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

by Langley, Philippa

  That left Clarence’s daughter, Margaret, who married into the Pole family. In 1539 Henry VIII decided they were all a dynastic threat, and executed Margaret’s son. He also arrested Margaret and her twelve-year-old grandson. On 27 May 1541 this sixty-eight-year-old woman, now frail and ill, was led to her execution still roundly protesting her innocence. She was dragged to the block, and as she refused to lay her head upon it, was forced down. When she struggled, the inexperienced executioner mistimed his blow, making a gash on her shoulder instead. Ten additional blows were required to complete the execution. One account stated that she leapt from the block after the first clumsy blow and ran, being pursued by the executioner, and was struck eleven times before she died.

  Contemporaries expected that her fourteen-year-old grandson, Henry Pole, would be executed at the same time. Instead, in a sequence eerily reminiscent of the possible fate of Edward V, he was withdrawn into the recesses of the Tower, deprived of his tutor and other servants, and then vanished completely. It was rumoured that he had been starved to death some time in 1542.

  Today, we know little of this last prince of the House of York. Our ruling dynasties were quite ruthless in protecting their own survival – by our standards, horrifyingly so. Richard III, whatever the fate of the two sons of Edward IV, must be put firmly back into the context of his times.

  It was all too convenient for the Tudor writers who followed Thomas More to blame Richard for the death of his brother, George, Duke of Clarence, although no contemporary source ever made that accusation. It was Clarence and his lineage that the Tudors were most worried about. Richard’s designated successors, the de la Pole family, also gave them a run for their money. John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, made heir presumptive by Richard in 1484, died fighting against Henry VII at the Battle of Stoke, two years after Bosworth, in 1487. Two of his brothers were subsequently imprisoned by Henry VII in the Tower of London. And even forty years later, the death of the youngest of them, the exiled Richard de la Pole, the ‘White Rose’, who on a number of occasions had threatened to lead a foreign invasion against the Tudors, was greeted with relief and celebration by Henry VIII and his court.

  A genealogy drawn up for the de la Pole family early in the reign of Henry VII diverged sharply from the official Tudor view. The pedigree was dominated by a fine portrait roundel of Richard III in the centre of the roll. The sons of Edward IV were dealt with in perfunctory fashion, no title being accorded to Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower, who was said simply ‘to have died without heirs in his youth’. The accession of Henry VII received scant respect, accommodated by the addition of a thick black line in the right-hand margin, thus appearing peripheral to the roll’s content.

  The purpose of the pedigree was to extol Richard III’s legitimate right to rule – a remarkable statement to make in the early Tudor period. His coronation was described, and his subsequent nomination – after the death of his son, Edward of Middleham – of John de la Pole as his heir presumptive. It was emphasized that this had been done with the consent of all the nobility of the land. The male de la Pole offspring were clustered around Richard III; Henry VII had been pushed to the margins.

  The issue did not die away. Late in the reign of Henry VIII – in March 1541 – an insulting tale was recounted about Henry Tudor’s ancestry. Richard Fox of Colchester was charged with making slanderous statements about the House of Tudor and its right to rule, in which Katherine of Valois’s liaison with Owen Tudor, Henry VII’s grandfather, was described in less than flattering terms. Fox told how Katherine (Henry V’s widow) took Owen to bed, ‘baying like a very drunken whore’, and through this conceived a child, Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor. Henry’s own career was then given an unenthusiastic résumé, described as a little-known exile, brought up largely outside the country, who invaded England in 1485 and only secured the throne by killing the reigning king, Richard III, in battle. He had ‘no right to it’, Fox concluded bluntly.

  Fox’s tale was embarrassing for the Tudors, one of a number of skeletons in their genealogical cupboard. Once again, the spectre of the belated Valois-Tudor marriage had been raised. A secret marriage had probably taken place between Katherine and Owen Tudor some time in late 1431, probably after the dowager queen had borne her first child. The couple subsequently had four children – three sons and a daughter. But remarkably the English council remained blissfully unaware of developments, although Katherine had been forbidden by statute to marry anyone of such low rank as Tudor. The council only found out about the relationship in 1437, after Katherine of Valois’s death. Owen was subsequently arrested, but pardoned and released in 1440. His two oldest sons, Edmund and Jasper, were placed under the care of the crown. This secret and scandalous marriage bore an unhappy resemblance to Edward IV’s own union to Elizabeth Woodville. Richard III’s attack on the validity of this match in the Titulus Regius was thus doubly painful for the Tudor dynasty that supplanted him.

  Speculation about the relationship between Henry VII’s grandfather and Katherine of Valois was common currency in the early Yorkist period. One Welsh poem mockingly said that Owen, ‘once on a holiday, clapped his ardent, humble affection on the daughter of the king of the land of wine’. This cryptic statement contained the seed of a story current in the sixteenth century that Owen caught Katherine’s attention at a ball, when he was so unsteady on his feet that he fell into her lap.

