April 25, 2023 • 34 mins
After the Battle of Bosworth Field, Henry Tudor became King Henry VII. But what happened to the king he replaced, King Richard III? Well, we weren't quite sure. Not until 2012, when a group of archeologists galvanized by an amateur named Philippa Langley made a momentous discovery in a Leicester parking lot.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankie Listener Discretion advised King Richard
(00:20):
the Third was preparing for battle. After three decades of
the civil conflict that have come to be known as
the Wars of the Roses, the fighting between two rival
claimants to the throne of England was finally reaching its head.
Richard knew as he was preparing to face off against
(00:42):
his rival, Henry Tudor, that this would be the end
of the fighting.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
This battle at.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Bosworth Field would be, as Richard remarked, the end of
either wars or his life, though pop culture portrayals in
the Senate curies since Richard's death have often painted him
in the imagination as a middle aged man. On August
twenty second, fourteen eighty five, Richard the Third was only
(01:12):
thirty two years old. He would lead his men into battle,
descending into the fray himself, and so he wore heavy
armor and a helmet covered his face. And whether it
was a symbolic decision or whether it was a strategic
one meant to inspire and rally his troops atop his helmet,
(01:36):
Richard the Third secured his actual crown on that morning
at Bosworth Field. Henry Tudor's men approached first. They had
the advantage of readying themselves on the field of battle
before Richard's men. But soon the king descended on Tudor
(01:57):
with full strength, and its seemed like Richard the Third
would be victorious. His men knocked over the Tudor standard bearer,
the man holding the banner which marked the position of
their commander. It was an incredibly powerful and symbolic move
(02:18):
that would have alerted Tudor soldiers to the fact that
their captain might be dead. But then the tide shifted.
Tudor had reserve men led by a noble named Lord Stanley,
and Stanley's fresh army overwhelmed the exhausted Riccardian men. At
(02:40):
some point, King Richard was thrown from his horse. Shakespeare
famously imagined him in the heat of battle shouting my
kingdom for a horse, and then the king, fighting on foot,
lost his helmet. King Richard the Third, the last English
(03:01):
king to die in battle, was struck down by a
blow to the back of the head strong enough to
dislodge bone and brain. Word of his death spread across
the battlefield Like a ripple. The crown that Richard had
been wearing into battle had fallen among the dirt and blood.
(03:23):
It was recovered, and Lord Stanley, as kingmaker, whose soldiers
had turned the tide of the battle, had the honor
of placing it atop Henry Tudor's head. From the dead
temples of this bloody wretch have I plucked off to
grace thy brows withal Stanley says of the crown in Shakespeare.
(03:47):
And though the real Stanley almost certainly had found the
crown in the mud and had not actually pulled it
off of Richard's dead body, it was a profound moment
of symbolism. There would be no rush for Henry Tudor's
official royal coronation. He was crowned on the battlefield Henry
(04:11):
the seventh, As for Richard, while history is told by
the victors, and history was being written very quickly in
real time after the Battle of Bosworth Field. For Henry
the Seventh's claim to the throne to be legitimate, his
narrative that Richard the third was a villainous usurper needed
(04:34):
to be legitimate as well. Richard's dead body was stripped
and paraded publicly, after all, as many people as possible
needed to know that the former king was actually dead.
The Dead Richard Parade proceeded to the nearby town of Leicester,
where it underwent whatever humiliations and mockery would have felt
(04:58):
fitting for a murderous tyrant struck down, But from there
sources petered out. Some say that Richard's bones had been
thrown in the River Sore. Others wrote that he was
buried in the chapel of Greyfriars Priory. But over the centuries,
the exact fate of the lost King's body, even the
(05:22):
exact location of the priory itself, disappeared from record. A king,
one of the most famous kings of England, was just gone,
but not forever. Five hundred and twenty seven years after
Richard the Third was struck down in battle, a team
(05:45):
of archaeologists, galvanized by a passionate amateur named Philip A. Langley,
would uncover his final resting place in one of the
most exciting archaeological discoveries of the twenty five first century.
From under the staff parking lot of a municipal building,
(06:07):
the bones of Richard the Third were brought to the surface,
and with them a fascinating conversation about how history is
written and who gets to write it. Because this isn't
just the story of a man from the fifteenth century.
It's a story about Philippa Langley and the University of
(06:28):
Leicester scientists, a story of a mid century detective novel
and a king Richard the Third fan club. It's the
story of a team of genetics researchers and bureaucrats and
a furniture designer in Canada. For years, Richard the Third
had been there, buried just beneath two feet of earth
(06:51):
in a parking lot, waiting for his story to be rediscovered.
Incredibly enough, Richard was found on most beneath a reserved
parking space marked plainly with the letter R. I'm Danish
Schwartz and this is noble blood. Pretty much as soon
(07:24):
as Henry the seventh became King of England, he set
about stabilizing his claim to the throne. Whether you believe
that includes him killing two princes imprisoned in the Tower
of London who may or may not have already been
dead by the time Henry became king is not something
I will be weighing in on on this particular episode,
(07:45):
but Henry the seventh did begin solidifying his power through propaganda.
