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

by Langley, Philippa

  ‘In that charge’, Polydore Vergil related, Richard III ‘killed several men and toppled Henry’s standard’. Others had intervened to protect Tudor and buy him precious time, as Sir William Stanley’s forces – likely to have been stationed on nearby rising ground, close to Crown Hill – rode to his rescue. Richard had flung Sir John Cheney to the ground, a remarkable feat of strength and horsemanship. Cheney (a former standard-bearer of Edward IV) was, according to Vergil, a warrior ‘of surpassing bravery’ and may have been, on the evidence of bones found in his own tomb, no less than six feet eight inches tall – a giant of a man.

  And Richard had killed Henry’s own standard-bearer, Sir William Brandon, chosen for his physical toughness, whose brother and then his son became notable jousters at the Tudor court. Forty-four years before Bosworth, on 20 July 1441 at Pontoise, Guillaume Chastel had sacrificed his life for his royal master, allowing the French king, Charles VII, narrowly to escape the clutches of Richard’s father, the Duke of York. Charles VII never forgot that sacrifice, instructing that Chastel be buried in the royal mausoleum at Saint-Denis, an exceptional mark of honour. Henry VII remembered William Brandon’s sacrifice in similar fashion, allowing his infant son Charles to be brought up in the royal household in the company of the king’s own children. At the court of the Tudor king’s son and successor, Charles Brandon would be elevated to the dukedom of Suffolk and become one of Henry VIII’s closest companions.

  The description of Richard’s army in the first parliament that Henry VII summoned was telling. We hear of a great force, well-armed, with banners unfurled, ready to wage ‘mighty battle’. Henry had decided to date the beginning of his reign to 21 August 1485, the day before Bosworth, thereby making all those who had fought for Richard there traitors, who would have to petition for a return of their lands. To do so successfully, they would need to accuse the last Plantagenet king of coercion, claiming that he had forced them to fight against their will. In this fashion the parliament of November 1485 – on Henry’s prompting – deliberately set out to create an image of Richard III that was cruel and vindictive.

  This was, in fact, a highly unpopular move by the new monarch. A diarist of the sessions in the House of Commons noted that it was the subject of heated, angry debate. A contemporary letter of the Yorkshire Plumpton family added that many were opposed to it, but as it was the king’s strong wish it was eventually pushed through. Even the Croyland Chronicler, no supporter of the memory of Richard III, attacked the decision. What would happen when a future King of England summoned an army to attend him, the chronicler wryly observed: would his subjects, instead of responding loyally and wholeheartedly, calculate that if their sovereign lost they were likely to forfeit lands, goods and possessions – and stay at home? Yet the measure had its desired effect.

  The king now attainted for treason no fewer than thirty persons who had been in Richard’s army, including five peers and eight knights. Others could be proceeded against later. Geoffrey St Germain had died the day after Bosworth from wounds received in the fighting. His daughter and heir claimed that he was only with the royal army through fear, because he was so threatened by Richard’s summons ‘that unless he came to the said field he should lose his life’. Roger Wake of Blisworth (Northamptonshire) claimed that it was against his ‘will and mind’ to fight for the late king. Wake was in fact the brother-in-law of Richard’s staunch supporter William Catesby. The command that had now allegedly so worried both men merely followed the standard form used by all medieval monarchs to muster troops before battle.

  But parliament passed up the chance to dissect Richard’s claim to the throne, the Titulus Regius, by questioning its author and architect, Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who had initially revealed the pre-contract that had invalidated Edward IV’s marriage. Rather than allow Stillington to be subjected to questioning, Henry gave the fortunate bishop a free pardon, and ordered that all copies of the Titulus Regius be destroyed. And destroyed they mostly were, although John Stow unearthed one, more than a century later.

  As for Henry’s own rightful title, the Croyland Chronicler frankly admitted that it would be better to say little on this matter, and instead wait for the king’s marriage to Elizabeth of York. This took place in January 1486, although Elizabeth’s coronation as queen was delayed until the following year – as if the new king did not want to seem too beholden to his wife for the right to rule.

