The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds (25 page)

Sunday, 3 February 2013

It was the afternoon of the day before the University of Leicester was to announce the results of all the tests to the world’s media. Unlike modern DNA which can be isolated in a matter of days, ancient DNA is incredibly delicate and difficult to deal with. Dr Turi King led the investigation, making it a model of excellence by using a double-blind test. Four molars from the skeleton had been carefully removed in a sterile lab and ground to a fine powder. If the DNA was there, it would have been protected inside the tooth’s enamel. The powder was divided between the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, and the University of York, and by using two samples and two laboratories Turi King was hoping to reduce any possibility of error.

A sample of Michael Ibsen’s DNA had been taken at the beginning of the dig and King had sequenced it in her labs, identifying its particular code. If Richard’s DNA matched that of his alleged seventeenth-generation nephew, it would be the final piece of evidence that the Greyfriars remains were those of the king. The test would also check for the male Y-chromosome since it was feasible, though unlikely, that the remains could be those of a female. Evidence of gender had yet to be found.

Michael Ibsen had asked for the result of the investigation to be revealed to him first privately. Turi King met him in an office in the university then brought him to meet Simon Farnaby, Richard Buckley and me.

As Michael entered he was in shock, his face ashen. King began with the news that a Y-chromosome had been found, meaning that the Greyfriars skeleton was male. She then revealed that the mitochondrial (female line) DNA was a complete match. This confirmed that Michael was a direct genetic descendant of Richard’s elder sister, Anne of York, and that he carried the same rare genetic subgroup as the Greyfriars skeleton – his seventeenth-generation great uncle, Richard III. Moreover, with the help of Morris Bierbrier, genealogist and author Kevin Schurer, a historian at Leicester University, had traced a second line of maternal descent from Richard’s sister, Anne of York. Michael Ibsen not only had a new cousin, but the DNA of this person was also a perfect match, and could be triangulated with Ibsen’s line from the original research by Dr John Ashdown-Hill.

The remains we had found on 25 August 2012, in the Leicester City Council Social Services car park, were those of King Richard III (1452–85).

Was I surprised the DNA was a perfect match? Yes and no. The project had run so smoothly, from the finding of Richard’s remains on the first day, exactly where I thought they would be, to the carbon-14 dating, the osteology, scoliosis, insult wound and facial reconstruction. Although I believed from the very beginning that the remains were those of Richard, I had been assailed by fears and doubts throughout the process. Now, after confirmation of the identity of the remains, I was unmoved. Perhaps it was exhaustion. Perhaps it was a new concern.

Leicester University wanted to publish pictures of the remains, including the skull. However, I didn’t want the skull to be shown full face, as a mark of respect to the man, and the university had agreed that no images would be shown that might be considered prurient. The university had also assured me that I would be allowed to attend its scientific announcement as they would be inviting Sir Peter Soulsby, the Reverend David Monteith from the cathedral, and the team from Channel 4 and DSP, but there was no invitation for Dr John Ashdown-Hill. University scientists would form the panel issuing the statement but I would be allowed to speak at the end.

Monday, 4 February 2013

At 11 a.m., the University of Leicester made its historic announcement. The investigative work of the scientists had been exemplary, their conclusions compelling and I was thrilled that Richard Buckley was asked to declare the identity of the remains. He said: ‘It is the academic conclusion of the University of Leicester that the individual exhumed at the Greyfriars in August 2012 is indeed King Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England.’

That evening Channel 4 in association with Darlow Smithson Productions, premiered the documentary that had taken nearly two years to bring to fruition.
Richard III: The King in the Car Park
told the story of the search for the king’s grave.

10

Bosworth

I
N
A
UGUST
1485 events moved rapidly. Henry Tudor embarked from France with a small invasion force at the beginning of the month and reached Milford Haven in south Wales on 7 August. When Richard heard the news of Tudor’s landing he immediately set about recruiting his army, and then, with preparations nearly complete, moved his forces from Nottingham to Leicester. Tudor, who had marched through Wales gathering recruits to his cause, and had reached Shrewsbury on 17 August, was now fast approaching. Contemporaries realized that a major battle was not far off, and the anxious citizens of Nottingham sent out a rider to shadow the king’s army and report back on the outcome of events. They would not have long to wait.

