Richard III, his Queen Anne, and his son; with related heraldry(15th c.).

Note that in this Rous Roll's contemporary images there is no trace of deformity about Richard and the hand of God seems to offer each a crown. Shakespeare is working a century later from chronicles by More, Hall, and Holinshed written from the point of view of subjects of the Tudor dynasty. The Tudors overthrew Richard III by armed invasion supported by the French and Welsh, so that it seemed important to support the "Tudor Myth" of the incredible viciousness of Richard symbolized by a supposedly crippled body. In fact Richard was so physically fit that he came close to personally killing the Earl of Richmond (aka. Henry VII) at the battle of Bosworth Field, in 1485, though he lost his life at that point. Most audiences and readers do not realize that Shakespeare's last play, Henry VIII (guessed by some to be partly by John Fletcher) is actually a systematic sequel to Richard III. Thus Henry VIII completes Shakespeare's epic cycle by bringing it down to his own time under Queen Elizabeth, by Cranmer's final prophecy at her christening, which is the play's climax.

Image: College of Heralds. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).