The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds (28 page)

It is here that the dramatic discovery of the king’s body opens a compelling window on the last few minutes of the battle. The pattern of injuries found on Richard’s recently discovered skull powerfully recreates the last agonizing moments of the king’s life. (For details see Chapter 9.) His foes closed in on him. Two wounds to the chin show his helmet straps were cut off by his opponents and his helmet then flung away. Richard fought on, but a rain of blows was now falling upon his unprotected head. The king was struck repeatedly: a puncture mark from the head of a sharp-bladed weapon – probably a dagger – forced him to his knees. And then, the fatal strike from a halberd, slicing off the bone and cutting through to the skull. With Richard finally on the ground, a sword was thrust through his head.

Richard’s remains confirm the account of the Burgundian Jean Molinet – who almost certainly gleaned his information from French mercenaries in Tudor’s army – that the king was killed by a Welsh halberdier after his horse lost its footing and plunged into a nearby marsh. A later, seventeenth-century life of Sir Rhys ap Thomas also alluded to the family tradition that Rhys and Richard engaged in fierce mounted combat, forcing the king further and further away from Tudor; and a Welsh praise poem by Guto’r Glyn described the deadly blow that ‘shaved his head’. But the most striking evidence is found in the beautifully carved bed lintel Rhys ap Thomas later commissioned in Henry VII’s reign. It showed Bosworth’s culmination, with Rhys and Richard clashing on horseback and captured the moment when the king’s mount lost its footing – rearing up, with a horseshoe coming off its hoof. Between the two combatants a foot soldier had been placed, carrying a halberd – symbolically depicting the blow that killed Richard.

However, Molinet also related that at the very end Richard sought to flee the battlefield. If this had been true, the Tudors would have made much of it. A Spanish account of the battle, written by Diego de Valera, conveyed something very different: that Richard had been offered a fresh horse by his followers and told to make good his escape, but had resolutely refused to do so. ‘God forbid that I retreat one step,’ Richard had exclaimed. ‘I will either win the battle as a king – or die as one.’ Polydore Vergil also caught the king’s defiant response, ‘that this day he would either make an end of war or of life’, adding reluctantly ‘such was the great fierceness and force of his mind.’

It is here that even sources highly critical of Richard provide a firm rebuttal. Polydore Vergil described how the king fought and died in ‘the thickest press of his enemies’; John Rous said simply, ‘he bore himself as a gallant knight and acted with distinction as his own champion until his last breath.’ And the
Croyland Chronicler
– an implacable enemy of the king – was moved to offer this remarkable tribute: ‘For in the thick of the fight, and not in an act of flight, King Richard fell in the field, struck by many mortal wounds – as a bold and most valiant prince.’

The fight was over – Bosworth was now a Tudor victory. ‘We were in part the reason the battle was won,’ the French mercenary acknowledged. Moments later, a relieved Henry was greeted by his battlefield saviour, Sir William Stanley. Richard’s cut-away helmet had been recovered from under a thorn bush, and its circlet crown was hacked off in an impromptu ceremony and presented to the victor. But Henry’s exhilaration at surviving these last frenzied moments of combat quickly turned to spite. He ordered that his rival’s body be stripped of its armour and clothing, trussed up with the hands tied together and then flung naked over a horse. Richard, who had so valued the power of dignified ritual in life, was to be granted little of it in death.

Examination of Richard’s bones shows that one of Tudor’s followers now stabbed the dead king in the buttocks, in an act of ritual humiliation. Henry wished to prove to all and sundry that his opponent was dead, and at the same time – still shocked and frightened by how close Richard had come to winning – he vindictively encouraged his men to disparage his corpse. Richard’s naked and disfigured body was then carried to Leicester and publicly displayed for two days in such shocking fashion. Afterwards the new king began his victorious progress to London, and, as his men departed, the corpse – unwashed with the hands still tied – was hurriedly interred in the Church of the Greyfriars, without coffin or shroud. No ritual respect was to be offered to the fallen leader; his body was forced into a crudely excavated hole beneath the choir. And when the gap was too short, and the remains did not easily fit it, the corpse was left hunched in the grave. The hasty burial complete, Henry’s followers rushed off to join their master. The Tudor dynasty had begun.

