Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  Ironically, in due course excavation would prove the GPR survey correct in what it had shown, not least in its accurate mapping of what the archaeologists decided was probably the site of the school bike sheds, and a medieval stone coffin. With no walls or other graves that might have indicated a cemetery, however, in 2011 the coffin remained unidentified. Which was just as well. When excavated, it would turn out not to be Richard’s grave, and could have resulted in a wild goose chase.

  ‘It was a really difficult moment,’ said Philippa. ‘We’d found nothing. We couldn’t even see the outbuildings.’ But that was only the start of the problem.

  Richard Buckley had costed it all, including reinstating the car park after they were done, for which the city’s Highway Maintenance team would charge them over £15,000, nearly half the archaeology budget. All the parking spaces needed to be relocated – Philippa had helped negotiate that. ‘Logistically it was quite difficult,’ said Richard, ‘but that’s what I like about urban projects. I like the complexity.’ Altogether, they needed about £35,000, and naturally, Richard’s first thought was, where’s it going to come from?

  Philippa had brought in a major sponsor, Leicester Shire Promotions, a company marketing tourism in the city and the county. However, seeing that the hi-tech GPR survey had failed to show any sign of the friary, they pulled out. Those manhole covers had cost Philippa a lot more than five grand.15

  Now what was she to do? The dig had been planned for April 2012. The months were flying by, she’d lost her sponsor and she’d spent a pile of the Richard III Society’s money for nothing. By Christmas 2011, the project, Richard told me, ‘was dead in the water’.

  Philippa got on the phone.

  Sarah Levitt, Head of Arts and Museums at Leicester City Council, had supported Philippa from the start. ‘Her belief in the project’, said Philippa, ‘opened doors. She had real vision.’ Since her arrival in Leicester in 1997, Levitt had, in her words, turned ‘a traditional, under-funded and inward-looking institution’ – Leicester’s museums, the first of which opened in 1849 – ‘into a modern city service’. She was keen to make the museums relevant to Leicester’s unusually diverse population.

  Unfortunately, in 2011 she had the task of telling these citizens that three of their museums were going to close. ‘They are not part of the core business of the council’, she said, in language to which people across a recessionary Britain had by then become all too accustomed. But the help she gave to Philippa would prove to be one of the best investments the council could have made.16

  Hold it off until the August bank holiday weekend, said Levitt. Give yourself more time, and the council will be able to sort out the staff parking. And that is what they did. Only later did Philippa realize the significance of that weekend. The dig would start on 25 August, three days after the Battle of Bosworth: the day of Richard III’s burial.

  As they entered 2012 and Philippa and Annette Carson continued with the fundraising, the debate about exactly where the friary church might have been became increasingly academic. If there was anything of the friary buildings left in the ground, the archaeologists were going to find them. Of course, they had no idea that, all this time, Richard III’s remains were quietly lying there, just below the rubble concealed under the smooth tarmac of the Social Services car park. Neither could they possibly know that, but for a combination of luck and Mathew’s archaeological skills and experience, when it came to it the bones might have been crushed into pulp before anyone saw them.

  Mathew Morris, though originally from Cambridgeshire, had studied archaeology at Leicester (‘It was a really good university,’ he told me, ‘the nicest one, with the best archaeology course and good students’). Afterwards he returned to Cambridge, to excavate and work in a museum, but was drawn back to Leicester by the offer of a job on the Highcross project in 2004. He stayed with ULAS, where in 2011 he was an archaeological assistant, his name the last in a list of 21 staff. He’d wanted to be an archaeologist since a primary school trip to see an excavation at an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, with skeletons lying in the graves. He enjoys digging, and has the confident air of a man happy in his job. However, it is unlikely that he ever imagined, as a nine-year-old boy fascinated by those skeletons, that one day he would himself find the skeleton of a king. For Richard was to put him in charge of the Greyfriars dig.

  Soon after the book launch, Mathew was in the office rather than out in the field. So as Richard prepared the WSI, every so often he would come over and ask for Mathew’s opinion on his plans for the trenches, on how they might make some sort of use of those geophysics plots, on the best way to do things. Philippa kept coming back with details she wanted to add. Chris Wardle, the City Archaeologist in the planning department, suggested revisions. At first, Leon Hunt, who’d written the DBA, knew much more about it than Mathew. ‘But’, Mathew told me, ‘he has no real urban experience, so he didn’t want to run the excavation. So I ended up running it.’ ‘Mathew’, Richard told me, ‘is a very good archaeologist.’

  Mathew Morris, director of the excavations that found Greyfriars friary and Richard III’s remains, poses for the press at the grave, lower right of centre (he wears a hard-hat for work). (Gavin Fogg/AFP/Getty Images)

  In most jobs, you would expect to find the information you needed in the WSI, making it an essential document (‘Can you do this tomorrow?’). By the time the Greyfriars report was finally handed over to Mathew, however, it was all a little irrelevant. It had been rewritten five times, and they had discussed the strategy as it went along. Mathew already knew what he had to do.

