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

by Langley, Philippa

  There would be no such consideration for King Richard from either Henry VII or his son and successor Henry VIII. They left him exactly where he was. In reburying this last Yorkist king, the Looking for Richard project could now offer him the same spiritual care that he had shown others in his lifetime and in so doing give him what had been denied him in 1485.

  Now we are in a position to honour the remains of Richard III in a fitting ceremony of reinterment. Before we had found his remains, in anticipation of that day, in September 2010, the Looking for Richard project commissioned the design of a tomb based upon Richard’s life and what was important and meaningful to him. Undertaken by a team of Ricardians, it is hoped that the finished design, welcomed by so many, may form a part of the innumerable deliberations in the busy months ahead as we move inexorably towards the reburial when the last warrior King of England will finally be laid to rest.

  The discovery of King Richard is a historic moment when the history books will be rewritten. A wind of change is blowing, one that will now seek out the truth about the real Richard III. Already the project has challenged many of the myths that surround him. We now know that his remains were not dug up and carried through the streets by a jeering crowd to be thrown into the River Soar. We also know he had no ‘withered arm’, nor did he suffer from kyphosis, a debilitating condition where the head is thrust onto the chest, inappropriately termed ‘hunchbacked’. Richard’s limbs were straight, so he probably walked normally, and indeed no one before Shakespeare suggested otherwise. None that saw him, or knew him, described him as being ‘lame’, a well-known medieval description for those that walked with an abnormal gait. What is clear is that Richard’s scoliosis, first shown when his body was stripped naked at Bosworth, has been deliberately exaggerated and used against him. Might this have been why his body was thrown over a horse, to display the uneveness of his back when bent forwards?

  During the project I was described as a ‘fan’ of Richard III, trying to recast him as something of a saint. That was certainly far from the truth. But as a screenwriter I wanted to delve behind the caricature Shakespeare has given us and gain psychological insights into the man himself and his reality.

  Contemporary writers agreed that Richard, as Duke of Gloucester, was a man of good reputation, a skilled arbitrator and respected dispenser of justice. It seemed he was a man to be relied upon, and trusted, and by none more so than the king, his brother. I wanted to understand Richard’s motivation, what got him out of bed in the morning and defined his character. As the youngest son of a great lord his life’s work was already determined: to devote himself to loyalty, duty and service. He could have chosen to rebel against this path, as others had done before him, but he chose to carry out his duties to the best of his ability.

  So it seems rather out of character that Richard decided to take the crown, particularly in the way that he did. Until, that is, one considers Edward’s disastrous marriage, the declared illegitimacy of his children and the power of the Woodvilles. In that light it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that Richard transferred his loyalty, duty and service to the kingdom since he could not commit his allegiance to Edward’s illegitimate sons. But from what I could see of the man, I doubted it was in his character to murder children. It was much more likely for him to send them to a place of safety.

  The enlightened laws he enacted showed that Richard was clearly willing to defy convention. I came across an earlier example of this behaviour when in April 1482, when he was Duke of Gloucester, a citizen of York had visited his castle at Middleham but had been insulted by Thomas Redeheid, a servant of the castle treasurer. Richard was informed about the insult, which in itself tells us he was someone who was approachable, unlike many another lord. But it is what happened next that intrigues. There were two courses open to Richard: to ignore the incident, or punish the servant himself. Richard did neither, but chose a third option. He sent the offending servant to York with a letter authorizing the city fathers to punish him in a way they deemed appropriate. It is a story reminiscent of the wisdom shown by King Solomon in the Old Testament. Richard showed principle, insight and sensitivity, as well as a strong sense of fairness and absolute trust.

  I consulted two further sources whom I believed would help clarify Richard’s character. First I decided to take a slightly unusual tack. While some may doubt the reliability of grapho-analysis it is a scientific system for assessing an individual’s character from their handwriting and is used as a tool by many respectable organizations, including the police. In 2000 I therefore approached master graphologist Bridget Hickey who had no previous knowledge of Richard. For the purposes of analysis, I chose the postscript, in Richard’s own hand, in a letter to Chancellor Bishop Russell, dated 12 October 1483, denouncing the treachery of his former ally, the Duke of Buckingham. I chose this partly because it is the longest example of Richard’s writing, and partly because it was composed at a time of great stress. It seemed likely to me that, given the circumstances, any viciousness of character would be clearly revealed. But Hickey’s graphoanalysis emphasized the likelihood of illness – a possibility I had originally rejected as the historical record showed quite plainly that he was a physically able and active man. Then the dig revealed Richard’s scoliosis, and I returned to the analysis which said:

  There is nothing to indicate a repressed childhood, but there appears to be suffering and mental unhappiness. He suffers and is plagued with conflicts. There is stability much of the time but a swing from withdrawal to charming extrovert can suggest sickness, unhappiness and suffering. Both physical and mental. Optimism is not evident and he may easily resort to a gloomy view. This could further suggest health problems. It is possible in childhood he had a fear he might not succeed or too much was expected of him. (Perhaps health or competition.) He might have lost confidence. Though full of courage, he would avoid chancey risks. In early childhood there may have been a feeling of self-castigation, guilt or even self-pity. Poor health might have played a part in this. However, most things were overcome, not on physical strength, but on his mental abilities, willpower and determination. Criticism of a personal nature could hurt him. There appears to be some sadness and a desire to withdraw into the self. Suffering in silence may have been endured. He is not a manipulator, liar, deceiver, selfish or mean with others. He faces facts and knows himself. What he sees is another matter. Conflicts. One could almost picture the actor clown, concealing unhappiness and depth of feeling. The clown’s make-up hiding perhaps illness, sadness, despair and suffering. Both mental and physical.

