Richard, Duke of Gloucester , who became King Richard III, lived from 1452 to 1485, a time when the Western world experienced a cultural earthquake. Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus, Michelangelo, Gutenberg and Copernicus lived during this period, and their discoveries and creations shaped a civilization that changed the world forever. The Turks captured Constantinople and conquered Athens, Bosnia and Herzegovina, shifting the balance of world power entirely. The world was shedding its medieval sensibilities and in its place emerged a tougher, more cultured worldview in the form of the Renaissance.

The Yorkshire Rose

Richard III grew up the during the Wars of the Roses, a bloody civil war extending over 30 years between the House of York (bearer of the white rose) and the House of Lancaster (bearer of the red rose). The Lancastrian monarch King Henry VI's mental state started to seriously deteriorate at the end of 1453, and Richard, Duke of York (father of Richard III), was made protector of the Realm. Henry VI eventually recovered from his illness, but not before Henry VI's wife, Queen Margaret, had given birth to a son, Edward, Prince of Wales, who displaced Richard, Duke of York, as heir to the throne.

The Wars of the Roses erupted in 1455 when fighting broke out between Richard, Duke of York's supporters and King Henry VI's Lancastrian supporters—a feud whose roots stemmed back to the Lancastrian Henry IV's usurping of the Crown from the Yorkist Richard II in 1399. In 1460, Henry VI was captured and forced to recognize Richard, Duke of York, as his heir apparent. As a result, Queen Margaret, whose son, Edward, Prince of Wales, was thus disinherited, retaliated by killing the Duke of York in the bloody Battle at Wakefield. But the following year, in 1461, the Duke of York's eldest son, Edward (Richard III's brother), defeated the Lancastrians and recaptured the dynasty, for the Yorkists. He was later crowned King Edward IV.

All hope seemed lost for the Lancastrians, but a dispute between the Earl of Warwick and King Edward IV over the King's marriage in 1464 to a gentlewoman (though not a member of the nobility), Elizabeth Woodville, reignited the battle between the Yorkist factions at Court. With support from Louis XI of France, Henry VI's wife, Queen Margaret, teamed up with two key defectors from the Yorkist cause—Warwick and King Edward's brother, George, Duke of Clarence—and together they restored Henry VI to the throne in 1470. Edward IV and his younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III, went into exile.

But Edward IV, refusing defeat, formed a series of alliances and reclaimed the Crown the following year (1471). Queen Margaret's only son, Edward, Prince of Wales was killed in the Battle of Tewkesbury (and not at the hands of his captors, Richard and his brothers, as Shakespeare and his Tudor sources report). The Prince of Wales' widow, Lady Anne Neville, married Richard, Duke of Gloucester a year later, subsequently becoming Queen Anne when Richard was crowned king. Henry VI was captured and a few days later, presumably at Edward IV's order, assassinated in his prison at the Tower of London. (Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare's primary source, places the assassin's weapon in Richard's hands, though there is no historical evidence to associate Richard with King Henry VI's murder.) The reinstated King Edward IV banished Queen Margaret from England, who then fled in exile to France, never to return (though Shakespeare departs from his sources here to stage her dramatic presence in the English Court).

Under King Edward IV's rule, the following 12 years were relatively peaceful and prosperous. During his reign, his two younger brothers led very different careers. Clarence, who had already defected once before to the Lancastrian cause, continued to defy and challenge his brother's reign. Eventually, the King arrested Clarence for treason and ordered his execution. Richard spent his brother's reign as an able and respected administrator and general in the north of England, where he lived with his wife, Anne Neville, the widow of the Lancastrian Edward, Prince of Wales.

The Tudor Rose

King Edward IV's sudden death at age 40 in 1483, a turning point in Shakespeare's Richard III, unleashed a series of power struggles that three months later led to the coronation, not of his son Edward, Prince of Wales, but instead, of his younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who became Richard III. Richard's coronation followed a long battle with the family of the widowed Queen Elizabeth, who fought to keep the prince from the hands of his uncle-protector, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. The events of the next three months—the two sons of Edward IV imprisoned and Richard crowned—are understood to be less the consequence of an ambitious, premeditated plan than they were of multiple reactions to a chain of events, and fear all around. The murder of the two princes was linked to Richard by the Tudor historians, but no clear evidence of his guilt exists.

Richard's rule lasted two years when he was defeated by the last heir of the Lancastrian line, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Richmond crowned, Henry VII, was the father of Henry VIII and the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth I. Richmond's marriage to former King Edward IV's daughter, Elizabeth, united the two dynastic lines, finally ending the York and Lancaster struggle and the Wars of the Roses.