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

by Langley, Philippa

  In his history, More refashioned the mannerism in which Richard absent-mindedly toyed with his dagger into something altogether more menacing: ‘His eyes whirled about, his body secretly armoured, his hand ever on his dagger, his countenance and manner was like one always ready to strike back.’ He provided a compelling portrait, with Richard now the embodiment of evil, by cleverly heightening dramatic effect. This is seen in his embellishment of Polydore Vergil’s account of the council meeting of 13 June 1483, a key moment in Richard’s seizure of the throne.

  The solemn gathering of the English council might seem a staid affair, but More gave us a roller-coaster ride. In his version of events, Richard arrived late for this important meeting in apparent good humour, innocently asking Bishop Morton for a dish of strawberries from his garden, and then briefly left the room. But he returned with a change of mood that astonished those assembled there, suddenly rolling up his sleeve to display a withered arm, accusing the unlikely partnership of Edward IV’s widowed queen and former mistress of being witches, responsible for this affliction, and then charging the chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, of plotting against him. More related that Richard ordered Hastings’s immediate execution, swearing that he would not dine until his head had been struck off.

  More had abandoned his account by 1518, only partway through Richard’s reign, and it is not clear whether he ever intended it to be published. But when it was finally printed in the mid-sixteenth century, it was quickly incorporated into the chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, and these in turn became the principal sources for William Shakespeare’s play. Hall and Holinshed consolidated the hostile Tudor view of the king. Richard was now guilty of a whole series of murders and his mind and body were progressively distorted to match them.

  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many saw no need to depart from the evil character so powerfully brought to fruition here. The court poet Michael Drayton, writing in 1613, saw him as ‘the most vile devourer of his kind’; the following year Sir Walter Raleigh dismissed him as ‘the greatest monster in mischief ‘. Over a century and a half later, in 1762, the Scottish philosopher David Hume saw no reason to question either the ‘singular probity and judgement’ of Sir Thomas More, or the even more hostile accounts of Hall and Holinshed, concluding that Richard was ‘hump-backed, and had a very disagreeable visage, his body being, in fact, no less deformed than his mind’.

  But there were also significant stirrings of doubt. At the time of Shakespeare’s play, William Camden, in his survey of Britain, while believing that Richard almost certainly murdered his nephews and usurped the throne, was prepared to pay tribute to his qualities as a ruler and law-maker, saying: ‘in the opinion of the wise he is reckoned in the number of bad men but good princes’. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the antiquarian John Stow went further, unearthing a copy of the Titulus Regius, Richard’s right to rule, and commenting that the king’s responsibility for the murder of his nephews had never been categorically proven. Stow was particularly uneasy about the way Richard was physically represented as a monster. He recalled that in his youth he had spoken to old men who had seen the king, and had told him that although short of stature he was in no way deformed. Shortly afterwards, King James I’s Master of Revels, Sir George Buck, in his History of King Richard III, presented the first comprehensive assault on the Tudor tradition. Buck believed that one of his ancestors had fought and died by Richard III’s side at Bosworth, and – consulting a range of manuscripts – now championed the king’s cause, praising his courage, piety and concern for justice, and claiming that Richard’s ‘good name and memory’ had been most foully traduced.

  The best known and most influential of Richard III’s defenders was Whig politician and man of letters Sir Horace Walpole, who in 1768 brought out his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III. Walpole concluded that a number of crimes attributed to the king were either improbable or contrary to his character. Walpole was undecided about the fate of Edward IV’s oldest son, stating that ‘I can neither entirely acquit Richard nor condemn him’, though he believed the younger boy may have somehow escaped. He was also sceptical of Tudor accounts of Richard’s appearance, telling of an anecdote in the Desmond family that Richard cut an attractive figure at court.

  Walpole’s book provoked much interest, and significantly saw the rediscovery – in private archives – of John Rous’s first, sympathetic portrait of the king. On 26 February 1768 the poet Thomas Gray wrote to Walpole: ‘Let me tell you,’ he confided, ‘that Lord Sandwich, who was lately dining at Cambridge, spoke appreciatively of your book, and said it was a pity you did not know that his cousin, [the Duke of] Manchester, had a genealogy that went down to Richard III and his son, in which the king appeared to be a handsome man.’ This was Rous’s illustrated history, and Walpole was subsequently able to inspect it, noting with pleasure of the etching of King Richard, next to the favourable commentary on his reign: ‘The figure is traced with a pen – well-drawn.’

  The great debate continued. In 1819 Roman Catholic historian John Lingard, in a vindication of Sir Thomas More, condemned Richard III ‘as that monster in human shape, a prince of insatiable ambition, who could conceal the most bloody of projects under a mask of affection and loyalty’. But four years later another historian, Sharon Turner, while believing Richard probably murdered the Princes in the Tower, saw him very much as a product of his age, judging that he ‘proceeded to the usurpation of the crown with the approbation of most of the great men, both of church and state, then in London’.