  Henry had won the throne by killing the reigning king on the battlefield. For this reason, Tudor was anxious to display the body of his rival for two days at Leicester, to demonstrate to all that Richard had fallen at Bosworth. The bodies recently excavated from the Towton grave had had their faces hacked away, either in the last stages of the fighting or as spite wounds after death. But a study of Richard’s skull showed that he had not suffered this form of injury. In the last terrible moments of the battle an order must have gone out not to disfigure Richard’s face – Tudor had to prove that his rival was dead. But Henry VII’s struggle to assert his authority had only just begun.

  The Tudor poet Bernard André likened the first twelve years of his reign to the labours of Hercules, as plots and conspiracies abounded. Henry’s position remained terribly vulnerable. Rumours persisted that the younger of the Princes in the Tower might have escaped, a part played by the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck, and as the story spread, Warbeck attracted considerable international support. Plotting on his behalf was no less a person than Sir William Stanley, the king’s chamberlain, who was executed for treason less than ten years after decisively intervening for the Tudor monarch at Bosworth.

  In Henry VII’s first parliament a number of petitioners referred to Richard III’s cruelty. Richard’s anger could be frightening, but the charge of cruelty implied something different, a coldblooded relish in the suffering of others. Such cruelty as there had been was now heavily distorted by the new regime. Richard’s ruthlessness when as duke he bullied the helpless Countess of Oxford was now recounted in a Tudor parliament and portrayed in the most hostile light. But ruthlessness in pursuit of one’s ‘livelode’, one’s rightful inheritance, was a feature of late medieval life.

  For instance Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, was renowned for her piety and educational benefactions. Yet she deliberately ignored the pious request of her great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort to endow his hospital of St Cross in Winchester, and instead diverted the lands for her own use. And the Stanleys pursued a feud against the Harrington family to enhance their landed power in northern Lancashire, and intimidated and imprisoned the Harrington heiresses to secure their interests, eventually marrying them off against their wills.

  Richard displayed dynastic ruthlessness as Protector when he summarily executed Lord Hastings. If he believed that Hastings was now opposed to him, or was plotting against him, it was necessary dynastic ruthlessness. He subsequently treated his widow with respect and allowed Hastings the burial in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, that he had wished in his will. Since we do not know what happened to the Princes in the Tower after he took the throne, Richard, as a man of his times, is the most likely suspect for their murders. This may, however, be true without bringing with it the wholesale besmirching of his character. Was he really a Machiavellian, a master of dissimulation?

  Machiavelli wrote his famous treatise, The Prince, from which our present-day understanding of the term Machiavellian is itself derived, in the early sixteenth century. Yet late medieval England was already becoming more Machiavellian in its political standards, even before The Prince gave the definitive description of such behaviour. In 1399 the Lancastrian Henry Bolingbroke returned to England from exile merely claiming his ducal lands. This clever subterfuge allowed him to gather support and then depose the reigning king – Richard II – and claim the throne for himself, when the time was right. This sleight of hand would be repeated in 1471 when Edward IV returned to England from exile in Burgundy practising subtlety and deceit, and The Arrivall, the
official account of the king’s return, praised him for doing so. When Edward approached the city of York, The Arrivall tells us that the returning Yorkist king instructed his followers to pretend that he came ‘only to claim to be duke of York’, in other words to claim his aristocratic inheritance, not the crown of England. This dishonest declaration got him into the city unopposed, and The Arrivall described the tactic with wry amusement. The Earl of Northumberland was also praised for dissembling, refusing to commit himself openly one way or the other, and thus doing the king a good service.

  The arch dissemblers in the Wars of the Roses were of course the Stanley family. At the Battle of Blore Heath in September 1459 Sir William Stanley joined the Yorkist army while his older brother Thomas, Lord Stanley committed himself to the Lancastrians, even though he found all manner of excuses to avoid joining their army. This family strategy was repeated in 1470–71, when the Stanleys first supported the Earl of Warwick and then changed sides, throwing in their lot with Edward IV. In 1483, during Buckingham’s rebellion, Lord Stanley’s son, George, Lord Strange, raised an army in Lancashire; contemporaries were unable to discern what he intended to do with it. The Stanleys’ hesitant and puzzling behaviour during the Bosworth campaign in 1485, rather than being directed against Richard III, was entirely consistent with their survival strategy practised during the entire civil war.

