Fiction: Richard III's Seduction of Research Proposal

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They fear Richard because he is a great warrior, I thought. Although Richard tried to deny it, Queen Margaret described how he slew my husband without pity. Indeed, I suppose the good have no place in this world, no place in politics. Henry VI and my husband should have been monks or shepherds, not rulers. But then what of myself? What will happen to me? I wondered this as I tossed and turned at night. I had already seen too clearly how women are treated during times of war and strife.

There is no place for tenderness in this world, I thought, no place where a woman can rest easy -- and then, for the first time in my life, I felt regarded. I felt as if I was not a woman who was a political pawn, but truly seen as a woman. Richard said, to me, Anne:

Your beauty was the cause of that effect;

Your beauty: which did haunt me in my sleep

To undertake the death of all the world,

So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom (II.2).

No one had ever called me beautiful before -- daughter, yes, wife, yes, and woman, yes, but never beautiful. Oh, I spat at him when he said it -- but he gazed at me with a fixed, hypnotic stare so I could not look away.

And then -- and this was the truly extraordinary thing. This great warrior opened his shirt to me, lay open his white throat, and begged me to kill him. He said he repented of his crimes, the crimes of war -- the crimes, I remembered, that were not specific to him, but had been committed by all soldiers during times of strife. Was he really indeed so much worse for raising his hand against a king he was commanded to kill? After all, it was not he who pitted the houses of Lancaster and York against one another.

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Who was I to take vengeance, and break the peace by killing him?

What woman, other than Margaret, had held a sword? Certainly not I, with my gentle and trembling girl's hands. Bid me to kill myself, he said. How could I do so, and take such a grave and serious crime upon my soul? How could I inflict more ugliness into an ugly world, and treat Richard so, a man who had been rejected by his own mother, simply because of how he looked?

My husband's face had already grown dim to me. It is the nature of youth to live only in the moment, and to be tempted by what is living and breathing. So I was by Richard. For the first time I felt awakened and alive, and I do not have the contemplative and pious nature to enter a nunnery and spend the rest of my life saying prayers for I man I wed before I had left girlhood. Who would marry me, I thought, the cast-off widow of the son of the former, dead Lancastrian king?

I followed my fate, and followed my desire, and have lived to regret it:

Look, how this ring encompasseth finger.

Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart; (I.2).

Thus he stole my heart away from my good sense. And now they say, foolish Anne, to marry the murderer Richard. But to marry is foolish, and to love is foolish, and many a woman has married a cruel man, kings and queens, commoners and….....

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