Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  One of these forms is passed exclusively down the female line, the mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, that Philippa hoped would prove Skeleton I to be Richard III. It is not part of the DNA that defines us (so cannot tell us anything about how a person looked), but is found in mitochondria. Billions of years ago these were probably bacteria, but they found safe homes inside cells of other forms of life, and they now reside in our cells, in simplified form with their own DNA, as important sources of energy, like tiny batteries. They are very common, which makes them ideal when looking for ancient DNA to understand ancestry.

  Among the DNA molecules that do make us what we are, just one is passed on without change. It is packaged in the Y chromosome, and is what makes a human male. Y-chromosome DNA offered the second possibility for testing the identity of Skeleton I – which is of course male – as well as the potential to learn a little about him. As all descendants through a direct female line to Richard III will have the same mtDNA, so anyone on a direct male line will have his Y-chromosome.

  Several challenges had to be overcome for this quest to succeed, and it would be expensive – accounting for the greater part of the £94,000 the University of Leicester had given to post-excavation by the end of 2012 alone.30 By far the hardest task would be to find and describe either of the two forms of DNA – ideally both – in the bones of Skeleton I. First, however, living people needed to be identified with proven links to Richard III through direct male or female lines.

  Ashdown-Hill had traced such a descendant, Joy Ibsen, from Richard III’s mother. Mrs Ibsen had died in 2008, but she left a daughter and two sons who had inherited her mitochondrial DNA, the same mtDNA Richard III would have inherited from his mother. One of her sons, Michael, born in London, Ontario, was now helpfully living in London, England, and had readily agreed to take part in the project. However, if after successful mtDNA extraction it turned out that Skeleton I’s did not match Michael Ibsen’s, it could have been because of a fault in the family tree; the remains might still have been Richard III’s. Ashdown-Hill’s attempt to confirm the Ibsen connection by analysing some of Edward IV’s hair had unfortunately not been successful.31 Kevin Schürer, the project’s genealogy expert, set out to test the tree.

  The first 13 generations from Richard’s mother, down to Anne Spooner who died in 1873, had been published in 1909; Ashdown-Hill had brought the line up to date. The links had not been documented, however, so Kevin and his genealogical colleagues searched the archives. From Anne of York’s 15th-century will, to a 17th-century baptismal register, an 1851 census and a passenger list for SS Mauretania (which took Joy Brown, as Mrs Ibsen was then, to New York),32 all told the same story: the lineage was good. Michael Ibsen is a true descendant of Richard III’s mother.

  In the process they discovered a second maternal line, the search for which Kevin described as ‘a long shot, and overly hopeful and ambitious with several blind alleys’. This was critically important. Michael Ibsen’s new-found ‘distant cousin’ agreed to take part, while wishing to remain anonymous, allowing the team to triangulate two modern mtDNA samples with any retrieved from Skeleton I. The checks were watertight.

  Kevin was even more successful with a continuous male line. This went up from Richard III to his great-great-grandfather Edward III, then down through 15 generations to the 5th Duke of Beaufort, who died in 1803 – a well-documented noble line that can be looked up in Burke’s Peerage. They then found nearly 20 living descendants of the duke with Richard III’s Y-chromosome. They tracked down four, all of whom agreed to take part, again anonymously. The men didn’t know each other: one lives in England, one in Scotland and two in Australia.33

  Analysing modern DNA is now a relatively quick and simple process and one that Turi King, leading the genetic study, could do at the University of Leicester. Skeleton I’s DNA, however, was no simple matter. Turi had extracted teeth early in the project, as the skull could not be otherwise handled or studied until this was done, for fear of contamination. She chose teeth because these held the best chances of preserving DNA, protected by the enamel.

