Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

In this second talk on Richard the Third, historian Michael Hicks

contextualises the life and character of the notorious king.

I'm going to talk about Richard of York or Father Wingay,

later Richard Duke of Gloucester and King Richard the third,

and I'm going to talk about his character, what we can know about his character.

Now first of all, who he is, here we've got an earlier family tree. We can see that he's the youngest surviving child and the youngest surviving son of Richard Duke of York and his wife, Cecily.

And therefore he was never scheduled to be king. He was never scheduled even to be Duke of York. He's an obscure child

and scarcely anything is recorded of his childhood up till the age of about eight or nine.

We can't, for example, document the scoliosis, which we saw

on the skeleton that's been dug up. But we know that he resembled his father, Richard

Duke of York. We can presume, we can be sure that he had the military and bookish

education appropriate for a great nobleman, for great aristocrat, which is what he actually

became. And he had prolonged experience living with him, living in his household, of Wyrich the

kingmaker, whom we may take was the model of the great aristocrat that Richard was going

to become. We can be sure, we know, that Richard was taught the values of chivalry,

and can be sure he learned about loyalty and honour.

We also know that he was clever.

The Crollan chronicler, who was mentioned earlier,

...