Richard III and his army rode out from Leicester on the morning of 21 August 1485. Richard’s force had been recruited quickly and purposefully, and was around 8,000 strong. The king had learned from his scouts that his rival Henry Tudor had disembarked in Wales with little more than 2,000 men. Although he had gathered further reinforcements, these were not numerous. Tudor’s army was now on the Warwickshire-Leicestershire border near Atherstone, and as yet no major English nobleman had thrown in his lot with the challenger. The king now had the opportunity to crush the smaller force of his opponent.

Richard was responding to this threat against his rule with urgency. If he delayed, he knew that Tudor had a chance to increase his strength considerably, forging an alliance with the powerful Stanley family. The head of the family, Thomas, Lord Stanley, was married to Tudor’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Margaret had plotted on her son’s behalf during an earlier rebellion against Richard’s rule, in 1483, but on that occasion the Stanleys had stayed loyal to the king. However, in the summer of 1485 Richard openly suspected Stanley’s younger brother, Sir William, of being in treasonable communication with his opponent. If Sir William Stanley and his retainers from Cheshire and the Welsh Marches joined Tudor’s cause, it would more than double the strength of his army.

Richard had taken precautions against such a danger, keeping Sir William’s nephew as a hostage within his own force. Mindful of this, and aware that Tudor’s chances did not look good, Stanley brought his men into the vicinity of Atherstone, but did not join Henry. Stanley’s temporizing offered Richard a chance to strike hard and fast against the weaker army of his rival, and it was one that he now seized upon. Moving westwards out of Leicester, the royal forces covered some fifteen miles that day, reaching the area around Market Bosworth in the evening. Richard and his men then camped on the nearest high ground surrounding Ambien Hill. The king’s attention was fixed firmly on the road south, the old Roman road running through Atherstone, and then on to London. It was the route Henry and his followers – now gathered close to Atherstone in the grounds of Merevale Abbey, eight miles to the west – would take the next morning. When they did so, they would find Richard’s army firmly blocking their path.

In the summer of 1485 the realm of England had already seen thirty years of civil war. Long periods of relative peace and prosperity were interspersed with bouts of sudden, violent fighting. The armies approaching each other were of very different character. Tudor’s was predominantly a mercenary force from France, Brittany and Scotland, with smaller contingents of Welsh and Englishmen. He had experienced war captains with him, including the Lancastrian exile John, Earl of Oxford and the French soldier of fortune Philibert de Chandée. And there were those who had joined his cause repelled by Richard’s violent accession to the throne. The majority of these men would fight with grim professionalism.

By contrast, Richard III’s army was fully English, recruited from the royal household and the retinues of major aristocrats such as John, Duke of Norfolk and Henry, Earl of Northumberland. Both men had strongly supported him when he took the throne, and in the first major rebellion against his rule. Richard had also brought up an artillery train.

In the fifteenth century gunpowder weaponry was transforming the face of medieval warfare. Cannon were now routinely used in sieges, and smaller field guns and hand arms were also beginning to be deployed on the battlefield. Artillery was rarely seen in earlier civil war clashes, but Richard – always interested in the latest military technology – this time brought guns from the royal arsenal in the Tower of London, and some were even transported from the English garrison at Calais. The king’s intention, as far as we can gauge it, was to place his artillery ahead of Tudor’s advancing forces and, as they approached, let off a series of volleys to demoralize his army.

We cannot of course know what was going on in Richard’s head as he prepared for battle. He left no personal account of his actions, and those of his closest followers who survived wisely said little about them during the reign of Bosworth’s victor, Henry Tudor (who after Richard’s death became Henry VII, the founder of the new dynasty). But Tudor chroniclers were quick to second-guess Richard’s state of mind – a characterization that culminated with William Shakespeare’s dramatic portrayal of man and battle. In these accounts, which grew more and more exaggerated, Richard was nervous and uneasy, afflicted by terrible nightmares in which his victims rose as one to curse him and his army. Sinister prophecies circulated, including one found pinned to the king’s own tent flap, foretelling that the monarch and his followers would be betrayed, just as they had betrayed so many others. Henry Tudor was the avenging angel, poised ready to administer this divine punishment.

