Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  ‘This plaque’, it says of its larger stone neighbour, ‘originally erected … on the nearby site of the Austin Friars, records the 17th-century tradition, now generally discredited, that … the body of King Richard III was disinterred from his tomb at the Greyfriars in Leicester and thrown into the River Soar.’

  The whole added up to an extremely clever, and possibly unique, propaganda exercise in public places, by a private society, about a popular historical figure. Once, Leicester had marked Richard with a random collection of street furniture that recorded his presence, but told you little else. Now, there was a story. It began at the statue, where ‘Richard III King of England 1483–1485’ was shown proud and thoughtful, without a hint of deformity. We were told he was a good legislator, a man of the people, and that he died bravely. Across the road we were informed that the traditions that his remains were thrown into the river, or that they were buried nearby at the Austin Friars, were wrong. And in the city centre was marked the site of the friary where he was really buried.

  Early in 2011 Richard Buckley was in the office doing the usual things – emails, costing jobs, thinking about the reports he needed to read – when the phone rang. It was a member of the Richard III Society, and she wished to talk about the king. But this was not to chat about his reputation or his history, or to offer ideas for another plaque. The Society wanted to give the archaeologists a job. It was, perhaps, the logical conclusion of its Leicester operation.

  Memorial to Richard III by type designer and letter cutter David Kindersley, set in the floor of the choir of Leicester Cathedral in 1980 and photographed in 2013. (Mike Pitts)

  ‘Can you’, asked Philippa Langley, ‘dig up Richard III?’

  Philippa Langley makes people happy.

  Channel 4 television loves her: they had barely escaped having to defend dropping Time Team, the world’s favourite archaeology series, when she brought them a blockbuster of a dig. Journalists love her for all the work she creates – and being so friendly – and Google must love her for all the things journalists write that get the bloggers going. The Richard III Society loves her, of course – they gave her both their Robert Hamblin Award and honorary life membership for finding their king (an indication of their faith in her, as this was four months before anyone had officially decided whether the skeleton dug up in Leicester was the right one). If you can say she is giving your lecture, or coming to your conference or your festival, you can be sure of good press coverage, and your seats will fill. People want her to sign their books, their newspapers, or anything really. They want to be photographed with her. If he’s up there somewhere, I imagine Richard III’s quite pleased. Internet searches for him in February 2013 were 20 times what they had been for years.20 People care.

  In 2011 all that was in the future. Philippa was as well known as any would-be screen writer with six or seven scripts seeking a producer, but none actually commissioned – she had three in development, she tells me, and then the recession hit. I imagine writing half a dozen screenplays on spec, the determination that must take, and wonder where she found the time to think about looking for a medieval king – let alone to organize the project and raise the money. So was history an obsession? I’ve talked to many archaeologists, and most – like Richard Buckley – date their passion back to a childhood experience. Did something inspire Philippa to pursue Richard III when she was young?

  Hardly, at least as she explains it. Born in East Africa, she grew up in Hummersknott, a suburb of Darlington, a market and engineering town in northeast England. Somehow, what with moving schools and the way things were taught, she missed out entirely on Richard III in both history and English; she left knowing nothing of the historian’s Richard or of Shakespeare’s Richard, or what the difference between the two was, or should be. History was her favourite subject – but one minute she had a teacher who brought it all to life (‘It was like watching a movie,’ she says wistfully, ‘listening to him’), and the next a teacher who killed it dead.

  In another world she might have read history at university, and stuck with the subject. But she’d seen her brother and sister go through it, and that wasn’t for her. ‘I couldn’t handle being the poor student,’ she says. She decided to get out into the world, and earn some money.

  In 1989 she moved three hours’ drive north up the A1 to Edinburgh, her Scottish boyfriend’s home city. She entered marketing and advertising, and ended up with The Scotsman Publications, working as sponsorship manager across all its newspaper titles. It was going well. Then she became ill, and had to stop. She began to read more, which seems curious to her. Before the illness she liked to keep fit, be active and physical. Suddenly that was no longer an option, and reading became fundamental. ‘When you get seriously ill,’ she tells me, ‘your view of the world and what’s important changes.’

  It was then she picked up the book that transformed her life. It was 1998, and she was in her mid-30s. She was going on holiday. Usually this would be an active affair, water-skiing, swimming and walking. But she was exhausted, physically and mentally. She just wanted a book, to sit round a pool and do nothing else.

  So she went into Waterstone’s on Edinburgh’s Princes Street. It was the first store of its kind to open outside London, a warehouse of books on several floors linked by a huge, antique-style staircase hidden unexpectedly behind the classical stone façade of a 19th-century club. There were books from floor to ceiling. ‘You walk in’, she tells me, ‘and it’s just packed. And the weird thing was, I went straight to this particular shelf.’

  And to a particular book – not the one in front of her, but down at the bottom. She picked it up, looked at it, thought, ‘Oh, that’ll do’, paid for it and left. ‘I mean’, she says laughing, ‘it must have taken me less than a minute.’