Even the nomenclature of the Wars of the Roses is
a bit of Tudor trickery. Though the Yorks did occasionally
use the White World as their sigil, it was used
much more frequently after the fact, in order to give
(08:06):
Henry's claim to the throne a clean, digestible narrative. On
one side, there was the red Rose of Lancaster, on
the other the white Rose of York. Henry, taking up
the Lancastrian claim, married Elizabeth of York and united England
under a new dynasty, the Tutors with a new sigil,
(08:28):
a rose that's red and white. But as I've alluded
to before, though Henry was a descendant of King Edward
the Third, his claim to the throne through lineage was,
to put it, mildly shaky, especially compared to Richard the
Third's claim. There's a fine line between hero who just
(08:50):
claimed his throne legitimately and opposed a tyrant and guy
who just murdered the rightful king, and Henry was determined
to land on the side of the former. A young
page in the household of Henry's Lord Chancellor proved to
be exactly what Henry Tudor needed. This young page wrote
(09:15):
a book entitled The History of Richard the Third, which,
in the words of Stephen Greenblatt at The New Yorker quote,
wove together every dark rumor about Richard's brief life into
a brilliant narrative which paints a portrait of a bold, gifted,
and ineradicably evil man whose evil was marked in his
(09:38):
very body end quote. The history described Richard as short,
crooked backed, with one shoulder higher than the other, and
a personality that matched with the author saw as God's
judgment made visible.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Quote. He was close and.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Secret, a deep, dissimilar lowly of continents end quote. In
other words, this man was born evil, a despicable man,
and a worse king, and the fact that he was
short and twisted was evidence of that.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
The page who.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Wrote this history, in case you were wondering, was Thomas Moore.
The Tudor propaganda train continued on with Shakespeare's famous History
that sees Richard as no less of a villain, but
a more complicated one, a man lonely and plodding and
all too aware of how his hunchback and disfigured arm
(10:36):
hold back his ambitions. It's a distinction between the two
texts that I think is interesting enough to consider for
another minute. Back to Greenblatt at the New Yorker quote.
In Moore's history, Richard's physical deformity is an uncanny sign
of his viciousness, a kind of preternatural portence or emblem.
(10:58):
In Shakespeare, it is the root condition of his psychopathology.
There is nothing mechanical in this conditioning, certainly no suggestion
that all men with twisted spines become cunning murderers. But
Shakespeare does suggest that a child unloved by his mother,
mocked by his peers, and forced to regard himself as
(11:22):
a monster, will develop certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of
them both destructive and self destructive.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
End quote.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Complexly motivated or not. Thanks to tudor writers, Richard the
Third's reputation as a ruler in the popular culture was
well established by the twentieth century, to the degree that
to defend him, or even point out the way his
tutor propaganda misinformed our perceptions of him, was outside of
(11:57):
academic circles. The contrary position, if you asked the average
person on the street about Richard the Third, they would
almost certainly come back with words like hunchback, scheming, murderer.
Though Edinburgh based screenwriter Phil B. Langley would lead the
charge of uncovering Richard the Third's body in twenty twelve,
(12:20):
she was not the first person to suggest that maybe
the King's reputation was unwarranted as far as modern popular
culture goes. One of the biggest pillars in the Richard
the Third Reclamation movement was actually a nineteen fifty one
detective novel by Josephine Tay called The Daughter of Time.
(12:44):
In the book, Tay's recurring detective Alan Grant, not to
be confused with Jurassic Parks. Alan Grant is stuck in
bed with a broken leg, bored without his job. Grant
sees a portrait of Richard and is struck by the
man's apparent kindness. Grant is a detective with a preternatural
(13:07):
talent for judging people's guilt and innocence based on their
face and his gut feelings, and so upon seeing Richard's face,
Grant thinks, well, that man couldn't have murdered his two
nephews with the help of a research archivist, Grant pours
through every book and text available to him, very real
(13:29):
books and texts, I might add, as he builds an
argument that the reader can follow along with every step
of the way, that Richard Third was not in fact
the likeliest culprit for the murder of his nephews. Tay's
book made a massive impact on popular and intellectual culture,
(13:50):
and it was the first in a wave of books
and media in the fifties and sixties revisiting.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
The history of Richard the Third.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Though a group of amateur historians and Richard the Third
defenders had formed a group in nineteen twenty nine calling
themselves the Fellowship of the White Boar, after Richard's heraldic badge,
the group had mostly fallen by the wayside in the
preceding decades. A daughter of Time Reader named a Soulda
(14:21):
Wygram was galvanized enough by the book to reform the
group under a new name, the Richard the Third Society.
Philippa Langley would form the society's Edinburgh chapter. Langley had
first encountered Richard Third in a biography written by Paul
(14:42):
Murray Kendall, and since then she had been devoted to
rehabilitating the image of an English ruler she believed had
been wrongfully maligned. The legacy of King Richard the Third's
missing body nagged at her. Langley was research reaching a
screenplay that she wanted to write about Richard, and so
(15:03):
she went to Leicester to scope out the scene where
it was rumored the king's body was taken after he
was killed. Langley described walking over the car park where
she believed Richard was buried, lingering at the reserved spot
with the painted R quote. I just felt like I
(15:24):
was walking on Richard the Third's grave. I can't explain
it end quote. A medieval historian named John Rouse had
written a few years after the Battle of bosworth Field
that Richard the Third was buried in Greyfriars Priory, but
even though that area in modern Leicster was called Greyfriars,
(15:45):
the church itself was gone somewhere under a parking lot,
a school yard, a street. The church had been demolished
in fifteen thirty eight after Henry the eighth Henry the
seventh son dissolved the monasteries the Tudor dynasty, inadvertently adding
insult to injury. I suppose Langley's intuition wasn't pulled out
(16:09):
of thin air. In the nineteen eighties, an academic named
David Baldwin suggested that Richard might be buried under that
parking lot, but no one seemed that interested in while
doing anything about it. It would be a lot of
money and a lot of trouble for something that was
(16:30):
basically a theory, a historical rumor. A dig would cost
tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more experts would need
to be galvanized. Off site parking would have to be arranged,
and even if they found some random bones, which again
was no guarantee at all, who could even say if
(16:52):
they were Richard the Third's. But Langley's mission was now
officially underway. She would pick up the man of finding
justice for Richard by finding Richard himself. After all, to
quote Alan Grant, the detective in A Daughter in Time,
if you can't be a pioneer, what's wrong with leading
(17:15):
a crusade? There's that old saying about constant water and
its effect on stone end quote. It took Langley years,
literal years years of repeatedly requesting that the University of
Leicester undertake the dig in the Social Services Department parking
(17:35):
lot aka the best guess for where the buried former
location of Greyfriars Priory would be where Richard might be
buried nothing. But then a miracle of science and research occurred.
