Anne's Blog

         J ust look at these paintings! Doesn’t your heart break for these brothers, “imprisoned” in the Tower of London and unaware of their fate? One of the paintings (Victorian, granted) shows the “murderers” hovering over those adorable boys.      What really happened to them? After July 1483, they were never seen again — or were they? This is probably the most intriguing mystery of English history after who was Jack the Ripper. It has gripped me for most of my adult life, too.      All I know, in my heart of hearts, is that Richard III was not the killer, although history loves to say he was!      So who were they, and why were they important? Edward, 13, and Richard, 11, were the only sons of King Edward IV and when Edward died suddenly at age 42, young Edward--I'll call him Ned to avoid confusion with his Dad--was named (but not crowned) King Edward V. In medieval times, it was never  a good idea to have ...

I was pleased to see, for a change, that The Lost King movie chose a nice-looking, undeformed young actor named Harry Lloyd to play the fantasy Richard. And he was downright pleasant throughout, unlike the character in the famous Shakespeare play! Harry Lloyd as Richard III Anyone who has read or seen Richard III  should know that our Will played hard and fast with the historical record. Such a brilliant play with an enviable lead for an actor, but oh so wrong in many ways. For example, there's the hunchback bit, which I covered in last week's blog. It was scoliosis--sideways curvature, not kyphosis--hunchbacked. Then there were the murders attributed to him on his way to "usurping" the throne--even that of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who actually died in the first Battle of St. Albans when Richard was only three! How's that for a skilled toddler-warrior?  And his inappropriate, sleazy seduction of Anne Neville at the funeral of her husband, Edward, prince...

  Richard III's skeleton Was Richard really a hunchback? I get that question over and over during my book tours, and up until 2012, my answer was enigmatic. "We don't know," wasn't satisfactory, I know, but being a writer meticulous about accuracy, I chose not to even refer much to his physicality in all my books--except the last one, This Son of York.  I needed to write the final book in my series about Richard's family precisely so I could now set the record straight and answer the question truthfully. It added to his story immeasurably. No, he was not a hunchback: he had a bad case of scoliosis that developed gradually only during his teen years, which is very different from kyphosis (hunchback).   With the discovery of his skeleton under that car park in Leicester, the dreaded words "crooked spine" were used to describe what the osteologist saw in the makeshift grave. "Oh no," I thought, "and I haven't mentioned his back in any...