Richard III: A common criminal We are burying a psychopathic serial killer with the reinterment of Richard III, says Nigel Jones Wouldn t Richard want to be buried with his wife in Westminster Abbey? Queen Ann lies there in a grave that is unmarked, if enviably close to the remains of St Edward the Confessor. Photo: Alamy By Nigel Jones 7:05AM GMT 21 Mar 2015 Comment When the twisted bones of King Richard III are laid to rest in a magnificent modern tomb in Leicester Cathedral, it will be with all the pomp and ceremony that England s Church and State are still capable of bestowing. But does our most controversial King deserve the honour? The huge upswell of interest aroused by the finding of his skeleton under a council car park, and the controversy over where to re-bury him, have obscured the most salient fact about the wretched little man. He was, in modern terms, a psychopathic serial killer who eliminated his imagined enemies: friend and foe, adult and child, with the merciless ruthlessness of an Ian Brady or a Peter Sutcliffe. Richard s most notorious crime, of course, was the smothering by his hired hitmen of his nephews, King Edward V and his younger brother, Richard the 'Princes in the Tower the children whose frail bodies stood in the way of his plan to usurp the throne for himself in 1483. Those who doubt Richard s responsibility for this double infanticide should look at his blood-stained record. For Richard had form.
A psychiatrist defending Richard in a contemporary law court would point to his disturbed childhood and youth as mitigation for his long criminal career. He had seen his father, brother and guardian die violent deaths on the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses. He had grown up in an atmosphere of fear, treachery, plots and open violence culminating in another brother, King Edward IV, ordering the judicial drowning of his remaining brother, George, Duke of Clarence, in a butt of Malmsey wine in the Tower. Small wonder, then, that at his own coronation Richard was seen to be playing with a dagger at his side, drawing it in and out of its sheath, while shooting suspicious glances around him. The Tower was also the scene of the first of Richard s recorded murders, a regicide almost more shocking than the deaths of the Princes in the same location a decade later. This was the butchering of the feeble-minded King Henry VI, the last Lancastrian monarch. At least three contemporary chroniclers accused Richard of murdering Henry with his own hands as the saintly sovereign knelt at his prayers. Once his domineering elder brother Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard s trail of blood grew thicker as he slaughtered his way to the crown. The first to die was William, Lord Hastings, the very man who had helped to engineer the coup that brought Richard to the throne. Hastings, accused of treason at a meeting of Richard s new council in the Tower, was decapitated on a rough wooden builder s block after Richard had sworn to have his victim s head off before lunchtime. Another erstwhile ally of the king, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, recognising Richard s truly evil nature when it was too late, was executed in Salisbury market place after rebelling against him. Two other perceived enemies, Lord Rivers and Sir Richard Grey (respectively uncle and halfbrother of the little princes), were arrested in their beds after being entertained at dinner at Richard s table and lulled into drunken sleep at the Rose and Crown Inn in Stony Stratford, before being sent north to Richard s Yorkshire heartland to be quietly murdered. Richard III had a long list of crimes to answer for before his own subjects appalled by his tyranny and the killing of the princes, which was shocking even in such a blood-drenched age rebelled after just two years of his rule. They helped the unknown Welshman Henry Tudor to defeat Richard s army at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, killed the king before he could flee, and dragged his torn and battered body to the nearby town of Leicester. The Richard III Society, which helped find Richard s dishonoured original grave, may huff and puff but almost all serious modern historians have come to the same conclusion: contemporary evidence rather than Tudor propaganda leaves little room for doubt that he is guilty of the crimes for which posterity (and Shakespeare) have traditionally condemned him. To pretend otherwise, as so many Ricardians do, is sentimental fantasy. We may be burying a King in Leicester, but we are also interring a common criminal.
