[/quote]Well you know that I'm a Lancastrian born and bred as well, EC and I used to believe the story that Richard was a wicked uncle and a tyrant king. But then I began to research the Wars of the Roses and like St Paul on the road to Damascus I had a complete and utter change of opinion. I've read authors who are for and against him and weighed up the opinions and the evidence. I've visited Middleham and York and talked to people about him and I think that a man who was, and still is, held in such high esteem by people who knew him well and dealt with him on a regular basis cannot possibly deserve the reputation that popular history has given him, partly because of what seems to have been a protracted smear campaign and the popularity of Shakespeare's fictional version of events.
You won't find anyone in Yorkshire who has a bad thing to say about him - and there are a good number of Lancastrians (those with historical knowledge of the period) who will also acknowledge that he was a good and fair man who doesn't deserve to be remembered as a villain. He ruled as a lord of the north in that area for many years and I believe that collective memory of him as a good and decent and clean living man is not something that can easily be dismissed. I believe that collective memory and what is passed down from generation to generation probably has more truth than some of what has survived in writing - given that the survival of what is written may be more selective. And when you consider that most of the influential men of York defied Henry VII to sign their names to a document that deplored the murder of Richard, possibly knowing that they were putting their lives on the line, then you have to acknowledge that support for Richard from people who knew him was very, very strong.
The people who plotted against him seem to have done so for their own gain, and rumours about him only spread in the south of the country and abroad where people didn't know him. The Stanleys have a lot to answer for. They were a big factor in Richard's downfall. As a Lancastrian I ought to be supporting them, but I'm not. My family originally come from Yorkshire anyway so I've been told.
My father is Lancastrian, my mother Yorkist so I guess there's a whole Tudor rose in there somewhere!