According to Tudor sources, Richard went into battle with desperate resolve. This, however, was not shared by his army, who quickly began to desert him. Seeing the battle spiralling out of his control, Richard then attempted to find and overcome his Tudor opponent – but instead was left, isolated and alone, overwhelmed by a mass of his enemies. Tudor Bosworth was thus a morality play, where the forces of good enjoyed a rightful and inevitable triumph.

But there was nothing inevitable about the outcome of a medieval battle. Instead of resorting to a series of moral judgements about Richard III and his army, it is vital to consider what the king’s real intentions might have been, from what we know of him as a man and from the battle experience of the Wars of the Roses. We must put him firmly back into the context of his times.

Richard was going into battle against a man he had never met, and whom he knew little about. His rival and challenger Henry Tudor was twenty-eight years old, five years younger than Richard. But most of Tudor’s adult life had been spent out of the country, as an exile in Brittany, and then in France. In Tudor accounts – and in Shakespeare’s play – Henry’s apparent anonymity was cast as a virtue, his inoffensive demeanour becoming a mirror to reflect back all the more strongly the horror of Richard’s crimes. But bland and anodyne leadership was not a virtue on the battlefield. In an age where charismatic leadership was an essential prerequisite of military success, Tudor – during his advance into the English Midlands in August 1485 – had contrived to lose touch with the rest of his soldiers for a whole day. Fearful and disorientated, he was relieved to find them again at nightfall. A challenger to the throne who managed to lose his entire army could also easily lose the confidence of his followers. The clash of personalities at Bosworth was far less clear-cut than Tudor accounts would have us believe.

Richard had ample time to think about this confrontation. From the autumn of the previous year, Tudor, sheltering in the court of the young French king Charles VIII, had claimed the throne of England, sending out a stream of letters and proclamations, styling himself in the manner of a king, and urging his supporters to rise up and join him when his invasion was launched. Now that time had come.

This was an age where one’s ancestry, one’s family pedigree, was thoroughly scrutinized in lavish genealogies commissioned by ruling dynasties and aristocratic houses. But, despite the support of the French, Henry Tudor’s own claim to the throne was very weak, as Richard had made clear in his proclamations of 7 December 1484 and 23 June 1485. His lineage, from his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, linked him to the royal blood of the House of Lancaster, but the Beauforts were of bastard stock, and although legitimated at the end of the fourteenth century they had been specifically barred from succession to the throne. Henry’s grandfather, Owen Tudor, had married Henry V’s widowed Queen Katherine, connecting him to the French House of Valois, but the circumstances of this secret marriage to a man of lowly rank and status were disreputable, and the couple’s first child, Edmund (Henry Tudor’s father), may well have been born before the ceremony took place. Beyond this, Tudor had a supposed descent from a distant Welsh prince and a hoped-for marriage to Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Richard’s brother, Edward IV. But Henry would have to win at Bosworth for such a marriage to come about.

He therefore drew his chief credentials from relentless attacks on Richard and the violence he had used in taking the throne. Henry had repeatedly denigrated the king as a murderer and homicide, who no longer had the right to rule the country. Here lay the genesis of Tudor mythology about Richard III. The new dynasty was forced to attack Richard’s reputation because its own claim to the throne was so weak. And yet, for this strategy to be effective, its accusations had to be founded upon at least some measure of fact. The Princes in the Tower had disappeared shortly after Richard had taken the throne, and many believed the rumours that they had been murdered by the king. Richard had certainly executed a number of noblemen as he took power, on charges of treason that looked contrived and unconvincing to others; it is more likely that they were seen as threats to Richard and so were summarily removed. But after the bloody events of the summer of 1483 Richard ruled moderately and with merit. Tudor’s accusations therefore carried some weight, but whether they would be enough to unseat the king in battle was far from clear.