Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  If we are to understand how Richard III’s remains came to be found, we need to fathom the power that this image of an unjustly wronged monarch has over Ricardians – it might have been the archaeologists who excavated a skeleton and proved its identity, but they would never have looked unless pushed. It is the power that inspired Paul Murray Kendall, who wrote the book that Philippa took with her on holiday in 1998. It is the power that motivated other authors too, from George Buck as long ago as 1619, to Horace Walpole (1768), whose logic convinced John Wesley and Jane Austen, to vicar’s wife Caroline Halsted (1844), who ‘fell in love with’ Richard, to the geographer and traveller Sir Clements Markham (1906).5

  There have always been other writers keen to take the opposing view of Richard as borderline psychopath – or journalists hammering out the odd throwaway line about a hunchback – to ensure regular new recruits to the case for the defence. We saw in Act II Scene 1 how Josephine Tey’s novel enlivened the Richard III Society in the 1950s. Shakespeare’s indestructibly potent play showcases a living monster – the worse for his intriguing streaks of humanity – from one theatrical season to the next, born anew in the hands of talented directors and actors, challenging Richard’s supporters to take up their swords.

  The comparison doesn’t entirely explain it, but we can gain a perspective on this if we consider J. F. Kennedy. Both the king and the president died young – aged 32 and 46 respectively – and violently, and while in office after short terms: Richard III’s lasted two years and 58 days, Kennedy’s two years and 307 days. They were both members of powerful and wealthy political families that knew much personal tragedy; it is said that Kennedy is unlikely to have been president if his brother Joseph had not been killed in the Second World War. Oddly, they both suffered serious back trouble: Richard III, we now know, had deforming scoliosis, while Kennedy endured recurrent and severe back pain for which he had unsuccessful surgery.6 And I suspect that long after the moment, many people remembered what they were doing in 1485 when they heard the news of Richard’s death.

  All of that is curious enough. The key point, however, is that it is easy to imagine these two men as having been cut down just as they were ready to make their glorious marks: they were stolen from history, so that their times in power were associated with death, cruelty and fear (Richard) or a failed military invasion and a brush with nuclear war (Kennedy), rather than the constructive peace that lay ahead of them.

  For Ricardians, Richard III was killed by a usurper with no claim to the throne, whose followers and descendants needed to overturn Richard’s benevolent character to justify his death. There was a conspiracy, which needs to be exposed. Philippa, said Annette Carson at the Leicester conference, wanted her to join the project ‘to help ensure that the true facts about [Richard III] were always set out for the public to see, to counteract the villainous portraits the media always revel in’.

  Kennedy’s assassination launched conspiracies on a perhaps unmatched scale. In this case it wasn’t that anyone needed to justify his manner of death to the public, but the opposite: his true killers, it was argued, whoever they might be, sought to conceal their identity and their reasons for murdering Kennedy by manipulating evidence. Their actions and motives needed to be exposed, to honour a politically wronged leader.

  Why is JFK relentlessly popular, asked Robert Dallek in 2011, when he achieved so little? The people, he replied, want a heroic, inspiring leader. He was young and handsome, said one of many online comment posters. He was one of us, said another. We love him for what he might have achieved; we can judge him only by his intentions, not by his performance. He was for peace, and paid for it with his life. He had everything, and he lost everything. His death came at a moment of cultural change.7

  One of two portraits of Richard III owned by the Society of Antiquaries, painted soon after 1512–20, possibly the oldest that survives and copied from a life portrait. (By permission of the Society of Antiquaries of London (LDSAL 321))

  These are strong feelings. You can imagine them reflected in the face of a bronze statue in Leicester, of a man holding up a crown with an expression that says he knows he will never be able to do the things he wanted to do. Kennedy inspires powerful emotions. There is something similar in what drives Ricardians, but with added zeal: they believe that most people do not understand the target of their attentions. The unbelievers need to be told the truth. It would take a lot to discourage Philippa, a story teller who had caught the Richard III bug, from tracking down the real Richard III. The grave was but a marker on the journey.8