  But Richard himself had not dissembled when he supported the Harrington family. He did this in 1470, when the Stanleys first attempted to seize the Harringtons’ residence at Hornby Castle in Lancashire. He did this again as king, when he considered overturning the arbitration award that finally delivered Hornby to the Stanleys. If he was practising the art of realpolitik, assisting the Harringtons made little sense; the Stanleys were far more powerful and far more necessary for Richard’s political survival. Here Richard’s favourite motto, ‘loyaulte me lie’, ‘loyalty binds me’, had a clear meaning. The Harringtons were in this predicament because the head of the family and his son and heir had died supporting Richard, Duke of York at Wakefield. Richard was loyal to the memory of his father and loyal to those who had fought and died in his cause.

  A similar loyalty can be seen in his grant to Queens’ College, Cambridge, on 1 April 1477, where humble soldiers who had died fighting with him in the Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury were remembered by name. Richard garnered no political advantage by such acts; they appear heartfelt and genuine and without contradictory evidence must be assumed to have been so.

  And if Richard could be as ruthless as his contemporaries, he was also brave, loyal and charismatic. We now know more about him: more about his incredible courage in the last few moments of Bosworth; and more about the pain he probably suffered from the scoliosis of his spine. ‘Deformed’ was a word readily used by medieval and Tudor writers to pass judgement on others. We would use different words, ‘disability’ or ‘condition’, and draw no moral inference from them. (For details on Richard’s scoliosis see Chapter 9.)

  The condition left him with one shoulder higher than the other, which some contemporaries noticed while others did not. The disparity could have been disguised by the tailored clothes Richard wore; he is also likely to have had his own armour made for him. Richard was physically active and strong, and particularly enjoyed the hunt. But interestingly, despite his love of chivalry, he did not enjoy the tournament, where court jousters such as Anthony, Earl Rivers were prominent: it is likely that he found the frequent changes in armour and costume off-putting. And Richard’s awareness of his physical condition may understandably have heightened his distaste for the sexual debauchery of the latter years of Edward’s court.

  In June 1483 we do have evidence that Richard suffered from a level of pain that was briefly disabling. In the period from 10 to 13 June Polydore Vergil related that Richard suffered from a debilitating torpor, where he was overcome by lethargy and unable to eat or sleep. Thomas More acknowledged that Richard believed he was under attack from witchcraft in the council meeting of 13 June. These Tudor sources did not take these symptoms particularly seriously. We should, however. They would account for the sense of danger Richard felt menaced by when he appealed to his northern followers for aid, believing the Woodvilles were using witchcraft against him. They help to explain the tumultuous council meeting of 13 June too.

  Richard was also afflicted the night before Bosworth. The Croyland Chronicler related that the king’s face was unusually white and drawn on the morning of the battle, and that he complained of terrible dreams where he had been assaulted by demons. But Richard cast away the pain and psychological distress with extraordinary resolve. We can only admire his courage. His physical condition makes the bravery and valour of his conduct on the battlefield all the more remarkable.

  The ritual that Richard enacted to his followers before the clash with Henry Tudor, where he displayed the ‘rich crown’ of England, thereby enacting a second coronation on the field of battle, demonstrated an exceptional belief in the rightness of his cause. He rode against Tudor with a battle crown welded to his helmet, and fought with an incredible determination.

  Richard III – in death as in life – divided opinion, and did so with a remarkable intensity. Symbolic of this division was Richard’s own badge or emblem, the boar. This boar, which was recently and movingly found on the edge of the marsh at Bosworth, was the device by which this fascinating and controversial man was recognized. Its mark can still be seen in some of the places most closely associated with Richard’s life; one, the oriel window in Barnard Castle overlooking the Tees, almost allows one to feel his presence. It was the badge worn by his supporters, followers such as Ralph Fitzherbert, whose magnificent tomb effigy adorns Norbury Church in Derbyshire and was also the image deployed by his opponents to denigrate him. In Richard’s choice of the boar, we learn more about the inner thinking and self-identity of the man.