  By the end of the nineteenth century battle lines between the king’s detractors and supporters had been firmly drawn. James Gairdner, a prolific scholar and editor of chronicles and records, published in 1878 a history of Richard III utterly convinced of ‘the general fidelity of the portrait [of Richard] with which we have been made familiar by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More’, declaring firmly that Richard ‘was indeed cruel and unnatural beyond the ordinary measure, even of those violent and ferocious times’. A vigorous debate in the pages of the English Historical Review ensued, where Gairdner was opposed by the notable geographer Sir Clements Markham (who went on to write his own vindication of Richard III), who cited Richard’s proven abilities as a warrior and administrator, both before he became king and afterwards, his concern for legal reform and his popularity in the north – particularly Yorkshire – and closed with the rebuttal: ‘such a monster [as presented by Gairdner] is impossible in real life. Even Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are nothing to it.’ Interest in Richard has continued unabated. In 1924 the Richard III Society was founded, and continues to flourish, with the aim ‘to promote in every possible way research into the life and times of Richard III and to secure a re-assessment of the material relating to this period, and of the role in English history of this monarch’. In 1936 historian John Armstrong discovered the only strictly contemporary account of the beginning of Richard’s reign, that of an Italian visitor to London, Dominic Mancini. In 1951 Josephine Tey brought out a bestselling novel, The Daughter of Time, in which her detective hero, Inspector Grant, inspired by an early sixteenth-century portrait of Richard III, puts his investigative talents to unorthodox use, eventually acquitting Richard of all the charges made against him by More and Shakespeare.

  Yet for the general public, the dark power of Shakespeare’s villain is never far from the scene, even if few would fully agree with the historical accuracy of his portrayal. The accepted view of Richard’s early career is now more positive, paying tribute to his courage, loyalty to his brother Edward IV, and his genuine piety and chivalric aspirations. Yet with all the wealth of new material that is being unearthed, we still struggle to make a connection with the real man, and to understand why he took the throne. As Paul Murray Kendall wrote in 1955, in a more sympathetic biography of this much maligned king, a succession of hostile Tudor paintings had distorted his physical appearance in the same way as they had twisted his character
: ‘If we cannot see his portrait clearly, we can at least choose its painter.’ In a major study of Richard III in 1981, Charles Ross saw him in many ways as a strikingly conventional medieval prince, and also very much a product of a brutal and ruthless era. But his taking of the throne, and the violence that accompanied it, was still depicted as ‘an unashamed bid for personal power’.

  We do not come to terms with the reality of the man either by blackening his reputation or whitewashing him. Tudor sources that progressively twisted his appearance and motivation have to be treated with caution, but cannot simply be disregarded. They built on hostility that was already present during his reign, as our earliest sources, those of Dominic Mancini and the Croyland Chronicle – written by an official well-placed within the Yorkist government – make clear. And yet Richard’s reign was all too short, and his death at Bosworth left him unable to give us his own version of his life and account for the motivation that drove him. It is indeed telling that even the most critical Tudor commentators were moved to praise his exemplary courage at the end of the battle. It is sometimes said that we end our life in the manner we have hoped to have lived it.

  Retrieving the remains of this king, whose body was stripped naked and violated after his death, put on public display and then hurriedly buried at Leicester, as the victorious army of his challenger, Henry Tudor, moved south to London to claim the throne, would give vital tangibility to his life – a tangibility that could at last counterpoint the power of Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare, and the hostile Tudor tradition that he drew upon, tell us only one half of Richard’s story.

  The great debate we have charted really began in 1484, in the last year of Richard III’s reign. His rival, Henry Tudor, an exile in France, was now claiming to be king in his own right, and sending out letters to his supporters in England explaining this on the basis of the character of his opponent, ‘an unnatural tyrant and homicide’. Henry was employing character assassination to justify his right to rule, a character assassination that subsequently reached its apogee – or nadir – with Shakespeare’s play. Whether we agree or disagree with these sentiments, we have been replaying this side of the debate ever since.

  But Richard responded to his opponent’s letters with a proclamation of his own. In it, he derided Henry Tudor’s claim because through his pedigree, his family descent, he had no legitimate right to claim the crown at all. Henry was, he asserted, of bastard stock from both his maternal and paternal lineages – an observation that was fundamentally correct. This was the issue that John Rous was strongly hinting at in his earlier version of Richard III’s reign. Richard, by contrast, was born from a true marriage, and this not only validated his own right to rule, but fatally undermined the right of his opponent. Richard’s side of the argument revolved around legitimacy, a belief in his own legitimate right to be king and a conviction that his challenger possessed no right at all.

  This was the argument the Tudors feared most deeply. We often employ the phrase ‘Tudor propaganda’ when discussing Richard. Yet although that propaganda grew apace over time, it was notably hesitant, even reticent, in the reign of the first Tudor king. Henry was content to be the avenging angel, sent by God to chastise an unnatural tyrant. Any departure from this script would mean revealing information about Tudor’s own difficult life, the political compromises that he made in exile and the confusion over his claim to the throne, which persisted long after he had won it. And that was something Henry was most reluctant to do.

