Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  The Herricks were a powerful group of Leicestershire families. Wren was tutor to a young Herrick at Beaumanor Hall, about 16 km (ten miles) north of the city. Robert Herrick, whose memorial slab or ledger stone (as I write) now lies in the floor of Leicester Cathedral a few paces from that of Richard III – surrounded by testimonies to Herrick ancestors and descendants – had bought the eastern part of the Greyfriars plot and built himself a fine townhouse. It is debatable if he had any evidence to back up the claim that the king’s body actually lay under his paths and flowerbeds, or whether he was just acknowledging historical fact that Richard had been buried in the friary from whose grounds he had created his city retreat. But if anyone could be expected to have known that the body had been removed, it would have been a Herrick and a former mayor of Leicester – and one who had developed the old friary site, to boot.19

  The clear conclusion, and one that neither Richard Buckley nor Leon Hunt had expected to reach so simply, was that other things being equal, Richard’s body should still be in the ground at the Greyfriars site. They were not the first to realize this. As they knew at the outset, Ashdown-Hill had made the same case, on the BBC website and in his book published the year before; it was partly this that had encouraged Philippa to press ahead with her project. Yet Ashdown-Hill was far from the first.

  Among researchers who had clearly stated the same opinion was the Leicester historian Charles Billson. ‘Richard’s remains’, he wrote in 1920, ‘must now lie, if undisturbed, somewhere beneath the Grey Friars Street or the buildings that face it.’ David Baldwin, writing in 1986 when he was a history lecturer at Leicester University, agreed. Indeed, he ended a short paper that deftly manages to assemble all the evidence, with detailed historical references, by stating, ‘It is possible (though perhaps now unlikely) that at some time in the twenty-first century an excavator may yet reveal the slight remains of this famous monarch.’ Rarely can such a portentous archaeological prediction have been proved right.20

  As Leon Hunt continued with the desk assessment, that proof was yet to come. The important remaining caveat was Billson’s ‘if undisturbed’. Was the grave still there? Or had it been unknowingly destroyed at some time as the open space of the friary precinct had been steadily built over and dug into in the 470-odd years since the Dissolution? That question was tied up with another: where exactly had the friary church stood?

  If you walk five minutes from St Augustine Road, crossing the river over Bow Bridge, dodging the traffic below the Holiday Inn and continuing along Peacock Lane, you find yourself in front of the cathedral and looking down the eponymous St Martins. Continue along St Martins (which with Peacock Lane used to be called St Francis Lane), and turn right at the corner. Walk down Grey Friars (noticing a bronze plaque on the wall of the old bank), turn right at the next corner and walk down Friar Lane, past the narrow alley of New Street off to the right and along a pleasant early 18th-century red-brick terrace until you get to the far corner of number 35. In those few minutes, walking St Francis Lane, Grey Friars and Friar Lane, you have traversed three of four sides of the old Greyfriars boundary as it appears in the earliest map. Continue past number 41 (like 35, now occupied by a firm of commercial solicitors), and you can peer up a small gap back towards Peacock Lane.21

  Seeing it like that, you could be forgiven for imagining the entire plot has been built over. The premises are mostly three-storey 18th- or 19th- century businesses and public buildings, all interesting and some of them lovely. They date from Leicester’s industrial heyday, when the city was one of the country’s wealthiest – in just 40 years up to 1901, its population trebled. The original friary precincts probably extended further at either end, so that Grey Friars as well as New Street cut through it, slicing it into three; beyond Grey Friars to the east – on your right as you stand on Friar Lane facing north – the block is solid with buildings. But behind the grand façades of Grey Friars and Friar Lane in front of you is a surprising amount of open space.

