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
Exhumation and reburial of Richard III of England research, Langley urged Ashdown-Hill to contact the producers of Channel 4's "Time Team" archaeology series to propose an excavation of the car park, but they declined as the dig would take longer than the standard three-day window for "Time Team" projects. Three years later, writer Annette Carson, in her book "Richard III: The Maligned King" (2008), independently came to the conclusion that his body probably lay under the car park. She joined forces with Langley and Ashdown-Hill to carry out further research, in the course of which she found what she called a "smoking gun"—a medieval map of Leicester showing