| “ | As the Good Lord said, love thy neighbour as thyself... Unless he's Turkish, in which case, KILL THE BASTARD!!! | „ |
| ~ Richard IV. |
| “ | A word of advice: if you cross me now, or ever, I will do unto you what God did unto the Sodomites. | „ |
| ~ Richard threatens Blackadder. |
King Richard IV is the main antagonist of the 1983 BBC sitcom The Black Adder (which would later become the series known as Blackadder). He is the King of England following the House of York's victory at Bosworth Field, and the father of the series protagonist Edmund Blackadder. However, after his death the House of York's victory and Richard IV's reign are written out of history by Henry VII.
He was portrayed by Brian Blessed, who also portrayed Clayton in Tarzan, El Supremo in Freddie as F.R.O.7., The Nekross King in Wizards vs Aliens, and Mr. Avericci in Archie's Weird Mysteries.
Biography[]
Richard is the nephew of King Richard III, the husband of Gertrude of Flanders and the father of Edmund Blackadder, whose name he consistently forgets, and Prince Harry. At the beginning of the series, Richard is present at the Battle of Bosworth Field, giving a violent battle speech baying for Lancastrian blood prior to the battle. After the Yorkist victory, Richard talks to the king, who tells him that he's going to get a horse; however Edmund mistakes him for a thief and decapitates him. The king's body is found, but everyone presumes Henry Tudor to be the killer and Richard proclaims himself King Richard IV, making Harry Prince Regent and Edmund Duke of Edinburgh and Warden of the Royal Privies.
Throughout the series, King Richard continues his violent behaviour, going to war against the Turks in Constantinople in the second episode. During this war, he is apparently able to kill 10, 000 heavily armed Turks with only a fruit knife. He returns to find Edmund claiming that Dougal McAngus has given him proof that Harry is a bastard; upon realizing McAngus tricked him and he is in fact the bastard, Edmund decries the evidence as a fraud and destroys it, despite Richard's demands to let him see the letter.
Richard's most villainous role comes in "The Archbishop". In this episode, it is revealed that Richard constantly attempts to have various dying noblemen leave their lands to the Crown; however the Archbishop of Canterbury always convinces them to leave their lands to the Church. The Archbishop will always die in a freak "accident" soon after; despite it being blatantly obvious that all of these "accidents" were in fact murders ordered by the king, Edmund is the only one able to figure this out, even when they involve the Archbishop being impaled after "slipping and landing on Winchester Cathedral". Richard is eventually able to have Lord Graveney leave his lands to the Crown after appointing Edmund to the position of Archbishop. He then accidentally orders Edmund's murder when two knights overhear what they believe to be Richard demanding his head, although he is able to escape.
Richard also has a more villainous role in "The Queen of Spain's Beard", in which he attempts to force an unwilling Edmund to marry the repulsive Spanish Infanta in order to secure an alliance with Spain in a war against France (he lost an alliance with Switzerland after ordering his troops to sack Geneva, having forgotten they were on his side). Despite Edmund's various attempts, he is forced to go through with the marriage, but Richard calls it off at the last second after Spain ally themselves with France, instead having Edmund marry the five-year-old Princess Leia of Hungary.
In the final episode, Edmund conspires with the Black Seal, a group made up of the six most evil men in England, to depose Richard. However, his arch-nemesis Philip of Burgundy, the evilest man in the world, takes over the group with plans to kill Richard (Edmund had simply wanted to exile him) and brutally tortures Edmund to near-death before his former friends Baldrick and Lord Percy poison the whole group. Richard, along with the rest of the royal family, attends the dying Edmund at his bedside and finally gets his name right (although he immediately gets it wrong again after he thinks Edmund has corrected him). He then says that Edmund's name will last as long as their dynasty, before the entire royal family immediately dies due to Lord Percy having stupidly poisoned all the wine in the castle while trying to kill the Black Seal.
Following Richard's death, Henry Tudor takes the throne, and re-writes history so that he won the Battle of Bosworth and Richard was murdered while a child by Richard III, who Henry paints as a deformed, homicidal maniac who was heroically killed by the Lancastrian forces at Bosworth Field.
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 Villains
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