  This was unusual poolside reading: a heavy, unillustrated work of non-fiction, first published in 1955 and written by an American academic named Paul Murray Kendall, who died in 1973. The book was a biography. Its subject was Richard III.

  Kendall’s account is a good read. It conjures scenes you might have thought beyond the reach of history. As the king and his army swept out of Leicester, the Ohio University English Literature professor tells us, Richard ‘was mounted on a white courser, a slight figure even in the casing of full armour … without fear or hope, his general’s eye scanning the country, noting the bearing of soldiers, and picturing, as scouts brought their reports, the possible movements of the enemy.’21

  Yet it was not just his style that the critics liked. ‘Kendall writes well,’ opined the New York Times Book Review, ‘with the result that when the sun goes down on Bosworth field, the reader is full of wrath at the treacherous Stanleys and the calculating Northumberland.’ For Kendall had a captivating agenda. His book, he claimed, was based ‘almost entirely’ on contemporary sources. There he found a sympathetic narrative of a just but wronged king, quite unlike the monster portrayed by later Tudor writers whose vindictiveness, glorified by Shakespeare, had misled generations. Kendall’s biography was the historian’s answer to The Daughter of Time, published four years earlier. Tey had successfully raised the notion of a historical conspiracy to darken Richard’s reputation: Kendall offered the corroborative evidence, with 65 pages of footnotes.22

  It blew Philippa away. ‘At the time’, she says, ‘I was considering screen writing. My love is writing stories that challenge people’s perceptions of established truths. It’s really important that we question.’

  And here it was: a cracking story that needed to be told. ‘It had everything,’ she says, ‘power, politics, romance, betrayal, courage. I just thought if it’s grabbed me like this, then surely it’s going to grab other people, up on screen in the cinemas.’

  Suddenly, in the languid peace of a rippling pool, Philippa needed to find out everything she could about Richard III. She would write his story. This one wouldn’t be a two-dimensional caricature, but a portrait of a fully rounded medieval man and king. A complex man
for sure, and a conflicted man, but not a psychotic, murdering … ‘You know, Machiavellian’, she trails off.

  She read all the histories. But it wasn’t working. None of them presented a believable man. ‘I was going to walk away from it,’ she tells me. And then a new book came out, and for the first time she could make sense of Richard’s life. She could make a film with this. She got in touch with the author, Michael K. Jones.

  (After talking to Philippa, I read Jones’ book, Bosworth 1485: Psychology of a Battle. It is a fascinating, engagingly written narrative with many new insights and, for me, useful new academic references in its footnotes. Yet I also found its arguments at times tortuous, so that an imaginative, if reasonable, hypothesis in one part of the book can reappear as fact within another discussion.23)

  So the screenplay was in its first draft, pretty rough and ready, and Philippa wanted to go down and walk some of the places that Richard walked. She had a good visit to Bosworth, and ended her trip in Leicester. She’d contacted some local Ricardians, Richard III Society members, and they’d directed her to New Street car park. There’s a bit of medieval wall there that might be part of the Greyfriars precinct where Richard was said to have been buried.

  It was her last Leicester stop. ‘It was a lovely warm sort of late spring day’, she remembers, ‘and the car park was very empty.’ She walked in, had a look around, saw the wall – an unloved, small thing, half-hidden, when I see it, behind graffiti, a bag of garbage, vegetation and the parking attendant’s wooden shed – and thought, right, that’s done, time to get home and write the screenplay. She was finished in Leicester.

  Then she saw another car park on the other side of the road. It had a private sign, and a barrier. But she had this overwhelming urge to go in.

  ‘So I slithered round the barrier,’ she says. ‘It was quite empty. I was drawn to a red brick wall ahead of me, and as I walked towards it I had to stop, because I had the strangest sensation. It was a warm day, but I had goose bumps so badly I was actually freezing cold to my bones. I knew then. I absolutely knew I was standing on his grave.’

  She pauses, then says, ‘And I know that sounds bonkers.’

  I ask if she was looking for Richard’s grave. Not until then, she says. Her interest was in his life, not his death. But then, well, it all changed.

  That was in 2004. A year later, she went back. Perhaps, you know, perhaps she had been a little daft. She stood on exactly the same spot, and had exactly the same experience. But something was different. A few feet to her left, on the ground, someone had painted a white letter R.

  Scene 2

  A friary

  Philippa knew that Richard III had been buried in Leicester. But everyone told her his grave had been lost.

  Archaeologists such as Richard Buckley, who quite frankly were not really bothered about what had happened to the king’s remains – their interests lay in the people, and the ones they dug up were always anonymous – tended to believe in the old story: the tomb had been wrecked, and its bones cast into the river. Richard III had no physical presence in the city.

  In the privately owned New Street car park, behind the attendant’s shed, is a small stretch of stone wall said to be all that survives above ground of the medieval Greyfriars friary. (Mike Pitts)

  Some Ricardians preferred to think that their king had never suffered such indignity, and told Philippa that what was left of his battle-scarred body still lay in the ground. It was under the old Parr’s Bank, an imposing white stone fortress raised in 1900, with great columns and carved allegorical friezes at the front and round, domed towers high above.

  It was here, just round the corner beside a Grey Friars cast-iron street sign, that the Richard III Society had placed their plaque in 1990. It commemorates the king’s burial in the friary church. It doesn’t actually say the grave was there, but with the words Requiescat in pace (rest in peace) and a reproduction of an 18th-century engraving showing monks carrying a coffin in front of what was said to be the Greyfriars church, it’s easy to read it that way. When the plaque was commissioned, the site was occupied by the National Westminster Bank. The NatWest had moved out in 2000, and five years later, when Philippa had returned to Leicester to sneak a second frisson in the private car park, the building was still vacant.

  On the face of it, whether he was lost in the river or under offices – or more likely, scooped up and lost when the original bank was built – Richard III had gone. Indeed, this was the official line: up to the grand denouement in February 2013, the British monarchy’s website concluded its summary of Richard III’s reign by saying that he had been buried without a monument; and later, it said, his ‘bones were scattered during the English Reformation’. Historians gave the matter little attention.1

  Yet Philippa’s car park experience told her the grave was still there, and she was not one to ignore instinct, however improbable. Cold shivers didn’t solve anything, but they proved a potent catalyst. Thus began the second part of her saga with Richard III. With the clarity of a woman on a mission, she knew what she had to do. ‘My problem’, she told me, ‘was I had three huge questions to answer before any search for Richard’s grave could begin.’

  First, if the weight of opinion was that Richard’s bones had been thrown into the River Soar, she had to disprove that – or, as she put it to me, ‘I needed to see research that showed that was not the case.’

  Then she had to find the church. People seemed to have a rough idea where the friary precinct had been, but that was a large area. Where was the church within that precinct? ‘Could it be’, she recalled, ‘where this car park was?’

  The Richard III Society erected this plaque in Grey Friars street in 1990, to mark the king’s burial site; the unidentified funeral scene is taken from an 18th-century engraving. (Mike Pitts)

  And finally, if that worked out and they found a skeleton (‘Even if by some happenchance we managed to dig the car park’), how could they show the remains were those of Richard III? It was a very Philippa Langley project. She would set out not so much to find Richard’s grave, as to prove that it was where she intuited it to be. It was, you might say, a marketing person’s approach to research.

  ‘And it was then’, she told me, as if so far all had been perfectly normal, ‘that strange things started to happen.’

  She went back to Edinburgh. Within months someone published some new research, in which they claimed to have traced a living relative carrying Richard III’s DNA. If Dr John Ashdown-Hill was right, his discovery meant it would be possible to test the identity of an excavated skeleton. ‘So straight away’, said Philippa, ‘I had one of the problems answered immediately.’ They might have dug up Richard, but been unable to prove it was him. Not now. ‘I now knew’, she said, ‘that we could identify Richard III if we found him.’

  John Ashdown-Hill seems a gentle, almost delicate man, with a dapper moustache whose dark colour now offsets his close-styled silver hair. His carefully elocuted voice and light sense of humour, however, belong to a driven, determined researcher. He trained in French and history. At first he taught languages, but for a couple of decades he has been following his real passion as a freelance history writer. In a curious parallel to Richard Buckley, he traces his interest in old things to seeing Victorian coins when shopping as a child. Early TV broadcasts introduced him to Shakespeare’s history plays, and since 1996 he has been a regular contributor to both the Richard III Society’s journal and to its less formal bulletin.2

  He became involved in the search for a close living relative of Richard III when Belgian colleagues asked for help. They were hoping to identify remains that might have been those of one of Richard’s sisters. Margaret had died in 1503 as the wife of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Her body had been buried in the Franciscan friary in Mechelen. As with Greyfriars in Leicester, the buildings had been destroyed in the 16th century and the grave lost. And as in Leicester, the Richard III Society had made its mark with a plaque, erected in
2000.

  Over the years, archaeologists had found three sets of human remains that could conceivably have been Margaret’s. In 2003, five centuries after her death, it was decided to see if DNA could be used to settle the case. Ashdown-Hill set out to locate a modern sample.3

  The following year he found what he was looking for in the person of Joy Ibsen. Mrs Ibsen, a retired journalist born in Shrewsbury, in England, had settled in Canada in the 1940s. According to Ashdown-Hill’s research, her family – herself, her brothers and her children – were unique possessors of Margaret’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), passed down the female line through 16 generations from Margaret’s oldest sister, Anne. When Ashdown-Hill relayed this startling news, he found she had no idea of the royal connection.

  ‘Her face lit up after the conversation ended,’ recalled her husband Norm, who had been sharing dinner with her when an unexpected phone call came through from England. She was happy to provide DNA samples, which were analysed first by Oxford Ancestors at Ashdown-Hill’s expense, then by Jean-Jacques Cassiman at the Université catholique de Louvain.4

  As far as the immediate task went, the result was a failure: none of the Mechelen samples matched those from Joy Ibsen. There was, however, a bonus, which might at some time prove useful. For Anne of York’s mtDNA, derived from her mother, would have been the same as all her siblings’. Among those, separated from Anne by two sisters and seven brothers, was Richard III.5