  At the time of Fox’s table-talk, a more elevated but equally worrying conversation was taking place within the walls of Dublin Castle. The king’s master of the rolls, Sir Anthony St Leger, stated that prior to his marriage to Elizabeth of York, Henry VII had only the most slender title to the throne, passing over Henry’s Tudor lineage completely. When a companion pointed out that Henry had a title of sorts through his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, St Leger was unimpressed. Henry had no rightful title, he emphasized, and that was why his supporters had urged him to marry Elizabeth of York without further delay.

  Early Tudor sources were reticent about Henry VII’s personal background, and details of his exile, first in Brittany and then in France, were scarcely alluded to. There was a similar reticence over his family background – unsurprising given that his mother’s Beaufort lineage was tainted by bastardy and his father’s by a clandestine marriage. The issue of legitimacy was the shadow over the Tudors’ right to rule, and it fuelled their attacks on Richard III. By relentlessly pointing up his villainy, they hoped to distract the political community from the weakness of their own dynastic position.

  To remember the legacy of Richard positively in the Tudor period took real courage. In around 1525 Jane Sacheverell decided to erect a memorial brass to her first husband, Sir John Sacheverell of Morley in Derbyshire, on which she specifically stated that he had died in Richard’s service at Bosworth Field; Sacheverell had almost certainly fallen in that last brave cavalry charge against Tudor. It was the only memorial of its kind in existence.

  And the widowed Jane Sacheverell showed further mettle, for in the aftermath of Bosworth she was abducted and forced to marry against her will. In a bill of complaint she later brought, Jane described the awful occasion, on 11 November 1485, when she and her party were ambushed by Richard Willoughby of Wollaton with a band of over a hundred followers ‘riotously arrayed, as if for war’. Jane was assaulted, robbed and bound, and then carried off by Willoughby, ‘there to do his own pleasure with her, at his own will, without her consenting or being agreeable’. But Jane Sacheverell was a survivor. In May 1486 she obtained a divorce from Willoughby, and went on to marry another. In 1485 the forcible abduction of a woman was a mere trespass under the law; in 1487, in response to a petition Sacheverell brought to parliament, Henry VII made it a felony, passing an act ‘against the taking away of women against their wills’.

  In his proclamation against the rebels of 1483, and in the Titulus Regius the following year, Richard III had spoken out in favour of the sanctity of marriage and against sexual immorality
and the mistreatment of women. It was fitting that the sole existing Tudor memorial brass to name a king scarred by seeing his mother assaulted and raped was put in place by a woman who had suffered exactly the same experience.

  Our history books are full of heroes and villains. But real-life experience sometimes defies such convenient generalizations. People, then and now, are complex – and in a violent age genuine concern for justice and deeply felt morality can coexist alongside political ruthlessness. For Shakespeare, Richard’s book of hours, his personal prayer book, was a prop in a theatre of deceit, and Richard’s reading from it a clever ruse to assist his seizure of the crown. Richard – in this version – was acting a false part of modesty and piety to cloak his naked ambition for the throne. Yet Richard’s piety was genuine and deeply felt, and his prayer book, carried with him to the battle where he fought and died, was later found in his war tent at Bosworth Field.

  Richard III had a cause that he believed in. Some were repulsed by the way he took the throne; others remained loyal to him to the very end. When we finally lay Richard to rest we do not seek to make him ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Rather, we put a stop to the stigmatizing and vilification and allow for complexity. We also grant him the dignity of resting in peace, a dignity that 500 years of history have denied him.

  Social Services car park: looking east towards the former Grammar School car park over the wall. Letter ‘R’ is directly ahead, just before the wall in first parking bay to the left. Philippa had her intuitive feeling in second parking bay to right of letter ‘R’ where remains were discovered

  ‘R’ marks the spot with Richard III banner and portrait. Photograph taken during Ground Penetrating Radar Survey, Social Services car park, 28 August 2011

  Ground Penetrating Radar Survey results for the three car parks

  Annette Carson and Dr John Ashdown-Hill at Trench One, Social Services car park at the start of the dig, 25 August 2012

  Trench One, Social Services car park. Leg bones discovered immediately before first concrete structure crossing trench in foreground

  Richard Buckley and Philippa Langley at Trench Three in the former Grammar School car park. With them are Pete Woods (film director at the dig) and Alex Rowson (associate producer) from Darlow Smithson Productions

  Philippa Langley at exhumation with Dr Turi King and Dr Jo Appleby in Trench One, Social Services car park

  Skeletal remains discovered in Trench One in the Social Services car park. Remains showing hands off to the right and possibly still tied

  Philippa Langley and Michael Jones at the grave site

  Removing the remains. Philippa Langley and Dr John Ashdown-Hill with Richard III banner over remains box

  The ‘Time Tomb Team’. (From left to right) Archaeologists Jon Coward, Mathew Morris, Leon Hunt and Tom Hoyle

  Site map of the Medieval Church of the Grey Friars post dig. Grave location in Trench One shown by marker at walking place. Circle denotes head positioned in the west

  Skeleton of Richard III

  (From left to right) Philippa Langley, Dr Stuart J Hamilton, Robert Woosnam-Savage, Dr Jo Appleby

