"It is uncertain … whether Muammar Gaddafi has studied the fate of the man who died on Bosworth Field. But if he died, he might find it instructive. Like Richard, Gaddafi came to power in a palace coup, when he and a group of young officers - the Tripoli equivalents of the Duke of Buckingham et al - overthrew the popular but ailing Idris, Libya's first and only king, in 1969. With a ruthlessness that might have impressed the Duke of Gloucester, Gaddafi had Idris tried in absentia while disinheriting all of his heirs... Just as Richard was challenged by a coalition of the willing assembled around the Lancastrian Earl of Richmond, so have Libyan rebels seeking Gaddafi's overthrow declared their allegiance to the memory of the old king and used his tricolour standard as their symbol of resistance. Gaddafi's well-documented use of assassins, sent abroad to hunt down and murder his enemies during the 1970s and 1980s, and his complicity in the 1988 destruction of Pan Am flight 103, provides a clear echo of Richard's monstrous methodology in commading the killings of the young princes and numerous perceived rivals. Gaddafi's resort to 'human shields'... to protect himself from Nato bombs is no less lethally duplicitous than Richard's treatment of Lady Anne."