Richard III

This volume pairs two opposed accounts of the last Yorkist king. Sir Thomas More's unfinished History of King Richard III, written in the early sixteenth century, presents Richard as a usurper who clears his way by the deaths of Hastings, the princes in the Tower, and others, in a narrative shaped like a moral history. Horace Walpole's Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III, published in 1768, tests that Tudor story, questions the evidence for the murders, and argues that later writers copied a hostile tradition. Read together, the texts form a debate about sources and character, not a modern biography.

Bound in blue cloth cover blocked with a feather design in black and silver. Orange endleaves. Black and mottled grey slipcase.