by Mike Pitts
Philippa had barely begun her quest, to find the first of her big questions solved. Given the bones, she thought, she could now prove they were Richard’s. All she had to do was find them. Remarkably, it was Ashdown-Hill who would again help her on her way.
He had been asked by the BBC to contribute a column to an online series called Local Legends. A large stone plaque by Bow Bridge in Leicester, noted the website, says Richard III’s remains were nearby. But was that true?
The historian’s answer was plain. There was no evidence to suggest the remains had been thrown into the river, nor that they had ever been dug up, nor that any stone coffin had anything to do with Richard. ‘The more simple reality’, he wrote, ‘is that Richard III’s body probably still lies where it was first buried, somewhere beneath Grey Friars Street or the adjacent buildings.’6
Or, as Philippa described it to me, ‘Ashdown-Hill showed that the story the bones had been thrown into the River Soar was a nonsense. It really does not hold any water.’
That just left the church. Could Philippa show it had been in the car park? In this case, it was archaeologists who gave her the answer. Once again, it was the one she wanted.
Another year, another step forward. In 2007 there was an excavation at the old NatWest bank, where the Richard III Society had put its plaque. It was a small project, and the report was dry and technical. In fact, she told me, it had been ‘dismissed locally as being of absolutely no importance’. But for her, it changed everything. They found no evidence whatsoever of Greyfriars church! Nothing! Richard’s grave could not have been under the bank.7
‘So I knew’, she said, ‘that the church must be further to the west. And in the west we had those three car parks.’ Three open spaces – New Street car park to the west, the Social Services car park across the road to the east and, beyond a high wall continuing east, a former school playground – with no buildings to cover or destroy the grave, just waiting to be investigated. Philippa had answered her own questions, and the answers were good. Which left her with a new one. Now what?
Back in 2005, enamoured with Ashdown-Hill’s research, she had asked him to write to Time Team, Channel 4 television’s long-running series in which a group of professional archaeologists attempted to solve a point of local history over three days. In October of that year he had duly rung the production company, and followed up with a letter. His proposal was strong on his genealogical research (he included a copy of an article he had written for the magazine, Your Family Tree). But though he also sent a photo of the actual car park in which Richard III’s grave was later to be found, taken for him by a local Ricardian, his description of Greyfriars, if honest, was not encouraging: ‘the layout’, he wrote, ‘is totally unknown’. Understandably, Time Team declined to take it further.8
Up to this point, Philippa had not met Ashdown-Hill. But in February 2009, in her capacity as Secretary (and founder) of the Scottish branch of the Richard III Society, she invited him up to Edinburgh to give a talk. He spoke about Richard’s DNA and the Greyfriars church. As she listened, she realized that his work pointed to the same conclusion she had reached in her own research. Richard was buried in the Social Services car park.
They went for lunch at the Cramond Inn, a white-painted pub down by the estuary of the River Almond on the far west of the city. ‘We put all of our research together’, she remembered, ‘and everything said, he’s there. He’s absolutely there.’
Suddenly it all seemed clear. If no one else was going to find Richard, she would. ‘I’m going in search of him’, she proclaimed, ‘and I’m going to do it.’
A couple of people at the meeting knew someone at Time Team, and thought they’d try again, but Philippa guessed what the response would be even before they said no for the second time. So that was that.
She asked Ashdown-Hill to write to the local archaeologists: they’d understand. University of Leicester Archaeological Services would be the perfect team. He tried a few times, but they never got back.9
So Philippa went further afield, got on the phone and asked other archaeological contractors. She didn’t come out and say she wanted them to dig up Richard III, but otherwise she was quite specific. She was looking for a grave under a car park in the Midlands, could they help? But archaeologists didn’t seek out graves, and anyway, they didn’t have the local knowledge. She should ask around in the Midlands.
