Richard III of England due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The Richard III Society contends that this means that 'a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building.' The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play "Richard III" as a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself, in his "History of the
Richard III of England Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese King's sister Joana, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joana's cousin Duke Manuel (later King of Portugal). The most significant of Richard's defenders was Horace Walpole. In "Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third" (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted