Elizabeth's New Show: History’s Greatest Fails

In this debut preview episode of History’s Greatest Fails, Elizabeth Day and Dan Jones argue that the story of Richard’s rise and fall (and rise again) is much more modern that you’d first believe. Not least because of the reality-TV-style discovery of his remains under a Leicester council car park in 2022. To listen to the full mini-series, head to This is History: History’s Greatest Fails wherever you listen to podcasts and on YouTube. And more about this episode: In many ways, Richard’s alleged ‘failures’ — which include allegedly killing the Princes in the Tower and overseeing the demise of Plantagenet rule — overshadow Richard III as the reformer that also existed. He introduced trial by jury and translated many laws into English. But those facts are not often what’s associated with him. He’s more likely to be seen as the villainous caricature of Shakespeare’s Richard III. He died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. And we haven’t been able to stop talking about him since. Yes, it’s time to consider the story of England’s last Plantagenet king, Richard III — a centuries-old tangle involving alleged murder, Shakespeare, vanquish and one mighty rediscovery. – A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices –– Presented by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day Producer - Alan Weedon Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman Researcher - Phoebe Joyce Executive Producer - Simon Poole Executive Producer for Daylight Productions - Elizabeth Day Executive Producer - Dan Jones Production Manager - Jen Mistri Production coordinator - Eric Ryan Head of content - Chris Skinner Special thanks to Alex Lawless, Hannah Talbot, and Selina Ream Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I should have brought it, but I found a photograph. I was clearing out a box of photographs. It sounds like a task that only happens in novels, but I was actually doing it. I found a photograph of you in my parents' kitchen. Don't know what you were doing there. I do know, it was my 21st birthday party.

• 0:18Elizabeth Day?

  I remember that party.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Do you?

• 0:20Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  And when I was looking at the photos, I didn't really remember much, but I was like, fuck no, there's Elizabeth.

• 0:24Elizabeth Day?

  I don't think I really knew you that well up until that point. Because how we met, we were both at university together.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 0:31Elizabeth Day?

  And I was dating your friend.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  You were.

• 0:34Elizabeth Day?

  But I remember you being the year below and at that stage in life, it feels like a really big age gap. And I was like, who's this?

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Ooh, this youngster.

• 0:43Elizabeth Day?

  Young buck. And I don't think we ever really spoke that much, but I was just aware that you were in the vicinity. And Rick, my then boyfriend, referred to you as Dollar.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  He did?

• 0:54Elizabeth Day?

  That was your name.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  That was my nickname.

• 0:55Elizabeth Day?

  As far as I was concerned. But then I was invited, as Rick's plus one, so you're 21st. And it was really lovely because as you say, it was in your family home. There was a marquee. I remember thinking, oh, that's grown up.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  You're making me sound a bit posh.

• 1:07Elizabeth Day?

  And over the years, we've fallen in and out of contact. Because our friendship was only really established through podcasting. And that's when we reconnected. And I feel like that's when we had our first proper conversation. And during the course of that conversation, I remember Richard III coming up. Confession time. I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels.

• 1:51Elizabeth Day?

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• 2:31Speaker 00

  So that, yes, I remember the conversation. There were two things that we spoke about. The first was Peloton.

• 2:36Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, our other obsession.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  And my exercise bike radar went off. And the second was you, I think, admitted to, straight off the bat, to being a Ricardian.

• 2:49Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. There's no admission to it, Dan. I don't need to admit, I don't need to confess it. I'm not ashamed of it.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Well, maybe you should be.

• 2:56Elizabeth Day?

  I know you think that because you are obsessed with the Tudors. You have such a hard on for them that you've fallen for every single piece of Tudor propaganda you could do. And that's why I'm thrilled that we're having this conversation. Because not only have we bonded over the years as friends, but we're both history graduates.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Both history graduates. And as any history graduate will tell you, there are two sides to any argument. One right and one wrong. We will establish which side of those we rely on. Why don't we start?

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Hello, this is History's Greatest Fails with me, Dan Jones. I'm a medievalist broadcaster and author.

• 3:38Elizabeth Day?

  And I'm Elizabeth Day, a fellow author and podcaster.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  We're old friends and fellow history graduates. And in this podcast, we're going to dig into failures of historical proportions.

• 3:50Elizabeth Day?

  To understand why failures make history.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Now, before we begin, some housekeeping.

• 3:55Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. If you were expecting how to fail, don't fret. My podcast hasn't changed. As this is our first collaboration, we're marking this very special moment by giving you the debut episode of History's Greatest Fails on both of our feeds.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  And to catch the rest of this series, indulge your inner history nerd by subscribing to my podcast, This is History: A Dynasty to Die For. Now, let's get stuck in.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  You, Elizabeth Day, I put this to you, are a Ricardian. You're in love with Richard III in some kind of sick fetishistic way. And I think that the failure of the last Plantagenet monarch, who brought down the glorious House of Plantagenet, which I've been spending season after season narrating the story of on my podcast. This man, for some reason, you think is totally marvellous. I wonder if you can just explain, first of all, why you're such a Richard III obsessive?

• 4:53Elizabeth Day?

  I will explain, but before I do, I'd like to point out there that you've done something that many Ricardian women have to constantly, constantly address, which is that you have accused me of being in love with Richard III, which automatically, from the outset, undermines my historical prerogative to put this case. And one might suggest that your argument is going to be the weaker because of it, because you've gone personal from the start. And actually, there's an enormous amount of historical fact that I can draw on to put my case.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Well, you go ahead, but before you do, can I just say not just women who are in love with Richard III.

• 5:34Elizabeth Day?

  Okay, that's your defence.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  That's one of my defences, yeah. I've got a few more.

• 5:38Elizabeth Day?

  So I became fascinated with Richard III at quite a young age. I think I was around 10 or 11. And I don't know if you remember the erstwhile, much lamented Discovery magazine?

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Discovery magazine?

• 5:55Elizabeth Day?

  Were you ever a subscriber?

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Just context for listeners and viewers. Elizabeth, as a child, was maybe the geekiest child that ever lived?

• 6:05Elizabeth Day?

  I take that as a compliment coming from you.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  It was a compliment.

• 6:10Elizabeth Day?

  Discovery magazine was a history periodical for kids.

• 6:17Elizabeth Day?

  And I loved it so much. I loved it so much. And they did an entire issue on Richard the Third and Henry the Seventh. And I think there is something somewhat mystical about the allure that Richard the Third has for so many people. And I think maybe it's because it's what we all love. It's an unsolved mystery. It's an unsolved true crime story for many of us. And I, since reading that copy of Discovery magazine, have been obsessed with the fact that Richard the Third was wrongly accused of murdering the princes in the tower. That's one of the things that we're going to address in this episode, but we're also going to address what you have claimed, which is that he brought down the Plantagenets.

• 6:59Elizabeth Day?

  He had a very brief reign of around 26 months, I think. And so we're going to discuss whether that shortness is in and of itself a failure.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  But before we do that, let's, just for the sake of clarity for listeners, like, spell out who Richard was before the reign, because I think that what often happens with discussions of Richard the Third is that they're played backwards. And when you read the story forwards, I think what you see with Richard the Third is a personal tragedy, and a good object lesson in the way that politics in particular can spiral very badly when you have these decision trees of bad decision leads to two more options for bad decisions and things get worse and worse and worse. But first of all, I think you have to start with who is Richard? Well, Richard, born in 1452, for sort of broad

• 7:53Speaker 00

  context, the same year as Leonardo da Vinci. For most of his life, he is a significant political success. One of three brothers of Richard, Duke of York, one of three sons, sorry, of surviving sons to significant political adulthood of Richard, Duke of York, the elder of which is Edward the Fourth, who defeats the House of Lancaster at the Battle of Tauton in 1460, and becomes the first Yorkus King of England. Richard the Third is actually extremely competent, but probably too, in a way, too competent, in the sense that he can't sort of grasp the broader political implications of what he's going to do. So, on the death of Edward the Fourth in 1483.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Richard has effectively a binary decision to take. Does he allow Edward the Fourth's son, the young Edward the Fifth, who has been effectively captured by the Woodville family, the family of Edward the Fourth's wife, widow?

• 8:51Elizabeth Day?

  Side note, obsessed with Elizabeth Woodville.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Why are you obsessed with Elizabeth Woodville?

• 8:55Elizabeth Day?

  Because she's called Elizabeth, number one. And she's one of the founders of my Cambridge college, Queens College. And I find her story fascinating because she was a commoner and she'd been married before and so brought into this marriage with a king, children that she, pre-existing children, his stepchildren.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:16Elizabeth Day?

  And I find that all very interesting. And then the sanctuary in Westminster Abbey of it all.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  You really like reality television, correct?

• 9:23Elizabeth Day?

  I love reality TV and that's what history is.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  And that is, I totally agree. That is in no way a criticism. And the Woodville marriage with Edward the Fourth is precisely that. It's just a sort of weird kind of jumble of all these oddball people interacting with each other. And then suddenly this amazing moment of revelation where the king turns up and goes, guess what? I've got something to tell you all. Gather round. I got married to someone completely inappropriate.

• 9:49Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, whose brother was a championship joust.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:54Elizabeth Day?

  It's such, they're such a glamorous family. Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  So Edward the Fourth, interesting marriage, he's got the two children. Up until the point of Edward the Fourth dying, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, has been like the right hand man. But he has this decision to make in 1483 as to whether he's going to allow the new king effectively to be captured by the other side of the family. And when he decides he's not, that he's going to force himself on the situation, it's where the spiral begins. And every decision he makes thereafter starts to drag him into this sort of zero sum politics where if he backs off at this point, if he can't, he can't anymore surrender to the

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Woodvilles because it becomes kill or be killed. He has made enough decisions at that point when the princes are in the tower. That have been extremely ruthless and politically calculated, that it seems to me utterly bizarre and out of keeping with his like 15th century brutal politics head on. And if you've been born in 1452, you know, politics is kill or be killed. If he doesn't kill those princes in the tower, he's insane.

• 11:09Elizabeth Day?

  Let's hypothetically say that I agree with you for the purposes of this.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  It doesn't have to be hypothetical.

• 11:17Elizabeth Day?

  Is it therefore fair to say that that was a successful decision? And so this whole notion of Richard III being a failure is irrelevant?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  I think it's a necessary political decision, but it can also be morally abhorrent. I think the slight red herring about his failure or success is that we zoom in on the princes in the tower instead of the Battle of Bosworth. The Battle of Bosworth is connected to the princes in the tower in the sense that when you fight a battle, you're inviting God's judgment. And so Richard fights this battle against Henry Tudor and God decides. We tend to, I think, when we look at this from our sort of post Enlightenment, you know, rational 20th, 21st century worldview, think that stuff about God, well, yes, they go to church a bit more than we do, but that's the only difference.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  No, this is like baked into your understanding of the world, which is that by fighting this battle, God will decide who was right and who was wrong. But anyway, I think the broader point is that Bosworth is the big failure, the failure to defend the crown once he'd won it and once he'd taken such drastic steps to get it.

• 12:27Elizabeth Day?

  Allegedly, allegedly taken those drastic steps.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Some of the steps aren't alleged. I mean, the killing of Hastings, for example.

• 12:33Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, let's not focus on the killing so much. Hastings was a grown up. Titulus Regius, right? So that was an act of parliament that was passed that said that he was totally within his rights to be king. So having passed that, was there still the necessary motive to do off with the princes in the tower?

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Um, well, it it depends on when we think they they've been done away with.

• 13:01Elizabeth Day?

  Exactly. And isn't that interesting? Because there's no proof, I refer to my earlier point. And why do you think no bodies have ever been found?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Well, there are two bodies were found under the, under the staircase and, and they're in Westminster Abbey in the urn that Christopher Wren sort of rather beautifully made for them.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  And I don't think it's going to happen in the near future, but I don't, I think we're probably closer to it than perhaps we have been. That testing could be carried out on the remains that are in those urns to see if they are indeed the princes in the tower. Now, of course.

• 13:37Elizabeth Day?

  Late Queen Elizabeth said absolutely not.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  I think there's a, yes, I mean, this, this would have to be signed off by the royal family and also by, um, by Westminster. But the sort of hypothetical about the, the remains of the princes in the tower is that even, and, and this, this is, this speaks to the whole case of Richard the Third and our perception of historical failure, I think. Even if some hypothetical DNA testing were done on the remains of the prince in the tower against known family members. And it said, the, these are definitely the remains of the, the princes. It still wouldn't change most people's minds.

• 14:18Elizabeth Day?

  That's true.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Because you'd still go, well, I think Henry, not you, but also you, uh, would say, no, no, well, I think Richard the Third wouldn't have done that. I think somebody else did it. It doesn't really change because this is a case where the facts are

• 14:35Speaker 00

  are incomplete and the case is probably unprovable. And so there's enough, uh, space within this discussion always to make up your mind about what you think. And then argue the facts towards that conclusion.

• 14:52Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, there's a tremendous poignancy to it because either you believe, as I do, that he was grossly maligned and unfairly so, and his body lay undiscovered for centuries. And he had this, he fought valiantly at Bosworth, by all accounts, he was a great warrior, but his body was inflicted with degrading wounds and, and then history inflicts him with further wounds in terms of his reputation. Or you believe, as you do, that he gradually painted himself into a political corner because of the desperate amount of pressure he was under. And either way, there's a sense of tragedy to that.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Yes, I totally agree.

• 15:37Elizabeth Day?

  I would like to make the case now more broadly, moving on from The Princesses in the Tower, as to why Richard III does not deserve to be consigned to the failure bin of history.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  I see, okay.

• 15:50Elizabeth Day?

  And I would like to draw attention here to the fact, you said that he was an excellent political enforcer and strategist for his brother, and his brother put him in charge of the kingdom in the North. And by all accounts, he executed that incredibly well, and he was very popular, and he often stood up for the common people against the nobility, which was very rare for that time. He also, as we well know, when he was king, introduced trial by jury. He translated a lot of laws into English so that people could understand them. And that, for me, speaks of such a progressive leader who existed way beyond his, way before

• 16:30Elizabeth Day?

  his time, and in a way, because of all of the drama around his very short reign, we sort of forget that. One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted. But just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response

• 17:15Elizabeth Day?

  Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable so you can live more of the life you want to live. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Autumn's here, soup season is back, and my kitchen is suddenly working overtime. Quick dinners after a manic day recording, and I'm enjoying spending a bit more time at home as the days are getting shorter. The thing that's made all of that easier is Hexclad. I am genuinely obsessed with these pans. They heat evenly, nothing sticks, and the

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• 18:41Speaker 00

  Yes, I agree. And I think that one of the things that, you know, whenever we think about history.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  This is a cliche, but it's forgotten a great deal, particularly when history's discussed online in kind of, you know, in social media debate and stuff, as Richard the Third very often is. It's that, of course, this is an incredibly nuanced case and that to judge Richard the Third as either failure or success is of course to ignore the arguments on both sides. Yes, there are many, many ways in which he was an excellent lieutenant to his brother and had the makings of a successful king, starting out from the worst possible position for a king, which is a usurper with another claimant to the throne very close

• 19:32Speaker 00

  to him, a whole bunch of enemies and needing to fight a battle early in his reign, which as it turns out went the wrong way. So, but I think that the great failure to win at Bosworth, if we place these on the historical scales, does outweigh everything else. But I would add to that and say that the, my sort of premise in this mini-series, in this idea of thinking about historical failures, isn't so much to think about failure or not failure, do we need to rescue them? It is, as you do so brilliantly on your podcast, say, what can we, what do we understand from cases of failure? And if we start from the premise

• 20:15Speaker 00

  that no matter how, you know, hard Richard tried or how many good things he did, ultimately his reign ended in failure, what do we learn about the way we think of history from that failure? And here's what I've been thinking about Richard recently, which is, we are always looking back, and you've mentioned Tudor propaganda already, we're always looking back at the 15th century through the lens of the 16th. And, and a lot of that is through Shakespeare, but Shakespeare had his sources as well earlier in the 16th century. Once Richard was dead, Battle of Bosworth, we can agree, he at least was dead, and Henry

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Tudor had taken the throne. It's often said that then an enormous amount of Tudor propaganda was pumped out to blacken the name of Richard the Third. And I've been thinking about that in the context of the specific politics of the world we're living in today and how cultural propaganda, as it were, works.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  It's not the case of a sort of early Tudor CIA pumping out psyops against Richard the Third. It's once the fact, the fact is he's dead and lost and God has passed his judgement at Bosworth and there's a new regime. That regime is, is creating a kind of story around itself. Henry marries Elizabeth of York, they have the sort of white and red rose that implies there were two sides that are now united again. But I think what you also see is that once it's clear, well, this is the new regime, do I want to be in with them or out with them? A narrative starts to emerge, a cultural narrative starts to emerge. Well, that guy died and seem, you know, he's dead and gone and that world is over. And we're, I'm going to start writing the world as I see it now. And you see this

• 22:01Speaker 00

  evolve throughout the first half of the 16th century until you get to about sort of the 1540s, Grafton's Chronicle, Hall, Hollenshead. And they have these amazing frontist pieces which see Henry VIII as the sort of the combination of the two houses. And, and they start to create, I think organically, I think without, without top down direction, to create this satisfying narrative that says in 1399, Richard the Second was deposed, and that was a sort of original sin. And it splintered England into these two noble factions of Lancaster and York, and they grew apart. And then all of the sins of the age were contained within this monster, Richard the Third, who, who then had to be killed to expunge the moral

• 22:42Speaker 00

  stain. And now we live on the other side of it. Here is, here's the new regime. And people write towards that for lots of different reasons. One, because it offers the opportunity of political advancement and not political persecution. Another, because again, there is this sort of picturesque narrative neatness to it. And when you get to Shakespeare, looking back through the lens of all of that writing, I think, well, Shakespeare writes Richard the Third. What is he aiming to do with the play Richard the Third? Is it to yet again make the case that Richard the Third was guilty? Really? He's not in the business of, of making historical arguments. He's in the business of making moral arguments,

• 23:25Speaker 00

  right? Of saying, I want, I want to tell a story that's about some deep element of humanity. And I want my audience in whichever sort of Suffolk theatre it might be, to engage with that. And I need a story that's instantly familiar. They don't need to bother with the plot. Needs to be as simple as Batman or whatever. Every time we watch a new Batman film, you kind of know, you know, the Joker's the bad guy, Batman's the good guy, it's Gotham City, you know, they're going to fight each other, Commissioner Gordon, I know all these characters, now tell me this story again and draw some new morality out of it, or give me a new kind of brilliant performance from it. And I think that's what Shakespeare's doing with Richard. He's like, I want to, I want to explore the concept of how evil and power interact with each other. And I'm going to use the story of Richard the Third, because literally everybody knows it by

• 24:08Speaker 00

  now, and they know the shape of this story. And so when that's being done, it's taking this historical failure and using it for the, for an artistic purpose. But now here we are sort of 500 years later, we kind of crunch all those things together and say, yes, bloody Shakespeare, Tudor shill, out there blackening the name of Richard the Third for political purposes. Shakespeare had a political bone in his body with regard to the 15th century.

• 24:37Elizabeth Day?

  Also, the fact that we are sitting here talking about Richard the Third, all of these centuries later, and the fact that figures like Philippa Langley exist.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Your friend, yeah.

• 24:48Elizabeth Day?

  My, your friend and mine, Philippa Langley, who is one of the foremost Ricardians of our age.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  I think she'd be offended by one of the, I mean, the foremost Ricardian.

• 24:58Elizabeth Day?

  The foremost Ricardian of our age, and essentially single-handedly responsible for finding Richard the Third's body under an R sign for reserved in a council car park in Leicester. And it was the first day of that dig, she had raised, I think it was 36,000 pounds from members of the public. And they had enough money, I think, to exhume six bodies. And it was the first day, within the first few hours, minutes even, that they disinterred what would later be proven to be Richard the Third's skeleton. And his feet were not part of that skeleton, because the wall to a council building

• 25:39Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 25:40Elizabeth Day?

  had, had been built, the foundations had chopped off his feet, basically. If that wall, if that council building had been sort of two inches to the left or the right, we might not have found it. It's an extraordinary thing. And the fact that we're still talking about that, and the fact that so many of us watched that documentary of Philippa walking across the car park, seeing the R painted on the tarmac and thinking, I'm, I have a feeling that it's here.

• 26:07Elizabeth Day?

  In a way, that's a kind of success.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Oh, no, it's a massive success.

• 26:10Elizabeth Day?

  There are so many historical figures that are forgotten about. And actually, that we're still talking about him is in and of itself really interesting. And carry on, Dan.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  No, I was going to totally agree with you. And I think that actually we've.

• 26:26Elizabeth Day?

  Say that again.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  I'm going to totally agree with you.

• 26:29Elizabeth Day?

  Clip that.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Just that.

• 26:31Elizabeth Day?

  Have that as my ringtone.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  You make all your preposterous Ricardian statements and I say I totally agree with you.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Failure is more interesting to us, I think, in terms of history. Or if not failure, isolated, then the rise and fall. You know, the story of the Knights Templar, you know, world dominance around the Mediterranean at any rate. And then calamitous collapse. You know, Napoleon conquers Europe and then ends up exiled in Helena. You know, the, these, the stories like this have, again, that sort of the tragic shape to them are just deeply fascinating to us as, as people. But I also wanted to ask you about Philippa Langley and about the, the dig and the, the sort of weird funeral of Richard III. Because you reported that when you were on the Observer.

• 27:19Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Newspaper.

• 27:21Elizabeth Day?

  Before we get on to that, I just want to say something about failure, which I think is really interesting. That you ultimately believe that Richard III's reign was a failure because it ended at the Battle of Bosworth. And that is true, but also.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Can we just clip that bit?

• 27:38Elizabeth Day?

  How interesting. Ultimately, failure is also about taking risks, managing risk and living boldly and taking the risk that you might fail spectacularly. But there's a broad argument to be made that isn't it better to live that way than to play it very safe?

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Is that the question?

• 28:02Elizabeth Day?

  I don't know. I don't know if it's a question of more, more of a philosophical musing.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:06Elizabeth Day?

  Because I actually also don't think that things are failures just because they end. That ultimately what you have contributed in this case to history, to trial by jury, to the fact that we're still discussing his legacy now in this podcast studio, surrounded by busts. Historic stone sculptural bust. Is is just a it's a fascinating thing. So I would say that things aren't failure simply because they end. But I think your argument would be it's the nature of the ending.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Yes, I think.

• 28:35Elizabeth Day?

  And I'll come back to Philippa Langley.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  I most yes, please do. I think I mostly agree with that. And maybe this this will bring us back to Philippa Langley. I wonder if Richard III's time is really now. I think we're we're living in an age that is more and, you know, this is this is everything that how to fail and and your philosophy is about is like that that failure is not something to be ashamed of. Failure is is something to to learn from and grow from. We're unusual in that being a sort of a dominant cultural understanding. So sort of quite progressive modern way of thinking. And for most of my instinct is that for most of history, failure

• 29:18Speaker 00

  is is sort of shameful and and or sort of negative connotations. And so we've just sort of entered this period where Richard is really the perfect character because there are questions about his supposed guilt. See, I've started calling it supposed guilt. You might have won. And there are sort of issues around his disability. There he is a sort of the perfect character to be reexamined, loved, fetishized. Back to Philippa Langley.

• 29:53Elizabeth Day?

  That is so beautifully put. That really yes, well done. I didn't even have something sarcastic to say after that.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Well, OK, then we're drawing again.

• 30:02Elizabeth Day?

  And I and I sort of feel that's what's amazing about history. You describe him there as a character. This person actually existed.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:12Elizabeth Day?