  Richard’s boar badge made a pun on the Latin for York (Eboracum), his favourite city, the place that mourned him with such feeling and courage after his death. For ‘bore’ – an alternative spelling of the animal in the late Middle Ages – was an anagram of ‘Ebor’, the contracted form of the city’s Latin name. But even in York Richard could divide opinion. The civic records showed that in 1491, in a drunken argument, a schoolteacher called Richard a ‘hypocrite and a crookback’, declaring of his unseemly death and burial, ‘he died like a dog in a ditch’ – as if he thoroughly deserved it. Others rushed to Richard’s defence, and in a way we have never stopped replaying this debate.

  To Richard’s opponents, the boar – by which they both identified and denigrated Richard – was a wrathful and impulsive creature, and features in hunting manuals as an angry and dangerous animal. Polydore Vergil may have drawn upon the image of the enraged boar as he described Richard, about to launch his last, fateful charge against Tudor, ‘overcome with ire’.

  But the discovery of the boar badge at Bosworth is a timely reminder that Richard’s supporters wore this emblem with pride, and were prepared to die for this king and the cause he championed. Richard’s own attraction to this badge may have been much deeper than a pun on the city he loved.

  One of the saints Richard venerated was St Anthony, who, exiled in the wilderness, had been protected by a boar. This boar drove off threatening animals, kept demons and evil spirits at bay and protected Anthony from sexual temptation. Here we can see a different man, the one caught in Dominic Mancini’s portrayal, alienated from the sexual debauchery of Edward IV’s court, and forging his own morality – and the religious and chivalric values that overlaid it – largely in isolation from it.

  Richard III’s brief reign was mired in controversy. The hostility of Thomas More – which so influenced Shakespeare – was in turn inspired by the real-life enmity of John Morton towards Richard. Morton was Bishop of Ely at the beginning of Richard’s reign, and subsequently a political exile and strong supporter of Henry Tudor, rising to Archbishop of Canterbury under the new Tudor dynasty. Morton
witnessed – and never forgot – the terrifying council meeting of 13 June 1483, and was imprisoned after it. Morton’s view was slanted by the allegiances he subsequently chose, but there is no doubt that he hated Richard III.

  However, others were as positive as Morton was negative. Thomas Barowe, who got to know Richard during his patronage of Cambridge University, and afterwards served him as duke and king, was a valued member of his legal counsel and rose to become Richard’s master of the rolls. Barowe was still prepared to honour Richard’s memory – and the battle in which he had died – in a grant to the university in the reign of Henry VII. In an indenture of 19 January 1495 Barowe asked that the name of Richard III be remembered and masses said for his soul on 21 and 22 August each year, the eve of Bosworth and the anniversary of the battle itself.

  There are no winners and losers in a vicious civil war. All suffer. If Richard genuinely believed in the legitimacy of his right to rule, and killed to enforce it, so did the Tudors. Henry VII locked up the young Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of the Duke of Clarence, and then executed him on trumped-up charges. Warwick’s ‘crime’ was to have a better claim to the throne than Henry VII. The likely fate of this innocent prince was a cause of concern throughout the first half of Henry’s reign, although we hear little about this third Prince in the Tower, and much about the two sons of Edward IV.

  Yet the injustice of Warwick’s imprisonment by Henry VII featured regularly in the newsletters of the time, even though the Tudor regime discouraged speculation about him. On 29 November 1486 Sir Thomas Bateson reported that in London ‘there is little speech of the Earl of Warwick, but after Christmas they say there will be more of this’. There was not. On 17 December 1489 Edward Plumpton witnessed four royal servants hanged on Tower Hill for an attempt to rescue him, organizing a plot ‘to take out of the king’s ward [custody] the Earl of Warwick’. Warwick remained incarcerated in the Tower. And on 21 November 1499 John Pullen bluntly noted that the earl had now ‘confessed of treason’, and had been tried and executed.