The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA

by John Ashdown-Hill

  MAP 1: The Battle of Bosworth.

  On the lower ground in front of Richard’s army some of the terrain was marshy.21 As the king and his men gazed down they saw Henry ‘Tudor’’s much smaller force mustered beyond this marshland. Towards eight o’clock this smaller rebel force slowly began to advance towards the royal army, skirting the boggy ground. For a time the king took no action, but eventually, seeing that the rebel forces were clearing the marshland, he gave orders to oppose their further advance.

  When John de Vere (soi-disant Earl of Oxford, and one of Henry ‘Tudor’’s most experienced commanders) saw men of the royal army advancing to oppose them, he swiftly ordered his men to hold back and maintain close contact with their standard bearers. In consequence, the rebel advance may have more or less ground to a halt, but by maintaining a fairly tight formation Henry ‘Tudor’’s men effectively prevented any serious incursion into their ranks by the royal army. In total, all this slow manoeuvring may have taken up as much as an hour.

  It was apparently at this point – when in religious houses throughout the land monks and nuns, canons and friars were beginning to sing the office of Terce22 – that the king suddenly caught sight of his second cousin, Henry ‘Tudor’, amongst the rebel forces.23 Perhaps out of bravado; or from a sense of noblesse oblige; from fury at seeing ‘Tudor’ displaying the undifferenced royal arms, or possibly because he was suffering from a fever and not in full possession of all his faculties, Richard called his men around him and set off with them in person, at the gallop, to settle Henry’s fate once and for all. An eyewitness account reports that ‘he came with all his division, which was estimated at more than 15,000 men, crying, “These French traitors are today the cause of our realm’s ruin”’.24 The king’s action could be seen as a risky move, and one which suggests that Richard may not have been thinking very clearly. In some ways it recalls his father’s sortie from Sandal Castle, which had led to the Duke of York’s death in December 1460. But unlike his father, Richard was in command of a large army and he should have had every chance of winning his battle. Jones prefers to see his charge as ‘the final act of Richard’s ritual affirmation of himself as rightful king’, and it was certainly an action fully in accord with the late medieval chivalric literary tradition.25 Whichever interpretation is correct, the king’s dramatic charge did come very close to succeeding. The force of his charge cut through the ‘Tudor’ army, and Richard engaged his rival’s standard bearer, William Brandon, whom he swiftly cut down. The ‘Tudor’ standard fell to the ground, and at this point Richard’s hopes must have been high indeed, since probably only Sir John Cheney now stood between him and his adversary.

  But Henry ‘Tudor’’s foreign mercenaries now suddenly deployed themselves in a defensive manoeuvre never hitherto witnessed in England. They fell back, enclosing Henry in a square formation of pikemen, through which the mounted warriors of the king’s army could not penetrate.26 The forefront of Richard’s charging cavalry suddenly stalled, and the men riding behind cannoned into them. Many must have been unhorsed as a result. Seeing the royal charge thus broken in confusion against the wall of pikemen, the treacherous Stanley now took a swift decision and committed his forces on the ‘Tudor’ side.27 His army cut more or less unopposed through the muddled mêlée of the royal cavalry, and in minutes the balance of the field was reversed. Richard III’s horse was killed beneath him, and the king fell to the ground, losing his helmet in the process. He was struck on the head. As he struggled to his feet, one of his men offered him his own mount and shouted to Richard to flee, so that he could regroup and fight again. But the king refused. Surrounded now by enemies, he received further blows to his exposed head. His body, still protected by plate armour, was safe, but one hefty blow to the back of his unprotected skull was fatal. Given that in one sense his defeat and death clearly lay at Stanley’s door, the report that Richard III’s dying words were ‘Treason – treason’ may well be true.