  And in this person's reputation and legacy, we can put all of our own feelings of inadequacy and failure and shame and humiliation and embarrassment, all of those petty grudges, all of those reputations that we want to save about ourselves, we can put into this historic receptacle. It's kind of an it's why I love these stories. Philippa Langley. So I was for many years a staff feature writer on the Observer newspaper here in the UK.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  And a very good one, may I say.

• 30:45Elizabeth Day?

  You may say.

• 30:48Elizabeth Day?

  And I got sent to meet Philippa Langley in the Leicester car park and go to the University of Leicester and speak to the scientists who've done the DNA testing on Richard III's skeleton and chat to the dean of Leicester Cathedral because they were preparing for this essentially a kind of state funeral for Richard. I don't think it was quite state funeral, but.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  I think kind of is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, yes. It was, it was a sort of, I mean, it depends how kind you want to be. It was, it was a dignified laying to rest of his remains or a deranged pantomime.

• 31:26Elizabeth Day?

  Guess which side Dan's on. But I, and I know that Philippa Langley has been the subject of so much ridicule and I think an enormous amount of that is deeply sexist.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:36Elizabeth Day?

  I really enjoyed meeting her and I thought she was great. One of the things that really struck me when I wrote the piece was a series of serendipitous coincidences. And there was one in particular that has always stayed with me, which is that Richard III, as you well know, Dan, was, was killed on the 22nd of August at the Battle of Bosworth, 1485.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  So far, so good.

• 32:05Elizabeth Day?

  Now, his skeleton was discovered in that car park, under that painted letter R, on the 22nd of August 2012 by Philippa Langley and her team, 527 years later. It was a bank holiday in 2012. And in order to exhume and identify the body, they had to seek permission from the Ministry of Justice, stay with me. But because it was a bank holiday, they had to wait three days before the Ministry of Justice reopened its doors and said, yes, you're fine to go ahead. So Richard III's body was removed on the 25th of August. Now, if we go back in time 527 years from that point.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:50Elizabeth Day?

  Richard III, his body was displayed for three days after he was killed at Bosworth. His body was displayed for three days until he was buried. So it's exactly the same dates, if you think about it. Now, isn't that amazing, Dan?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Not really the same dates, though, because of the shift in the Julian Gregorian calendar.

• 33:13Elizabeth Day?

  You are such a buzzkill.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

• 33:18Elizabeth Day?

  The point is, time is a human construct, but sometimes

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:22Elizabeth Day?

  the universe sends you mysterious messages from the edges of consciousness. And I find something very romantic about the idea that his body needed to be found, and it needed to be found in this echo of time on the day that he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  That is truly romantic, and brings us really to the end of our discussion of Richard III, but is also a wonderful segue to our discussion next week. Elizabeth, it's been such a pleasure talking to you about Richard III. Next week, we're going to be talking about failed romances of world history. We're going to be talking about Antony and Cleopatra, Edward and Wallace, and of course, everyone's favourite, Henry VIII and Anne Berlin, the Ross and Rachel of early modern history, if Ross chopped Rachel's head off.

• 34:08Elizabeth Day?

  That's almost all for us this episode, but Dan, where else can we find more failures?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  I'm so glad you asked. Yes. If you're one of my This is History royal favourites, listen to this week's bonus episode to hear me and producer Al dissect your favourite historical failures. Listen at patreon.com/thisishistory. And Elizabeth, what about you?

• 34:29Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. Do you subscribe to my podcast, How to Fail, where I've had Panna Anderson, Kate Winslet, Jon Bon Jovi, and so many more tell me about how they've survived failure in the present. And if you're listening to History's Greatest Fails on my feed, How to Fail, do subscribe to This is History to get the rest of the series.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  And if you've got a question about anything we've discussed on History's Greatest Fails so far, my royal favourites can DM us on Patreon or email us on [email protected].

• 34:57Elizabeth Day?

  Now, friends, let's make history. Let's fail again next time.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Next week, I will bring my Ouija board.

• 35:09Elizabeth Day?

  Please do.