The Wars of the Roses (adaptation) IV", Hall wrote, "underlying these plays is the curse on the House of Lancaster. Bolingbroke deposed Richard II to become Henry IV. Richard II was a weak and sometimes a bad king, ungoverned, unbalanced; he could not order the body politic. Yet for Shakespeare, his deposition is a wound on the body politic, which festers through reign after reign, a sin which can only be expiated by blood-letting. The bloody totalitarianism of "Richard III" is the expiation of England." John Jowett argues the production very much reinforced the teleological assumptions upon which the Tudor myth is based; "it generated an
Richard I of England a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III). Meanwhile, Muslim writers during the Crusades period and after wrote of him: "Never have we had to face a bolder or more subtle opponent". Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, on the other hand, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six