  As with all parts of the body, survival of ancient DNA depends on burial conditions. Skeleton I’s DNA was bound to be degraded: but was sufficient left to be of any use at all? That damage brought a second problem. To make it possible to study any extracted DNA, it would have to be biochemically amplified. This is a standard procedure, but if there is any contamination, it too will be amplified, and can completely swamp the ancient DNA.34

  This work could not be done in Leicester. They wanted to have two independent studies in case anything should go wrong, as they had had with the radiocarbon dating. It was December by the time Turi had a slot in the first lab’s schedule, at the Ancient DNA Facilities in the University of York. Here she worked with Michael Hofreiter and Gloria González Fortes, who between them had previously studied, among other things, the ancient DNA of woolly mammoths and cave bears.

  In January she set off for her second lab, in Toulouse. It is easy to picture Turi returning from the Université Paul Sabatier – where she worked with Patricia Balaresque (male–female interaction in evolution) and Laure Tonasso (human migrations) – holding up a long queue at airport customs while she explained in rusty French that her white powder was a ground-up tooth, perhaps of an English monarch. Turi grew up in Vancouver, and has a relaxed sense of humour and a mane of red-brown hair. She came to Leicester to study molecular genetics after obtaining a degree at Cambridge, and now researches the genetic impact of diasporas on Britain, and how genetic genealogy testing can affect a person’s perception of their identity – an interest she can now perhaps share with fellow Canadian Michael Ibsen. The powdered tooth is safely back in Leicester.

  Early results were promising. Modern DNA proved an exact match between Ibsen and his anonymous ‘cousin’, confirming the female-line tree. The labs in York and Toulouse had both found sufficient ancient mtDNA for analysis. Y-chromosome DNA was proving more elusive, and as I write Turi is still working on trying to isolate meaningful quantities. But mitochondrial DNA looked set to provide another strand of evidence in the case for the identity of Skeleton I. On 9 January 2013 the University of Leicester Press Office alerted the media. In the first week of February, it said, the university would reveal what its scientists had been up to. The announcement was headed, The Search for King Richard III.

  When it came, on 4 February, the conference was something that no one there, whether behind the scenes, in the audience or on stage, would ever forget. This time the event was not down by the cathedral, in a car park or in the medieval Guildhall, but up the hill at the university. It challenged Ather Mirza’s Press Office long in advance, as media organizations around the world – some of which you might have imagined would be above such tactics – tried anything they could to get advance information (Mirza trusted one journalist, who for a few days was privileged to witness the genuine up-to-the-hour research: the Leicester Mercury’s Peter Warzynski).

  But the press team was only one of many concerns making the day. Academics from departments across the university had joined in the research. Now, it seemed, the entire institution was wired up, roped in, briefed, preened and enthused, as Richard Taylor, in his best suit and tie, grasped the lectern in front of banks of TV cameras and rows of blogging and tweeting journalists. Among the audience were Philippa Langley, Michael Ibsen, David Baldwin (who had predicted in 1986 that Richard III might be found and exhumed), Channel 4 executives (they would broadcast Darlow-Smithson’s film that evening) and members of the research teams. Others watched a relay in an adjacent room. Outside, satellite vans were ready to broadcast live to the rest of the world.

  ‘It doesn't look like the face of a tyrant. He’s very handsome. It’s like you could just talk to him.’ Philippa Langley in February 2013 with the model of Richard III’s head. (Andrew Winning/Reuters/Corbis)

  Round the corner and up four flights of stairs, behind an unmarked door in an obscure small room of the D
avid Wilson Library, a complete human skeleton (minus feet) lay under a clear acrylic case on black velvet. Two security guards and two chaplains watched in silence.

  ‘Today’, said Taylor, ‘we bear witness to history.’

  In his second sentence, he said that what we were about to hear would be published in leading peer-reviewed journals. Suddenly, this was no longer a press event: it was an academic conference. When Taylor had finished his introduction, five specialists in turn talked about their fields, with pictures on a screen – Richard Buckley (showing the world the first images of Skeleton I), Jo Appleby, Lin Foxhall, Kevin, Turi and finally Buckley again. More than half an hour after the start, without a cough or dropped pen, the ever-silent room knew what was coming. With immaculate theatrical timing, Richard Buckley paused, looked down at his text, breathed deeply, his broad shoulders straining his jacket, and raised his eyes to the audience.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘It is the academic conclusion of the University of Leicester that beyond reasonable doubt, the individual exhumed at Greyfriars in September 2012 is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England.’

  There was a pause. Then we clapped. Journalists smiled and cheered. We were children at the feet of royalty.

  ‘I was working up to the wire,’ said Turi later. She recalled seeing a match in the first DNA results. ‘I went utterly still,’ she said. ‘And then I got up and did a little dance around the lab!’ She carried on with the work, telling no one – not even her husband, though he might have guessed from seeing her dance in the kitchen. Only by the end of the week before the press event was she convinced Skeleton I was Richard III: his mtDNA precisely matched the two modern samples. It belonged to a relatively rare group (known as J1c2c), making it unlikely the matches could be chance. She told her colleagues on the Sunday. The conference was the next day.35

  At the Leicester University press conference on 4 February 2013, left to right: Richard Buckley, Jo Appleby, Lin Foxhall, Kevin Schürer and Turi King. (Mike Pitts)

  Her father watched the conference from Vancouver. As Turi walked across to the lectern, wearing a plain, long-sleeved black dress and a simple necklace, he knew before anyone else what she would say. They had agreed on a jewelry code.

  A battlefield, and a burial

  What was the weather like, that summer day in Leicestershire in 1485? Was there dew at dawn, a clear blue hope in the crisp air? Or perhaps it was grey, clouds swelling and churning – August is England’s wettest month. Did the sun flash from the decorated gold as Richard’s stolen crown rose in the air? Or did rain gutter from its crevices, leaving mud and grass on Henry’s forehead and dripping nose, discovering paths down his neck and under his loosened armour, to soak into his shirt?

  We don’t know. We don’t know how many fought at Bosworth, or how many died. We have limited knowledge of what skills and what weaponry the armies of the two sides brought to the field, or how they were arranged and how they manoeuvred. At the time of the battle very few can have known exactly what was happening, and people were not in the habit of collecting information after such an event, analysing it objectively and committing it to paper. In other words, the historical record for Bosworth is much like that for any medieval battle: half-remembered gossip and chance incidental detail that needs to be interpreted and brought together with informed guesswork (as no one mentions the weather, for example, it was probably dry) to create a complete picture.

  The new knowledge of Richard III’s grave, of how he lived, died, was buried and forgotten, and of the Greyfriars church where his body was taken in, is a substantial addition to this picture. Research into the excavated remains continues, and we will hear more about both king and church. Also of interest are the linked inquiries the dig has inspired from University of Leicester staff, including speculation about Richard III’s personality and his voice, and new studies of early historical accounts and of Leicester’s Blue Boar Inn.1

  Such inspiration will expand beyond Leicester, and reach not just academic historians and archaeologists, but enthused amateurs and other specialists (the early Richard III portraits would seem to be an obvious subject, and were the spine to be preserved rather than buried, it surely would unlock generations of research grants). The Richard III Society has received unprecedented publicity, acquiring 450 new members in the month after the February press event and nearly 1.5 million hits a day on its website – impressive figures for a small independent organization. It is no surprise to hear the society’s chairman, Phil Stone, proclaim the discovery of Richard III’s grave as ‘truly the greatest thing to happen in five hundred years of Ricardian history’.2

  Channel 4 used its film of the dig (its most watched factual documentary in over 30 years of broadcasting) in evidence to a parliamentary committee.3 Leicester University estimated immediate print media coverage of its Grey Friars Project was worth £2 million ($3.2 million).4 Such attention will affect not just the archaeology department but – as Richard Taylor understood in the early days of the research – the entire university. It was the university that the Times Higher Education Awards celebrated in November 2013 by naming the discovery of Richard III’s remains the Research Project of the Year – across all UK institutions and all subjects. When Richard Buckley and colleagues attend Buckingham Palace in 2014 to receive a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education, they will do so as university representatives.