  The way to work out what happened in that space over preceding centuries is to look at maps – Hunt called his study ‘map regression analysis’. We are particularly lucky that the first large-scale, reliable map to survive, detailing Leicester’s streets and what went on behind them, was surveyed immediately before the friary land was subdivided. It was published by Thomas Roberts in 1741. Overall, it is striking how rural the city looks: the great bulk of the land seems to be orchards. Immediately south of the cathedral is a large, wedge-shaped plot marked Gray Fryers – the one we walked around, cutting through down the modern street named Grey Friars. Half of it is orchard, distinguished by 20 independently drawn little trees. There are buildings only along part of the south street frontage, with an unusually large complex (though frustratingly indecipherably drawn) in the southeast corner. This is almost certainly Robert Herrick’s mansion. The rest of the land is his garden, including walkways that separate quadrants and meet at a circle.

  By 1740 the site had become the property of one Roger Ruding, who had inherited it and sought to realize his windfall. He arranged for a street to go through the middle – rather unimaginatively called New Street – and sold it off in parts; Herrick’s house and gardens, known as The Grey Friars, were bought by a wealthy tradesman. Division continued down the years. The street of Grey Friars itself was laid out in 1872. The details of all this need not concern us,22 but what is of special interest is what happened when New Street was built, and houses were raised along it and St Martins. The houses had cellars. Digging them out, workmen found bones.

  We owe our knowledge of this to the ever-alert John Throsby, whose interest in antiquities encouraged him to pay anyone who brought him finds. The New Street development occurred before he was an adult (he was born in 1740), but in later life he recorded what happened.

  Much of the Greyfriars land, he wrote in 1789, ‘was purchafed, in my time, to build thereon; it was fold to different people, and was the occafion of that ill-contrived and unpleafant paffage, called New-ftreet. When the workmen were digging to fink the cellars, I remember, though very young, that the quantity and the perfectnefs of the human fkeletons found there, very much attracted the attention of the people of Leicefter.’23

  A couple of years later he recalled the memory again, with a different twist. ‘When the workmen were digging for the cellars’, he said, ‘to the range of houfes which face St Martin’s church, they caft up, I remember, many human bones; one fkeleton lay entire: the Friary church probably ftood there.’24

  Perfect human skeletons, one of them complete: this was precisely what ULAS’s small dig east of Grey Friars street in 2007 had failed to find, encouraging the belief that the friary church was probably not at that far east end of the plot. But over two centuries before, Throsby had used the same logic to argue the opposite. Perfect skeletons meant a church. And he could point to where that church had been: on the south side of St Martins, near the north end of New Street, facing St Martin’s church (what is now the cathedral) – in modern terms, under the houses on Peacock Lane and St Martins either side of New Street, or the car parks immediately behind them, New Street to the west and the Social Services to the east.

  Peacock Lane and St Martins bisect this view, with Leicester Cathedral to the right and the car parks opposite that now fill much of the medieval Greyfriars precinct (see map of Greyfriars). (Blom UK/Getty Images)

  On the face of it, then, Throsby’s evidence was critical, key indication of where in the plot the church might have been. This evidence was consistent with a couple of medieval texts. One describes a brutal street murder in 1300, in ‘the lane which leads to St. Martin’s church and towards the church of the Friars Minor’ (i.e. Greyfriars). The other, written in 1543 only five years after the Dissolution, says Greyfriars was ‘at the end of the hospital of Mr Wigston’, which was immediately west of the cathedral. Both passages imply the friary was across the road from St Martin’s, in the case of the second, in New Street car park – as the Ordnance Su
rvey marked the friary site on its maps, and where a small part of supposed medieval wall still survives.25

  But how reliable was Throsby’s memory? Could it even be possible that one of those skeletons was Richard III’s? After all those stories and debates, had his bones been turned over like potatoes and covered in brickwork when no one was looking?

  The good news was that in the most detailed early map of this area, by Thomas Roberts, none of the land had been built on; and a surprising amount of it was open now, notably in two car parks and an old school playground. The question was, what had happened in those spaces in the intervening centuries? Had buildings that might have destroyed archaeological remains been cleared away, or had there never been any? It was time to compare Roberts’s map with later surveys, to chart the friary precinct’s history of occupation.