A historian named John Ashton Hill was doing research on
(17:57):
Richard the Third's sister and he made a breakthrough. He
had been able to trace the matrilineal line of descent
mother to daughter from Richard's mom and sister to a
modern woman named Joy Ibsen who lived in Canada. Richard
the Third had no living descendants and being able to
(18:20):
trace his matrilineal line of descent was a huge deal.
One because it's a fun cocktail party conversation starter for
that family in Canada, but also because now if a
body was unearthed in Leicester, there would be a way
to determine whether or not it actually was Richard the
(18:40):
Third using mitochondrial DNA.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
This is a podcast on.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
History, not genetics, but in very very simplistic terms, the
mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Kidding, but basically,
most human DNA is located in a cell nucleus, but
a tiny part of the genome is located in the
mitochondria and the DNA of people from the same matrilineal
(19:08):
line will have identical sequences. Langley invited Ashton Hill to
give a lecture in Scotland through the Richard the Third Society,
and the two of them, along with a couple of
their fellow Ricardians, officially formed the Looking for Richard project.
The funding was the most important hurdle, but eventually, by
(19:31):
securing documentary television interest and raising considerable funds through donations
of members of the Richard the Third Society both in
Europe and in the United States, the requisite institutions in
Leicester agreed on the dig. The University of Leicester archaeologist
(19:51):
Richard Buckley, who was the dig's project manager, knew that
success was unlikely. He told Langley to keep her expectations
in check. Fifty to fifty at best for finding the
church and nine to one against finding the grave, he said.
After a few months of preparation of testing the site
(20:14):
and researching possible trenched dig locations, the dig officially began
on August twenty fifth, twenty twelve. After just one day
they found human bones. It took another week to carefully
dig back and unearth what was soon revealed to be
(20:35):
an undisturbed human skeleton, missing its feet, but almost entirely complete,
near what would have been the choir of the church,
buried in a place of honor. The body wasn't buried
in a coffin, and it wasn't covered by a shroud.
It had been hurriedly dumped into a grave that was
(20:57):
too small. Most asonishing of all, the body's spine was
curved in a visible, pronounced s shape. This man, when
he had been alive, must have been hunched over one
shoulder taller than the other. They had found Richard the third,
(21:19):
at least they hoped they had. Now they just needed
to prove it. Analysis of the body determined that it
was a man in his late twenties or early thirties
who died in battle between fourteen fifty five and fifteen forty.
All of that was in line with Richard, who died
(21:40):
at thirty two in fourteen eighty five. The scientists also
proved that the body would have had a high protein
diet with plenty of meat and expensive fish, which would
have been available to an incredibly privileged class of person
in the fourteen hundreds. They also digitally reconstructed the body's
face based on its skull, and it looked like portraits
(22:04):
we have of Richard. And then there was the hunchback.
Some Richard the Third supporters had dismissed the idea of
Richard having a hunchback as pure Tudor fiction, but no,
here it was. The body that they found in the
parking lot had a pronounced visible s shape severe scoliosis, which,
(22:28):
if it hadn't given Richard an outright hunchback, certainly would
have made one shoulder sit higher than the other. This
detail thrills me. It makes the discovery of Richard the
Third's body so much more interesting in my mind, because really,
what does the fact that Richard had scoliosis or even
(22:48):
a hunchback say about his personality? Absolutely nothing. Yet for
centuries it's been a primary factor in our understanding of
rich Id. Tudor writers attempted to use the hunchback as
a metaphor or motivator, and Riccardians tried to dismiss it
(23:10):
in their quest to repaint Richard as a straight backed hero.
History is storytelling, and stories love metaphors. Heroes are handsome
and tall, princesses are beautiful villains have crookbacks and shriveled hands,
(23:31):
But that's not how the real world works. Richard might
have been guilty of killing his nephews, or he might
have been entirely innocent, or he might have been guilty
of a slew of other terrible things, but none of
that would be because of how his spine was shaped.
