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

by John Ashdown-Hill

  Likewise, what happened at the priory church would have been private, unseen by any but the friars themselves. We can be certain of this because Rous reports that the burial took place in the choir, and the recent excavation at the Leicester Greyfriars site confirms this. The choir was an enclosed part of the church, which was not usually accessible to lay people. No great royal hearse with mountains of candles will have been prepared before the high altar, and the stretcher bearing Richard’s body must just have been placed on trestles before the altar, perhaps with tapers burning on either side.

  There may have been a brief period of vigil after the reception of the body, with one or two friars watching over the corpse and praying silently. At some time during the morning, Requiem Mass will have been celebrated. There will have been no mourners in attendance with torches: only the friars themselves, standing in their choirstalls. At the end of the funeral mass, the body will have been lowered into a new grave, which had been opened in the floor the day before near the centre of the western end of the choir, close to the point where an archway gave access to the walkway and the nave beyond it. Here some of the coloured, glazed floor tiles had been lifted up and a shallow hole had been dug in the earth beneath. There, Richard III’s shrouded body was laid. It proved a tight fit. The body had not been measured, and the grave was barely long enough for it.

  But we must also consider the alternative possibility: that Richard III’s remains were not buried by the friars but by servants of Henry VII. In this case, the friars may not even have been warned in advance of the plans. On the morning of 25 August, as the new king was preparing to leave Leicester, some of his servants would simply have been sent to pick up the body from the Newark and cart it to the Fanciscan Priory. The friars may only have become aware of these arrangements when they were summoned by the banging on their door. The king’s servants would then have dragged the body into the choir and rapidly dug a simple pit to receive it. Into this they would have thrust the body, shovelled the earth back on top of it, and then left the astonished and probably appalled friars to deal with the sequel in whatever way they saw fit. Unfortunately, there is some evidence from the excavation of the grave site that this kind of burial may have been accorded to Richard’s remains. Even so, it is hard to imagine that the religious community would not have offered prayers for the dead once the new king’s servants had departed.

  Certainly no coffin was employed for Richard’s burial. This was confirmed by the excavation of August 2012. A little more needs to be said about coffins, because unfortunately a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition in Leicester ascribed to Richard III a stone coffin, which was displayed to visitors at that period, at a Leicester inn. The normal pattern for royal and aristocratic burials in the fifteenth century was to use either a lead coffin (as attested by the cases of Edward IV and Lady Anne Mowbray) or a wooden coffin (as in the cases of Eleanor Talbot and Elizabeth Woodville). In Richard III’s case, however, it is clear that no coffin was used.

  The supposed ‘stone coffin of Richard III’ was a much later red herring, pressed into service by a canny innkeeper simply to generate tourist interest. Stone coffins had certainly been used in the early Middle Ages, but they were not used in the fifteenth century. The one displayed at the Leicester inn in the eighteenth century very probably came from a genuine priory site – perhaps even from the Greyfriars. No doubt it was unearthed by chance during the redevelopment of the site after the Dissolution, and was then immediately seized on by a quick-thinking entrepreneur with an eye to business as a potential ‘tourist attraction’. Unfortunately, this story has recently resurfaced with the discovery of a similar stone coffin in the Leicester area, in use as a garden water feature. This ‘new’ stone coffin has subsequently been transported to, and placed on display at, the Bosworth Battlefield Centre, where it is now apparently playing a very similar tourist role to that of its eighteenth-century predecessor. The ‘new’ coffin probably also came originally from a priory site. However, the recently discovered coffin is certainly not identical to the one which was displayed in Leicester as ‘King Richard’s’ in the eighteenth century, for we know that by the end of the eighteenth century that one had been broken into fragments which later disappeared – probably used as rubble in the foundations of later buildings. On the other hand, the ‘new’ coffin is more or less intact. It is also important to stress that it is absolutely certain that neither the old stone coffin nor the new ever had any genuine connection with Richard III.