  The king had died some six weeks short of his thirty-third birthday. Polydore Vergil’s account of his death recorded simply that ‘king Richerd, alone, was killyd fyghting manfully in the thickkest presse of his enemyes’.28 Although this account was written by and for Richard’s enemies, it is a fitting tribute. Interestingly, it is also one which, in the final analysis, acknowledges without question the one key point which Richard himself was defending, namely his kingship.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the vast royal army, most of whom had as yet done no fighting whatever, watched aghast as their sovereign fell. The quick-thinking John de Vere now seized the initiative. Taking rapid advantage of the new situation he hurled himself and his men at the position defended by his cousin, the Duke of Norfolk (who was in command of the royal archers). As de Vere grappled with his cousin, the latter unluckily lost his helmet. It was in that instant that an arrow, loosed at a venture, pierced the Duke of Norfolk’s skull and he too fell dead.29

  The vast royal army was now, in effect, a leaderless rabble. As the great host began to disintegrate, and its individual men-at-arms started to flee in the direction of Dadlington, the men of the smaller Tudor army began to pursue them and cut them down. The premise that the final stages of the combat were located in the vicinity of Dadlington is based upon the known fact that Henry VIII later established a perpetual chantry at Dadlington parish church for the souls of those who had been killed in the battle.30

  By about ten o’clock in the morning the fighting was over. It was only from this point onwards that Henry ‘Tudor’ would have had the leisure to detail a search for Richard III’s body, which had been left lying where it fell, somewhere near Henry’s position at the outset of the battle. We shall explore in detail what happened to the king’s remains in the next chapter.

  Ironically, it was apparently in the month of August 1485 that Richard III’s marriage negotiations in Portugal finally came to fruition. We have seen already that the Portuguese Council of State, meeting in Alcobaça, had urged both their king and their infanta in the strongest possible terms to accede to Richard III’s marriage proposals, for they feared that otherwise the English court would turn its attention to Castile and Aragon, in which case the ‘Catholic Kings’ were only too likely to agree to a marriage between King Richard and the Infanta Doña Isabel de Aragón.

  Duly impressed by his councillors’ arguments and prognostications:

  King John bullied and brow-beat his sister, but also employed their aunt, Philippa, to try more feminine means of persuasion. A dramatic dénoûment [sic] followed. Joanna [sic] retired for a night of prayer and meditation. She had either a vision or a dream of a ‘beautiful young man’ who told her that Richard ‘had gone from among the living’. Next morning, she gave her brother a firm answer: If Richard were still alive, she would go to England and marry him. If he were indeed dead, the King was not to press her again to marry.31

  Apparently the infanta had been granted supernatural help in resolving her (and her country’s) dilemma. The earliest extant written account of her vision dates from 1621, by which time Joana was, of course, also dead, and indeed, well advanced upon the path to sainthood. She was finally canonised in 1693 by Pope Innocent XII, and it is as St Joana of Portugal, Princess, that the Catholic Church remembers her today. Her mortal remains now lie splendidly enshrined at the Dominican monastery to which this princess, who came so close to being Queen of England, finally and definitively retired after Richard III’s death in order to cultivate the religious life.

  9

  ‘A Sorry Spectacle’1

  After Richard III’s death, his body, stripped and slung over a horse’s back, was carried back to Leicester: a distance of some 15 miles.2 This journey was accomplished during the afternoon of 22 August, for it was the evening of that day when Henry VII and his army reached the city with their ‘bag and baggage’,3 which now included Richard III’s remains. If we assume the new king and his entourage set out from the battlefield at about two o’clock in the afternoon, the tail end
of Henry VII’s baggage train would probably have reached the city by about six in the evening, an hour or two before sunset.4 Thus, it may well be the case that the arrival of Richard’s corpse was greeted by the sound of bells from the city’s churches. But these would not have been the ‘great bells’, which were traditionally tolled solemnly for the passing of a soul.5 Rather, the sound would have been the bright chiming of little Sanctus bells, sounding from the parish churches for the evening Angelus, combined with the bells of Leicester Abbey and of the various Leicester friary churches, calling their respective communities to the evening office of Vespers.