I find it fascinating.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Back to the scientific research, the matrilineal DNA proved to
be the most conclusive piece of evidence in conjunction with
all of the other evidence. The researchers at the University
of Leicester had also tested DNA from the patrilineal line
father to son for fifteen generations. But even though the
(24:16):
two modern descendants they found had DNA patterns that matched
each other, neither of them matched the body that was
supposed to be Richard. Well, that's a problem, but not
really a big problem. You see, every generation there's a
risk of false paternity, someone identifying someone as the father
(24:39):
who wasn't, And in the fifteen generations between Richard the
Third and now among feuding nobles, there are plenty of
historians who can point to specific cases that might have
thrown off the patrilineal line, but matrilineal DNA, well, it's
(25:00):
much harder to misidentify someone as the mother. Doctor Torry
King at the University of Leicester was able to extract
the mitochondrial DNA from the body they dug up and
compare it to the DNA of two of the living
descendants of Richard's sister. One of the descendants was a
(25:22):
cabinet maker named Michael Ibsen, son of the Canadian Joy Ibsen,
who had been identified years earlier. All of the DNA
samples from the matrilineal line shared a rare type of
mitochondrial DNA carried by only one to two percent of
the population. It was a match, according to The New
(25:46):
York Times. When doctor King saw the results, she quote
went very quiet, then did a little dance around the
laboratory end quote. So as the University of Leicester made
clear beyond a reasonable doubt the body did belong to
Richard the Third. The next question was what could it
(26:09):
teach us. The killing wound had been a blow to
the head, most likely from a halberd that hit Richard
from behind below his left ear with enough force that
it knocked away bone and brain. Richard's helmet evidently had
fallen off or been removed at some point in combat,
(26:30):
which gives credence to the way that Shakespeare painted the
scene with Richard having fallen from his horse and fighting
on foot in the fray. There were a number of
other wounds on Richard's body, but because they were in
places that armor would have been covering, scientists and historians
(26:51):
determined that they were what's known as humiliation wounds committed
to Richard after he was already dead, possibly when they
were carrying the body from Bosworth Field to Leicester. Most
news outlets and historians, when they're speaking about it publicly
leave it just there, just describing them as humiliation injuries.
(27:14):
But in case you're curious, and my apologies in advance
for this. In this case, it means that Richard had
wounds the face, and also that someone attempted to stick
a knife or sword or dagger up his deceased buttocks.
Richard's naked body was thrown over horseback and brought from
(27:37):
Bosworth Field to Leicester, where Friars, no doubt terrified at
the regime change happening in real time, tried to bury him.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
As quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Richard was buried in a shallow grave at the head
of gray Friar's Priory, near the choir, naked and with
no winding sheet or shroud. The grave was so small
that Richard, who had only been five to two, had
to have his neck pressed forward and upright so that
he would fit in the hole. The skeleton was also
(28:11):
found with its hands close together pulled over its right hips,
which indicate that Richard's hands may have been tied together
at the time. Neither arm was shrunken or shriveled, and
there Richard stayed underground as the world above him changed
(28:34):
until summer twenty twelve, when the archaeologists at the University
of Leicester announced that the bones exhumed beneath the parking
lot were beyond a reasonable doubt, the last Plantagenet King
of England. They arranged for Richard to be presented on
a black velvet lined table under a glass case for
(28:58):
journalists and their public to see. Two chaplains sat in
the room as journalists filed in providing the dignity that
the university said that the king was owed. It would
be another several years before bureaucratic red tape would allow
(29:18):
poor Richard to reach his final resting place with rival
factions vying for power in a way that resembles a
much lower stakes archaeology based War of the Roses. Members
of the Richard the Third Society had voiced their opinion
that Richard should be interred with other English kings at
(29:39):
Westminster Abbey. A group comprised of Plantagenet descendants sued for
the right to bury Richard near his lands in York,
but in the end the ruling was made that the
body would be buried there in Leicester, in an Anglican cathedral,
just two hundred yards from the parking lot where Richard
(30:00):
had been found. It seems the legal system ruled in
the manner consistent with the British Museum's approach to possession
finder's keepers. On March twenty sixth, twenty fifteen, Richard the
Third was buried in a ceremony with the pomp and
(30:20):
circumstance befitting a king. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided the
ancestral research had revealed that the actor Benedict Cumberbatch was
a relative of Richard the Third, and he read a poem.
This was twenty fifteen, Benedict Cumberbatch was hot as they came.
(30:41):
Both Philippa Langley and John Ashton Hills were present too.
The coffin that Richard the Third was buried in was beautiful,
polished to glistening, made of golden English oak and ewe.
It was constructed by hand for this very occasion to
(31:01):
inter a king. But it wasn't built by someone who
specialized in coffins. King Richard Third's coffin was constructed by
Michael Ibsen, the cabinet maker from Canada whose DNA had
proved to be instrumental in bringing Richard to his final
(31:23):
resting place. That's the story of the unearthing and reburial
of Richard the Third. But keep listening after a brief
sponsor break to hear a little bit more about Richard Third.
In pop culture, thanks in no small part to Shakespeare,
(31:56):
there have been plenty of depictions of Richard Third stage
and on screen. One could even argue that in Disney's
Lion King, Scar the scheming slightly disfigured Machiavellian uncle owes
as much to Richard the Third or more as he
does to Claudius in Hamlet. Hamlet is, of course the
(32:18):
play whose plot explicitly inspired Lion King. But I think
my favorite portrayal of a version of Richard IID isn't
evil at all, or at least, let's say, not as
evil as he could be. The Game of Thrones series
is explicitly inspired by the Wars of the Roses, and
(32:41):
some of the parallels are incredibly obvious. The Starks are
analogs for the Yorks, the Lanisters, the Lancasters, but not
every character and dynamic has a one to one equivalent.
Tyrian Lanister, who's portrayed by Peter Dinklage in the HBO series,
is obviously a Lanister, which should correspond to Lancaster. Richard
(33:06):
the Third was a York. But Tyrian is also scheming
and self serving, the self aware chess player who sees
moves before others make them. He's also a little person
who frequently remarks, not unlike Shakespeare's Richard with a hunchback,
that his physical difference is what holds him back from
(33:27):
the glory afforded to his brother. And of course, Tyrian
is the uncle to a boy king rumored to be illegitimate.
