Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes - Softcover

Fields, Bertram

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0750925450 ISBN 13: 9780750925457

Publisher: Sutton Pub Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

Notoriously immortalized by Shakespeare and historians, Richard III is history's most infamous royal villain. In this book, US litigator Bertram Fields goes back more than 500 years to review the case of Richard and the princes in the tower. Applying the same modern techniques he successfully uses in the courtroom, Fields outlines and evaluates the arguments on both sides and weighs the evidence, aiming to offer the definitive truth about this extraordinary man. Clearing away the dust of time, Fields attempts to answer the intriguing questions inherent in the drama: was Edward IV's marriage truly legal? Were his sons, Edward, Prince of Wales, and Richard, Duke of York, illegitimate? What role did Richard play - or not - in his brother Clarence's death? Were the bones found in the Tower of London those of the young princes? Was there even a murder? Were the boys instead removed from the Tower and raised in secrecy? And if they were cold-bloodedly killed, who else would have wanted them dead? The book ends with a re-examination of British and world history: what if Richard had never accepted the Crown? What if he had instead insisted his young nephew reign as Edward V? How would our lives be changed?

About this title

Review:

Prominent entertainment attorney Bertram Fields uses his legal expertise to analyze the life and times of Richard III in Royal Blood, shining a light on that most ambiguous and important period of English history, the years of the 15th century between the War of the Roses and Richard's bloody death at Bosworth Field. Rebuking traditional historians who have immortalized Richard as the treacherous usurper--the vile mastermind behind the deaths of his brother, nephews, and friends--as well as revisionists who treat him as the courageous victim of treasonous allies and Tudor power, Fields cross-examined all the earliest accounts, including Thomas More's history (which would serve as the basis for Shakespeare's play), exposing the geographical, political, and cultural influences that have shaped previous interpretations of Richard's career.

Among the many surprises is Fields's suggestion that Richard did not commit what is widely understood to be his most atrocious crime: the murder of his nephews, the Woodville Princes. With a lawyer's zeal for establishing doubt, Fields boldly entertains several possibilities for the princes' fates, arguing that other powerful contestants for the English throne, like Richard's Tudor successor Henry VII, could have been responsible for the deaths of the boys--or that the infamous killing might not have even taken place. Fields also speculates on what might have happened had Richard not become king. Would England have remained Catholic? Could the First World War have been prevented? Such conjectures may raise an eyebrow--they are as delightfully provocative as the rest of Royal Blood. --James Highfill

About the Author:

Bertram Fields, the author of two novels published under a pseudonym, is widely regarded as the most prominent entertainment lawyer in the US. He has successfully tried many of the landmark cases in the entertainment and communications industries over the past twenty years. He lives near Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sutton Pub Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0750925450
• ISBN 13: 9780750925457
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352