It's interesting to speculate what type of king Prince Edward would have made had the Lancastrians instead of Edward IV won the battle of Tewkesbury. The circumstances of his youth—growing up in an impoverished exile, dogged by rumors of bastardy, fathered by a man who was insane at his son's birth and who even after his recovery seems to have been fragile mentally—might have made him into a bitter, cold man, or they might have made him into an attractive figure like Charles II, who grew up in not entirely dissimilar circumstances. We shall never know, but surely that's no excuse for novelists to keep churning out the same stereotypical picture of a young man whose life was cut tragically short.