So it was back to Leicester. This time Philippa went to the City Council, who, after all, owned the car park. But first, she approached television. In July 2010 she’d watched a programme on Channel 4 about the archaeological exhumation of soldiers’ remains from an unmarked First World War grave in France, and their individual reburial in a new war cemetery. She was impressed, and noted that the film had been made by Darlow Smithson Productions, an independent London-based company. She contacted Julian Ware, Darlow’s then Co-Creative Director. Ware is a tall, charming man, an experienced broadcaster with an expansive vision. He responded positively.
Then she pitched the project to Leicester City Council. Look, she said, I know where Richard III is buried, and Channel 4 want to make a film about it, and it’s all in your car park. And the council said yes. They had just one question. ‘Which archaeologists are you going to hire?’
They heard the saga about Time Team, and the archaeologists who don’t look for graves, and they sent her to the council’s museum service. And the museum people said to Philippa, why don’t you ask Richard Buckley? He’d be perfect for the job, he knows Leicester. Here are his contact details. He works at ULAS, University of Leicester Archaeological Services.
Her heart sank. ULAS had already said no. But Philippa Langley was not yet ready to give up. In January 2011 she gathered her thoughts, looked at the number, and picked up the phone.
People call ULAS from time to time with ideas for excavations. They imagine, said Richard, the archaeologists have the resources to drop everything, and do what they want. ‘Which of course’, he added, ‘we haven’t. All the work we do is for external contracts.’
Yet there was something about Philippa that encouraged him to keep listening. He’d already given quite a few talks for the Richard III Society, promoting the study of medieval history and archaeology, telling them about ULAS’s work in Leicester, such as the big Highcross project. ‘I never thought for a minute’, he told me, ‘that the search for Richard would be successful.’ But if that was a non-starter, quite quickly he realized that the dig Philippa was proposing would be about the friary. And that appealed to him.
They would be able to research a part of the town that they had never been able to look in before, to check out one of Leicester’s great medieval institutions. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been interested, but their work was determined by development. They’d excavate where planners thought important remains might be destroyed. That was what happened at the NatWest bank in 2007, where an investment business had hoped to build flats (though it never happened). There had been one modern research excavation in Leicester, at the Augustinian Abbey in the north of the city. After much searching, archaeologists finally located the site in the 1920s, and excavations were continued between 2000 and 2008 by ULAS, as a training project for archaeology students at the university. But, said Richard, ‘Nobody had ever done a research excavation within the walls of Leicester.’ Not until now.
‘OK’, he thought, ‘here we go.’ Ooh yes, it would be exciting to have some funding for research. He told Philippa it was all very interesting, but he needed to look into it. ‘Only if my research comes back with anything,’ he said, ‘am I going to be prepared to take this further.’ And Philippa thought, that’s fair enough.
I asked Richard if he had found Philippa, well, a little eccentric? ‘Oh yeah,’ he replied. So what had he said after the call? He laughed. ‘I’m not sure I should actually tell you, really,’ he said. He paused. Then, smiling, he quoted himself: ‘There’s this bonkers person on the phone – but we’d get the chance to look for
the friary.’ That is, at least, how he told it to me.
But he was hooked. He slipped into project manager mode. How could Philippa’s vision be turned into a productive excavation? The first thing was the king. He was aware that Richard III had been buried in Leicester’s Greyfriars, and he knew where Greyfriars had been. But perhaps there was truth to the story that the body had been dug up and thrown in the river? So straight away there was only a 50 per cent chance of being right.
The second thing was that the site of the friary was now heavily built up. Medieval layers such as those where Richard’s grave might have lain would have been destroyed by house foundations and cellars, and the open spaces would be riddled with service trenches.
Leicester was notoriously a town without any local stone. There was a premium on building materials, and people quarried abandoned structures. This meant that when archaeologists came across Roman or medieval foundations, what they usually saw was just the trench: someone else had been there before them to take away the bricks and imported stone. They might find the friary, but if all its masonry and floors had been ripped out – and perhaps Richard’s grave, even if the robbers had no idea whose it was – it could be difficult to make much sense of it.