  The conclusions were interesting pointers to the potential effects of scoliosis. If the condition had worsened during his lifetime, Buckingham’s rebellion may have exacerbated its effects.

  The second resource I decided to explore was psychological profiling, and for the Looking for Richard project I had commissioned Professor Mark Lansdale and Dr Julian Boon of the University of Leicester to carry out what, to the best of my knowledge, was the first academic study of Richard’s psychology.

  To assess Richard’s mindset they first explored whether he was a murderous psychopath. According to their findings, the reverse appears to be the case. (For a summary of the conclusions, see Appendix 2.) Key aspects of psychopathy were examined including narcissism, cowardice, thought disorder and Machiavellianism. The latter was a favourite accusation by his detractors, but no evidence was found to support it. In terms of the overall personality portrait, three psychological approaches were explored, each of which offered a different key to understanding: the effect of Richard’s scoliosis; the possibility of an anxiety disorder; and the elevation in his status from Lord of the North to monarch.

  Reading Lansdale and Boon’s analysis, it seemed to me as if Thomas More’s description of Richard biting his lower lip and constantly drawing his dagger from its sheath were not the quirks of a cunning murderer, but of someone with heightened levels of anxiety, and a need for order and security.

  So,
from all this we have a man whose turbulent childhood provoked a fundamental need to create a stable, dependable world, but was ejected from that safe haven into an unpredictable and challenging world of life-threatening responsibility where he was forced to tame a crowd of determined, and therefore dangerous, courtiers, who did not share his worldview.

  One of the main difficulties in studying the last Plantagenet is there are relatively few contemporary accounts of his reign. Those who knew him often spoke well of him, but most of our information comes from later sources who hadn’t met him and tend to be either foreign or openly hostile. Why there is such a dearth of information on Richard is unclear. It may be that the Tudors destroyed much of it. The end result is that for any personal insights we are dependent upon scraps of generally private correspondence to and from those who knew him.

  There are letters from him that reveal a well-developed sense of humour such as the one he wrote in summer 1483 to Chancellor Russell asking him to try to dissuade Thomas Lynom, one of the king’s solicitors, from marrying Elizabeth (Jane) Shore. In it Richard’s understated humour at Lynom’s captivation with Shore is apparent. Richard may have been infuriating and frustrating, but his true friends were unfailingly loyal and supported him to the death.

  After the news of Richard’s death at Bosworth, the Welsh bard Dafydd Llywd, who knew Henry Tudor, but not Richard, set to work. He composed the first piece of Tudor’s propaganda against the last Plantagenet. It was a damning indictment, regaling its readers with images of the former king’s deformity of body, mind and spirit. This new story about Richard came from the top down even though Henry Tudor had never met Richard. The Tudor regime, it seemed, needed a bogeyman.

  Happily, the Looking for Richard project has begun to expose the propaganda that underlies the centuries-old vilification of the last Plantagenet king. It has not only succeeded in finding Richard III’s body, it has also brought the real Richard III back on to centre stage. Shakespeare’s evil and misshapen tyrant, and the psychotic murderer beloved of Tudor writers, should now be seen as a great dramatic invention, not a fully rounded historical portrait.

  Richard III wasn’t a saint. He was a man, who played the hand he was dealt loyally and, as far as he could within the limitations of his time, humanely. Above all, whether on or off the battlefield, he never failed to display courage. In this, I am reminded of the words of Winston Churchill: ‘Courage is the first of all human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all others.’

  12

  The Man and his Times

  ON 22 AUGUST 1485 the body of Richard III was stripped naked, thrown over the back of a horse and carried from Bosworth battlefield to Leicester. There the remains of the king were put on public display. Even in the mid-Tudor period, the chronicler Edward Hall still found the treatment of the corpse shameful. ‘Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,’ Shakespeare had Richard declaim. Three days after the battle, on 25 August 1485, Richard III was hurriedly buried in the Church of the Greyfriars, Leicester. Polydore Vergil related that this burial took place without any funeral rites.

  While he had lain on display, his victorious challenger, Henry Tudor, chose first to celebrate his victory not at Leicester but Coventry, travelling there on 24 August, and holding a banquet, before returning to Leicester the following day, and then journeying on to London. Henry stayed in the house of Coventry’s mayor, Robert Onley, where money was paid for 512 penny loaves of bread, and, in a choice of beverages that would have pleased the French mercenary contingent in his army, 110 gallons of red wine and a relatively modest four and a half gallons of ale.

