higher than the other (with chronicler Rous not able to correctly remember which one, as slight as the difference was), Richard had no other noticeable bodily deformity. John Stow talked to old men who, remembering him, said "that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature" and a German traveller, Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent ten days in Richard's household in May 1484, describes him as "three fingers taller than himself...much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart." Six years after Richard's death, in 1491, a schoolmaster named William Burton, on hearing a defence of Richard, launched into a diatribe, accusing the dead king of being "a hypocrite and a crookback...who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog." Richard's death encouraged the furtherance of this later negative image by his Tudor successors due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The Richard III Society contends that this means that "a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building." The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself in his History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength". Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife. Jeremy Potter, a former Chair of the Richard III Society, claims that "At the bar of history Richard III continues to be guilty because it is impossible to prove him innocent. The Tudors ride high in popular esteem." Polydore Vergil and Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage".