IV. Richard dealt firmly with opposition and rebellion,
and on 22 June 1483 he announced that his brother’s
children were illegitimate. Shortly thereafter, on 6 July,
he was crowned king of England.
By the end of 1483, rumors about the fate of the
two young princes began circulating when it was re-
ported that they were no longer in the Tower. Richard’s
previous loyal supporter, the duke of Buckingham, began
to plan a rising to put Henry Tudor on the throne, but
his plot was discovered and Buckingham was executed
on November 1483.
In 1485, Henry Tudor, a claimant to the throne,
raised an army and, supported by the barons envious
of Richard’s power, defeated him in battle at Bosworth
in Leicestershire on 22 August 1485. Abandoned by his
leading general, Sir William Stanley, on the battlefield,
Richard was killed there, the last English king to die in
battle. It was also the last major battle in the Wars of
the Roses.
Tudor historians subsequently accused Richard of
the murder of Henry VI, his brother Clarence, and the
two little princes in the Tower, but some historians now
believe he was innocent of these crimes. However, Wil-
liam Shakespeare’s portrayal of him in Richard III means
that history and popular opinion has damned him.
References: Buck, Sir George, The History and Life and
Reigne of Richard the Third, Composed in Five Bookes by
Geo. Buck (London: W. Wilson, 1647); Shakespeare, Wil-
liam, The Tragedie of King Richard the Third... (London:
Thomas Creede, 1612); Fields, Bertram, Royal Blood:
Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes (New York:
Harper Collins, 1998); Gill, Louise, Richard III and
Buckingham’s Rebellion (Stroud, Gloucestshire, U.K.: Sut-
ton Books, 1999); Jesse, John Heneage, Memoirs of King
Richard the Third and Some of His Contemporaries: With an
Historical Drama on the Battle of Bosworth, 2 vols. (New
York: F. P. Harper, 1894).
Ridgway, Matthew Bunker (1895–1993)
American general
Matthew Ridgway was born in Fort Monroe, Virginia,
on 3 March 1895, the son of Colonel Thomas Ridgway,
an artillery officer, and Ruth Bunker Ridgway. He later
wrote in his memoirs, published in 1956, that his “earli-
est memories are of guns and marching men, of rising
to the sound of the reveille gun and lying down to sleep
at night while the sweet, sad notes of ‘Taps’ brought the
day officially to an end.” As the son of an army officer,
Ridgway grew up on army bases before he graduated
from the English High School in Boston, Massachusetts,
in 1912. He tried to enter West Point in 1912, but poor
grades forced him to postpone his plans. He succeeded
in gaining entry in 1913 and graduated in 1917, de-
scribed in the academy’s yearbook as “beyond doubt, the
busiest man in the place.” Commissioned with the rank
of second lieutenant of infantry as the United States was
entering the First World War, he underwent training for
service on the western front, but the war ended before he
could be sent to France. At the end of 1918, he returned
to West Point as an instructor in Spanish as well as an
athletics teacher. He was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia,
in 1925 and then posted to Tsientsin, China, to com-
mand the 15th Infantry, a regiment guarding American
installations there.
Because he was fluent in Spanish, Ridgway was
sent as a member of the U.S. mission to Nicaragua to
monitor elections held there in 1927. This appointment
forced him to forego a chance to compete in the 1928
Olympics in Amsterdam. He later served on a military
commission examining boundary disputes between
Bolivia and Paraguay, and in 1930 he was named as a
military adviser to General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the
governor-general of the Philippines. In 1935, he was
posted to the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff
School in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he served
until 1937. Promoted to major, he became an aide to
General George C. Marshall.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in
Europe in September 1939, Ridgway was named to the
War Plans Division of the General Staff of the Depart-
ment of War in Washington, D.C. From here he quickly
rose in the army ranks, being promoted to brigadier gen-
eral in August 1942 and given command of the 82nd
Infantry Division. When the division was trained to be-
come an airborne formation, Ridgway did likewise and
became a paratrooper. In 1943, he helped plan the Allied
invasion of Sicily, and his unit was one of the first to
drop into Italy when the invasion occurred on 10 July- Although the 82nd suffered serious losses, his-
torians credit Ridgway for taking every precaution he
could. He had not jumped at Sicily, but when his men
were set to jump in Operation Overlord, the Allied inva-
sion of Normandy, Ridgway demanded that he go with
his men—and he did. His commendation for his heroic
RiDgwAy, mAtthew bunkeR