Whether you watched or read Game of Thrones and saw
Tyrian as a villain or a hero or somewhere in between. Depends,
I think on your point of view. Noble Blood is
(34:05):
a production of iHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me
Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston,
Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The
show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima
(34:28):
Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers
Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankie Listener Discretion advised King Richard
(00:20):
the Third was preparing for battle. After three decades of
the civil conflict that have come to be known as
the Wars of the Roses, the fighting between two rival
claimants to the throne of England was finally reaching its head.
Richard knew as he was preparing to face off against
(00:42):
his rival, Henry Tudor, that this would be the end
of the fighting.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
This battle at.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Bosworth Field would be, as Richard remarked, the end of
either wars or his life, though pop culture portrayals in
the Senate curies since Richard's death have often painted him
in the imagination as a middle aged man. On August
twenty second, fourteen eighty five, Richard the Third was only
(01:12):
thirty two years old. He would lead his men into battle,
descending into the fray himself, and so he wore heavy
armor and a helmet covered his face. And whether it
was a symbolic decision or whether it was a strategic
one meant to inspire and rally his troops atop his helmet,
(01:36):
Richard the Third secured his actual crown on that morning
at Bosworth Field. Henry Tudor's men approached first. They had
the advantage of readying themselves on the field of battle
before Richard's men. But soon the king descended on Tudor
(01:57):
with full strength, and its seemed like Richard the Third
would be victorious. His men knocked over the Tudor standard bearer,
the man holding the banner which marked the position of
their commander. It was an incredibly powerful and symbolic move
(02:18):
that would have alerted Tudor soldiers to the fact that
their captain might be dead. But then the tide shifted.
Tudor had reserve men led by a noble named Lord Stanley,
and Stanley's fresh army overwhelmed the exhausted Riccardian men. At
(02:40):
some point, King Richard was thrown from his horse. Shakespeare
famously imagined him in the heat of battle shouting my
kingdom for a horse, and then the king, fighting on foot,
lost his helmet. King Richard the Third, the last English
(03:01):
king to die in battle, was struck down by a
blow to the back of the head strong enough to
dislodge bone and brain. Word of his death spread across
the battlefield Like a ripple. The crown that Richard had
been wearing into battle had fallen among the dirt and blood.
(03:23):
It was recovered, and Lord Stanley, as kingmaker, whose soldiers
had turned the tide of the battle, had the honor
of placing it atop Henry Tudor's head. From the dead
temples of this bloody wretch have I plucked off to
grace thy brows withal Stanley says of the crown in Shakespeare.
(03:47):
And though the real Stanley almost certainly had found the
crown in the mud and had not actually pulled it
off of Richard's dead body, it was a profound moment
of symbolism. There would be no rush for Henry Tudor's
official royal coronation. He was crowned on the battlefield Henry
(04:11):
the seventh, As for Richard, while history is told by
the victors, and history was being written very quickly in
real time after the Battle of Bosworth Field. For Henry
the Seventh's claim to the throne to be legitimate, his
narrative that Richard the third was a villainous usurper needed
(04:34):
to be legitimate as well. Richard's dead body was stripped
and paraded publicly, after all, as many people as possible
needed to know that the former king was actually dead.
The Dead Richard Parade proceeded to the nearby town of Leicester,
where it underwent whatever humiliations and mockery would have felt
(04:58):
fitting for a murderous tyrant struck down, But from there
sources petered out. Some say that Richard's bones had been
thrown in the River Sore. Others wrote that he was
buried in the chapel of Greyfriars Priory. But over the centuries,
the exact fate of the lost King's body, even the
(05:22):
exact location of the priory itself, disappeared from record. A king,
one of the most famous kings of England, was just gone,
but not forever. Five hundred and twenty seven years after
Richard the Third was struck down in battle, a team
(05:45):
of archaeologists, galvanized by a passionate amateur named Philip A. Langley,
would uncover his final resting place in one of the
most exciting archaeological discoveries of the twenty five first century.
From under the staff parking lot of a municipal building,
(06:07):
the bones of Richard the Third were brought to the surface,
and with them a fascinating conversation about how history is
written and who gets to write it. Because this isn't
just the story of a man from the fifteenth century.
It's a story about Philippa Langley and the University of
(06:28):
Leicester scientists, a story of a mid century detective novel
and a king Richard the Third fan club. It's the
story of a team of genetics researchers and bureaucrats and
a furniture designer in Canada. For years, Richard the Third
had been there, buried just beneath two feet of earth
(06:51):
in a parking lot, waiting for his story to be rediscovered.
Incredibly enough, Richard was found on most beneath a reserved
parking space marked plainly with the letter R. I'm Danish
Schwartz and this is noble blood. Pretty much as soon
(07:24):
as Henry the seventh became King of England, he set
about stabilizing his claim to the throne. Whether you believe
that includes him killing two princes imprisoned in the Tower
of London who may or may not have already been
dead by the time Henry became king is not something
I will be weighing in on on this particular episode,
(07:45):
but Henry the seventh did begin solidifying his power through propaganda.