  We can summarise and conclude our review of the burial arrangements made (or at least approved) for Richard by Henry VII in August 1485 by observing that they present no surprising or unexpected features. Henry exposed the corpse to public view, and then had it buried with basic funeral rites in a priory church. As we have already seen, this corresponds very closely to the treatment accorded to the corpses of England’s other displaced monarchs. Based upon those earlier examples we might then anticipate that at some convenient later date – possibly after the accession of Henry VIII – a royal tomb for Richard would have been commissioned. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is more or less exactly what happened. The reburial of Henry VI at Windsor had taken place twelve years after the king’s death and original burial, and it had to wait for the death of Edward IV and the accession of Richard III. The upgrading of Richard II’s burial had taken about fourteen years, and also had to wait for Henry V to succeed his father. However, in Richard III’s case the provision of his new royal tomb took only nine years, and Richard did not have to wait for the accession of the second ‘Tudor’ king.

  Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Bosworth, the news of Richard III’s death slowly crept its way around the courts of Europe. On 20 October 1485, the Bishop of Imola wrote, in a letter to Pope Innocent VIII:

  According to common report as heard by me on my way, the King of England has been killed in battle.14

  11

  ‘King Richard’s Tombe’1

  As has just been noted, the one slightly unusual feature which we encounter in the upgrading of the burial of Richard III, is the fact that he did not have to wait quite so long for his royal tomb as his dethroned predecessors. We shall explore possible reasons for this shortly.

  As a matter of fact, although it has usually been assumed that Richard’s burial place was initially left unmarked, we actually have no surviving evidence on this point. It is possible that, once the earth had settled and it was possible to reinstate the paving at the western end of their choir, the friars themselves marked King Richard’s burial site in some way. In any case, the lapse of time was relatively short, so that knowledge of the precise burial location would certainly not have been lost when the time came to install the new royal monument.

  It seems to have been in about the summer of 1494, nine years after the Battle of Bosworth, that King Henry VII initiated the creation of a fitting tomb for his erstwhile rival.2 The king delegated the responsibility for this project to Sir Reynold Bray and Sir Thomas Lovell, committed ‘Tudor’ adherents and well-established servants of the new king. Nevertheless, Richard III’s mother, Cecily Neville, dowager Duchess of York, seems to have considered both men trustworthy, since in April–May 1495 – within a year of their being charged by Henry VII with supervising the construction of her son’s tomb – she named them amongst the executors of her will.3 Since one of Cecily’s motives was a wish to ensure her own proper entombment at Fotheringhaye, it is reasonable to suppose that Bray and Lovell had dutifully fulfilled their task in respect of Richard III and had commemorated him in a fitting manner.

  In fact, they commissioned a Nottingham alabaster man, Walter Hylton, to erect a monument ‘in the Church of Friers in the town of leycestr where the bonys of Kyng Richard the iijde reste’.4 This was probably that same Walter Hylton who served as Mayor of Nottingham in 1489/90 and again in 1496/97.5 We are aware of his commission only because it subsequently gave rise to a legal dispute. The case was presented to the chancello
r, Cardinal Morton (though it was not, of course, heard by him in person), at some date between 1493 and 1500, and the plea is dated on the reverse 1 July 11 Henry VII [1496]. Following Hylton’s commission, an alabaster tomb monument for Richard III was made in Nottingham and subsequently installed at the Greyfriars church in Leicester. As we shall see, Richard’s epitaph appears to date the commissioning of this monument to 1494. The sum paid to Hylton for his work on the tomb is usually reported to have been £50, though in fact the reading of this figure is problematic.6

  It is virtually certain that the payment to Hylton (whatever the sum involved) did not represent Henry VII’s total expenditure on Richard’s tomb. BL, Add. MS 7099 contains extracts from the household accounts of Henry VII in the form of manuscript copies in the handwriting of the antiquarian Craven Ord (c. 1755–1832).7 On folio 126 Ord notes that the original documents which he transcribed were then ‘in the Exchequer, every leaf signed by the king’. However, those original fifteenth-century records are now lost. Ord’s surviving copies in the British Library contain tentative attempts at regnal year dating, although these have been subsequently erased, and appear to have been in error. We shall return to the question of dating presently.

