WHY did so many people wallow in the Richard III mass media frenzy?

He was honoured with a state funeral and an elaborate re-burial with all the reverence of the Christian church, not a ceremony usually afforded to murderers.

This evil man was the last of the Plantagenets, a dynasty spanning 300 years of tyranny, bloodshed and violence. Between 1154 and 1485 England was ravaged by warfare created and sustained by the ruling royals in their lust for power and foreign conquest.

Hundreds of thousands died by violence and starvation, and their livelihoods, homes and possessions confiscated by the king’s men.

Many Plantagenet kings, pious servants of the church and proven fornicators, were complicit in the deaths of their own fathers, uncles and brothers and it was Richard III in 1483 who arranged the murder of his nephews, the little princes in the tower.

Our Queen Elizabeth II did not attend her ancestor’s re-interment. Does this say something about the efficacy of this event which attracted tourists to Leicester but not for the most noble reasons?

JOYCE CLARE Belmont, Hereford