Even the nomenclature of the Wars of the Roses is
a bit of Tudor trickery. Though the Yorks did occasionally
use the White World as their sigil, it was used
much more frequently after the fact, in order to give
(08:06):
Henry's claim to the throne a clean, digestible narrative. On
one side, there was the red Rose of Lancaster, on
the other the white Rose of York. Henry, taking up
the Lancastrian claim, married Elizabeth of York and united England
under a new dynasty, the Tutors with a new sigil,
(08:28):
a rose that's red and white. But as I've alluded
to before, though Henry was a descendant of King Edward
the Third, his claim to the throne through lineage was,
to put it, mildly shaky, especially compared to Richard the
Third's claim. There's a fine line between hero who just
(08:50):
claimed his throne legitimately and opposed a tyrant and guy
who just murdered the rightful king, and Henry was determined
to land on the side of the former. A young
page in the household of Henry's Lord Chancellor proved to
be exactly what Henry Tudor needed. This young page wrote
(09:15):
a book entitled The History of Richard the Third, which,
in the words of Stephen Greenblatt at The New Yorker quote,
wove together every dark rumor about Richard's brief life into
a brilliant narrative which paints a portrait of a bold, gifted,
and ineradicably evil man whose evil was marked in his
(09:38):
very body end quote. The history described Richard as short,
crooked backed, with one shoulder higher than the other, and
a personality that matched with the author saw as God's
judgment made visible.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Quote. He was close and.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Secret, a deep, dissimilar lowly of continents end quote. In
other words, this man was born evil, a despicable man,
and a worse king, and the fact that he was
short and twisted was evidence of that.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
The page who.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Wrote this history, in case you were wondering, was Thomas Moore.
The Tudor propaganda train continued on with Shakespeare's famous History
that sees Richard as no less of a villain, but
a more complicated one, a man lonely and plodding and
all too aware of how his hunchback and disfigured arm
(10:36):
hold back his ambitions. It's a distinction between the two
texts that I think is interesting enough to consider for
another minute. Back to Greenblatt at the New Yorker quote.
In Moore's history, Richard's physical deformity is an uncanny sign
of his viciousness, a kind of preternatural portence or emblem.
(10:58):
In Shakespeare, it is the root condition of his psychopathology.
There is nothing mechanical in this conditioning, certainly no suggestion
that all men with twisted spines become cunning murderers. But
Shakespeare does suggest that a child unloved by his mother,
mocked by his peers, and forced to regard himself as
(11:22):
a monster, will develop certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of
them both destructive and self destructive.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
End quote.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Complexly motivated or not. Thanks to tudor writers, Richard the
Third's reputation as a ruler in the popular culture was
well established by the twentieth century, to the degree that
to defend him, or even point out the way his
tutor propaganda misinformed our perceptions of him, was outside of
(11:57):
academic circles. The contrary position, if you asked the average
person on the street about Richard the Third, they would
almost certainly come back with words like hunchback, scheming, murderer.
Though Edinburgh based screenwriter Phil B. Langley would lead the
charge of uncovering Richard the Third's body in twenty twelve,
(12:20):
she was not the first person to suggest that maybe
the King's reputation was unwarranted as far as modern popular
culture goes. One of the biggest pillars in the Richard
the Third Reclamation movement was actually a nineteen fifty one
detective novel by Josephine Tay called The Daughter of Time.
(12:44):
In the book, Tay's recurring detective Alan Grant, not to
be confused with Jurassic Parks. Alan Grant is stuck in
bed with a broken leg, bored without his job. Grant
sees a portrait of Richard and is struck by the
man's apparent kindness. Grant is a detective with a preternatural
(13:07):
talent for judging people's guilt and innocence based on their
face and his gut feelings, and so upon seeing Richard's face,
Grant thinks, well, that man couldn't have murdered his two
nephews with the help of a research archivist, Grant pours
through every book and text available to him, very real
(13:29):
books and texts, I might add, as he builds an
argument that the reader can follow along with every step
of the way, that Richard Third was not in fact
the likeliest culprit for the murder of his nephews. Tay's
book made a massive impact on popular and intellectual culture,
(13:50):
and it was the first in a wave of books
and media in the fifties and sixties revisiting.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
The history of Richard the Third.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Though a group of amateur historians and Richard the Third
defenders had formed a group in nineteen twenty nine calling
themselves the Fellowship of the White Boar, after Richard's heraldic badge,
the group had mostly fallen by the wayside in the
preceding decades. A daughter of Time Reader named a Soulda
(14:21):
Wygram was galvanized enough by the book to reform the
group under a new name, the Richard the Third Society.
Philippa Langley would form the society's Edinburgh chapter. Langley had
first encountered Richard Third in a biography written by Paul
(14:42):
Murray Kendall, and since then she had been devoted to
rehabilitating the image of an English ruler she believed had
been wrongfully maligned. The legacy of King Richard the Third's
missing body nagged at her. Langley was research reaching a
screenplay that she wanted to write about Richard, and so
(15:03):
she went to Leicester to scope out the scene where
it was rumored the king's body was taken after he
was killed. Langley described walking over the car park where
she believed Richard was buried, lingering at the reserved spot
with the painted R quote. I just felt like I
(15:24):
was walking on Richard the Third's grave. I can't explain
it end quote. A medieval historian named John Rouse had
written a few years after the Battle of bosworth Field
that Richard the Third was buried in Greyfriars Priory, but
even though that area in modern Leicster was called Greyfriars,
(15:45):
the church itself was gone somewhere under a parking lot,
a school yard, a street. The church had been demolished
in fifteen thirty eight after Henry the eighth Henry the
seventh son dissolved the monasteries the Tudor dynasty, inadvertently adding
insult to injury. I suppose Langley's intuition wasn't pulled out
(16:09):
of thin air. In the nineteen eighties, an academic named
David Baldwin suggested that Richard might be buried under that
parking lot, but no one seemed that interested in while
doing anything about it. It would be a lot of
money and a lot of trouble for something that was
(16:30):
basically a theory, a historical rumor. A dig would cost
tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more experts would need
to be galvanized. Off site parking would have to be arranged,
and even if they found some random bones, which again
was no guarantee at all, who could even say if
(16:52):
they were Richard the Third's. But Langley's mission was now
officially underway. She would pick up the man of finding
justice for Richard by finding Richard himself. After all, to
quote Alan Grant, the detective in A Daughter in Time,
if you can't be a pioneer, what's wrong with leading
(17:15):
a crusade? There's that old saying about constant water and
its effect on stone end quote. It took Langley years,
literal years years of repeatedly requesting that the University of
Leicester undertake the dig in the Social Services Department parking
(17:35):
lot aka the best guess for where the buried former
location of Greyfriars Priory would be where Richard might be
buried nothing. But then a miracle of science and research occurred.