  (From left to right) Sir Peter Soulsby, Sarah Levitt and Dr Phil Stone with facial reconstruction of Richard III

  Facial reconstruction of Richard III with sixteenth-century portrait in background

  The original modest tomb design in Yorkshire stone: 7' long × 3'6 wide × 2'3 high

  Richard’s book of hours – showing his date of birth at Fotheringhay (2 October 1452), written in his own hand

  Fotheringhay Church

  Tomb of Richard’s father, Richard Duke of York

  Baynard’s Castle – the London residence of Cecily Neville, where Richard stayed during much of his Protectorate in 1483

  Cecily Neville’s seal – both her piety and her political acumen would be inherited by her youngest son

  Portrait of Richard’s older brother, King Edward IV

  Middleham Castle – where Richard was brought up and later a favourite residence of his as Lord of the North

  Richard’s signature as Duke of Gloucester and one of his mottoes (tant le desiree – ‘I have longed for it so much’) at the bottom of his manuscript copy of Ipomedon – the story of ‘the best knight in the world’

  Nottingham Castle – enlarged by Richard, and where he stayed before the Battle of Bosworth

  Richard’s opponent and rival to the throne, Henry Tudor

  The likely battlefield area – remnants of the marsh, with the high ground of Crown Hill rising above it

  Recent artillery finds at Bosworth

  The boar badge found on the edge of the marsh – where Richard was probably overwhelmed by his foes

  Close up of Richard’s skull showing battle wounds

  The death of a king: the three weapons used to kill Richard (sword, halberd and rondel dagger)

  Memorial brass of Sir John Sacheverell of Morley (Derbyshire), recording that he fought at Bosworth for Richard III

  Effigy of Sir John Cheney, Salisbury Cathedral, the man who protected Henry Tudor as Richard’s last charge came so close to killing his opponent

  Richard’s final moments of combat, from the carved bed lintel of Rhys ap Thomas. The king’s horse is to the left of the halberdier

  APPENDIX 1

  The Fate of the Princes in the Tower

  Introduction

  THE FATE OF the two sons of Edward IV, the Princes in the Tower, is one of the great mysteries of Richard III’s reign and a controversy so powerful and compelling that it has often overshadowed all other aspects of Richard’s life and kingship. It is also an issue where the two authors disagree. Because of this – and also because the issue has still not been solved, and may never be – we have added this brief debate as an appendix to our book. This issue is complex, and in truth one could write many pages on the subject. But it is our hope that this brief discussion will be a pointer to ongoing debate and research.

  And such ongoing debate and research is necessary, because there is no proof that Richard III killed the Princes in the Tower. If Richard were put before a modern law court he would almost certainly be acquitted, as we saw in Channel 4’s 1984 staging of Richard’s trial. But it is equally the job of the historian to deal with probabilities not certainties. The survival of archive and chronicle information from the late Middle Ages is frequently fragmentary and incomplete – and new material often emerges that forces us to reassess our opinions. New material may still be discovered that will cast fresh light on this particular mystery.

  It is important to remember that people at the time also lacked clear knowledge of what had happened. No less a person than Sir William Stanley, who had been steward of Edward, Prince of Wales’s household in the 1480s, whose intervention was so decisive on the field of Bosworth and who subsequently became chamberlain of Henry VII’s household, was not completely sure of their fate. In 1495 Stanley was overheard saying that if the younger of Edward IV’s two sons, Richard, Duke of York, had in fact survived he would be bound to support him – words that cost him his head. At the time of Stanley’s statement the pretender Perkin Warbeck was claiming to be Richard, and this claim was attracting considerable European interest and support and, importantly, was authenticated by Richard’s sister, Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy. If Stanley could not be completely certain of the princes’ fate, neither can we.

  Henry VII was surprisingly sluggish in investigating what had happened to the princes. The first parliament of the reign made no specific accusation against Richard, but rather employed inference, ‘the shedding of innocents’ blood’. It may have been difficult to ascertain their fate in the immediate aftermath of Bosworth. However, there was a cynical and self-interested reason for the lack of urgency. If Henry had declared the younger of the two princes dead, he would have been forced to release his substantial estates, as Duke of York, to the three younger sisters and co-heiresses of his queen, Elizabeth. The lands of the Duchy of York were highl
y lucrative and, after endowing his queen, Henry chose instead to keep the remainder and enjoy their profits.

  The first specific indication of what had happened to the princes only emerged, or apparently emerged, in the last decade of Henry VII’s reign. Sir James Tyrell had been one of Richard III’s most trusted servants. He was then retained in the service of the first Tudor king, but in 1502 was convicted of treason for conspiring with members of the de la Pole family. Facing execution, Tyrell also allegedly confessed to his involvement in the murder of the Princes in the Tower. Yet strangely, details of this confession were never circulated, and the confession itself was only reported in a London chronicle some ten years after it had happened. This supposed confession formed the basis of Sir Thomas More’s investigation into the princes’ fate, and his work gives the first dramatic account of how they met their deaths. More’s verdict was clear: Richard III was guilty.