  Like Richard, he saw the project as a good chance to explore an area of Leicester they didn’t usually get to see. It would be intriguing, and exciting: they might discover anything. It seemed so improbable that they would find Richard III, he didn’t consider that aspect seriously. It’s difficult to imagine now, after all that has happened, but at the time the ‘Richard III bit’ was secondary. This was, after all, the Grey Friars Project, not a quest.

  But first, Mathew had bigger things to think about. In the spring he was back out by Highcross Street, directing an evaluation of a large parcel of land where there had been a Victorian brewery that had succumbed to vandalism and as yet unfulfilled ambitions for new development. They dug seven 30-m-long (98 ft) trenches, and found copious amounts of Roman archaeology, including parts of a street surface and a mosaic floor, but little substantial of more recent date. They were in that part of the town that Mike Codd’s medieval painting showed mostly as gardens and meadows. He seemed to have got it right there.

  Over at the Richard III Society, in June Philippa announced her project, with the planned late August date for the dig, in their printed newsletter. The chance to investigate Greyfriars had finally come, and with it the opportunity to ‘potentially recover the remains of our king so that they can be reinterred with true honour and dignity’. There would be a memorial service in the cathedral on the second of October, which should give everyone enough time to tidy up.17

  It understandably got Ricardians talking and excited about what might happen. Which was good, because almost at once, in July, Philippa’s key sponsor, who though facing its own challenges had come back with £15,000, wobbled again and pulled ten grand. What made it worse was that Sarah Levitt had set the first of August as a deadline: if they were unable to raise the funds by then, they would have to postpone the project to the following year.

  That was it, thought Philippa, game over. She rang Annette Carson. We need to raise £10,000, and we’ve got two weeks in which to do it. And Philippa (former marketing student and sponsorship manager for The Scotsman) and Annette (award-winning PR and advertising copywriter), aided by the ever understanding Phil Stone, launched an international appeal of a kind that perhaps only the Richard III Society could manage. With its branches across Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia they begged ‘Ricardians and their friends to band together and make it possible for this once
-in-a-lifetime excavation to take place’. Others took up the cause, not least the King Richard Armitage website, an online petition to promote a ‘historically accurate’ movie, whose two heroes are neatly encapsulated in its title.

  Within minutes, the money poured in, absolutely flooded in. ‘I think there was one day’, Philippa told me, ‘I actually sat at my computer from seven in the morning till three in the morning, dealing with emails that were, literally, coming ping, ping, ping, it was that fast.’ The money arrived from everywhere the society had branches, and also from Holland, Belgium, Germany and Austria, and even Turkey and Brazil. They raised the £10,000, and the dig was saved. By the time they closed the appeal, they had nearly £13,000.18

  With a month to go, all the money was in place. Just over half of the total of £33,000 came from the Richard III Society. After struggling to maintain its commitment, Leicester Shire Promotions held to £5,000, and Leicester Adult Schools (backed by a former mayor) brought in a further £500. The City Council, which had helped Philippa so much in the planning, felt it would be politically inappropriate at a time of severe financial stringency to put up cash, but they had agreed to offer £5,000 in reserve. The university, however, had given £10,000. The dig was a reality.

  Richard Taylor, then the university’s Director of Corporate Affairs and a man to be underestimated at your peril, was grappling with one of the severest challenges to hit English higher education in recent times. With continuing cuts in central government subsidies, annual student fees were rising, and from 2012 the universities were allowed to charge an unprecedented £9,000 for a year’s tuition. In the event, many sought the maximum, and student applications fell.

  Taylor argued that universities needed to be clear about how they positioned themselves in the market, and that their reputations were critical assets. This was not language to warm the hearts of all academics, though at Leicester’s Department of Archaeology, where ULAS had been operating successfully as a commercial outfit for over a decade, it was rhetoric they understood. Taylor’s line was that Leicester was a top university, and among its peers by far the most socially inclusive – ‘elite without being elitist’.19

  He saw the dig as an interesting project that people would engage with, and, along the way, would raise the university’s profile – and there was little doubt that he himself was excited about it. And what if it succeeded? The idea that Leicester’s archaeologists might solve a centuries-old mystery with TV-style forensics from university scientists; do this while helping to restore the reputation of a wronged monarch, at the same time as putting paid to a slur on the city’s ordinary Tudor citizens; and all because they’d found a king whose remains had lain at the feet of those unfortunates needing the help of Leicester’s social services – well, it might have been designed by the university’s marketing office.

  Initially, Taylor’s grant made Richard Buckley a little uncomfortable: if the university was going to give away £10,000 for a dig in Leicester, is this how he would have spent it? There were so many more things in the city he wanted to know about, starting with the castle. ‘What always worried me all the way down the line’, he told me, ‘was that, yes, it would generate some interest, but there was no chance of it being successful!’ He laughed. What would he say to the sponsors when they failed to find anything?

  Richard learned that the dig was finally going to go ahead just before he went on holiday. He would return on 23 August, the day before launch. He stayed for a fortnight with friends in the south of France, joking about a curious project that was sure to be a failure. Perhaps it was more from fear than conviction, but he was downbeat about it, and no one could have guessed how much was at stake.