A historian named John Ashton Hill was doing research on
(17:57):
Richard the Third's sister and he made a breakthrough. He
had been able to trace the matrilineal line of descent
mother to daughter from Richard's mom and sister to a
modern woman named Joy Ibsen who lived in Canada. Richard
the Third had no living descendants and being able to
(18:20):
trace his matrilineal line of descent was a huge deal.
One because it's a fun cocktail party conversation starter for
that family in Canada, but also because now if a
body was unearthed in Leicester, there would be a way
to determine whether or not it actually was Richard the
(18:40):
Third using mitochondrial DNA.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
This is a podcast on.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
History, not genetics, but in very very simplistic terms, the
mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Kidding, but basically,
most human DNA is located in a cell nucleus, but
a tiny part of the genome is located in the
mitochondria and the DNA of people from the same matrilineal
(19:08):
line will have identical sequences. Langley invited Ashton Hill to
give a lecture in Scotland through the Richard the Third Society,
and the two of them, along with a couple of
their fellow Ricardians, officially formed the Looking for Richard project.
The funding was the most important hurdle, but eventually, by
(19:31):
securing documentary television interest and raising considerable funds through donations
of members of the Richard the Third Society both in
Europe and in the United States, the requisite institutions in
Leicester agreed on the dig. The University of Leicester archaeologist
(19:51):
Richard Buckley, who was the dig's project manager, knew that
success was unlikely. He told Langley to keep her expectations
in check. Fifty to fifty at best for finding the
church and nine to one against finding the grave, he said.
After a few months of preparation of testing the site
(20:14):
and researching possible trenched dig locations, the dig officially began
on August twenty fifth, twenty twelve. After just one day
they found human bones. It took another week to carefully
dig back and unearth what was soon revealed to be
(20:35):
an undisturbed human skeleton, missing its feet, but almost entirely complete,
near what would have been the choir of the church,
buried in a place of honor. The body wasn't buried
in a coffin, and it wasn't covered by a shroud.
It had been hurriedly dumped into a grave that was
(20:57):
too small. Most asonishing of all, the body's spine was
curved in a visible, pronounced s shape. This man, when
he had been alive, must have been hunched over one
shoulder taller than the other. They had found Richard the third,
(21:19):
at least they hoped they had. Now they just needed
to prove it. Analysis of the body determined that it
was a man in his late twenties or early thirties
who died in battle between fourteen fifty five and fifteen forty.
All of that was in line with Richard, who died
(21:40):
at thirty two in fourteen eighty five. The scientists also
proved that the body would have had a high protein
diet with plenty of meat and expensive fish, which would
have been available to an incredibly privileged class of person
in the fourteen hundreds. They also digitally reconstructed the body's
face based on its skull, and it looked like portraits
(22:04):
we have of Richard. And then there was the hunchback.
Some Richard the Third supporters had dismissed the idea of
Richard having a hunchback as pure Tudor fiction, but no,
here it was. The body that they found in the
parking lot had a pronounced visible s shape severe scoliosis, which,
(22:28):
if it hadn't given Richard an outright hunchback, certainly would
have made one shoulder sit higher than the other. This
detail thrills me. It makes the discovery of Richard the
Third's body so much more interesting in my mind, because really,
what does the fact that Richard had scoliosis or even
(22:48):
a hunchback say about his personality? Absolutely nothing. Yet for
centuries it's been a primary factor in our understanding of
rich Id. Tudor writers attempted to use the hunchback as
a metaphor or motivator, and Riccardians tried to dismiss it
(23:10):
in their quest to repaint Richard as a straight backed hero.
History is storytelling, and stories love metaphors. Heroes are handsome
and tall, princesses are beautiful villains have crookbacks and shriveled hands,
(23:31):
But that's not how the real world works. Richard might
have been guilty of killing his nephews, or he might
have been entirely innocent, or he might have been guilty
of a slew of other terrible things, but none of
that would be because of how his spine was shaped.