1. HOME» 2. HISTORY Richard III: We re burying the wrong body There is much controversy surrounding the reburial of Richard III, but the biggest question should be, is this even him? says Dominic Selwood Email Archaeologists have been searching for the remains of Richard III, Britain's last Plantagenet king Photo: Univeristy of Leicester/PA By Dominic Selwood 7:05AM GMT 21 Mar 2015 Comment Away from the Leicester-York battle or the Anglican-Catholic liturgical debate, the biggest question about the reburial of Richard III the most unutterable one is whether we are even burying the right bones. The evidence, you may be surprised to learn, is very far from clear. The way you normally hear it is that the skeleton has a bent spine, is related to the House of York, died violently, and was buried in Grey Friars, the lost church of Leicester. Therefore, it is Richard. However, there are major and I do mean major problems with this. Richard III returns to Bosworth Field for final time Richard III: A common criminal
Richard died in 1485, but the two carbon dating tests performed on his bones gave dates of 1430 1460 and 1412 1449. These were then adjusted with a statistical algorithm because he ate a lot of fish, resulting in a new range of 1475 1530. Really, you might as well stick your finger in the air. The DNA analysis has also been controversial. The skeleton s mitochondrial DNA shows descent from the same female line as Richard. But every mother passes the same mitochondrial DNA to her sons and daughters, and her daughters pass it to their sons and daughters, and so on. Over generations and centuries, that means a large group of people in different places with different surnames. The other usable DNA from the bones is the Y-chromosome DNA, which passes from father to son. Unfortunately, the Leicester car park bones do not have Richard s expected male-line DNA. This means either the skeleton is not Richard, or that the Plantagenet line has, at an unknown date, been broken by illegitimacy. This male-line DNA is therefore worthless, as it does not prove one way or another whether the skeleton is Richard. Then there is the fact his DNA codes are for blond hair and blue eyes, when we know Richard almost certainly had black hair and brown eyes. Although blond hair can darken to a degree during childhood, blue eyes do not mutate into brown ones. Richard III: A hero maligned by Shakespeare So the carbon dating and genetic evidence is a bit of a mess. Professor Michael Hicks, a leading Richard III scholar, has challenged Leicester University s claim that we can be 99.999 per cent certain it is Richard. The most we can conclude, he points out, is that the bones belong to someone with the same female-line DNA group as Richard. No more. Away from the science, there are other difficult questions. Nothing actually links the bones to the Battle of Bosworth Field. In fact, the skeleton s fish-adjusted date range covers the entire Wars of the Roses as well as a number of other conflicts. Richard was a war veteran but the bones show no healed wounds. Nor can we know who else may have been buried at Grey Friars. Some believe that even if Richard had been buried there, his body was most likely exhumed at the Dissolution and thrown into the nearby river. So, as we prepare for a week of royal spectacle, the sort England always does stirringly well, it is worth pausing during the pageantry to wonder if it is indeed King Richard III being given such a glittering reburial, or whether his cold, battle-scarred Plantagenet bones still lie out there, somewhere, undiscovered and unrecognised. * Dominic Selwood is author of Knights of the Cloister (Boydell Press) Em ail
Richard III: A hero maligned by Shakespeare Richard III was an innovative king of England, argues Dr Phil Stone, who doesn't deserve his monsterous reputation Email The torso has a pronounced bias to the left, the spine as twisted as a tapeworm Photo: University of Leicester By Dr Phil Stone 7:05AM GMT 21 Mar 2015 Comment History has not dealt justly with the posthumous reputation of our last Plantagenet king. Many commonly held ideas about him emanate not from historical study, but from William Shakespeare. His play, 'Tragedy of King Richard the Third, first performed in 1633, is a splendid piece of drama, depicting the king as a monster, the devil incarnate, who enjoys a murderous climb to the throne yet the known facts simply don t support this version of events. Like many of Shakespeare s other plays, underhand politicking and a high body count
make for great drama but it is not history. Since Richard s remains were found in Leicester in 2012, the question has often been asked whether the discovery will make a difference to the way people think about him. Will it finally dispel the myths? It certainly should, since his remains have already started to set the record straight. Some of the more fanciful myths have given Richard III a withered arm, but there was no evidence of it in his skeleton. Many portrayals give him a severe hunchback. Again, there is no evidence, except for a moderate scoliosis, which is not the same thing. Richard III: We're burying the wrong body Strip away the spin, the unfair innuendo, the Tudor artistic shaping and the lazy acquiescence of later ages, and Richard III is no longer the monster depicted by Shakespeare. It is not widely appreciated that Richard III was an innovative king of England. Some of his legal reforms continued long after his death, with some still embedded in our laws today. He was the first king to use English to swear his coronation oath and to record acts of parliament. He had a genuine commitment to fair play in the judicial system, his actions and proclamations stressing that his laws were to be administered impartially without delay or favour. An important initiative was the development of an early form of Legal Aid, which provided support for those unable to afford lawyers by allowing people to make direct petitions to the Royal Council. He also supported the new book-printing industry by the removal of trade restrictions, a policy reflecting the king s own personal interest in books. Richard III: A common criminal When the Duke of Gloucester became patron of the Richard III Society more than 30 years ago, he wrote that its purpose and strength came from a belief that the truth is more powerful than lies a faith that, even after all these centuries, the truth is important. It is proof of our sense of civilised values that something as esoteric and as fragile as a reputation is worth campaigning for. The discovery of the king s remains and their reburial next week are the two most exciting things to happen in recent Ricardian history. Now the Society will continue, with renewed vigour, to seek a meaningful reappraisal of Richard III s reputation. Dr Phil Stone is chairman of the Richard III Society (www.richardiii.net)