  Folio 129 (in the modern, pencil enumeration) includes the entry ‘11 Sept. – to James Keyley for King Rich. Tombe – £10. 0s. 12d.’. Superficially the sum specified may appear odd, but the extracts contain other entries where the figure in the pence column is 12 or above, or where the figure in the shillings column is 20 or above. Presumably, therefore, the sum paid to James Keyley was in fact £10. 1s. 0d.

  The unequivocal use of the title of king in relation to Richard in both the Hylton and Keyley texts is interesting, since it appears to confirm that there was absolutely no question as to his status. The Keyley reference includes no royal numeral, but it could not possibly relate to Richard I (who lay buried in France). Some might wish to argue that Keyley’s payment could refer to some repair to the tomb of Richard II in Westminster Abbey. In that case, the fact that the date of the payment corresponds with the period at which Henry VII is known to have been arranging a tomb for Richard III would be a remarkable coincidence – for although the payment to James Keyley mentions no year, the precise date can be ascertained. The preceding folio records the payment of £10 to Sir William Stanley ‘at his execution’. This entry is dated 20 February, and Stanley was executed in February 1495. Thus the payment to Keyley was clearly made on 11 September 1495. This, in turn, suggests that the inauguration of Richard III’s new tomb may well have taken place on the tenth anniversary either of Richard’s death or his burial (22 or 25 August 1495). Moreover, the occasion might perhaps have been marked by some royal ceremonial, since this would have been in Henry VII’s interest at that time, as we shall see.

  It is not stated what exactly Keyley did in respect of Richard III’s tomb, but one possible clue is provided by another entry dated 20 January [1501?] recording the payment of £10 to Master Estfield ‘for conveying of the King’s [Henry VII’s] Toumbe from Windesor to Westmr’. In a similar way Richard III’s tomb may have been made in Nottingham in Walter Hylton’s workshop, and then transported to (and set up in?) Leicester by James Keyley. Certainly the payment of £10. 1s. 0d. cannot possibly refer to Richard III’s actual burial. First, the date is far too late, and second, the Add. MS 7099 accounts also record a payment ‘for burying of a man that was slayn in my Lady Grey’s chamber’ on 27 May 1495, and the sum involved on that occasion was merely one gold angel (6s. 8d.).

  Assuming that the money paid to Keyley was not part of the sum of ?£50 mentioned in connection with Walter Hylton’s indenture, but was additional to it, this would bring the total cost of the tomb to not less than (perhaps) £60. Nor can we assume that these two payments to Hylton and Keyley represent the total cost of the tomb. The records which have come down to us, mentioning Hylton and Keyley and their connection with Richard’s monument, survived by chance. Had there been no litigation in respect of the Hylton contract, and had Craven Ord not transcribed the reference to the Keyley payment, we should have no knowledge of either. There may well have been other payments of which nothing is now known. No other records referring to Richard III’s tomb in Leicester and dating from the period 1490–1500 are currently extant, either at The National Archives or at any other English repository. The total sum expended by Henry VII on Richard III’s tomb, therefore, remains unknown.

  For the purposes of comparison, we may note that in the 1450s an alabaster retable for an altar (roughly the equivalent in size of one side of a table tomb) cost £1. 17s. 3d., while in 1462 an alabaster image of the Virgin Mary (size unspecified) could be purchased for £2.8 A contract, drawn up in 1508, for a fine alabaster table tomb for Henry Foljambe of Chesterfield, Derbyshire, survives. This specifies a cost of £10 for the tomb table, decorated with small effigies and shields bearing arms on the side panels. In this case the table was to be topped off with gilt copper effigies which are presumed not to have been included in the price of £10.9 By comparison, a tomb costing in total more than ?£60 for Richard III – even given that this sum may have included an alabaster recumbant figure of the king – should therefore have been a magnificent specimen of the alabaster men’s craft. Tombs made of harder stone, and with bronze gilt effigies, were a good deal more costly of course. Thus the tomb of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d. 1439), had cost £715. Yet the only recorded expenditure for the original tomb of Cecily Neville, Richard III’s mother, was 100 marks (roughly £66).10

