The Society - History

Richard III’s Appearance
by Carolyn Hammond

Many people’s image of Richard III is influenced by Shakespeare’s portrait of the ‘poisonous bunch-backed toad’, a limping hunch-back with a withered arm. Shakespeare’s sources were the Tudor chroniclers, hostile to Richard. Perhaps Shakespeare also wanted to reflect the medieval idea that an evil mind must dwell in a twisted body. But if we examine what the people who actually saw Richard said, or look at his portraits, then a rather different picture emerges. The earlier portraits, such as that belonging to the Society of Antiquaries, which although not painted in his lifetime are based on originals that could have been done from life, show no sign of deformity. Later portraits, further from the lost originals, and painted to fit in with the established myth, show uneven shoulders and a villainous countenance. The raised shoulder of the Windsor portrait can be shown under X-ray to be a later addition to a painting with a normal shoulder line.The only totally unbiased commentator is von Popplau, who mentions no deformity; the Crowland Chronicler, Mancini and de Commynes, none of them particularly pro-Richard witnesses, also make no mention of any deformity, although they must all have either met Richard themselves, or, in the case of Mancini, spoken to those who had. Those writing under the early Tudors mention the unevenness of Richard's shoulders, but since they cannot agree on which was higher, this may not have been very pronounced - perhaps just the result of more development of the muscles of the right arm and shoulder as the result of weapon training in his youth. Even the hostile witnesses agree on Richard’s bravery and prowess in battle, so any disablement must have been slight enough not to affect his use of weapons or control of his horse.As Sir Winston Churchill said in his History of the English Speaking Peoples: ‘No-one in his (Richard’s) life time seems to have remarked these deformities, but they are now very familiar to us through Shakespeare’s play’.

Quotations about Richard’s Appearance

From a metrical account of the family of Richard, Duke of York, written between 1455 and 1460 and quoted in James Gairdner’s History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third, 1898, p. 5:

‘John aftir William nexte borne was

Whiche bothe be passid to Godis grace.

George was nexte, and aftir Thomas

Borne was, which sone aftir did pace

By the path of dethe to the hevenly place.

Richard liveth yit; but the last of alle

Was Ursula, to Hym whom God list calle.’

This has been taken to mean that Richard was a sickly child, but it is just saying that of the Duchess’s last six children only George and Richard were still living.

Niclas von Popplau

An itinerant knight of great strength from Silesia, who visited England in 1484 and was entertained by Richard:

‘King Richard is … a high-born prince, three fingers taller than I, but a bit slimmer and not as thickset as I am, and much more lightly built; he has quite slender arms and thighs, and also a great heart’

[from his travel diary, translated by Dr Livia Visser-Fuchs from ‘Reisebeschreibung Niclas von Popplau, Ritter, Burtig von Breslau’, edited by Piotr Radzikowski, 1998, and printed in The Ricardian, June 1999, p. 529]

Archibald Whitelaw, archdeacon of Lothian, who came to Richard’s court with an embassy from James III of Scotland in 1484:

‘Never has so much spirit or greater virtue reigned in such a small body’

[from his Latin speech of welcome quoted in George Buck’s The History of King Richard the Third, ed. A.N. Kincaid, 1979, p. 206]

John Rous (c.1411-1491), an antiquary and chantry priest at Warwick, who probably saw Richard during his visits to Warwick:

‘Richard was ‘retained within his mother's womb for two years and emerging with teeth and hair to his shoulders’

‘He was small of stature, with a short face and unequal shoulders, the right higher and the left lower’

[from: Historia Regum Angliae, written towards the end of Rous' life, i.e. after 1485; translated in Alison Hanham’s Richard III and his early Historians 1483-1535, 1975, pp. 120, 121]

Unknown

During a drunken brawl in York in 1491 one protagonist criticised the Earl of Northumberland for betraying King Richard, whereupon the other retorted that:

‘King Richard was an ypocryte and a crochebake and beried in a dike like a dogge’

[case reported in Robert Davies’ Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of York, 1843, p. 221]

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)

Spent some time as a page in the household of Cardinal Morton; he could have talked to those who knew Richard; his History was written about 1513, although not first published until 1557:

‘He was little of stature, ill fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favoured of visage... he came into the worlde with the feete forwarde ... and also not untothed.’

[from Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, ed. R.S. Sylvester, Yale 1963, p. 7]

Polydore Vergil (1470-1555)

An Italian cleric and scholar, commissioned by Henry VII to write an official history of England, which was first published in 1534:

‘He was lyttle of stature, deformyd of body, thone showlder being higher than thother, a short and sowre cowntenance, which semyd to savor of mischief and utter evydently craft and deceyt’

[from Three Books of Polydore Vergil's English History, ed. Sir Henry Ellis, Camden Society,
1844, pp. 226-7]

John Stow (1525-1605)

The London antiquary, who had talked to those who had seen Richard:

‘He was of bodily shape comely enough only of low stature’

Catherine Countess of Desmond (died 1604): In his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III, 1768, p. 102, Horace Walpole says that:

‘the old Countess of Desmond who had danced with Richard declared that he was the handsomest man in the room except his brother Edward, and was very well made’

This story is impossible to verify - the Countess certainly died in 1604, but was she born early enough to have known Richard? However an hypothesis by John Ashdown-Hill who has researched the subject is that the Countess’s husband, who was considerably older than herself, having been born in 1454, could have seen Richard III and described his appearance to his wife. An article on the Countess of Desmond by Kitty Bristow was published in the Autumn 2004 issue of the Ricardian Bulletin

This article was originally published in Speakers’ Notes published by the Society in 1988. The second edition (1997) is still available from the Society Shop.