  Yet imagine the appeal of finding that grave. Late medieval history is not distinguished by regular and spectacular new discoveries. In the Yale edition of Charles Ross’s biography of Richard III, there is a 16-page foreword by the Welsh historian Ralph Griffiths. He considered how ideas about Richard had changed in the 18 years since the original text had been published. Several writers, said Griffiths, had ‘sought to digest, rearrange and reinterpret the body of sources which Ross used’, rehearsing plausibilities, shifting emphases and adjusting verdicts. He credited the Ricardian, the Richard III Society’s journal, for its contributions. Historic texts had been edited and published, portraits of Richard had been scrutinized and his library reviewed.9

  All of that was important, the stuff of historical process (and its low-key nature testament to the quality of Ross’s text). But it is not a story to fire news editors and cause headline writers to reach for puns. Over a similar period, understanding of Stonehenge – to take a single prehistoric site – would have been transformed, with both new thinking and substantial new finds, aided by fast-moving developments in forensic-style sciences. Thinking about it, in the past 18 years that has actually happened at Stonehenge. Twice.

  The promise of uncovering Richard III’s grave hinted at unparalleled new information, of a material kind central to Ricardian concerns. Had Richard not been given a respectable burial, and had his bones never been disturbed? Had his coffin not been recycled as a horse trough? Had his arm not been withered, his back not deformed, his shoulders not uneven? How, precisely, had he died? Here, if the quest proved successful, would be the chance to share intimately in his pain, and to offer the respect he had been denied with a new memorial tomb, the ultimate station in the trail of modern plaques and testaments. Perhaps, even, through a form of sympathy like the medieval healing ritual of royal ‘touching’, it would prove possible to cure the world of the myth of Richard the Bad.10

  In spring 2011, the next step on Philippa’s journey was to visit Richard Buckley. He had called to say he had something to show her, and she was intrigued. She pitched up at his offices, and found he had all these maps laid out on one of their finds tables. He explained how they’d started with the oldest, and followed through right up to the modern ones, and they’d found this map made by Thomas Roberts in 1741.

  ‘I’d never seen it,’ Philippa told me. ‘I’d never seen it, and believe me I had trawled every single piece of Ricardian research, and I’d never, never seen it. It was incredible, it was just dynamite.’

  The map was amazing. It showed the Greyfriars area, and it had what looked – Richard was talking about it as her eyes tried to take it in – it had what looked like a gatehouse on the south side, which could be the remnants of Herrick’s mansion house. Then she saw the garden, and the paths that met at a circle. She could hardly contain herself.

  ‘There’s a formal garden,’ she said to Richard, ‘and it’s got four pathways and a central area. If you’ve got the grave of a king and a three-foot stone pillar that says, “Here lies the body of Richard III, sometime king of England”, wouldn’t you put it in the centre of your garden and have all pathways lead to it?’

  Richard had to admit it was an interesting theory. He hadn’t been aware of the pillar until Leon Hunt told him about Wren’s memoir. And this was right in the area of the car parks behind the Social Services and the old school. ‘It was right in the place’, Philippa told m
e, ‘we wanted it to be.’ And at that point, she looked up at Richard with a smile and widened eyes. Well?

  Richard told her he was ready to come on board. Obviously, his search would be for the church, Philippa knew that. He wasn’t going to look for a grave, because that’s not what archaeologists do. ‘But’, Philippa told me, ‘the two were mutually beneficial, because if he found the church, I could look for the grave. And if I found the grave, he’d found the church. So we kind of did it on that basis.’ Putting it like that, if she found the grave, whether or not they found the church seemed not really to matter.

  It had been a long haul for Philippa – discovering Richard III’s story in Waterstone’s in 1998, deciding at the pub in 2009 to look for the burial, and commissioning the desk-based assessment from the archaeologists early in 2011 – but now things were moving fast. She had the DBA at the end of March.11 The archaeologists needed to produce another study, and then they could start digging. Philippa’s job was to raise the money.