  The basic facts of the transportation of Richard’s corpse to Leicester, and the manner of it, are fairly well known, and the interpretation usually applied to this event is to see it as a major example of Henry VII’s vindictive nastiness. Thus Kendall, writing in the 1950s, chose to amplify the very basic information available from contemporary sources as follows:

  Stark naked, despoiled and derided, with a felon’s halter about the neck, the bloody body was slung contemptuously across the back of a horse, which one of the king’s heralds was forced to ride. As it was borne across the west bridge of the Soar, the head was carelessly battered against the stone parapet. For two days the body lay exposed to view in the house of the Grey Friars close to the river. It was then rolled into a grave without stone or epitaph.6

  The adjectives, of course, are Kendall’s own. Moreover, his highly coloured account certainly contains errors. The Franciscan (Greyfriars) Priory was not close to the River Soar.7 Nor is there any evidence that it was at that priory that Richard’s body was exposed to public gaze.8 Indeed, a religious house, parts of which were certainly closed to public access, would not have been a very suitable location for such a public display of the dead king’s body. Kendall’s account also contains other errors and misinterpretations, as we shall see in due course.9

  The whole thesis that the treatment accorded to Richard’s body represents gratuitous horror, personally inflicted upon Richard’s corpse by his successor, is open to question. We must not forget that, whether or not he was held to be the rightful king, Richard III was certainly the de facto king in August 1485, and it was a political necessity for Henry VII to acknowledge that fact, since his claim to the throne, as subsequently embodied in an act of Parliament, was based first and foremost on conquest, which implied defeat of the previous de facto sovereign.

  Henry VII is often portrayed by Richard III’s defenders as an innately unpleasant character. One piece of evidence adduced in support of this portrayal is Henry’s reported cynical attempt to date his reign from the day before the Battle of Bosworth (21 August).10 Another is his supposedly barbaric treatment of Richard III’s body. In fact, there is no evidence that Henry VII antedated his succession. Certainly it was subsequently 22 August, not 21, which was counted as the new king’s accession day for the purpose of calculating his regnal years.11 Nor was there, from Henry VII’s point of view, any possible political or financial advantage to be gained from gratuitous nastiness in respect of Richard III’s corpse – indeed, rather the reverse, since Henry needed to try to conciliate the defeated Yorkists if he was to reign in peace. In this context, it is significant to note that our two main written sources for the battle – Vergil’s account and that of the Crowland Chronicle – are in complete agreement in consistently referring to Richard III as ‘the king’ up to, and indeed beyond, the point of his death. At the same time both sources consistently call Henry ‘Tudor’ ‘the earl’ until after his victory.12 Bearing this important evidence in mind, let us now carefully re-examine the facts in this case.

  Vergil offers an early sixteenth-century account of the sorry spectacle of Richard III’s return to Leicester after the battle:

  Interea Ricardi corpus, cuncto nudatum vestitu, ac dorso equi impositum, capite et brachiis et cruribus utrimque pendentibus, Leicestriam ad coenobium Franciscorum deportant, spectaculum mehercule miserabile, sed hominis vita dignum, ibique sine ullo funeris honore biduo post terra humatur.

  [Meanwhile, they took Richard’s body to the Franciscan Priory in Leicester, stripped of all clothing and placed on a horse’s back with the head, arms and legs hanging down on either side; a sorry sight by Hercules, but one worthy of the man’s life; and there, after two days, he was buried in the ground without any funerary honours.]13

  An earlier but briefer statement is supplied by the Crowland Chronicle:

  Inventa inter alios mortuos corpora dicto Richardi regis … multasque alias contumelias illatas ipsoque non satis humaniter propter funem in collum adjectum usque Leicestriam deportato.

  [King Richard’s body having been discovered among the dead … many other insults were offered and after the body had been carried to Leicester with insufficient humanity (a rope being placed around the neck)].14

  Although there are no other contemporary or near contemporary written accounts, attempts to flesh out this basic story begin with the later sixteenth-century writer Holinshed. His authority (if any) is unknown, and parts of his fuller account may very well have been based upon nothing more than his own imagination. However, for what it may be worth, he tells us that Richard’s body ‘was naked and despoiled to the very skin, and nothing left about him, not so much as a clout to cover his privy parts: and [he] was trussed behind a pursevant of arms, one Blanch Senglier, or White-boar, like a hog or calf; his head and arms hanging on one side of the horse, with his legs on the other side; and all besprinkled with mire and bloud’.

  Since they are based upon no known contemporary source, Holinshed’s details cannot be relied upon. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that, while in general he apparently sets out to depict disgraceful treatment of the corpse – trussed like a dead animal, soiled with blood and mire (details absent from Vergil’s account) – he also adds one snippet which may tend in a different direction: he informs us that Richard’s naked body was transported to Leicester accompanied by the dead king’s pursuivant of arms. We shall return to this point presently.