11

The Man Behind the Myth

M
Y PROJECT, TO
find Richard III and his grave, seems complete. A battery of experts have subjected the skeleton found in Leicester City Council’s Social Services car park to a bewildering array of scientific tests and concluded, beyond reasonable doubt, that these are the remains of Richard III. But this is not the end of his story, or the reason my search for Richard began.

The Looking for Richard project had four clearly defined phases: research and development, archaeology, identification, reburial. The reburial was planned from the outset and was the reason the project had been created. Why was this? Richard III was deeply religious, with a keen sense of justice. These two strands of his character are powerfully woven around his reverence for the dead and provision for their spiritual welfare. For Richard, burial and reburial held a deep significance. At Towton he had ensured that the dead of that conflict, on both sides, were afforded proper burial, founding a chantry chapel to commemorate the slain. And although Richard executed William, Lord Hastings, he subsequently gave him a tomb in the royal mausoleum at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, beside Edward IV – as Hastings had requested in his will.

The reburial of his father, Richard, Duke of York, strongly demonstrated Richard’s own spirituality. In July 1476 Richard undertook the role of principal mourner for the translation of his father’s remains from Pontefract to Fotheringhay. The poignant event took nine days. Richard oversaw the exhumation, and at each stop along the way, as the coffins rested in a chosen church for the night, took part in the masses said for the souls of his father and older brother Edmund. At Fotheringhay Church – the mausoleum of the House of York – the family laid its loved ones to rest. The ritual allowed a full and final commemoration of the Duke of York’s achievements.

The similarity between the lives of the Duke of York and his youngest son, who carried his name and strongly resembled him, was striking. Both men mounted cavalry charges to take the fight to their enemy – at the battles of Wakefield and Bosworth – and both would be cut down in the fierce hand-to-hand combat that followed. The bodies of both men would then be mutilated and denied proper burial by their enemies.

With the discovery of his remains, we now know something of the treatment meted out to Richard III at his own burial. It would take Henry VII ten years before he honoured him with a tomb, and in so doing publicly recognized the former king. At the time it may have been politically expedient to do so. A pretender, ‘Perkin Warbeck’, claimed to be the younger son of Edward IV (one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’) and rightful King of England. By modestly commemorating his predecessor, Henry may have hoped to finally draw a line under the Yorkist dynasty.

But Henry VII’s gesture only went so far. Moving the remains of a former king to a more distinguished resting place was a way of fully making peace with the past. In 1413, as a mark of reconciliation, the young Lancastrian King Henry V moved the remains of Richard II (the monarch deposed and almost certainly murdered on the orders of his father, Henry IV) from King’s Langley to Westminster Abbey. Henry V hoped through this very public act to atone for this sin and to heal the divisions of civil war that had plagued his father’s reign. Richard himself undertook a similar symbolic reburial. As king, he had exhumed the remains of the saintly Henry VI from Chertsey Abbey and reburied him with honour in the royal mausoleum at St George’s Chapel. According to John Rous, ‘the king’s body was taken out of his grave in Chertsey in August 1484 and honourably received in the new collegiate church at Windsor, where it was again buried with the greatest solemnity to the south of the high altar.’ The treasurer’s accounts of the College of St George provide a window on this event, recording money paid ‘for the removal of King Henry VI from Chertsey’.

There would be no such consideration for King Richard from either Henry VII or his son and successor Henry VIII. They left him exactly where he was. In reburying this last Yorkist king, the Looking for Richard project could now offer him the same spiritual care that he had shown others in his lifetime and in so doing give him what had been denied him in 1485.

Now we are in a position to honour the remains of Richard III in a fitting ceremony of reinterment. Before we had found his remains, in anticipation of that day, in September 2010, the Looking for Richard project commissioned the design of a tomb based upon Richard’s life and what was important and meaningful to him. Undertaken by a team of Ricardians, it is hoped that the finished design, welcomed by so many, may form a part of the innumerable deliberations in the busy months ahead as we move inexorably towards the reburial when the last warrior King of England will finally be laid to rest.

