To Clear a King : * Royalty: Don’t try to tell members of the Richard III Society that their hero was an unparalleled villain. They insist the 15th-Century monarch was a victim of lies and innuendo.

He was born with a full set of teeth and grew up to have a hump on his shoulder and a withered arm. He murdered his two young nephews and was immortalized by William Shakespeare as “this poisonous hunch-backed toad.”

Thus has history portrayed Richard III, king of England from 1483 to 1485.

But for 750 crusaders in the United States and about 4,000 converts worldwide, there has rarely been a finer fellow than this last Plantagenet king of England. Ricardians, as members of the Richard III Society call themselves, are devoted to the revisionist mission of reassessing Richard’s ignominy and clearing the monarch’s name.

Richard, they protest, was the innocent victim of vicious lies perpetrated under the reign of his archenemy, Henry VII, his successor to the throne.

They give a huff of disgust when recounting how Sir Thomas More--a saint no less--maligned their beloved ruler in his “History of King Richard III.” More was only 8 when Richard died and he was Henry’s faithful servant, they harrumph.

As for that propagandist, “Bill” Shakespeare, Ricardians point out that he wrote under the heel of Henry VII’s granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth I.

Still, in the popular mind, Richard III, who, after the death of his brother King Edward IV, became protector of the realm for his son and successor, the 12-year-old King Edward V, allegedly had his two nephews smothered in order to have a clear claim to the Crown. After a two-year reign, he was slain at the Battle of Bosworth Field, which ended the War of the Roses between Yorkists and Lancastrians, and was succeeded by Henry, the victor, who established the Tudor dynasty.

Since then, Richard has been portrayed as a deformed monster and unparalleled villain.

To Ricardians, however, he is the sort of nice, down-to-earth chap a person might want for a neighbor. As Carol Rike, editor of the society’s quarterly newsletter, writes in the spring issue, “I just know that if I were alive in the fifteenth century I could borrow a cup of sugar from Richard. . . .”

She notes that Richard’s official portrait, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, pictures an attractive man of about 30 who is worriedly twisting a ring on his finger. In contrast, a portrait of Henry VII shows a thin-lipped, jut-jawed man--”a cut-throat personality,” declares Nancy Aronson, president of the Southern California chapter and a Los Angeles deputy district attorney.

Indeed, after defeating Richard and ascending the throne, Henry ordered the slaughter of all of Richard’s relatives, who might contest his right to rule.

“It was like chopping corn,” says Eugene McManus, the society’s national chairman and a Massachusetts physicist and mathematician.

But then, Ricardians have never pretended to be anything if not opinionated. With a membership that includes lawyers, doctors, scholars, a senator and a taxicab driver, the society characterizes its adherents as Anglophiles, amateur detectives and cheerleaders for the underdog. They also tend to be jovial, loquacious and just a tad sensitive when outsiders insinuate that they are, well, a little eccentric.

Founded in England in 1924, the society was organized in the United States in the 1950s by such actors as Tallulah Bankhead and Jose Ferrer, who were irked at the monarch’s sullied image. Other notable Ricardians included Sir Laurence Olivier, T. S. Eliot and Salvador Dali.

Richard often has a strong impact on the lives of rank-and-file members. Not only do they wear ties and carry tote bags emblazoned with white boars, Richard’s emblem, a number of Ricardians have penned books of historical fiction about their idol.

Rike, a New Orleans businesswoman, admits that she would have only white House of York roses at her wedding. When her maid of honor teasingly stuck a red rose in her bouquet, it almost ruined the day.

For Ricardians, no subject concerning their hero is too esoteric or fanciful for serious study.

At one bimonthly meeting, the Southern California chapter, which counts 70 members, considered the topic of medieval English cosmetics, which gave women’s faces the soft, white, round appearance of eggs. And the national society’s annual meeting, which will be held in Los Angeles in October, will feature a medieval fashion show.

But the topic that brings fire into the bellies of Ricardians is “the burning issue,” as McManus dramatically states it, of who killed the two little princes sequestered in the Tower of London.

It was utterly against Richard’s nature to kill his nephews, Ricardians proclaim, pointing to the king’s motto: “Loyaulte me lie” (Loyalty binds me). Henry, whose claim to the Crown was tenuous, is the more likely culprit, members assert.

Others suspect suicide, or perhaps, as McManus claims, Richard whisked the princes away to the safety of the north, where they lived happily ever after as ordinary citizens.

Given the lack of substantial evidence, however, the matter remains amicably moot. Still, Ricardians experienced a great moment of vindication when the murder case was tried some years ago on British television and the king was at last publicly pronounced innocent.

But belated exoneration does not excuse the vile treatment he received after his death. After fighting valiantly at Bosworth Field, Richard was hacked to pieces. His enemies, as Rike gives the grisly account, “threw him nude over the back of a horse and carried him back into the city, jeering.”

“He’s been picked on for a long time,” she wistfully concludes.

To pay tribute to his memory, Ricardians make summer pilgrimages to the cow pasture that was once the infamous battlefield and lay a wreath on the well where the king took his last draft of water.

On the date of his death, Richard III chapters across the country run In Memoriam notices in their local newspapers. “PLANTAGENET--Richard, great king and true friend of the rights of man, died at Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485. Murdered by traitors and, dead, maligned by knaves. . . ..”

Until recently, the notice was one of the two principal means by which the public was able to learn about the society’s existence. The other was a 1951 cult classic, “The Daughter of Time,” by the English mystery writer, Josephine Tey.

However, under the stewardship of McManus, Ricardians have become more aggressive about their proselyting. When she travels, Rike says, she distributes copies of “The Daughter of Time” with the zeal of a Jehovah’s Witness and has been known to pass out society pamphlets to theatergoers at performances of “Richard III.”

Writing under the rubric “Guerrilla Ricardianism,” a member fumes in the current newsletter: “Don’t you get steamed every time you find a copy of a book like Desmond Seward’s ‘Richard III: England’s Black Legend’ in a library?”

To get even, the writer advises members to insert a slip of paper with the society’s address on it into the book, concluding, “I find this a soothing activity when I have an afternoon to kill in a strange town.”

With their sights set on such high-profile projects as endowing university chairs in medieval studies and presenting Richard’s case on American television, the society has compiled a “chase” list of celebrities. Among them are actor Stacy Keach, who has played Richard sympathetically, and television host Alistair Cooke--although McManus decorously notes that they “might not want to be aware that we have singled them out as people we want to capture.”

And lest anyone accuse Ricardians of being a bit out of sync with the late 20th Century, McManus stipulates that the society’s mission serves as a caveat to contemporary politicians. They “may go to (their) graves with everyone singing hosannas,” he says, “but 500 years from now, some Ricardian-like snoopers may be sifting through their shredded papers.

“People who play fast and loose with the truth had best be on their guard!”