  Indeed, the international interest must already have benefited both British archaeology and universities as a whole (and could not have hindered Richard Taylor’s move to Chief Operating Officer at Loughborough University in September 2013). Leicester’s Chamber of Commerce, noting that nearly 30,000 people saw a temporary exhibition in the Guildhall in its first month, suggested Richard III could add up to £140 million ($230 million) to the city’s tourist income every year.5 He will do yet more for Britain, not least through reinvigorated interest in Shakespeare’s play.6

  No one could have known that Richard III’s grave lay undisturbed beneath a Leicester car park; to claim otherwise is to confuse luck with insight. All of the above, though, could have been predicted as a consequence of the extraordinary, unpredictable discovery – it was just the scale that was unexpected, and, it felt, unprecedented in the history of archaeology in Britain. Yet there has been further impact. Once in the control, separately, of Philippa Langley and a team of archaeologists, the projects are now in public ownership. It’s as if on that February morning when the world learned that Skeleton I was Richard III, the king died. The funeral approaches. The family argues about his will, and his legacy. Uncles that no one has heard of rifle the silver. Forgotten feuds coalesce; strangers in unfamiliar pubs shout across pints of beer. He’s our king. No, he’s ours.

  Recently I returned to Bow Bridge on King Richards Road, where we began the story in Leicester. There is a new panel beside the stone plaque that Benjamin Broadbent erected in 1856. Placed there by the City Council, it’s bigger and brighter than the Richard III Society’s polite notice, which is now redundant. The Council, as I write, will soon move Richard’s statue to a site opposite its new visitor centre, beside the cathedral where there are plans to rebury the king’s remains. Meanwhile, the County Council launched a competition for a new sculpture, likely to upstage the old statue, for the redesigned cathedral gardens.7 When some Richard III Society members, unhappy with the proposed new tomb design, were reported to have withdrawn their funds, the cathedral was unconcerned. The Society is no longer Richard’s sole contemporary voice in Leicester.8

  19th-century engraving showing Richard III’s crown being offered to the future Henry VII at the Battle of Bosworth field. (from William Howitt and John Smith, John Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, 2, 1858)

  But neither is the city in control. Few had heard of Stephen Nicolay, a self-employed gardener and former archaeologist, until he launched a campaign to have Richard’s remains buried in York. Neither, at first, did many
take his plea seriously, or his claim to be Richard III’s ‘representative and voice’, as a ‘living, collateral descendant’ (one of over a million, said Kevin Schürer, to be found around the world).9 But a High Court judge did, and granted Nicolay’s Plantagenet Alliance the right to a judicial review, ordering that the Ministry of Justice and the University of Leicester should pay the bill. This would cost the university far more than the excavation, even if they won. If they lost, the City Council could be left with an expensive new tourist development whose main attraction was in York. The Richard III Society maintained a dignified neutrality, though it did publish a note to explain, countering apparently widespread belief, that ‘there is no direct evidence whatsoever’ that Richard had planned to be buried in York.10

  Neither Philippa nor the archaeologists had expected any of this. Sometimes it seemed they could do nothing right. When the university controlled information about the dig in 2012, they were accused of hype and manipulation. When they released the story in February 2013 they were told off for publishing results before they had been peer-reviewed; others complained that there was nothing new there anyway. What were they supposed to do? They just wanted to learn about the past. Yet even that had proved divisive.

  The excavation had revealed a slight king with a deformed body who had been attacked from behind, brutally killed and buried with little sign of care. Worse, for Philippa, his appearance seemed uncannily like the portraits she had learned were propaganda, complete with raised shoulder, which aimed to vilify. Yet when the reconstructed head was revealed to the press, Philippa showed them a ‘true likeness of England’s last … warrior king’, ‘an approachable, kindly face’ conveying ‘loyalty and steadfastness’, a man ‘capable of deep thought’.11 This was not the evidence of the skull, of the scientifically reconstructed face: it was all in the art, that part of the process Caroline Wilkinson dubbed ‘guessing’.