  Richard prepared the new report. He called this one a written scheme of investigation (WSI). It would detail what they were going to do on the ground and why, as far as it was possible to know at this stage. This would help them to decide what kit they needed and how many staff, and how long it would take, allowing them to cost it and programme it into their other work. Central to all those decisions were the questions of precisely where they would put their trenches, how many there would be, and what size and shape they would make them. Designing the trenches would use all of Richard’s experience as an archaeologist working in Leicester for 30 years, drawing on the information that Leon Hunt’s assessment had collated.

  By comparison with their other work, this was a small project, and technically what they call an evaluation, not an excavation. They would test the ground to sample what might be there of interest, and see what survived. In a more typical job, they would then report to the city planners. In such an instance a developer would have paid for the evaluation. The archaeologists might tell the planners there was historic stuff underground of public interest that new building work would destroy. If the planners decided anyway to allow construction to go ahead, they would probably ask the developer to pay the archaeologists to do a proper excavation. A good WSI would ensure that the archaeologists got all they wanted out of the site, efficiently and fast, minimizing costs for the developer and finishing without getting in the way of often very tight construction schedules.

  In this case, however, there was no developer: the only people who might destroy things would be the archaeologists themselves. In the jargon, they would seek out the medieval archaeology and characterize it. They wanted to find the friary church. If they succeeded, they didn’t need to excavate it, just work out from the layout of the walls where the choir should be, and then look for a grave. If that too was successful, well, then they would excavate.

  One evening in July, Richard attended a book launch in the Guildhall, a magnificent timber-framed structure built around 1390 as a meeting place for the town’s more powerful businessmen. It’s remained in some form of corporate use ever since – from a very early public library in the 17th century, through a court, mayor’s offices, school and police HQ, until finally opening as a museum in 1926. No more than a footpath separates it from the west end of the cathedral, which, when the Guildhall was built, was a church frequented by merchants (Leicester has been home to a bishop since 1927, when the relatively modest St Martin’s church became Leicester Cathedral).

  Leicester’s Guildhall, built around 1390 opposite the west end of what is now the cathedral (at far left in photo) and was then St Martin’s church, in use as a town hall in Richard III’s time. (Mike Pitts)

  The University of Leicester Archaeological Services had produced an illustrated history of the city on the back of the huge Highcross shopping centre excavations. Mike Codd had crafted 22 detailed historical paintings showing Leicester through the ages, and Richard and his colleague Mathew Morris had written the text.12 Sir Peter Soulsby, who had become the city’s first elected mayor in May with an overwhelming majority, commended the book to university, city and council luminaries, and Codd’s original paintings stood around the edge. It was the sort of event with which the Guildhall must have felt very comfortable.

  One of Codd’s paintings was a cloud’s view of the medieval town, looking southwest as if coming down over the A46 from Newark. The old walls around the Roman city are still prominent, though the 14th-century settlement barely fills half of the enclosed space. You can see the River Soar meandering its braided way through the woods and fields beyond Bow Bridge, with the Austin friary on its island, and Black Friars inside the walls in the northwest corner, to the right. Towards the left, in an area of dense housing, is the prominent spire of St Martin’s church, and beyond that, squeezed into the space between St Martin’s and the crumbling south wall of the Roman city, the buildings of Leicester Greyfriars.

  Their church, envisaged as a low-key almost barn-like structure, is close to the town wall, south of the friary cloisters and other buildings. Richard told Mathew they were going to look for that church. He introduced him to Philippa Langley, who was also there, and they talked about Richard III. Philippa wasn’t impressed with the painting, as she and Ashdown-Hill had decided the church was north of the cloisters, close to St Martin’s where the Social Services car park is.

  Ashdown-Hill had argued that churches were always north of the cloisters. By and large this is true, but it is not an invariant rule. The excavation on which Richard had worked as a schoolboy had shown the Austin friars across town had put their church south of the cloisters, where it could be near the public road; unlike the rest of the complex, the western part of the church was open to everyone. At the Greyfriars, Philippa had found a medieval map in the Record Office that showed two churches close together, either side of St Martins lane, leaving space for the cloisters only to the south, and placing the friary church firmly under the car park. Richard had tried to discourage her from putting too much weight on the map: it purported to show medieval Leicester, but it was purely schematic. She never really gave the map up, though, and later, when she watched the first television film of the dig which at that point they were far from sure was going to happen, she was disappointed to see that her mantra, ‘church, road, church’, failed to make it past the editing process.

  Meanwhile, Philippa had been thinking about ground-penetrating radar, or GPR. GPR had helped archaeologists map out a large, First World War grave in France, before any excavation occurred, in the project that had impressed Philippa in Darlow Smithson’s film for Channel 4. GPR had come up when she talked to the City Council, hoping to persuade them to let her dig in Leicester. Now she needed to commission the survey.

  She’d asked Richard about it: ‘Do you think this is going to be worthwhile?’ And he said, ‘Look, I’ve done three ground-penetrating radar surveys in Leicester, and they’ve all been hopeless, they showed us nothing. But’, he added, ‘this is archaeologically virgin ground, so it’s worth a shot.’

  Actually, Richard was completely against it. ‘When it works, it’s brilliant’, he told me. But in Leicester it hadn’t. ‘People thought we’d get a plan of the friary, find the church, then dig the hole. It doesn’t work like that. Here walls are almost always entirely robbed out, floor levels often don’t survive, and the complexity of different periods of archaeology confuses things.’ In essence, there’s rarely anything of interest underground in Leicester that GPR is good at finding.

  That was Richard’s opinion, but GPR was the only geophysical process that might find anything in the conditions, what with the tarmac and everything. ‘We were all really hopeful’, said Philippa, ‘that this amazing scanner would give us a lot of information to take forward.’ She rang Dr Phil Stone.

  Phil Stone, a radiologist, is chairman of the Richard III Society, a gently spoken man with glasses, a fine head of silver-white hair and a Father Christmas beard. He had helped Ph
ilippa earlier with society research funds for the desk-based assessment. ‘What is it now, dear?’ he asked, in a kindly tone that Philippa recognized.13

  The GPR survey was conducted by Stratascan, a geophysical contractor based in Worcestershire near the border between England and Wales. It cost Philippa, or the Richard III Society, £5,043. For that she got what its manufacturer, a Swedish company called Malå, describes as ‘the most technically advanced GPR system on the market’ – the Mira – and a man to drive it. With a large, low box hiding the technical kit attached to the front of a mini tractor, it looks a little like a hi-tech estate lawnmower. The same machine had produced spectacular results on some Roman towns investigated by Time Team, where buried wall foundations were revealed in 3D – only GPR can do that. What might it find in Leicester?

  Philippa had arranged for the three car parks to be empty on the day of the survey in August. They made quite an event of it. Philippa and John Ashdown-Hill were there, and Phil Stone, and meeting with Philippa for the first time, Annette Carson. Richard Buckley had been invited along too, and a city councillor. Darlow Smithson, hoping to get a Channel 4 commission, filmed a short promo. The shiny yellow tractor trundled around, automatically collecting its data. Initial results visible on the laptop mounted by the driver’s seat were difficult to make sense of, but they would wait for the full report after it had all been processed back in Worcestershire.

  It was a disaster. A variety of underground responses showed on a map in lines and blobs of different colours. The technical language made it sound important, but what it came down to was that for about a metre (just over three ft) below the tarmac was rubble – made ground or demolition debris – and under that pipes and cables. There was nothing at all that looked like a wall, still less the plan of a church. Philippa had paid £5,000 to find a few drains and some manhole covers.14