Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  Portrait of Richard III in the National Portrait Gallery, by an unknown artist; thought to date from 1580 to 1600, it is close to a portrait in the Royal Collection that may have been the prototype for nearly 20 known paintings. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  About the Author

  Mike Pitts is an archaeologist and award-winning journalist. He grew up in Sussex and studied archaeology at University College London. In his early career he directed his own excavations at sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury, and he continues with scientific research, including most recently on an Easter Island statue. For the last ten years Mike has edited Britain’s leading archaeological magazine, British Archaeology, and as a freelance journalist he writes frequently for national and international newspapers and magazines.

  Other titles of interest published by

  Thames & Hudson include:

  The Crown Jewels

  The Medieval World Complete

  The Medieval World at War

  Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe

  England’s Forgotten Past:

  The Unsung Heroes and Heroines, Valiant Kings, Great Battles and Other Generally Overlooked Episodes in Our Nation’s Glorious History

  See our websites

  www.thamesandhudson.com

  www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Act I

  In which events of the Wars of the Roses are summarized, and we begin to ask why Richard III inspires such strong interest

  Act II

  Scene 1. Leicester. A bridge

  In which we visit Leicester, discover how a city remembers Richard III, meet Richard Buckley and Philippa Langley, and learn of the origins of Philippa’s quest to find a king’s remains

  Scene 2. The same. A friary

  In which Philippa Langley approaches University of Leicester archaeologists, who research the history of the Greyfriars site and confirm that Richard III’s grave may still be there

  Scene 3. The same. A university

  In which Richard Buckley plans an excavation in Leicester, Philippa Langley solves a late funding crisis and Mathew Morris prepares to direct a dig

  Act III

  Scene 1. Greyfriars. A car park

  In which an excavation is launched in a car park, and archaeologists find a friary, a church and a human skeleton

  Scene 2. The same. A grave

  In which a skeleton is excavated

  Act IV

  In which various scientific studies are conducted on a skeleton to establish age, gender, height and build of the individual, details of diet, health and pathology, and approximate date of death

  Act V

  In which scientific, historical and artistic research together establish the cause of death and the identity of a person represented by a skeleton

  Epilogue A battlefield, and a burial

  In which we consider why finding a king’s remains matters, assess what happened after the revelation, and describe how the site was found where the Battle of Bosworth was fought

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright

  For Nicky

  ‘The dead do not come back to complain of their burial.

  It is the living who are exercised about these matters.’

  Thomas Cranmer comforts Henry VIII, who has dreamed about his dead brother Arthur. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

  ‘What we are about to tell you is truly astonishing.’

  On 4 February 2013, a team from the University of Leicester delivered its verdict to a mesmerized press room, watched by media studios around the world: they had found the remains of Richard III, one of the most disputed monarchs in British history.

  This is the story of how that happened.

  The discovery, as Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist behind the project, said, was an astonishing achievement.

  Richard III is both a historical figure at the centre of dark and bloody events signalling the end of the Middle Ages, and an enduring mythical ogre, captured by Shakespeare as the archetypal villain. He is a man whose almost psychotic ambition holds a fearful fascination. Or, it may be, he is a maligned king whose noble progress was cut short and then concealed by those who would distort history for personal gain.

  His very life embodies terror and conspiracy. It demands precise analysis, the uncovering of truth and the exposure of falsities. How appropriate, then, that the most forensic of historical practitioners, scruffy, mud-spattered archaeologists in league with futuristic scientists, should uncover the physical remains of the protagonist himself. Fragile, delicate and intimate, Richard III’s bones are hard evidence that few had expected ever to see.

  Yet improbable as the discovery was, this success was not the only remarkable thing about the project. In my career as an archaeologist and writer, I have seen, studied and reported on more excavations than I can remember; I have worked on many myself, and even directed a few. But never have I witnessed an excavation like the one that found Richard III.

  It was well planned, as all good excavations are. It had precise goals, again a sign of a field project likely to deliver results. But here events parted with normality.

  The dig began on a Saturday in August 2012. The team had five objectives, and two weeks in which to achieve them. What typically happens in such situations is that discoveries are made that go some way towards solving the problems the archaeologists have set themselves. But other finds, as you might expect, raise new questions. At the end of the dig, the archaeologists pack up their things and anticipate the long process of analysis – always much longer (and more expensive) than the actual dig – and feel already they now know more than they did. But they also know there are new things they don’t understand. There is a sort of balance, with old, partly solved questions on one hand, and new questions to answer on the other. If funding bodies will permit, they will have to come back and dig again – in its way, of course, an achievement in itself. They enjoy digging.

