—
## The Tudor Rewriting of History
When Richard III died at Bosworth Field in August 1485, the question of how he would be remembered became immediately and intensely political. Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was, by most measures of the day, weak. He was descended from John of Gaunt’s legitimized bastard line, the Beauforts, and from Owen Tudor’s marriage to Catherine of Valois — connections that required considerable genealogical generosity to constitute a royal claim. His victory at Bosworth had rested on military factors: a timely betrayal by the Stanley family and the defection of the Northumberland forces at a critical moment, not any compelling dynastic right.
Establishing the legitimacy of the new regime meant delegitimizing the old one. The process began almost immediately, with the retroactive repeal of Titulus Regius, the parliamentary act that had declared Edward IV’s children illegitimate and provided the legal basis for Richard’s accession. Henry VII did not merely repeal the act; he ordered all copies of it to be destroyed. The destruction was not entirely successful — a copy survived in the records of the College of Arms — but the intent was clear: the previous regime’s own legal framework was to be expunged.
The chronicle tradition that established the dominant historical image of Richard III emerged over the following decades. Polydore Vergil, an Italian humanist invited to England to write a history of the country, produced an account that treated Richard as a usurper and tyrant. Thomas More’s *History of King Richard the Third*, written around 1513 and left unfinished, provided the most detailed and literarily powerful portrait: the deformed body, the withered arm, the “venomous humped back” that More described in language designed to signal moral corruption through physical marking.