Hold your horses: Richard III defenders tell Charlottetown filmgoers king wasn't all that bad
CBC
Christine Hurlbut and her husband Clement Carelse are committed Ricardians — a term used to describe people who believe the much-maligned King Richard III was actually a good ruler.
When the movie The Lost King was showing at City Cinema in Charlottetown earlier this month, the couple greeted people leaving the show every night to chat and hand out information.
The movie is based on the real-life story of amateur historian Philippa Langley.
Langley worked tirelessly to raise funds to find and dig up the remains of King Richard, whose characterization in Shakespeare's Richard III play — which Ricardians like to point out was written over a hundred years after the fact — turned the monarch into a paragon of villainy in the popular imagination.
Thanks to Langley, the king's skeleton was discovered under a parking lot in Leicester in 2012. He was then given a funeral and burial at Leicester Cathedral.
Hurlbut has been a member of the King Richard III Society of Canada for more than 40 years.
The group has 4,000 members worldwide. They believe the traditional accounts of Richard III's two-year reign from 1483 to 1485 aren't accurate.
She suggested City Cinema bring in the movie, because she'd seen it after its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
"They said, 'Oh, it's on our radar.' And I said, well let me know when it's happening and I'd be glad to come and do a bit of publicity for the society. And it very nicely coincided with the coronation weekend, too," she said.
Hurlbut's fascination with Richard III's story began when she read Josephine Tey's book The Daughter of Time, a novel published in the 1950s.
It's a mystery novel about a police officer who investigates the alleged crimes of King Richard III, and finds that what he's accused of — including the murder of his two nephews — may have been fabricated.
"I just felt it was one of those stories where history has been rewritten by the victor. And in this case it was the Tudor dynasty with Henry VII. And Henry had a very weak claim to the English throne, so he was kind of desperate to do whatever he could to solidify it, and so that really started me off."
Hurlbut said since the pandemic, the society has been meeting online.
"We try in whatever ways we can to correct public opinion about Richard the Third," she said.
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