  The excavation in Leicester was not like that. The archaeologists achieved their first objective on the first day. This had been considered in advance to be ‘a reasonable expectation’, though no one would have bet on pulling it off on day one. It took a little longer to achieve objective two (‘a probability’) – nearly a week. They ticked off objective three (‘a possibility’) on the eighth day, four (‘an outside chance’) on the twelfth, and five (‘not seriously considered possible’, with Richard Buckley having promised to eat his hat if it happened) on the same day as four. Two objectives in one day! And they still had two days of digging left.

  The excavation had been commissioned by Philippa Langley. Philippa is not an archaeologist, but a writer with an interest in history and a passion for Richard III. Before they began, the team had warned her not to be too hopeful. There was only one thing she really wanted from the project: to find the remains of Richard III. This was the objective the archaeologists judged, in plain speaking, to be impossible. Yet when the digging began, it seemed, anything might happen.

  ‘People would find things’, Philippa told me, ‘not just every day but really almost every hour. Every moment, we would hear a shout saying, “Look at this!” And we’d all be running to see what it was, and then we’d be running to the other side to see something else that had been found.’

  This was fun. They were sitting down in the tent having lunch, and Philippa said to the diggers, ‘God, I love your job. No wonder you’re archaeologists!’

  A ring of bemused faces looked up from their sandwiches.

  ‘This is just the best job in the world!’ Philippa repeated. ‘If I’d know
n it was like this, I might have been an archaeologist!’

  And they all looked at her, and said no, Philippa, no. Archaeology is being out in the rain and cold, moving dirt, hurting your back and bruising your hands. The pay is poor. Most of the time you’re lucky if you find a small piece of broken pot you’d have difficulty selling on eBay. Stick with something easy and well paid, like being a writer.

  ‘This dig’, said the archaeologists, ‘is NOT normal.’1

  A man stands alone, centre stage. He hears a door shut behind us, and turns to look. Leaning into a limp in his left leg and swivelling his raised right shoulder, he ambles towards us, eyeing us with an expression of curiosity and disdain, a hint of teasing humour, perhaps fear. He closes in and pauses, bent like a tree grown in constant wind.

  We then hear one of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies. In this 1955 movie Richard III is played by Sir Laurence Olivier. The actor, the direction and the words – ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ – together make an extraordinarily compelling scene.1

  Shakespeare’s Richard is an embodiment of evil, crippled physically and mentally by birth. Yet his intelligence and charisma fascinate us, as he schemes and murders his way to the power soon to be taken from him by his savage death in battle.

  Shakespeare is one reason for Richard III’s enduring presence, but not the only one. Richard lived in turbulent, changing times. The Battle of Bosworth, at which he died in 1485, was a watershed in British history. It effectively ended the thirty-year Wars of the Roses, replacing the Plantagenet dynasty, source of more English kings than any other, with the Tudor dynasty, opening the way for Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

  The Plantagenets are not forgotten: the current British monarch still receives significant income from their former estates; the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment toasts the Queen as the duke, and displays a red rose. But their power died with the Middle Ages. For the English, Bosworth symbolizes the medieval world’s end, and the start of the early modern era – a bloody, explosive event to mark the late arrival of the Renaissance.2

  Richard was born in 1452, a century after the Black Death, which killed up to half or more of the entire population of Europe and profoundly challenged its economy, politics and culture, with effects continuing during his lifetime. He was barely a year old when the Hundred Years’ War ended. This era of conflict between England and France was a struggle among ruling families that spread power through the wider population. It encouraged the centralization of states – and the national sentiments that these engendered – while draining English resources. The royal household was effectively put out of business. A failing economy and frustration with government inspired protest, and brutalized society. The wars also affected military technology and thinking, resulting in evidence at Bosworth that, centuries later, could be used by archaeologists to revise the conventional history of the battle’s course.

  Shakespeare’s Richard III played by Mark Rylance, English actor and former Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in London in 2012/13 and New York in 2013/14. (Nigel Norrington/ArenaPAL/TopFoto)

  Richard was 21 when the London merchant William Caxton, then working in Belgium, printed the first book in English. Within a decade of his death, Christopher Columbus had made landfall in America, the first English-speaking university to teach medicine had opened (in Aberdeen), and Leonardo da Vinci – born in the same year as Richard – was working on one of his most famous paintings, The Last Supper. It was no accident that Shakespeare devoted so much of his talent to these extraordinary times – eight of his ten history plays cover the century and a half that culminated on Bosworth field.3

  Richard was king of England for just over two years, but in that short reign enough happened to inspire generations of writers. He began controversially by seizing the throne, brutally and illegally. His two young nephews, rightful heirs, disappeared – the ‘princes in the Tower’ – though even at the time what happened to them was largely a mystery. And he ended his rule in unforgettable style, fighting bravely even when he knew he was doomed. When Richard died, he became the only English monarch to lose his life in battle since the accession of the Norman dynasty in 1066, a record that remains unbroken.

  Just over a century later, Shakespeare described a monster. He was writing fiction, inspired by texts from nearer Richard’s time that exaggerated the king’s faults. Yet that does not necessarily mean Richard did not have any. And if he was no saint, he certainly experienced as good as he gave. While he grew up, his family stole, tortured and murdered in pursuit of power, or just survival – as did others around them. His family suffered too. His paternal grandfather had been beheaded before Richard was born. He was eight years old when his father and an older brother were killed in battle. Later, another brother – Edward IV – executed their brother George, an act, say some historians, in which Richard was complicit.

  We would be cautious today about making judgments in an atmosphere of intrigue and fear, so how much more care must we bring to what we read about events that occurred over five centuries ago. As a modern historian has said, Richard’s times were ‘a period of struggle for power, carried on in an atmosphere of rumour, suspicion, propaganda, plot and counter-plot. Only those at the centre could be fully aware of what was going on.’4 And even if they knew, almost none of those at that dark place felt the need to tell us.

  Yet there are sufficient records of the times through which Richard lived to more than engage our interest. Events were both striking and rapid, even if occasionally they seem to play out in slow motion. Journeys, by ship or horse, or often on foot, took time. A simple message had to be physically conveyed, so that when action awaited critical intelligence, it could be more efficient to travel to the news source than to rely on messengers. Even as plots were secretly reshaped and counterattacks mustered in affairs that changed daily, there was time enough for gossip and confusion to build, and for decision-makers to reflect.

  So we too ponder. Through the prism of history we see a life of corruption and terror as a king struggles to retain power, breaking the law, killing as he sees fit, yet at other times showing empathy for ordinary people or enjoying a play or concert. We also see a man forced into decisions – sometimes by circumstances, sometimes by his own actions – which he understands will change his life but whose outcomes he cannot foresee. This is a human being expressing fear and courage, hatred and affection, judgment on the past and hopes for the future. The scene was thus set for dispute, conspiracy theories and reinvention long before Shakespeare. The search for the real Richard III began with his birth.

  That event occurred on 2 October 1452, a Monday, in Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. We owe this detail to a charming artifact, an illuminated prayer book owned by Richard.5 We are firmly in the Middle Ages. The castle, built 50 years after the Norman Conquest, became English royal property in the late 13th century. The prayer book, known as a Book of Hours, had been illustrated and written by hand in the medieval international language of Latin. Some 50 years after it was made, it was acquired by a king. And against 2 October that king added, in fine flowing script, the above details of his own birth.

  The pretty little book was said to have been found in Richard’s tent after the Battle of Bosworth. Its next owner was the new king Henry VII’s mother. Almost exactly a century after Bosworth, the first printed Book of Common Prayer was issued, in English, and 50 years after that Fotheringhay Castle was a ruin. The Middle Ages were no more.

  There is another curious pivotal feature of Richard’s birth: its location. Fotheringhay is just 65 km (40 miles) from a farm in Leicestershire now deemed to be the centre of England.6 And that is less than 5 km (3 miles) from the field where Richard died. A life of mythic significance in English history began and ended at its geographical heart.

  Like those of all of his class, it was also a life marked by genealogy. Many of us today take an active interest in our family histories, helped by magazines, websites and b
logs. We find stories of poverty and loss, of menial employment, early deaths and even criminal activities. The lives of our ancestors highlight their determination to survive, and the wider changes that have made possible our own relatively comfortable existence. Five centuries ago, for members of the aristocracy, genealogy had a harder reality. It defined their power.

  Frontispiece from Richard III’s Book of Hours (c. 1440); the angel Gabriel tells the Virgin Mary that she will bear Jesus. Richard’s birth is recorded on 2 October 1452. (Lambeth Palace Library, London)

  In the 1949 movie Kind Hearts and Coronets, Louis Mazzini, deprived of his birthright by his mother’s unconventional marriage, seeks revenge through the simple process of murdering all those who come between him and a dukedom. As he advances on his goal, he marks his accomplishments on a family tree hidden behind a picture hanging over his mantelpiece.7 Fifteenth-century members of the House of Plantagenet would have understood what Mazzini was doing. But their trees were less like neatly branching diagrams than thickets. (Indeed, to combat the genealogical complexities of this period, all occurrences of Richard III’s name in the following text are capitalized, so that he may be distinguished from other Richards. The family tree overleaf should also be helpful.)

  Parents sometimes had so many children that only those who mattered in the power game would appear in their lists. We remain complicit in such editing. How many published trees show RICHARD III’s full complement of four sisters and seven brothers?8 Death could come at any time, from disease, by accident, through axe or sword, arrow or bullet. Few lived to become elderly and infirm.

  Men and women of quite differing ages might outlive their wives and husbands, enabling them to marry more than once into different families, and their former or future spouses might do (or have done) likewise. A wedding was a way to reshape a family’s tree, and potentially its fortunes, acquiring titles that could bring huge assets in the form of estates and rents. Yet little could be taken for granted.