If Richard was starved to death then he was unique among monarchs. Over the centuries, the modes of a monarch’s death matched those of the population as a whole, with trauma and infection giving way to lifestyle-related chronic health problems, but no other king died of not eating enough. Whilst there was always a threat of poison, arrows, daggers, dysentery and falling from horses, monarchs did not have to worry about not having anything to eat. Whether his starvation was voluntary or inflicted by his jailers, we can’t know. As with many of the stories told about dying kings, this is a
...more
