Because Everybody's Got That Uncle

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, purveyors and enjoyers of history alike! What up. As we all know because it says so at the top of this post, today is October 2. What you may not know is that today we are celebrating the birthday of everyone's favorite baby-killer (or at least in the top 5), Richard III of England. Were he able to live forever, and had he not been cut down really, really violently by pikesman at the Battle of Bosworth Field back in 1485, he would be turning 557 today! Which I think we can all agree is a fine and noble age.

Let me tell you a little bit about Richard III. He was a fairly important dude, in that his death ended the Wars of the Roses and decided who would go on to screw over England for the next few centuries. The Wars of the Roses are really complicated and full of people named Henry and Edward, so I won't go into the whole sordid story. Basically, though, there was this guy named Edward III- a Platagenet, the family that ruled England for a long fucking time. And Edward had four sons, and those sons had MORE sons, and nobody could agree on whose sons should rule England, and so they decided the best way to solve it was to get in an epic decades-long slap-fight while they were also supposed to be fighting a war with France.

So anyway, there were two houses battling it out for control, the House of Lancaster and the House of York. It changed hands a couple of times, but the Yorkists were totally winning until Richard III got himself killed in battle and ruined it for everyone. Henry VII (a Lancastrian, kind of, if you squint) swooped in to marry Richard's niece, this fine young thing, and start the Tudor dynasty (which would go on to produce such delightful figures as Henry VIII, who went through wives like we go through toilet paper, and Mary Tudor, who lit heretics on fire for funsies on the weekends).

Right, so. Richard III. Like many in this particular story, he really shouldn't have been King at all. He was supposed to be serving as protectorate for his 12-year-old nephew, one of the many Edwards. Eventually, though, Richard got to thinking that maybe a pre-pubescent King wasn't really working out so well for the country, so he did a little dubious maneuvering and made HIMSELF the King. Which I'm sure I don't have to tell you comes with lots of fun perks, like beheading people at will, and also all the poon you could want.

This is where it gets a little bit, er, morally ambiguous. The 12-year-old nephew, and his 9-year-old brother, were sent to cool their heels in the Tower of London for a bit while Richard got settled in and painted all the palace walls just the right shade of hunter green. Problem is, the poor babies never came out again. In the 1670s the skeletons of two children were found under a staircase in the Tower- presumed to be the two princes. Gasp! Baby murder! Richard III got a pretty bad reputation for this, as you might expect. A lot of influential people performed some fantastic character assassination and successfully turned Richard III from a normal-looking, fairly intelligent guy into a limping, hunchbacked homosexual with bad hair.

Now, it's worth noting that there's no proof that Richard III murdered those kids and then nommed on their tender young flesh like a ravaging vulture. It could just as easily have been several other shady guys with plenty of motive and opportunity. After all, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg says he didn't, and that probably should be good enough for most people.