I find it fascinating.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Back to the scientific research, the matrilineal DNA proved to
be the most conclusive piece of evidence in conjunction with
all of the other evidence. The researchers at the University
of Leicester had also tested DNA from the patrilineal line
father to son for fifteen generations. But even though the
(24:16):
two modern descendants they found had DNA patterns that matched
each other, neither of them matched the body that was
supposed to be Richard. Well, that's a problem, but not
really a big problem. You see, every generation there's a
risk of false paternity, someone identifying someone as the father
(24:39):
who wasn't, And in the fifteen generations between Richard the
Third and now among feuding nobles, there are plenty of
historians who can point to specific cases that might have
thrown off the patrilineal line, but matrilineal DNA, well, it's
(25:00):
much harder to misidentify someone as the mother. Doctor Torry
King at the University of Leicester was able to extract
the mitochondrial DNA from the body they dug up and
compare it to the DNA of two of the living
descendants of Richard's sister. One of the descendants was a
(25:22):
cabinet maker named Michael Ibsen, son of the Canadian Joy Ibsen,
who had been identified years earlier. All of the DNA
samples from the matrilineal line shared a rare type of
mitochondrial DNA carried by only one to two percent of
the population. It was a match, according to The New
(25:46):
York Times. When doctor King saw the results, she quote
went very quiet, then did a little dance around the
laboratory end quote. So as the University of Leicester made
clear beyond a reasonable doubt the body did belong to
Richard the Third. The next question was what could it
(26:09):
teach us. The killing wound had been a blow to
the head, most likely from a halberd that hit Richard
from behind below his left ear with enough force that
it knocked away bone and brain. Richard's helmet evidently had
fallen off or been removed at some point in combat,
(26:30):
which gives credence to the way that Shakespeare painted the
scene with Richard having fallen from his horse and fighting
on foot in the fray. There were a number of
other wounds on Richard's body, but because they were in
places that armor would have been covering, scientists and historians
(26:51):
determined that they were what's known as humiliation wounds committed
to Richard after he was already dead, possibly when they
were carrying the body from Bosworth Field to Leicester. Most
news outlets and historians, when they're speaking about it publicly
leave it just there, just describing them as humiliation injuries.
(27:14):
But in case you're curious, and my apologies in advance
for this. In this case, it means that Richard had
wounds the face, and also that someone attempted to stick
a knife or sword or dagger up his deceased buttocks.
Richard's naked body was thrown over horseback and brought from
(27:37):
Bosworth Field to Leicester, where Friars, no doubt terrified at
the regime change happening in real time, tried to bury him.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
As quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Richard was buried in a shallow grave at the head
of gray Friar's Priory, near the choir, naked and with
no winding sheet or shroud. The grave was so small
that Richard, who had only been five to two, had
to have his neck pressed forward and upright so that
he would fit in the hole. The skeleton was also
(28:11):
found with its hands close together pulled over its right hips,
which indicate that Richard's hands may have been tied together
at the time. Neither arm was shrunken or shriveled, and
there Richard stayed underground as the world above him changed
(28:34):
until summer twenty twelve, when the archaeologists at the University
of Leicester announced that the bones exhumed beneath the parking
lot were beyond a reasonable doubt, the last Plantagenet King
of England. They arranged for Richard to be presented on
a black velvet lined table under a glass case for
(28:58):
journalists and their public to see. Two chaplains sat in
the room as journalists filed in providing the dignity that
the university said that the king was owed. It would
be another several years before bureaucratic red tape would allow
(29:18):
poor Richard to reach his final resting place with rival
factions vying for power in a way that resembles a
much lower stakes archaeology based War of the Roses. Members
of the Richard the Third Society had voiced their opinion
that Richard should be interred with other English kings at
(29:39):
Westminster Abbey. A group comprised of Plantagenet descendants sued for
the right to bury Richard near his lands in York,
but in the end the ruling was made that the
body would be buried there in Leicester, in an Anglican cathedral,
just two hundred yards from the parking lot where Richard
(30:00):
had been found. It seems the legal system ruled in
the manner consistent with the British Museum's approach to possession
finder's keepers. On March twenty sixth, twenty fifteen, Richard the
Third was buried in a ceremony with the pomp and
(30:20):
circumstance befitting a king. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided the
ancestral research had revealed that the actor Benedict Cumberbatch was
a relative of Richard the Third, and he read a poem.
This was twenty fifteen, Benedict Cumberbatch was hot as they came.
(30:41):
Both Philippa Langley and John Ashton Hills were present too.
The coffin that Richard the Third was buried in was beautiful,
polished to glistening, made of golden English oak and ewe.
It was constructed by hand for this very occasion to
(31:01):
inter a king. But it wasn't built by someone who
specialized in coffins. King Richard Third's coffin was constructed by
Michael Ibsen, the cabinet maker from Canada whose DNA had
proved to be instrumental in bringing Richard to his final
(31:23):
resting place. That's the story of the unearthing and reburial
of Richard the Third. But keep listening after a brief
sponsor break to hear a little bit more about Richard Third.
In pop culture, thanks in no small part to Shakespeare,
(31:56):
there have been plenty of depictions of Richard Third stage
and on screen. One could even argue that in Disney's
Lion King, Scar the scheming slightly disfigured Machiavellian uncle owes
as much to Richard the Third or more as he
does to Claudius in Hamlet. Hamlet is, of course the
(32:18):
play whose plot explicitly inspired Lion King. But I think
my favorite portrayal of a version of Richard IID isn't
evil at all, or at least, let's say, not as
evil as he could be. The Game of Thrones series
is explicitly inspired by the Wars of the Roses, and
(32:41):
some of the parallels are incredibly obvious. The Starks are
analogs for the Yorks, the Lanisters, the Lancasters, but not
every character and dynamic has a one to one equivalent.
Tyrian Lanister, who's portrayed by Peter Dinklage in the HBO series,
is obviously a Lanister, which should correspond to Lancaster. Richard
(33:06):
the Third was a York. But Tyrian is also scheming
and self serving, the self aware chess player who sees
moves before others make them. He's also a little person
who frequently remarks, not unlike Shakespeare's Richard with a hunchback,
that his physical difference is what holds him back from
(33:27):
the glory afforded to his brother. And of course, Tyrian
is the uncle to a boy king rumored to be illegitimate.
Whether you watched or read Game of Thrones and saw
Tyrian as a villain or a hero or somewhere in between. Depends,
I think on your point of view. Noble Blood is
(34:05):
a production of iHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me
Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston,
Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The
show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima
(34:28):
Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers
Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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