thousands of pounds to make this happen. University of Leicester also pitched in a little bit. They finally had enough money, 5 ,000 pounds, to rent a ground penetrating radar system to survey that parking lot. And they went, something's down there, you guys. Yeah. There's somebody wearing a T-shirt that says Greyfriars, so I think this is the place.

40:20I fought in the War of Roses and all I got was this Lousy T-shirt. I don't want to gloss over what Philippa Langley contributed. She really got this thing going. She's the one. I don't think the University of Leicester would have done this ever had it not been for her. She obtained permits to do this dig. She really went to town. But she wasn't an archaeologist. The University of Leicester had archaeologists. After that ground-penetrating radar, she was like, I'm telling you, I told you guys, let's dig here. So then on August 25, 2012, they started that dig. And this was, it's a, you know, a car park, a parking lot.

40:59It's big enough that if you're excavating it with brushes, like toothbrushes and dental picks, it's going to take you a while. The longer it takes, the more expensive it's going to be. So they dug in for a really long dig. Within hours, they discovered Richard III. Yeah. Or, you know, they discovered a skeleton. And they excavated the rest of the area. They found, all right, this is definitely beneath the former Greyfriars church here. And so everyone's getting pretty excited at this point. Yeah. A few weeks later, September 12th, they finally call a press conference and they say, everybody, we have a skeleton that's an adult male in his 30s.

41:43Richard died at 32. It's got severe curvature of the spine that looks like scoliosis, which, you know, is consistent with maybe one shoulder being higher than the other. had some serious head trauma. It looks like a death blow to the head. And the date, you know, matches the historical record. So we are pretty sure we have Richard III here. Yeah, it was a big deal. There's a good movie that came out in 2022 called The Lost King. It's about Philippa Langley. Oh, I didn't know about that. It's really good. Steve Coogan plays her husband. Love Coogan. It's a great movie. But it's definitely, it's based on her book.

42:22that's based on her project, the Looking for Richard project. So it's very sympathetic to her. And it's very critical of the University of Leicester. And it really kind of became prominent in the movie, at least, at this press conference where she showed up expecting to be part of this whole thing. And she was just sidelined from that point on by the university who held this huge press conference, really well done press conference. And they announced this to the world. This was an enormous deal, especially in the UK, obviously. And then I think just a couple weeks after that or within the next several months, they did some more tests.

42:58These were DNA tests. And they were like they held another press conference. They're like, this is definitely Richard III. Yeah. I mean, it was one of those 99.9 percent certainties basically through DNA. They got them. They found them. Some people say they called it the luckiest archaeological dig in history, which to me sells like sells her a little short because she did a lot of good. It didn't seem like luck to me. She literally found the place and said, dig there. That's not luck. That's like good work, I think. Sure. I mean, they did say it was like a one in a million thing. But again, I don't know.

43:35Call it a great discovery. But when someone says, I think he's buried under this and he is, that's not luck. That's right. That's guidance. That's selling her short. Who played her in the movie? Sally Hawkins, I think. I'm pretty sure that was her name. I love Sally Hawkins. Oh, good. Then that's who it was. Wasn't she the Shape of Water? That weird movie? I did not see that movie. Oh, well, it won the Oscar and it was a little weird. But yeah, that's Sally Hawkins. I love her. She's great. Okay, well then you would like this movie even more now because she is great in it. She was in the Paddington movies, which are fantastic if you haven't seen them.

44:11I saw the first one in the theater. Yeah, the second one's even better. Oh, really? Yeah. I was not expecting that, Chuck. Yeah, it's like one of the sequels outdid the first kind of things. Like, well, there's not many, but yeah. So you may be sitting there, especially if you're genealogically minded, and be like, well, how did they know? How did they do a DNA test on the skeleton? Like, did they swab its tooth and then its toe and compare them? No. There was a group of genealogists who got to work tracking down descendants of Richard III. His only son died long before he could have had kids, so he had no heirs whatsoever.

44:49So this was a bit of work, and they tracked down two different people. One guy was in Canada, and they said, you are definitely a direct descendant of Richard III. Can we stick this cotton swab in your mouth and swirl it around for 30 seconds? And he's like, do I get anything else? Like, can I be king? They're like, we've brought this Richard III tote bag as a thank you gift. And he said, what's in it? And they're like, nothing. It's just the tote bag. Yeah, with a swab. Put that in your mouth. So, yeah, I mean, they tracked down a relative and made that certainty certain, which is just remarkable.

