5 Pounds - Elizabeth II Shakespeare - Richard III

Issued as part of Jersey's broader Shakespeare series marking the 450th anniversary of the playwright's birth, this piece honors Richard III — the play that gave the historical king his most enduring, if deeply unfair, reputation. Tudor propagandists shaped Shakespeare's source material, and Shakespeare amplified it; the withered arm, the hunchback, the scheming villainy were literary constructions as much as historical record. Richard III Society members have argued for decades that the portrait is fiction dressed as chronicle.

The 2012 discovery of Richard's actual remains beneath a Leicester car park confirmed scoliosis, not the deformity Shakespeare described.