David Baldwin - (Amberley Press), 2013

272 pp., £9.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4456-1591-2

Interest in Richard III has recently peaked with the discovery of his skeleton in a Leicester car park, something David Baldwin had predicted twenty-seven years ago and he includes a chapter on the discovery in this well-written book.   For someone who reigned for only two years, Richard III is someone on whom it is difficult to be agnostic, a situation made more difficult by the pervasive and corrosive influence of Tudor propaganda.  He was either a ruthless hunchback who butchered his way to the throne or a good medieval monarch or, as Baldwin suggests, more likely something in between.  Being a medieval monarch meant making hard decisions like what to do with the princes he had just usurped and yes, I do think that he either ordered their deaths or was at least complicite in it.  But, and this is the fundamental question that he has addressed, ‘what was Richard really like?'  What we know about Richard is refracted through the available sources and they were not favourably disposed to Richard during his life and certainly not after his death.  Whether true or not, Shakespeare's view of Richard is of a man of blood...directly responsible for the death of Henry VI's son Edward in 1471 after Tewkesbury, the execution of George, Duke of Clarence in 1478, a usurper and most damingly the murderer of the ‘Princes in the Tower' in 1483.  Yet he was a loyal supporter of Edward IV and effective ruler of northern England until his brother's death in 1483 and, on one thing the sources agree, he was courageous in death.  David Baldwin has written an articulate, well-researched study of Richard's life and its contradictions.