Some people become legends because of what they accomplished.

Others become legends because no one can agree on what they actually did.

Richard III belongs to the second group.

Depending on which history book you pick up, he is either one of England’s greatest villains or one of its most misunderstood kings. His reign lasted just over two years, his death ended the Plantagenet dynasty, and his name has remained tangled in one of history’s most enduring mysteries ever since.

At the center of that mystery are the Princes in the Tower. The young princes disappeared after Richard took the throne, and although he has long been considered the primary suspect, no definitive evidence has ever answered what happened to them. More than five centuries later, historians are still asking the same questions.

Then, more than five centuries after his death, Richard III’s story took another unexpected turn.

In 2012, archaeologists searching beneath an ordinary parking lot in Leicester uncovered human remains. Scientific testing confirmed they belonged to Richard III, the last English king to die in battle. More than five hundred years after his death, he had been lying beneath the modern world while the debate about his life continued above him.

Finding his skeleton answered one mystery.

It raised several more.

This tarot reading doesn’t ask whether Richard III was innocent.

Nor does it try to prove he was guilty.

Instead, I wanted to ask a quieter question.

If we set aside the legends, the propaganda, and the stories written by those who came after him…

What kind of story would the cards tell?

---

About This Reading

I thought this reading was going to revolve around the Princes in the Tower.

It didn’t.

In fact, the cards had surprisingly little interest in answering that question.

Instead, they kept pulling me toward something I wasn’t expecting.

Some readings feel straightforward.

This wasn’t one of them.

It seemed as though the cards were less interested in solving a mystery than they were in peeling back the layers that had settled over it for centuries.

The deeper I went into the spread, the stranger it became. Every time I thought the cards were finally pointing toward the princes, they shifted somewhere else.

Toward reputation.

Toward power.

Toward legacy.

Toward the stories people leave behind after they’re gone.

By the end, I wasn’t asking whether Richard III was guilty anymore.

I was wondering who had been telling his story all these years.

As always, I followed the story the cards chose to tell.

Some mysteries survive because no one can answer them.

Others survive because every answer creates another question.

---

Before we turn over the first card, you might also enjoy my Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tarot reading. Like Richard III, his story isn’t just about the man himself. It’s about the legends that grew around him and how they shaped the way history remembers him.
👉 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: An Unsolved Mystery Tarot Reading