The council would never give permission: where would their staff park their cars? And where would all the money come from? Richard knew how expensive urban archaeology could be. ‘I always think of all the problems first,’ he told me, laughing. ‘Would we be allowed to make a huge mess in the car park in the off chance that Richard may not have been dug up and thrown in the river?’
Philippa and Richard arranged to meet in the Holiday Inn, a 1960s vision of towering modernity stranded in a roundabout of traffic lanes where St Augustine Road enters the city. John Ashdown-Hill was there too. By then he’d written a book in which he’d rounded up all the evidence he could find about the friary, Richard III’s tomb and the fate of his grave – each of these topics was treated to an entire chapter. Another chapter summarized his genealogical and genetic research. Published over a year after he and Philippa met in Edinburgh, it was a manifesto for Philippa’s project.
‘If we had access to Richard’s body,’ he concluded, ‘we’d know his height, what his face looked like, whether he really was deformed, and how he died.’ He found it ‘almost incredible’ that the Greyfriars site had not been examined. He reproduced Diana Courtney’s photo of the Social Services car park that he’d previously sent to Time Team, captioned ‘Richard III’s remains probably still lie somewhere beneath this tarmac’. And finally, he signed off with a teasing challenge: ‘Perhaps one day the search for Richard III will begin!’10
Richard advised them to commission a desk study. ‘We’d always known where the Greyfriars was,’ he told me – he’d drawn a map in 1987 that became the standard for medieval Leicester, with Greyfriars written on it in the right place. What they didn’t know was the arrangement of buildings within it. And neither did they know whether it was likely that anything of those buildings still survived underground – still less a feature such as a grave. Before embarking on a costly dig, they should find out what they could that might help them decide exactly where to place their trenches to best effect. Or whether it was worth doing at all.
‘What always strikes me’, he said, ‘is that people who are not archaeologists won’t see the problems. I can see them all. I perhaps came over as the killjoy to start with,’ he admits. ‘But I was on board pretty quickly.’
A unique partnership was launched, between two people driven by an interest in the past, brought together by different goals that could be achieved in only one way. Importantly, Philippa and Richard both had clear ideas of what they wanted out of it. To find a king and to understand a friary were not the same thing, but they weren’t going to argue about that. They respected each other. As the project moved from one extraordinary event to the next, that regard would be tested.
Other meetings followed with the City Council. Quite often Philippa would ring up Richard, and within a month or two the Richard III Society provided the £1,140 fee and she commissioned the desk project.11 ‘Good,’ he thought, ‘you’ve got to do your homework.’ He put Leon Hunt on to it, a Nottingham University graduate and experienced fieldworker who had come to work with ULAS in 2003. Hunt had written 150 such studies – they called them desk-based assessments, or DBAs. But never one like this.
Once he started looking into it, Hunt found there was actually quite a lot of useful information to guide an investigation on the ground. While Ricardians had been relentlessly attacking the many-headed hydra of myth and prejudice about Richard III, and archaeologists had by and large been ignoring the whole thing, some precious records had been gently gathering dust in the city’s archives, biding their time. Well, it had come now.
There was no question about the fate of Richard III’s body after he was slain in battle. Henry VII had it brought back into Leicester for full public gaze, slung naked over the back of a horse. Everyone would see that the king was dead.
