The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds

by Langley, Philippa

Everything appeared to be going well but there was a clock ticking. I had commissioned a GPR survey from Stratascan to cover the three car parks: New Street, the Social Services and, crucially, the former grammar school site, which was immediately adjacent to the Social Services. But the former grammar school was up for sale for redevelopment. A new owner might not give us permission to dig, yet if John Ashdown-Hill’s research (and my intuition) and Richard Buckley’s maps were correct, it could be critical to the success of the project. Buckley told me to take heart. In a recession there might not be a developer interested in buying the grammar school.

  I asked Buckley about the potential of the GPR survey. Having previously undertaken three on city centre sites, he was sceptical, since all had proved inconclusive and failed to reveal any structures that later digging had uncovered. In this case, however, with it being virgin ground, he felt it might be worth a go. However, he warned me that the church might be in the south of the precinct, and if this were the case it would be game over for my search because the south was heavily developed, which meant that King Richard’s grave would be under a building. The cost of the survey (just over £5,000) would be met by the Richard III Society and founding members of the Looking for Richard project.

  On Sunday, 28 August 2011 Stratascan began the GPR survey, using a powerful MIRA scanner. Annette Carson, an international award-winning copywriter as well as a biographer, had helped put together a short promotional script for DSP to film. She understood that the prospect of major media attention might keep the local authorities on board in difficult times. Richard Buckley, Phil Stone and John Ashdown-Hill (back briefly in the UK) were to be interviewed along with Carson, whom, at last, I finally met. Also coming along were local Richard III Society members Sally Henshaw, secretary of the Leicestershire Branch, and Richard Smith, their chairman, who had both been helping the project with research. Giving up his time on the bank holiday weekend too was Assistant Mayor, Councillor Ted Cassidy, representing LCC in Sir Peter Soulsby’s absence and who spoke powerfully to camera. With filming under way, the assembled team asked why I was so determined to search for Richard’s grave. I pointed to the ‘R’ on the tarmac, and told them my story.

  DSP were filming in the cathedral as I again met the Reverend Faull, together with Dr John Ashdown-Hill. The dean repeated her view that the tomb would be best situated in the sanctuary. Later, Dr David and Wendy Johnson showed her the first detailed computer-generated images (CGI) of the tomb design, its imagery of the boar, white rose of York and cross of St Cuthbert displaying what had been important to Richard, both as duke and king.

  A few weeks later, Richard Buckley’s scepticism of the GPR survey proved justified. The results were inconclusive, and alarming. A layer of apparent ‘made’ ground, or demolition debris, close to the surface had skewed the results, or was hiding the archaeology beneath. We couldn’t see any walls, and only with my prompting could Stratascan identify two or three potential gravesites, none of which was in the northern end of the Social Services car park near my ‘R’. The survey was a disaster for the project. Channel 4 was wavering, which meant Martin Peters at LPL was too, with his budgets constrained in straitened times. By March 2012, without the guarantee of a TV documentary, and with deep regret, LPL pulled its funding. The Easter dig was cancelled.

  Despite these setbacks, I couldn’t give up now. Sarah Levitt had offered us new dates in 2012: the August bank holiday weekend would work for LCC. Phil Stone, at the Richard III Society, told me to grab them, saying we couldn’t afford to lose another opportunity and we would make the new dates work. He offered to give £5,000 to kick-start the new funding round. Martin Peters was next. He said that, if we could guarantee a film for his website, LPL would put in up to £15,000, while Michael Johnson gave £500 from Leicester Adult Schools.

  By the end of April 2012, I considered re-mortgaging my home. Phil Stone had confirmed that we were too late to launch an appeal in the society’s Ricardian Bulletin, so I rang Leicester University. After some negotiation, Richard Taylor agreed the university would put in £10,000, plus £2,000 VAT (if needed) and a further £2,000 if Richard III was found (to cover the cost of the coffin and pall). Now Richard Buckley and I worked to reduce the cost of the dig. Thanks to his carefully revised layout for the first two trenches, allowing for more parking during the dig, I managed to shave over £2,000 from the cost of the off-site parking for the Social Services staff. The August dig could go ahead without my desperate re-mortgaging plan. Sarah Levitt confirmed the deadline of 1 August for all monies to be paid into the ULAS account. Miss it, and the dig was over.

  With a few weeks to go before the deadline, LPL gave us devastating news. Due to problems with their own funding, they could only put in £5,000. They would secure this funding, but I was £10,000 short. I trawled every local business and worthy to make up the shortfall. Martin Peters at LPL stepped in to help as did Martin Traynor, Group CEO of the Leicestershire Chamber of Commerce. It was a valiant effort, but in the worst recession in living memory local businesses could not see any investment potential in an archaeological dig; even one that was in search of a king. Further, the research grant I had hoped for from Leicester Archaeological and Historical Society was refused. The society said it couldn’t support an archaeological project in search of King Richard’s grave, citing the River Soar story as evidence of its likely outcome. At my request, John Ashdown-Hill put together a two-page document outlining his research repudiating the story, to no avail. The search for Richard would be cancelled. In desperation I called Phil Stone, who authorized an immediate appeal to the membership of the Richard III Society – worldwide. Annette Carson agreed to design and write a two-page International Appeal leaflet.

  The appeal went out by email. Within moments, pledges of money were pouring in from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and throughout the UK. Some who contacted me were out of work and struggling to feed their families but wanted to give what they could. The response was overwhelming, moving me to tears. In three weeks, the appeal raised just under £13,000 and gave the Looking for Richard project its mandate. The donors told us:

  ‘Search for him. Find him. Honour him.’

  On 1 August 2012 all monies were paid into ULAS’s account (see full funding below).

  Looking for Richard: In Search of a King – Two-Week Dig

  £

  %

  Richard III Society and members

  17,367*

  52.84

  University of Leicester

  10,000

  30.43

  Leicestershire Promotions Ltd

  5,000

  15.21

  Leicester Adult Schools

  500

  1.52

  Total

  32,867

  100

  * Includes £100 donation from the Society of Friends of Richard III in York, and donations from some members of the Richard III Foundation Inc.

  The remaining funding of £716 from the International Appeal was paid to ULAS at the end of the dig for costs including the exhumation.

  The tomb designers, Dr David and Wendy Johnson, had brought in graphics specialist Joseph Fox from Lost in Castles. With the tomb design nearly ready, Fox was working on the final renders, while award-winning local sculptor Graeme Mitcheson was interested in taking on the tomb commission. And Michael Ibsen (son of Joy), a furniture maker who sources his wood from the estate of the Prince of Wales and lives in London, said he would be honoured to make a coffin for his ancestral uncle, King Richard III.

  On 6 August 2012, at the pre-dig meeting, Richard Buckley confirmed the location of the first two trenches in the Social Services car park. The dig would begin on 25 August, which I told the team would be the anniversary of Richard III’s interment in the Greyfriars. The media pack was ready. Annette Carson had stepped in to organize it, but LCC admitted they were short-staffed and not ideally placed to handle communications. However,
Leicester University, our new partner, with much experience in the media, asked to take it on.

  Three and a half years after the first meeting in the Cramond Inn, Edinburgh, my search in Leicester for the grave and mortal remains of King Richard III was on!

  2

  The Great Debate

  A LINE OF horsemen is drawing up in the mid-morning sun. There is a wind blowing – enough to ruffle banners and surcoats, the loose silk fittings worn by knights over their armour. In the vicinity of this small cavalry force – several hundred strong – all is relatively quiet. But further away the sounds of battle can clearly be heard. There are shouts of command, delivered by call or trumpet blast, the guttural cries of men fighting at close quarters, the din of weapons striking against plate armour, the shrieks of the dying and the wounded. In the gently rolling fields of Leicestershire crops have been ripening for harvest. Now they lie kicked and trampled as bands of warriors surge towards each other, colliding with brutal impact. The date is 22 August 1485.The clash of arms – soon to be commemorated through the name of its nearest market town – is Bosworth Field.

  The horsemen have drawn up in formation around a banner bearing the royal arms of England. Its colours are unfurling in the breeze. The leader of this force is the anointed ruler of the realm – King Richard III. His plan is to launch a bold cavalry charge, skirting around the fighting to attack the vulnerable rearguard of his opponent Henry Tudor. Richard wishes to seek out his challenger, engage him in personal combat, and slay him. The stakes are high. If his mounted charge is successful the battle will be brought to a close with a resounding victory. If it fails, it will end in humiliating defeat. And every mounted man grouped around the king knows this.

  Richard III has ruled the kingdom of England for a little over two years. He is thirty-two years old. His reign has been marred by rebellion, and doubts about the legitimacy of his rule. He seeks to end all plotting through a decisive vindication of his regal authority on the battlefield. His men watch him intently. His face is drawn yet determined. He has slept badly and complained of nightmares where he was assailed by demons. But now those nightmares are put aside. He has drawn up his forces with steely resolve to block the line of advance of his opponent across the Roman road to Leicester and bring him to battle. And battle has now commenced.

  Still the line of horsemen waits. The king dons his surcoat, with its richly coloured arms of England, lifts his battle helmet – with a crown welded to it – and places it upon his head. He pauses for a moment, and then urges his horse forward. His men immediately respond. The whole line moves in close formation, first at a walk, then a trot, and finally – as it gathers speed – surging past the lines of battling soldiers at a gallop. As the horses and their armoured riders gather momentum the earth shudders – and all feel its impact. The Battle of Bosworth is nearing its climax, and for a moment every soldier on that field of combat stands transfixed by this mighty charge.

  In the opposing camp there is pandemonium. Richard’s challenger, Henry Tudor, has positioned himself in the rearguard, well back from the main area of the fighting. He has never fought in a battle and hopes to avoid any action. But now a huge dust cloud spumes above the mounted force charging straight for him. A tornado is about to hurl itself into his line of soldiers. Tudor’s men are also on horseback – and they will have to brace themselves against the impact of this terrible assault. Orders are desperately called out, but the thunderous approach of Richard’s riders makes it almost impossible to hear them. But in the growing din Tudor jumps off his horse and is surrounded by a small scrum of followers, wielding pikes and whatever other weapons are at hand. This is the last cavalry charge to be led by a King of England. And his challenger is to meet it cowering on the ground.

  If Richard III had won this battle, killed his opponent and through this victory laid the foundations for a long period of rule, there is no doubt that his charge would have been given an enthusiastic write-up in the sources of the day. But Bosworth was a Tudor victory, and Richard’s death in battle brought their own dynasty on to the pages of our history books. It is hard to imagine our island story without the Tudors featuring prominently within it. Yet history is written by the winners. The Tudors – in public at least – had their own take on the battle story, and it would do no favours to Richard in the telling.

  By the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, in one of his most famous history plays, gives us an altogether different ending to this headlong dash. In it, we find that Richard is now alone. He is still hunting out his opponent, but has lost the horse that carried him to his foe. He cries out: ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’ One of his followers briefly appears, urging him to flee. But the king’s reply is grimly resolute:

  I have set my life upon a cast,

  And I will stand the hazard of the die …

  And then once more the terrible refrain: ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’

  Shakespeare was of course unable to enact the full sequence of these events within the confines of a late sixteenth-century theatre. But there was a real poignancy to Richard’s cry. For an Elizabethan audience a cavalry charge – even one obliquely referred to rather than enacted on stage – would have seemed a relic from a bygone age. Even in the late Middle Ages, full-scale mounted charges were unusual in English warfare. The English custom was to dismount and fight on foot, while cavalry actions took place in the opening preliminaries to battle, or in the rout that would signify their end. Yet to deliver a coup de grâce with a massed onslaught of horsemen was regarded – in the chivalric literature and practice of the time – as the finest way to win a battle.