The discovery of King Richard is a historic moment when the history books will be rewritten. A wind of change is blowing, one that will now seek out the truth about the real Richard III. Already the project has challenged many of the myths that surround him. We now know that his remains were not dug up and carried through the streets by a jeering crowd to be thrown into the River Soar. We also know he had no ‘withered arm’, nor did he suffer from kyphosis, a debilitating condition where the head is thrust onto the chest, inappropriately termed ‘hunchbacked’. Richard’s limbs were straight, so he probably walked normally, and indeed no one before Shakespeare suggested otherwise. None that saw him, or knew him, described him as being ‘lame’, a well-known medieval description for those that walked with an abnormal gait. What is clear is that Richard’s scoliosis, first shown when his body was stripped naked at Bosworth, has been deliberately exaggerated and used against him. Might this have been why his body was thrown over a horse, to display the uneveness of his back when bent forwards?

During the project I was described as a ‘fan’ of Richard III, trying to recast him as something of a saint. That was certainly far from the truth. But as a screenwriter I wanted to delve behind the caricature Shakespeare has given us and gain psychological insights into the man himself and his reality.

Contemporary writers agreed that Richard, as Duke of Gloucester, was a man of good reputation, a skilled arbitrator and respected dispenser of justice. It seemed he was a man to be relied upon, and trusted, and by none more so than the king, his brother. I wanted to understand Richard’s motivation, what got him out of bed in the morning and defined his character. As the youngest son of a great lord his life’s work was already determined: to devote himself to loyalty, duty and service. He could have chosen to rebel against this path, as others had done before him, but he chose to carry out his duties to the best of his ability.

So it seems rather out of character that Richard decided to take the crown, particularly in the way that he did. Until, that is, one considers Edward’s disastrous marriage, the declared illegitimacy of his children and the power of the Woodvilles. In that light it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that Richard transferred his loyalty, duty and service to the kingdom since he could not commit his allegiance to Edward’s illegitimate sons. But from what I could see of the man, I doubted it was in his character to murder children. It was much more likely for him to send them to a place of safety.

The enlightened laws he enacted showed that Richard was clearly willing to defy convention. I came across an earlier example of this behaviour when in April 1482, when he was Duke of Gloucester, a citizen of York had visited his castle at Middleham but had been insulted by Thomas Redeheid, a servant of the castle treasurer. Richard was informed about the insult, which in itself tells us he was someone who was approachable, unlike many another lord. But it is what happened next that intrigues. There were two courses open to Richard: to ignore the incident, or punish the servant himself. Richard did neither, but chose a third option. He sent the offending servant to York with a letter authorizing the city fathers to punish him in a way they deemed appropriate. It is a story reminiscent of the wisdom shown by King Solomon in the Old Testament. Richard showed principle, insight and sensitivity, as well as a strong sense of fairness and absolute trust.

I consulted two further sources whom I believed would help clarify Richard’s character. First I decided to take a slightly unusual tack. While some may doubt the reliability of grapho-analysis it is a scientific system for assessing an individual’s character from their handwriting and is used as a tool by many respectable organizations, including the police. In 2000 I therefore approached master graphologist Bridget Hickey who had no previous knowledge of Richard. For the purposes of analysis, I chose the postscript, in Richard’s own hand, in a letter to Chancellor Bishop Russell, dated 12 October 1483, denouncing the treachery of his former ally, the Duke of Buckingham. I chose this partly because it is the longest example of Richard’s writing, and partly because it was composed at a time of great stress. It seemed likely to me that, given the circumstances, any viciousness of character would be clearly revealed. But Hickey’s graphoanalysis emphasized the likelihood of illness – a possibility I had originally rejected as the historical record showed quite plainly that he was a physically able and active man. Then the dig revealed Richard’s scoliosis, and I returned to the analysis which said: