by Mike Pitts
12 Cawthorne 2007.
13 ‘It is a relaxed book, and though it does contain a lot of miscellaneous information, its function is simply to entertain.’ Cottrell 1957.
14 Derrick 2005.
15 Mellor and Pearce 1981, 4.
16 The society conducts research into the world of Richard III, publishes a journal, The Ricardian, organizes conferences and has an impressive website, at http://www.richardiii.net.
17 In my old Penguin copy (Tey 1951), Cecily Neville’s name seems to be spelled randomly Cicely or Cecily, suggesting perhaps a knowing wink from the author, whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh. Peter Hitchens has described the book as ‘one of the most important … ever written’, having read which ‘you will never again believe anything that you are told until you have checked it personally’ (A Good Read, BBC Radio 4, 30 October 2012). Who could argue with such a sentiment?
18 The curiously unforgettable tambourine suggestion is Colin Hyde’s, in a video that tours Leicester’s Richard III-associated sites: http://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/multimedia/videos/lookatleicester.html.
19 Plans to celebrate Richard III at the cathedral began in the 1960s; a statue was designed but never made. The eventual memorial slab was made in 1980 by David Kindersley, who had been apprenticed to Eric Gill and died in 1995. His son Peter co-founded the publisher Dorling Kindersley.
20 Try searching Richard III in Google trends; for possibly obvious reasons, before that date there had been hardly any news searches at all.
21 Kendall 1955, 428–29.
22 J. McManaway, In defense of a king, New York Times Book Review 26 August 1956; Kendall 1955, 11.
23 Jones 2002. In a famous incident at Bosworth field, the victorious Henry dons Richard’s lost crown, retrieved from a thorn bush. Richard is described as wearing a crown in several historical sources, and Henry is given it. From these simple observations, Jones conjures three separate scenes: one before the battlefield, in which the king sports his coronation crown in a symbolically laden ceremony, which Jones uses to support a case that Richard had plenty of time and was thus well organized (2002, 23–24); one when Richard leaves Leicester, and a third when he actually fights, in both of which he wears ‘a gold circlet welded to his helmet’, a practical badge of royalty in battle – this was ‘leadership from the front’ (2002, 163–64). See also Hammond 2010, 134–36. Joining in the spirit perhaps a little too enthusiastically, the publisher boasts a quote on the back of my 2010 paperback edition that is not quite what it seems. In “an extraordinary shift … puts this key English battle over the county line THE GUARDIAN” (full quote), the first three words are the book’s author’s, and the rest is an altered extract from the paper’s headline – to a news story, not a review.
Act II, Scene 2
1 The official website of the British monarchy (http://www.royal.gov.uk) later removed that statement, but as of October 2013 nothing had replaced it (J. Russell, Rewriting history through DNA, 2013, The Legal Genealogist, http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/2013/02/03/rewriting-history-through-dna/#fn-5001-8). Although, as we shall see, evidence had long been in print suggesting Richard III’s grave lay undisturbed inside the city walls, many historians repeated contrary stories. For example, Ross (1981, 226) says, ‘the bones were thrown out and the coffin became a horse-trough outside the White Horse Inn’; Seward (1997, 256) that ‘during the Dissolution of the Monasteries … Richard’s bones were dug up and thrown into the River Soar. For many years a coffin said to have been his was used as a horses’ drinking trough’; Jones (2002, 206) that ‘At the dissolution of the monasteries Richard’s body disappeared. No-one knows its final resting place’; and Hammond (2010, 106) that ‘The tomb was destroyed and the body perhaps thrown into the river Soar during the Reformation. All trace of the tomb has vanished’.
2 A. Fox, John Ashdown-Hill from the Search for Richard Project, 2013, http://www.lostincastles.com/history-interviews/2013/3/16/john-ashdown-hill-from-the-search-for-richard-project.html.
3 The rather confused history of the remains and their excavations was described by Paul de Win in 2003, published in English as De Win 2005.
4 C. Mills, Canadian family’s DNA helps identify King Richard III’s remains, Toronto Star 4 February 2013; J. Ashdown-Hill, The search for Richard III, talk at a conference organized by the Richard III Society, 2 March 2013 (http://www.richardiii.net/leicester_conference.php#), at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YGCTkVYR9k.
5 Ashdown-Hill 2006. See also Ashdown-Hill 2013, chapters 14–15, and his website at http://plantagenetdna.webs.com (Plantagenet DNA: The DNA of England’s Plantagenet Kings).
6 Soon after this, he helped the Richard III Society fix its counter-plaque on the wall beside the stone one pictured prominently on the BBC web page. J. Ashdown-Hill, The fate of Richard III’s body, 2004, http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/myths_legends/england/leicester.
7 John Tate, lead author of the 21-page report on the dig, seems to have found it quite interesting: Tate 2007.
8 Ashdown-Hill, The search for Richard III, March 2013, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YGCTkVYR9k. It could not have helped that Time Team presenter Sir Tony Robinson had made a film for Channel 4 about Richard III, broadcast only the year before, in which he said Richard’s body had been dug up and thrown into the River Soar. Fact or Fiction: Richard III, a Spire Films production for Channel 4, first broadcast 3 January 2004.
9 Ashdown-Hill, The search for Richard III, March 2013, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YGCTkVYR9k. ULAS says it has no record of any communications from Ashdown-Hill at this date.
10 Ashdown-Hill 2010, 128 and plate 29.
11 A. Carson and P. Langley, The ‘Looking for Richard Project’, talk at a conference organized by the Richard III Society, 2 March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60CyRdCXls#at=11.
12 Buckley et al. 2013, 521.
13 Billson 1920, 180; Buckley et al. 2013, 521; Foard and Curry 2013, 66.
14 Baldwin 1986, 21.
15 Ashdown-Hill (2013, chapter 11) details the tomb’s manufacture in Nottingham. An apparent transcription of a Latin epitaph shows it commemorated Henry’s generosity and, depending on whose translation you prefer, said Richard ‘held the British Kingdoms in trust’ (Ashdown-Hill 2013, 102) or ‘By trust betray’d … to the Kingdom came’ (Hackett 1757, 92).
16 Buckley et al. 2013, 530.
17 Billson 1920, 185–86; the transcript of Speed’s text is from Ashdown-Hill 2013, Appendix 4.
18 Throsby 1791, 288–89. His name is spoken today as Throwsby.
19 Billson 1920, 182–83; Baldwin 1986, 22. Herrick was born very shortly after the Dissolution; as Billson notes, one might have expected his parents to have passed on a story as dramatic as that of Richard’s exhumation if it had occurred, even if he himself had not witnessed it. David Baldwin made the same point more recently (King’s body ‘lying under city centre’, Daily Telegraph 4 October 1993).
20 Billson 1920, 183; Baldwin 1986, 24, where he made a remarkably successful stab at predicting the actual location of the grave (and see Baldwin 2013, 221–24); Foss 1998, 52. Baldwin, again, in 2002: ‘It is my opinion that [Richard III] is still there, somewhere under those well trodden streets towards St Martins’ (Is there a king under this bridge? Leicester Mercury 8 October 2002).
21 Google Street View photographed this route on a bright sunny day in 2012, in what looks like late September. If you nip up New Street (I recommend starting at the cathedral and following round as I describe in the text – search for Peacock Lane Leicester in Google Map), as it bends to the right you leave the shade of the narrow passage to see the cathedral spire framed ahead of you in the sun. A car park opens up on the left. Continue to the end of that, then face round to the right. You can now see a smaller car park, at the back of which are some temporary wire barriers and, if you look closely, a camera crew. They are filming beside the site of Richard III’s grave. The barriers are protecting the excavation trench, most of wh
ich has been refilled but is there still open, and the grave itself, which is down below the kink in the near side of the trench. If you then continue back to St Martins, turn right and then round to the right where the sun shines across the street, you are looking into a school playground. New black tarmac marks the entirely backfilled and last of the three 2012 excavation trenches. Don’t be tempted by the Sale/Let sign: the City Council even then was negotiating to buy the old school for its new visitor centre.
22 See Billson 1920, 183–84.
23 Throsby 1789, 51.
24 Throsby 1791, 291.
25 Morris and Buckley 2013, 31.
26 The Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland, see http://www.leics.gov.uk/recordoffice. Holding priceless archives in towns and cities across the country, curated by people familiar with the places they document and available to be consulted by anyone, record offices, along with heritage and environment records which collate archaeological evidence, are the heart and lungs of Britain’s history. Occasionally it is necessary to remind cash-starved authorities how much these records, like museums, matter to their citizens.
27 Leicestershire County Council set up there in custom-built offices in 1936; in 1967 the staff moved out into a futuristic and lovely County Hall built on former farmland west of the city (with a fine concrete mural by Anthony Holloway depicting the River Soar), and Leicester City Council moved in, with what is now their Health and Social Care department.
Act II, Scene 3
1 The words are Allison Pearson’s (Me, a sex god? Spooks star Richard Armitage on his army of female fans, Daily Mail 25 January 2010). In 2009 he beat Johnny Depp to top place as the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s ‘Sexiest thing on two legs’.
2 The proposed tomb for King Richard III, http://www.richardiii.net/whats_new.php#team.
3 Carson 2013. Her publisher comments that she examines ‘the events of [Richard III’s] reign as they actually happened, based on reports in the original sources … In the process Carson dares to investigate areas where historians fear to tread, and raises many controversial questions.’
4 A. Carson and P. Langley, The Greyfriars Dig – A new Richard III, March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60CyRdCXls#at=11.
5 For the quotation and details of all the references, see Hipshon 2011, 217–27. Alternative histories of Richard III are well reviewed by Pollard (1991, chapter 8) and Hipshon (2011, chapter 9), the former with good illustrations, noting how dozens of modern novels have taken up the cause of a goodly king.
6 R. Dallek, The medical ordeals of JFK, The Atlantic December 2002. To accommodate the pain Kennedy wore ‘a “corset-type thing” and [slept] with a plywood board under his mattress’; out of public sight, he would sometimes walk with crutches. He suffered from osteoporosis and degeneration of his lower back, to counter which a metal plate was inserted but later removed in a second operation. Dallek even suggests that it was the back brace that held Kennedy erect and in the path of the fatal bullet.
7 R. Dallek, Why do we admire a president who did so little? Salon 20 January 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/01/20/jfk_dallek_anniversary.
8 Curiously, after I had written the above, I discovered that Richard Armitage had tweeted from the Hobbit movie set in March 2013 (responding to the question, if you could have dinner with any three people, real or fictional, who would they be?), ‘Richard III, John F. Kennedy, and Ian McKellen.’ McKellen may have been invited as a fellow actor playing Gandalf or as a performer of a famous Shakespearean Richard III – or perhaps both. One theory about Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s killer, was that he was a substituted Russian spy, leading to the excavation of his grave in 1981 and the demonstration, largely on the basis of the teeth, that Oswald was Oswald. He was a model traitor, a US Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, bringing to mind Richard III’s battlefield cry of ‘Treason, treason, treason!’
9 R. A. Griffiths in Ross 1981, xi–xxviii.
10 Ashdown-Hill 2013, 22.
11 Hunt 2011.
12 Morris et al. 2011.
13 A. Carson and P. Langley, The Greyfriars Dig – A new Richard III, March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60CyRdCXls#at=11.
14 Austrums 2011.
15 A. Carson and P. Langley, The Greyfriars Dig – A new Richard III, March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60CyRdCXls#at=11.
16 Leicester City Council plans to close museums as part of cutbacks, Leicester Mercury 26 January 2011.
17 Langley 2012a.
18 Langley 2012b.
19 K. Catcheside, Communication, reputation and fees: Q&A with Leicester’s Richard Taylor, Guardian Professional http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2011/mar/14/university-of-leicester-richard-taylor-reputation-and-fees, 14 March 2011.
20 Ashdown-Hill is not happy with the commemorative service at Sutton Cheney. The notion that Richard III attended mass there is, he says, an ‘unfortunate and quite incredible 20th-century invention … There is certainly no contemporary authority for this nonsense’, which, following Foss (1998, 40 and footnote 67), he ascribes to the early days of the Richard III Society in the 1920s (2010, 76).
Act III, Scene 1
1 There is in fact a good view from the Holiday Inn – ‘Henry Tudor’s camp’ in the original – from high bedrooms on the south side of which you can see St Augustine Road and the park where Richard’s statue was, sweep round across town where Richard’s body would have been carried and displayed, and find the car park backed by the distinctive Victorian roof-line of the old school, site of the new visitor centre.
2 It was slight wonder that some journalists left a little confused. The Daily Telegraph reported (Is Richard III ‘buried under council car park’? 24 August 2013) that the story that the king’s body had been thrown in the River Soar could be traced back to a 17th-century map maker called ‘John Speedie’; perhaps he should have left his car in the parking lot.
3 Alderman Newton’s Boys’ School was opened in 1784 with money left by Gabriel Newton (who, ‘in spite of the many unpaid debts of his clients and relations … died an extremely prosperous man’). It moved to St Martins in 1864, where its building was enlarged in the 1880s and 1890s. It was taken over by the Local Education Authority in 1907, becoming Leicester Grammar School. See Place 1960.
Act III, Scene 2
1 For a comprehensive introduction to this field, covering the nature of the evidence, cross-cultural approaches to death, and the ethics and politics of burial archaeology, see Tarlow and Stutz 2013; useful in a specifically British context is Giesen 2013. Sarah Tarlow is a professor of archaeology at the University of Leicester. As I was writing this book, she and Matthew Beamish, an archaeologist with the University of Leicester Archaeological Services who did not work at the Greyfriars site, wrote to the Independent newspaper on their concerns about the display of a photo of a severed human head in an art exhibition (Hirst photo betrays the dead, Independent 13 July 2013). Picked up by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, the issue was debated at length online (Don’t lose your head over Hirst, Guardian 17 July 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/jul/17/damien-hirst-photograph-severed-head-censorship); see also S. Tarlow, Damien Hirst insults the dignity of the dead, The Conversation at http://theconversation.com/damien-hirst-insults-the-dignity-of-the-dead-16210.
2 See Parker Pearson, M., Pitts, M. and Sayer, D. 2013. Changes in policy for excavating human remains in England and Wales, in Giesen 2013, 148–57.
3 St George’s Chapel, Windsor (Berkshire), is the burial place of Richard III’s older brother Edward IV, and of Edward’s predecessor Henry VI, whom Richard himself arranged to be reburied there in 1484. Henry’s vault was opened in 1910, revealing the fragmentary remains of ‘a fairly strong man, aged between 45 and 55’ (T. Tatton-Brown, Letters: What Richard did with Henry’s bones, Times 23 March 2013).
4 Horrible Histories is an award-winning comedy series made for the BBC that plays with histor
y in a sometimes penetratingly informative way. One of Farnaby’s best known characters is Death, who checks historical figures into the afterlife after hearing the strange ways in which they died, among them Richard I (but not III). My daughter frequently complains how boring archaeology is, but she loves Horrible Histories.
5 Richard III: The King in the Car Park, a Darlow Smithson Production for Channel 4, first broadcast 4 February 2013. The Darlow Smithson scenes described in this chapter come from this film, though sequences in the second film also helped to reconstruct events: Richard III: The Unseen Story, a Darlow Smithson Production for More 4, first broadcast 27 February 2013. Film shot by Carl Vivian for the University of Leicester also proved critical to understanding, with, of course, discussions with people who were there.
6 Richard III: The King in the Car Park.
7 S. McGinty, How Richard III was discovered by an ex-Scotsman employee, Scotsman 6 February 2013.
8 In the Channel 4 films Richard III: The King in the Car Park, and Richard III: The Unseen Story, it might look as if the public were watching and filming the excavation of Trench 1. That is an illusion of editing.