  By Shakespeare’s day the grandeur of such an intention had become lost under a mound of hostile propaganda. In the version of Henry VII’s court historian Polydore Vergil, Richard’s charge was portrayed as an impulsive and desperate act, prompted by rage and the betrayal of those around him, who showed little stomach for the fight. Shakespeare hints at this in a series of powerful vignettes. But from a military point of view, Richard’s plan required considered foresight, both in the logistics of his planning and his actual battle preparation.

  His charge was unlikely to have been the product of pure impulse, for his line of horsemen had to be readied in advance. A man in the plate and mail armour frequently used in the Wars of the Roses – the civil war that by August 1485 had already raged for thirty years – needed time to position himself and get into formation. In 1485 knights in full plate armour – the most advanced military technology of its time, when warriors were garbed in closely interlocking pieces of plate, providing the best possible protection against missile and weapon attack – would also need time to gather themselves. Such measures would not be undertaken whimsically, or on the spur of the moment. It is far more likely that Richard had carefully prepared for their use. He wanted to strike at his challenger with the power and velocity of a hammer blow.

  Recent battle archaeology is now telling us much more about the site and course of Bosworth, in particular that Richard also invested in a substantial artillery train, and used it in the opening stages of the battle. These pieces would need to be carried up from England’s principal armoury, the Tower of London, and then drawn up on the battlefield to block Tudor’s advance. Again, preparing and transporting these guns was a considered plan, not the desperate response of a demoralized ruler. Richard wished to shock the army of his challenger. He hoped that his artillery would dominate the opening stages of the battle; he envisioned his cavalry charge would end it.

  In William Shakespeare’s play, the hammer strike has been replaced by the stab in the back; the battle has become an awful judgement on Richard’s life and brief rule as king. And this is because – in Shakespeare’s eyes, as well as the Tudor histories that he drew upon – the king deserved such a fate. They believed that Richard had betrayed many in his ruthless ascent to the throne, and it seemed to them fitting that he had now been betrayed on the
battlefield. Henry Tudor’s victory would be the judgement of God upon his crimes. And yet we do not see the king’s last few moments of life. He exits from the stage. Then his rival appears, surrounded by his captains, and tersely announces: ‘The bloody dog is dead.’

  It is a death Shakespeare does not allow us to witness. The first reason why the search for Richard’s mortal remains is so fascinating is that we are still seeking an answer to this question. What were his last few moments really like – what happened to the king?

  For Shakespeare, more than any other, has shaped our reactions to this deeply controversial monarch. From the moment Richard appears on the stage, and delivers his first soliloquy, we are both entranced and repulsed. We are caught in the stare of a bejewelled but venomous snake, and these eyes will not release us from their gaze.

  Now is the winter of our discontent

  Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

  And all the clouds that lowered upon our house

  In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

  We are reminded of the historical events that led to this fateful moment, already recounted in Shakespeare’s previous play, Henry VI, in its final part. The ruling dynasty Richard belongs to – the House of York – has survived the buffeting of civil war. During one period of unrest Richard’s brother, King Edward IV, is briefly forced off the throne by his opponents, the Lancastrians, and goes into exile. Then Edward returns triumphantly and routs his enemies. Twelve years of peace ensue. The ‘winter of discontent’, the loss of the throne and exile, is replaced by stable and prosperous rule. Richard’s play on words, ‘Made glorious summer by this sun of York’ is both historically and visually accurate, for Edward’s heraldic badge is the sun in splendour, and introduces us to his consummate skill with language. Already it carries incipient menace, for Richard carries his own ‘winter of discontent’ within his heart. It lies deeply buried, but will soon burst forth upon an unsuspecting court with terrifying power.