45:27I mean, DNA changed. It was just such a game changer for everything. There was always so much guesswork before, like, hey, we're pretty sure. But now with 99.9 % certainty, like, they found their guy. Even without it, I'm not quite sure what they found that was incontrovertible evidence that it was Greyfriars. But if they had found Greyfriars and then they found this skeleton. Yeah. Killed in battle, obviously. Scoliosis. Spine who had scoliosis, who was the right age. Like, I think we would still all be like, yeah, that was Richard III. But yeah, the DNA definitely seals it for sure. They were able to give him like a burial fit for a king eventually.

46:07They had a big, he was reinterred at Leicester Cathedral. Benedict Cumberbatch was there. The Queen was there. Cumberbatch read an original poem that he did not write. But like it was a lot of fanfare. It didn't really, I mean, it proved that he wasn't like a quote unquote hunchback. He may have had scoliosis, but he wasn't some like deformed monster. It did not answer anything, obviously, about what happened to the two princes. It's not like they buried him with a confessional scroll that he had written down or anything like that. Right. I didn't do it. I was framed. Yeah. So I think when the remains were found, one of the headlines of the papers in England, Philippa Langley read, referred to Richard III as a child killer.

46:54And so she was like, you know what? I think I need to come up with another project now that the last one was successful. So she's got the two princes project. Now she's trying to figure out or prove that he did not kill the two princes and or who did. I think she published a book claiming that it was solved and everyone's like, this isn't actually solved. But she did come up with some pretty good evidence that suggests that those princes made it out of the tower outside of England and managed to grow up and were not killed by Richard III. That's her new jam. Yeah, but Chris Barron hit him with a cease and desist and shut it all down.

47:30Who? Oh, is that the Spin Doctors guy? Yeah. How do you know his name? I looked it up. Oh, okay. But that is the weird kind of musical stuff that I remember. I just didn't remember that. Emily's always like, how do you remember the bass player from Poison or whatever? Ricky Rouse? That was Ricky Rocket guitar player. Bobby Dahl was a bass player. Okay, thanks. You got anything else? I'm Richard III, Chuck. I got nothing else. This is a fun one. If you can keep track of all the Edwards and the Richards, it's actually not the hardest thing to follow and super interesting. Yeah, it is. I love this one, too.

48:09Well, since we both loved this episode, I think, everybody, that means it's time for Listener Mail.

48:16And you know what? This is another rare shout-out because we want to honor a Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout. And this is from Rebecca Joyner. Hey, guys, my son John just achieved rank of Eagle Scout, and we'd like for you guys to come to his court of honor in Michigan this June. It's a tradition in the Boy Scouts to invite some of their scouts' favorite celebrities to their court of honor. John is 16 years old, part of the troop. I told him I wouldn't say the troop on the air, but part of a troop here in Michigan. He served in the Honor Guard twice, spent a week at the Scout Ranch, and started a 5K to support type 1 diabetes in honor of his brother, Bo.

48:50Nice. His Eagle Scout project was to retire over 6 ,000 flags from the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans and Cemetery. He also cleaned and organized their outbuilding to protect future flags. We listen to you guys as a family at least once a week. And between you and Joe Rogan, I feel like he's getting at least a somewhat balanced view of the world. Please, guys, just let me believe that. So thanks again. That's from Rebecca Joyner. And Rebecca, we just wanted to give a big shout out to John. Congratulations, buddy, on achieving the rank of Eagle Scout. That is quite an achievement. And all the work you've done, all the volunteer stuff you've done is just awesome.

49:30And I'm sure you're just headed toward great things in life. Yeah, it sounds like it. Congratulations, John. Thanks for listening to us. We appreciate you. If you want to be like, what's John's mom's name? Rebecca. Rebecca. and send us an email about your kid or somebody you know and love in your life who's just great. We love to hear those kind of things. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

50:13Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone needs to take care of their mental health, even running back B.

50:48John Robinson. When I'm on the field and feeling the pressure, I usually just take a deep breath. When I'm just breathing and seeing what's in front of me, everything just slows down. It just makes me feel great before I run the play. Just like B. John, we all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game plan for your mental health at loveyourmindplaybook.org. Love your mind. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, and the Ad Council. You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals.

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