  On arrival in Leicester the corpse seems to have been exposed to the public gaze in the Newark so that all might know for certain that the king was dead.15 This can only have been done on Henry VII’s instructions, and it is certainly probable that Henry VII would have wished as many people as possible to see for themselves that Richard III was indeed dead. We have no account of what preparation might have been accorded the remains before their public display. However, from Henry VII’s point of view it would have been important that the body should be recognisable. It is likely, therefore, that the corpse was washed and that the cuts to the face and head were pressed shut rather than being left as gaping wounds.

  Since it was late August and the weather was probably hot, one might suppose that some preservative measures would have been taken in order to retard the natural process of decomposition. In similar circumstances the body of James IV of Scotland was embalmed in 1516 by the enemies who had vanquished him. Incidentally, the treatment of the dead body of James IV, and the light which this may throw on the events of August 1485 and how we should judge them, will be considered in fuller detail below.

  Against embalming, however, we have two pieces of evidence. First, there is the fact that the body of Richard’s friend and supporter, John Howard, Duke of Norfolk (which must have been brought to Leicester at about the same time as the king’s), seems not to have been embalmed. Howard’s body cannot currently be identified for certain, but it seems possible to narrow it down to one of two sets of remains now interred at Framlingham church in Suffolk. Although we cannot be sure which of these two possible bodies belongs to John Howard, both were found to be preserved only as skeletons, and no traces of cere cloth were reported when the vaults containing these remains were opened in 1841.16 The second piece of evidence is that, when Richard III’s own grave was open in August 2012, as in the case of John Howard, no signs of cere cloth were found.

  First, let us return to the treatment th
at is reported to have been accorded to Richard’s body immediately after the battle. We have seen that, based on the Crowland chronicler (who was almost certainly not present in Leicester in August 1485), followed by Holinshed and other later accounts, this treatment has generally been categorised as barbarous. But perhaps we need to pause at this point and consider carefully what happened. We shall then be in a position to observe that, in terms of the burial arrangements for expelled English medieval monarchs, only in two respects does the treatment of Richard’s remains appear to have been unique, and that is the stripping of his body and its transport from the battlefield slung over a horse. The funeral arrangements made for other deposed medieval English monarchs by their conquerors are considered in greater detail at the end of this chapter. For the moment, let us concentrate on the unique features: the stripping and transportation of Richard III’s corpse. We need to remember that amongst the displaced medieval monarchs of England, the manner of Richard’s death was in itself unique, a fact which cannot fail to be significant when we consider how his remains were handled.

  Richard III is often described as the last English king to die in battle, but in point of fact he is the only English king to die in battle after the Norman Conquest, so the circumstances surrounding his burial were bound to be unique in some respects. It is also a well-known fact that bodies on battlefields were routinely stripped – not by their conquerors in person, but by looters (see below). It is highly improbable that Henry ‘Tudor’’s men would have stopped to strip Richard’s body in mid-battle. It is far more likely that the stripping was carried out by local people routinely picking over the field in the wake of the victorious army. The king’s body, which was probably more richly attired than most, would have been particularly susceptible to the attentions of such looters as soon as the tide of battle moved on in pursuit of his retreating army. In this context it is interesting to note that the crown from Richard’s helmet (which was made of gold or gilded metal, perhaps set with jewels or paste) was reportedly found in a thorn bush after the battle. Had it perhaps been pushed there by a looter, intending to conceal it for later retrieval when things had quietened down? The fact that in the aftermath of the battle Richard’s corpse was naked is probably not to be attributed to the innate nastiness of Henry ‘Tudor’ and his men, but was rather the normal and inevitable concomitant of battlefield death. Thus we know, for example, that when the first Earl of Shrewsbury was killed at the battle of Castillon, his corpse could subsequently only be identified by his missing left molar. Clearly, like Richard’s, his body after the battle was heavily disfigured by blood and mire, and had been stripped of every particle of armour and clothing that might have been recognisable.17 Further apposite examples of this common battlefield phenomenon will be cited presently.