"Richard III is one of English history's best-known and least understood monarchs. Immortalized by Shakespeare as a hunchbacked murderer, the discovery in 2012 is his skeleton in a Leicester parking lot reignited debate over the true character of England's most controversial king. Richard was born in an age of brutality, when civil war gripped the land and the Yorkist dynasty clung to the crown with their fingertips. Was he really a power-crazed monster who killed his nephews, or the victim of the first political smear campaign conducted by the Tudors? In the first full biography of Richard III in fifty years, Chris Skidmore draws on new manuscript evidence to reassess Richard's life and times. Richard III examines in intense detail Richard's inner nature and his complex relations with those around him to unravel the mystery of the last English monarch to die on the battlefield."--Page [4] of cover.