  With Richard away for two weeks, returning just before the press launch, Mathew was starting to worry that he didn’t know what he was doing. They had had no last-minute talks. Would the diggers turn up? They’d never had a press launch before. Press launch?! They’d hardly ever had any journalists before. He’d done a short interview, once, for local BBC Radio Leicester. Perhaps that would help.

  And there was to be a camera crew there, filming for Channel 4. He’d watched a lot of Time Team programmes, and they seemed to get on fine despite all the cameras. In fact, only a couple of years before, ULAS had actually helped out with a Time Team dig, a few miles from Leicester in the grounds of Groby Old Hall, a crumbling, 15th-century red-brick manor house. One of its inhabitants had been Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s wife and mother of the princes who disappeared in the tower. Philippa Gregory, whose best-selling series of novels focusing on some of the women at the centre of the Wars of the Roses had then just begun with The White Queen, took part to help out with the history. The archaeologists dug away in the background, and no one bothered them. It would all be fine. If Richard came back from France.

  One week to go. Over at Bosworth, a few days before the anniversary of the confrontation, the Battlefield Centre held a weekend of events and celebrations, with a re-enactment of Richard III’s death. This was an impressive sight, with armoured knights on horseback, archers, pikemen, gunners, cannon, hawks and flags, and an amplified commentary to enliven the damp, smoky air.

  ‘Richard for England and St George! Come on, then, give our king a really good cheer!’

  A weak cheer drifted from the crowd.

  ‘I still can’t hear you!’

  Enter, field left, an army of rather downhearted-looking footsoldiers.

  ‘If you wish to cheer, or boo, the Tudors or the Lancastrians, here’s your chance!’

  There was a scatter of half-hearted booing.

  ‘Can I hear that a little bit louder, please?’

  If only he’d been there in 1485, history might have been entirely different. As a crown-wielding Henry VII was booed and the late king’s body was carried away, slung authentically over a horse (if tastefully clothed), the announcer had some news for the spectators. ‘I am reliably informed’, he said, ‘very soon there’s going to be a dig in Leicester to see if they can find ‘im.’

  The Richard III Society had a stall at the re-enactment, signing up new members and selling books. Late in the morning they had held their usual service at the medieval church in Sutton Cheney, a small, shrunken village east of Bosworth Field. Richard, say some, attended his last mass here early on the morning of the battle – ‘This church has strong links with King Richard III’ is the diplomatic wording on St James’s notice board. Every year loyal Society members gather here to commemorate the battle and honour the dead. On that day in 2012, as usual, the Prayer of King Richard was read from his Book of Hours. Celebrants lowered themselves on needlepoint kneelers made by Society members, and admired the wreaths and banners hung around the Society’s brass plaque, fixed there in 1967.20

  One week to go. It had been a day when, it seemed, dreams might come true.

  Sometimes they do.

  The church of St James, Sutton Cheney, where myth says Richard III heard his last mass before the Battle of Bosworth, and the Richard III Society holds an annual commemorative service. (Mike Pitts)

  Scene 1

  A car park

  ‘It’s a good start on the roads around Leicestershire and Rutland, with no major incidents to report. There’s a rather cold and windy day of weather in front of us, but we can hope for a few sunny spells here and there.

  ‘Good morning, I’m Jonathan Lampon and you’re listening to BBC Radio Leicester. History’s being made in Leicester today as the search begins for the remains of a king of England. It’s five minutes past six and we start with Barry White….’

  It was grey in the east, the sky barely growing light as the sun began to rise across the horizon. In the west some lights flickered from the Holiday Inn, a useful vantage point from which to survey the entire field. Dawn brought relief from a night troubled by uneasy dreams. He looked pale and death-like, as he consumed his modest breakfast. There was something, he said at last, that he must tell them.

  That last par
agraph is a fantasy. The words – with the obvious exceptions – are those of historians who like to release their inner novelists when describing the Battle of Bosworth.1 This is the half-real half-fictional world we inhabited, early on the morning of Friday 24 August 2012, in Leicester to attend a press event whose main features were historical re-enactments, rather than the reality they appeared to be, and the celebration of something that had not happened, and possibly never would.

  It was a curious and rarely entered world, of an archaeological dig that was designed to retrieve something very famous yet not known to be there. The matter of the quest meant it could not be ignored, not least for fear that with no control, the information that did get out – and surely, it would – could be false, misleading or likely to make fools of everyone. The best way to lead was to keep ahead of the gossip with real news. The problem for the university was that, as yet, there was no news. In addition to which, all it had to show people was a car park: a small, empty parking lot round the back of some council offices.

  Ather Mirza, Director of the University Press Office, remembered leaving his first meeting of the three partners: the university, the City Council and the Richard III Society. Everyone had agreed that the dig should be launched with a bit of a splash. But how on earth would he get the media to come and film a piece of tarmac? He decided, he told me, to stage-manage it. Which is exactly what he did, with a council car park as mise-en-scène.