  If we introduce legitimacy back into the heart of the debate we can break away from the endless sessions of a Kafkaesque court of justice, reconvening year after year, and century after century, to discuss the real and imagined crimes of this long dead king. Instead, we can give Richard III a cause to fight and die for, a cause that he could be loyal to – and loyalty was the guiding personal motto of his life. In doing so we also return to the heart of the family – the House of York – from which Shakespeare and the Tudors had plucked him. We see the power of the reverence for his dead father, whose achievements Richard admired so much, and whose rightful heir he increasingly felt himself to be. Departing from the hostile versions of More and Shakespeare, and following the contemporary account of Dominic Mancini, we encounter the force of his grief over the death of his brother, the Duke of Clarence, along with fear that he also was at risk, and an all-consuming desire to avenge his brother’s fate. This interpretation, which will turn Shakespeare on its head, forms a cornerstone from which much else will fall into place.

  Richard might have fought his way to the throne for no other reason than merciless personal ambition; he may also have killed for a cause – the legitimacy of his right to be king. Once we allow for that possibility, the fateful and heroic cavalry charge on the morning of 22 August 1485 begins to make more and more sense. The Battle of Bosworth saw the fall of the last King of England to die in battle and the succession of a dynasty determined to denigrate his name. To bring him back to life we do not need to try to replace a villain with a saint; rather, we need to understand better the bravery and self-belief of the line of horsemen who charged across the battlefield to meet their foe, and the astonishing courage of the king who led that charge. If we are able to allow history to be written by the losers as well as the winners, perhaps we can at last lay Richard III to rest with real dignity.

  3

  So It Begins

  Thursday, 23 August 2012

  THE ALARM GOES off at 5 a.m., but I had woken at two and slept unevenly, questions racing through my mind. What could go right and what wrong? What hadn’t I planned for? Would I be ridiculed for this quixotic search? The cab arrives promptly and the journey to Edinburgh’s Waverley Station is quiet, the familiar tree-lined suburbs slipping by. Would I see them differently on my return? Would my quest for the grave of King Richard III change everything for me? As I board the train for Leicester the sick feeling in my stomach finally subsides. This is what I’ve been fighting for. The dig is finally happening.

  As the train pulls out of Waverley Station, I’m actually following in Richard’s footsteps. When I was researching Richard’s life it had come as a revelation to learn that he had once walked the streets of Edinburgh, having been sent north by his brother, Edward IV, in 1482 (see here).

  At the next stop, Berwick, it was strange to think that the train stood on the remnants of what had once been the Great Hall of Berwick Castle, where Richard had also stayed. The train heads out over Northumberland, and Percy country, towards Durham, a city that held a special place in his heart. St Cuthbert, patron saint of Durham Cathedral, was much venerated by Richard who had dedicated a stall to him in his church at Middleham. Not far from Durham was Barnard Castle, one of Richard’s favourite residences where you can still see his personal emblem of a boar carved into a surviving window tracery. And nearby was Saleby, the home of the Brackenbury family, his most loyal supporters and adherents. Robert is the most famous Brackenbury, the man Richard would make Constable of the Tower of London, and who would be immortalized by Shakespeare as ‘Gentle Brackenbury’.

  If Durham and its cathedral and Barnard Castle captivated him, it was the next stop that surely held his heart completely. York was always Richard’s ‘fair city’, the Archbishop’s Palace chosen by him as the place where he would invest his young son as Prince of Wales, and whose people had known Richard man and boy.

  We’re delayed at Doncaster so I miss the connection at Sheffield but, with thirty minutes to spare built into my journey, I should still make the on-site midday meeting at the Social Services car park with Richard Buckley, co-director of University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), Dr Christine Fiddler, interim Heritage Manager for Leicester City Council, and Mick Bowers, Head of Greyfriars Property Services. I check my phone. No calls or texts from the media. The press release for the launch event in the car park tomorrow went out yesterday, embargoed until midnight tonight. Perhaps in the 527 years since Richard’s death at Bosworth and inter
ment in Greyfriars Church, the world has turned too many times and there’s no interest in the search for his grave. A part of me is relieved that I’ll then be able to perform my role quietly, away from the media spotlight. But my relief is tinged with frustration. If no one cares about the quest for Richard III’s grave then the chance finally to air the dichotomy between evil Shakespearean villain and man of good reputation – to challenge the status quo – will have been missed.

  The train trundles on to Leicester. It’s nearly eleven o’clock and my phone rings. It’s Fiona Phythian, education correspondent for the Leicester Mercury, who wants to do an article on the dig for tomorrow’s edition. I give her as much of the story as I can, and explain that the full story will be available tomorrow at the car park. I hear her frustration but if I say too much now this will ruin any chance we have of attracting other media to the launch. As the train pulls into Leicester Station the phone rings again. This time it’s Nick Britten, Midlands correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, who tells me the editor wants to run a piece. Thrilled that a national is interested, I give him as much information as I can.