  We first see New Street on a map in 1804, with buildings facing out all round the block. More significant, however, is John Fowler’s map, published in 1828, which identifies individual properties and shows considerable additional detail. At that time, apart from the development either side of New Street and along the lanes enclosing the precinct, the friary grounds remained entirely under gardens.

  Total mapping appears with the arrival of the Ordnance Survey, the national organization established in the 18th century by governments facing the prospect of war. The survey spread rapidly beyond Jacobite Scotland and the English coast threatened by Napoleon, with pioneering and ambitious precision and accuracy. It printed its first map of Leicester in 1888, updating it in 1904, and again in 1915, in 1930, in 1955, and on into the present. As you turn from one map to the next, as if watching a movie through time from the perspective of a crow, the spaces fill in. But remarkably, already by 1904 the layout looks recognizably modern. There is the school playground. There is the New Street car park, and there, with its distinctive crenellated L-shaped plan, is the Social Services car park. Only at the north end towards St Martins – precisely where Throsby ventured the friary church might have stood – are parts of the latter built over. Those structures are gone now. So what exactly were they?

  The answer to that lies in hand-coloured maps drawn up with extraordinary detail by a business that really needed to be clear about what was happening on the ground. They were produced by Charles E. Goad’s civil engineers for insurance companies, and are known today as Goad plans. The Leicester maps are held by the county Record Office. To see them, I drive south for ten or fifteen minutes into a spacious leafy suburb, where, for no charge – and there is even free parking! – inside a light and high-ceilinged reading room in a decorative old school built in 1881, I can lay out the maps and take 18th-century histories off the shelves.26

  I can’t find what I’m looking for in a card index. I ask the librarian for help. She leads me to rows of what look like hundreds of red plastic folders, and pulls one out. ‘Let’s try this one,’ she says, leafing through the pages. And then, ‘There it is.’

  ‘It helps’, she adds with a smile, ‘to remember numbers in this place.’ She returns to the desk, where a lady wants to know what a consanguine terrier is, and a man comes up to tell her he’s found something. I open the folder. There are 27, well-thumbed typed pages listing Goad plans compiled between 1888 and 1958. I find the one I want, fill in the details on a printed card and hand it in. While I wait for the map to be brought out of store, I settle down with Throsby’s Antiquities of Leicester.

  The map is a beautiful thing, made in 1938. Peacock Lane runs across the top and Newarke Street the bottom, with the friary precinct occupying a substantial chunk. Hundreds of small paper clippings have been glued on to a stiff white card, the buildings coloured pink and their every detail described in neat script. There are still gardens west of New Street, but Leicester is now a city learning to accommodate cars, and the ‘motor parks’ have arrived; the Social Services car park is over 75 years old. Beyond the block are symbols of Leicester’s lost industry – hosiery factories, a leather warehouse, sawmills, a cardboard factory, a litho printer and typesetting factory, and many more in this vein. At the far west of the friary precinct is the Birmingham & Midland Motor Omnibus Company’s Leicester Garage – pulled down only in 2009 – where presently is another, expansive car park.

  But the area I’m interested in was never transformed by factories, remaining instead a collection of genteel offices for workers who now arrived in their motor cars. The southwest part is newly occupied by the County Council.27 Buildings encroach into the northern space. There are garages and a library, with ‘concrete floors’, and some small unnamed outbuildings. These do not look like multi-storey structures with basements. If Richard III’s grave was still there undisturbed in 1804, it was probably still there in March 2011.

  This time it was Richard Buckley’s turn to call Philippa Langley.

  Scene 3

  A university

  ‘Blimey!’

  Richard Buckley was remembering Philippa Langley’s early submissions. She sent him stuff after their first phone conversation, when he had agreed to consider her idea that it would be worth looking for Richard III. He hadn’t taken it seriously, but he soon realized they could only find the king if they could identify the friary where his grave was said to be, and he was keen to have a go at that.

  Any thoughts he might have had that Philippa would share his excitement about the quest for the medieval church, however, were soon dispelled: for her the search was already over. She wanted Richard to know what would happen next.

  They were going to make a television programme! It would be presented by Richard Armitage, a tall, dark-haired actor, star of TV drama series Spooks/MI5 and Robin Hood and (at that moment undergoing early shooting in New Zealand) the movie The Hobbit, in which he plays Thorin Oakenshield. Philippa had found her king. Now she would net a ‘burnished and indecently handsome love god’.1

  Nearer the reality of a busy university office, with one foot in academia and the other in a muddy trench, were Philippa’s plans for reinterment. They hadn’t even found Richard III, let alone dug him up, but here she was, plotting the reburial of his remains. The previous September – months before she’d made first contact with the archaeologists – she’d commissioned a tomb design.2

  Richard Buckley was amused. ‘You’d plan a project in terms of something that was going to be a complete long shot,’ he said, ‘but you’d spend a lot of time designing a tomb and a coffin. She’s very optimistic,’ he added. ‘I find that funny.’ He was always quite open about his belief that they would never find Richard III. ‘Every phone call I had with her,’ he said, ‘I told her, “You realize we are very unlikely to be successful?”’ When she said that she was planning to order a coffin, he suggested she get some legs made for it so she could use it as a novelty sideboard.

  Designing the tomb was like commissioning cover artwork for your first blockbuster novel before you’d written a word (paying special attention, perhaps, to the lettering of the author’s name). However, this was far from a sign that Philippa was not to be taken seriously. In fact, it was the reverse. She was going to find Richard III. Of that there was no doubt. All that remained was the exhumation.

  But while for Philippa the searching was over, for Richard Buckley it hadn’t yet begun. These were different positions they were coming to appreciate, and to find compatible with their respective places in the mission. It worked well. They talked and they listened (‘Richard Buckley will always give you the time of day,’ said Philippa with admiration), and they had no cause to interfere with each other’s priorities. Significantly, they each had their own, separate schemes: the Richard III Society called theirs Looking for Richard, and the University of Leicester ran the Grey Friars Project. As it grew beyond anything either of them had yet conceived, however, the differences contained the potential for misunderstandings and even conflict.

  If the archaeologists imagined that Philippa was simply looking for a grave, the reality was more complex. At an understandably tr
iumphant conference held by the Richard III Society within weeks of the formal announcement of their project’s success in 2013, Philippa gave a joint presentation with Annette Carson. Now a retired copywriter, Carson had authored books on aerobatics, rock guitarist Jeff Beck and, in 2009, Richard III.3 Philippa had asked her to join the team as historical adviser.

  ‘Let’s make no mistake,’ Carson told a packed auditorium at the University of Leicester. ‘This project was about Richard III, it wasn’t about digging something up.’

  A curious remark, perhaps, to make of an archaeological dig. Carson, it seems, had been a little unnerved by the sight of archaeologists handling Richard’s remains: her preferred image of the king was James Butler’s noble statue, not ‘a series of bones which have been subjected to a lot of poking and prodding’.

  But it emphasizes how for the Richard III Society the excavation was only a step in a long struggle to change the public attitude towards a ‘maligned king’, to quote Carson’s book title. They wanted to persuade people that he was a good man and a good ruler, and to show how, again in Carson’s words, ‘bigotry, toadyism, propaganda and gossip’ during his lifetime, and ‘calculated propaganda’ after his death, had created a distorted view of his achievements that was further warped by Shakespeare.

  Philippa agreed, if she wasn’t quite so dismissive of the dig. The Looking for Richard project, she told the captivated audience, was a search for a grave and the king’s remains. But it was also a quest for a man, the real Richard III, the human being – she spoke as a screen writer, she said, not as a scientist or a historian – behind the myth.4