Medieval Leicester sits largely within the rectangular plan of the old Roman walls, with a new precinct to the south known as the Newarke (redrawn after Buckley and others). (Mike Pitts/Drazen Tomic)
Richard III’s namesake, Richard II, who died in 1400, had been the subject of a famous conspiracy against his successor Henry IV. Rumours spread down from the north that Richard was still alive and would return to seize the throne that was rightfully his. Henry sought to quash the protest and make an example, and he found the opportunity at Leicester Greyfriars. Five of the friars were convicted of conspiring against their king, and executed in London.12 Conscious of the parallel or not, the new Henry VII was not going to allow any such nonsense. Richard III’s bloodied and bruised corpse, swelling and stiffening in the August heat, was displayed for two days in a college church in the Newarke, a specifically Lancastrian religious development – the ‘new work’ – in the southwest part of the town beyond the castle. There, as Henry reported in proclamations issued to his kingdom, Richard ‘was laide oppenly that every man might se and luke upon him’.13
From there the body was carried through the streets and buried in the church of the Greyfriars, ‘without any pompe or solemne funeral’. The specific site was in the church’s choir, appropriate for such a prestigious figure but also one that was not accessible to the general public.14 It may be that Henry ordered the burial. He would know where the grave was, and tucked away in the choir the tomb was beyond public reach – and veneration. Killing Richard in battle was only part of his victory.
All of that we know from sources written close to the events they describe – Polydore Vergil recording the funeral ‘in thabbay of monks Franciscanes at Leycester’, and John Rous specifically mentioning the choir – and there is no reason to doubt their veracity. We can also be certain that ten years later Henry VII had the grave memorialized with a tomb in alabaster, a creamy, soft stone that looks like marble and was immensely popular in the later Middle Ages for funerary monuments. We don’t know what it looked like, except that it bore Richard’s image, whether in full sculpture or in shallow relief. When the friary was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1538 the tomb was probably quite rapidly taken apart and the stone reused. In any event, from this moment on we have no contemporary records of what happened to Richard III’s monument or his grave.15
Which is significant. In particular, there is no description of the grave being rifled or of bones being carried off. The first we hear of this is in 1611, three generations after the friary had been dissolved and precisely 50 years after the last note of any material being removed from the site for use elsewhere.16
We met the propagator of this story in the previous chapter. He was John Speed (1552–1629), a pioneering mapmaker and historian – some argue the first true English historian – whose maps we now value more than his histories. Richard’s tomb, he wrote, was ‘pulled downe’ after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, ‘and utterly defaced; since wh
en his grave overgrown with nettles and weedes, is very obscure and not to be found. Only the stone chest wherein his corpse lay is now made a drinking trough for horses at a common Inne…. His body also (as tradition hath delivered), was borne out of the City, and contemptuously bestowed under the end of Bow-Bridge.’17
Other antiquarians and historians copied or elaborated on Speed’s description, until it was fixed in stone in the engraved slab that can still be read beside the River Soar. But where did Speed get it from? We have no idea. What we do know, however, is that in the only point for which it is possible to check his facts, he got it wrong. The putative grave site he visited, ‘overgrown with nettles and weedes’, was apparently not at the Greyfriars at all, but at the Black Friars, another by then demolished friary, in the northwest of the city. As John Throsby, one of Leicester’s great antiquarians, wrote in 1791, ‘Mr. Speed, in his plan of Leicefter … places this houfe [Black Friars] in the fituation of Grey Friars, and Grey Friars where this fhould be’.18 The Black (or Dominican) Friary was close to the river, a little downstream from the Austin Friars. Perhaps Speed could see the ivy-covered Bow Bridge as he rummaged cautiously among the nettles, and recalled how Richard’s body was carried naked into Leicester over that same bridge.
Yet even as Speed toured the city picking up what historical information he could, he missed a key monument. It was small, but bore an informative inscription: ‘Here lies the Body of Richard III. some Time King of England.’ We don’t know precisely where it stood, but it was somewhere within the Greyfriars precinct, where Richard had been buried. Significantly, we know about it thanks to someone who was living and working in Leicestershire. This was Christopher Wren (later to become father of the famous architect), who just a year after Speed’s book was published was shown the inscription on ‘a handsome stone pillar, three foot high’. We might guess that the pillar was a decorative capital salvaged from the friary, but however it looked, it now stood as an ornamental feature in a garden. It was shown to Wren by the man who put it there, ‘Mr. Robert Herrick (sometime Mayor of Leicester)’.