  Before he left Leicester Henry executed three of Richard’s followers, William Catesby and John Bracher and his son. Bracher had betrayed news of Henry’s West Country landing in 1483 to Richard III. Catesby’s mission to Brittany in September 1484 had been to offer the duchy military assistance – a picked

  body of English archers – if in return it withdrew its support for Henry Tudor. Catesby’s arrival in Brittany and the onset of these negotiations was worrying enough to provoke Tudor’s hurried flight from the duchy into France. Francis, Duke of Brittany had been prepared to support Henry as rightful claimant on the basis of his promised marriage to Elizabeth of York, in other words through the right of his future wife. The French government made Henry play a different role.

  In contrast to supportive Brittany, Henry’s exile in France had been an unhappy one. The minority government of Charles VIII had forced him to set out a claim to the throne in his own right, then, finding itself unable to discern what that right was – as the chronicler Philippe Commynes bluntly put it – made him play the part of an impostor, a younger son of the murdered Lancastrian King Henry VI. That claim had jeopardized Henry’s pact with the Woodvilles – and nearly lost him the very marriage to Elizabeth that was vital to buttress his claim to the throne. The executions showed how bitter Tudor felt about that turn of events, a bitterness caught well by Commynes, who heard from Henry at their meeting in November 1484 how he had spent most of his life as an exile or fugitive.

  In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Henry benignly made provision for proper burial of the slain at Bosworth. But in a treatise on the sweating sickness, a disease that had made its appearance in England at the same time as the arrival of Tudor’s largely foreign army, the French doctor Thomas Forestier described something rather different. Forestier, who wrote his tract in London in October 1485, only two months after Bosworth, reported the widely held belief that most of the slain had simply been left on the battlefield. His candour was unwelcome to the new Tudor dynasty; he was promptly arrested and locked up in the Tower of London. All manuscript editions of his work were confiscated.

  Richard as king had planned a chapel at Towton in memory of those who had died in battle there. It was, as Archbishop Rotherham of York later described it, a most impressive building, ‘expensively and imposingly erected from new foundations’. The archbishop said that the chapel had been deliberately sited ‘upon the battleground where the bodies of the first and greatest in the land, as well as great multitudes of other men, were first slain and then buried and interred in the fields around’. Richard had been concerned not only to commemorate the fallen, but to ensure that the bodies of those killed in the battle, on both sides, received proper Christian burial. In a grant of an annuity to the nearby parish church of Saxton on 19 February 1484 Richard made this explicit, recalling that in this bloody clash of arms, fought in a blinding snowstorm on 29 March 1461:

  the people of this kingdom, in a plentiful multitude, were taken away from human affairs; and their bodies were notoriously left on the aforesaid field and in other places nearby, thoroughly outside the ecclesiastical burial places, in three hollows. Whereupon we, on account of affection, contriving the burial of the deceased men of this sort, caused the bones of the same men to be exhumed and left for an ecclesiastical burial in these coming months, partly in the parish church of Saxton in our said county of York and in the cemetery of the said place, and partly in the chapel of Towton aforesaid, and in the surroundings of this very place.

  Henry was not prepared to treat the fallen at Bosworth, largely from Richard’s army, with the same respect. News of his victory had now reached London, where an anxious city council – aware of the loans leading city members had made to Richard III in recruiting his army – at once named a party of eight leading citizens to ride towards the new king.

  But they had nothing to be worried about, since London had not contributed any of its levies to Richard’s defeated army. And it was Richard’s army only that Henry Tudor – now Henry VII, King of England – particularly distrusted. Bosworth had, after all, been almost too close to call.

  In the aftermath of the fighting the battle name itself remained in a state of flux: Redemore, Dunnesmore and Dadlington Field were some of the early attributions. Bosworth was only used for the first time – in a deed drawn up by one of Henry’s soldiers – in 1500, more than ha
lfway through the first Tudor king’s reign. Henry VII always honoured service performed for him at the battle, and one of his followers, Thomas Gregory of Ashfordby in Leicestershire, recorded proudly on 26 October 1500 that he had been with the Tudor king ‘at Bosworth Field’. There was little fixity of battle naming in the early years after Bosworth. And who can say whether on some dark and windy nights, when Henry slept uncomfortably in one of the royal palaces he had inherited from the vanquished Yorkist dynasty, it could have seemed that the battle result itself might reverse just as easily?

  During that clash, Richard’s loyal lieutenant John, Duke of Norfolk had fought and died for his master; his son, Thomas – who fought by his side – was captured and imprisoned. The Croyland Chronicler noted that the Earl of Northumberland’s rearguard did not engage with Tudor’s force, but battlefield terrain rather than treachery seems the most likely explanation for this – and Northumberland was also imprisoned by Henry in Bosworth’s aftermath. The tributes paid to Richard’s bravery in all the sources were a powerful and painful reminder to the new dynasty of how close the battle’s outcome had been. When Henry VII’s staunch supporter Sir Rhys ap Thomas celebrated his election to the Order of the Garter in 1505, he commissioned a series of fine carvings showing scenes of martial valour – and within it, his personal combat with Richard III took pride of place. In private at least, Rhys – whose courage had done much to save his Tudor master – believed Richard’s charge worthy of chivalric renown.