Richard III (1452-1485), last Plantagenet King of England, remembered in the Stanley tradition as the king who nearly had them killed.

The Manx sources approach him through the family that held the Island. A writer looking back on his reign from a safer one sets down the contrast: there was no fear of tyranny and cruelty under the government he was then living in, as there had been in the time of Richard III, when Thomas, Earl of Derby, came near to being murdered by that king's direction, and his son the Lord Strange was in danger of the like. It was for those and such like feats, the writer adds, that Henry VII, whose mother Thomas had married, got his crown so early.

The Stanleys were already Lords of Mann when Bosworth was fought, and their intervention there confirmed and enlarged what they held.