  No detailed description of Richard III’s tomb exists, but it was made by workers in alabaster, and although Richard’s epitaph describes its stone as ‘marble’, this was a very common late medieval synonym for alabaster. The tomb was surmounted by an effigy or image of Richard, which was certainly of alabaster. In the words of Holinshed, ‘King Henry the Seventh caused a tomb to be made and set up over the place where he [Richard] was buried, with a picture of alabaster representing his person’. The word ‘picture’ in sixteenth-century texts can mean ‘statue’. Whether Richard’s alabaster ‘picture’ actually comprised a statue or a flat engraved slab is uncertain, but alabaster tomb effigies were two-a-penny at this period, and were almost mass-produced. Surviving incised alabaster slabs from the end of the fifteenth century are much rarer – though not unknown.11 On balance, a recumbent alabaster effigy seems the more likely alternative.

  Richard III’s new tomb remained in place in the Greyfriars church for the next forty-three years. During this period, at least seven times a day, as they entered and left their choir for the ‘Hours’ of their daily Office, the Franciscan friars of Leicester would have passed by Richard’s tomb as they made their way to their choirstalls.

  For an idea of the possible appearance of the tomb, see figure 25. Near-contemporary English tombs of members of the royal family, such as the bronze gilt tomb of Henry VII himself in Westminster Abbey, or the alabaster tombs of Richard’s sister, Elizabeth of York, Duchess of Suffolk, and her husband, John de la Pole, at Wingfield Church, provide possible guidance as to the likely design of Richard’s monument. Both are also table tombs topped by recumbent effigies, lying with their feet towards the east end of the sanctuary. In the case of Henry VII the tomb is centrally placed in the specially built new Lady Chapel, which bears his name. Likewise, Richard’s tomb was centrally located in the choir of the priory church, with his feet towards the high altar – not placed against one of the side walls of the choir, like that of his sister and brother-in-law at Wingfield Church. However, Richard’s burial was towards the western end of the choir, presumably for the simple reason that all the available sites closer to the high altar were already occupied by earlier tombs.

  The text of an epitaph associated with Richard III’s tomb in Leicester has been preserved. This first appeared in print in the seventeenth century as an appendix to the posthumously published life of Richard III by George Buck. Until recently this epitaph had been little studied. Moreover
, discussion of it focused on a seventeenth-century English ‘translation’ (possibly by Buck himself) rather than on the original Latin text – leading to a tendency to dismiss the epitaph as a seventeenth-century invention. However, even a glance at the Latin text is sufficient to disprove this notion. The currently available Latin versions of the epitaph, together with the seventeenth-century English translation, are supplied below in Appendix 6. A modern English translation by the present writer will be given presently.

  The epitaph displays overt connections with the monument erected for Richard III in Leicester in the 1490s. Clearly the writer was aware of Henry VII’s commemorative arrangements, for the wording refers to the honours paid by Henry to Richard’s corpse and (apparently) to 1494. The epitaph must have been written after Richard’s death in 1485, and before 1619, when it was reproduced by Buck. On religious grounds it is unlikely to have been written later than about 1535, since it concludes with a request for prayers for Richard’s soul: something unlikely to have been written after the Reformation had begun.

  As for the style and structure of the epitaph, very close parallels, both in verse form and in length, are to be found among the recorded memorials of medieval English royalty. Among the closest parallel inscriptions are the epitaphs of Queen Catherine (widow of Henry V, mother of Henry VI and grandmother of Henry VII), and one of the epitaphs from the tomb of Henry VII himself.12 Thus, stylistically, Richard III’s epitaph could easily have been written in about 1495.

  Another important factor in favour of the authenticity of the epitaph is the fact that there are two independent seventeenth-century published sources for it: Buck and Sandford. The text was first reported by Sir George Buck in 1619 at the end of his History of the Life and Reigne of Richard the Third (published posthumously by his nephew in 1647). But it was printed again, in a slightly different version, by Francis Sandford in his Genealogical History of the Kings of England (London, 1677). Sandford was aware of the 1647 publication of Buck’s History, and he noted specifically that its version of Richard’s epitaph differed in minor respects from his own text. Clearly, therefore, Sandford’s source for the epitaph was different from that of Buck – and possibly closer to the original inscription.