Richard III

Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however. William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, yet made good laws". Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey upbraided the aldermen and Mayor of London for relying on a statute of Richard to avoid paying an extorted tax (benevolence) but received the reply 'although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made.'

Both of Richard's illegitimate children survived him, but they seem to have died without issue and their fate after Richard's demise at Bosworth is not certain. John received a £20 annuity from Henry VII, but there are no mentions of him in contemporary records after 1487 (the year of the Battle of Stoke Field). He may have been executed in 1499, though no record of this exists beyond an assertion by George Buck over a century later. Katherine apparently died before her cousin Elizabeth of York's coronation on 25 November 1487, since her husband Sir William Herbert is described as a widower by that time. Katherine's burial place was located in the London parish church of St James Garlickhithe, between Skinner's Lane and Upper Thames Street. The mysterious Richard Plantagenet, who was first mentioned in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (a two-volume miscellany published 1732–1735) was said to be a possible illegitimate child of Richard III and is sometimes referred to as "Richard the Master-Builder" or "Richard of Eastwell", but it has also been suggested he could have been Richard, Duke of York, one of the missing Princes in the Tower. He died in 1550.

Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" and "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king.

Polydore Vergil, Henry VII's official historian, recorded that "King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". Richard's naked body was then carried back to Leicester tied to a horse, and early sources strongly suggest that it was displayed in the collegiate Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke, prior to being buried at Greyfriars Church in Leicester. In 1495, Henry VII paid £50 (equivalent to £41,397 in 2019) for a marble and alabaster monument. According to a discredited tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, his body was thrown into the River Soar, although other evidence suggests that a memorial stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of Greyfriars. The exact location was then lost, owing to more than 400 years of subsequent development, until archaeological investigations in 2012 revealed the site of the garden and Greyfriars Church. There was a memorial ledger stone in the choir of the cathedral, since replaced by the tomb of the king, and a stone plaque on Bow Bridge where tradition had falsely suggested that his remains had been thrown into the river.

Richard was not without his defenders, the first of whom was George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, who completed a historical account of Richard's life in 1619. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including Richard's alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the Titulus Regius, but also claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth of York, according to which Elizabeth sought to marry the king. Though the book was published in 1646, Elizabeth's supposed letter was never produced. Documents which later emerged from the Portuguese royal archives show that after Queen Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king's sister Joanna, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joanna's cousin Manuel, Duke of Viseu (later King of Portugal).

Significant among Richard's defenders was Horace Walpole. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted his views in 1793 after the Terror, stating he now believed that Richard could have committed the crimes he was charged with, although Pollard observes that this retraction is frequently overlooked by later admirers of Richard. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer Clements Markham, whose Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) replied to the work of Gairdner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that the bulk of evidence against Richard was nothing more than Tudor propaganda. An intermediate view was provided by Alfred Legge in The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others.

Some twentieth-century historians have been less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. In the words of Charles Ross, "the later fifteenth century in England is now seen as a ruthless and violent age as concerns the upper ranks of society, full of private feuds, intimidation, land-hunger, and litigiousness, and consideration of Richard's life and career against this background has tended to remove him from the lonely pinnacle of Villainy Incarnate on which Shakespeare had placed him. Like most men, he was conditioned by the standards of his age." The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several groups dedicated to improving his reputation. Other contemporary historians still describe him as a "power-hungry and ruthless politician" who was still most probably "ultimately responsible for the murder of his nephews."

Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal is given in The Founding (1980), the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.

British historian John Ashdown-Hill had used genealogical research in 2004 to trace matrilineal descendants of Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, Richard's elder sister. A British-born woman who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War, Joy Ibsen (née Brown), was found to be a 16th-generation great-niece of the king in the same direct maternal line. Her mitochondrial DNA was tested and belongs to mitochondrial DNA haplogroup J, which by deduction, should also be the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup of Richard III. Joy Ibsen died in 2008. Her son Michael Ibsen gave a mouth-swab sample to the research team on 24 August 2012. His mitochondrial DNA passed down the direct maternal line was compared to samples from the human remains found at the excavation site and used to identify King Richard.

On 24 August 2012, the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society, announced that they had joined forces to begin a search for the remains of King Richard. The search for Richard III was led by Philippa Langley of the Society's Looking For Richard Project with the archaeological work led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). Experts set out to locate the lost site of the former Greyfriars Church (demolished during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries), and to discover whether his remains were still interred there. By comparing fixed points between maps in a historical sequence, the search located the church, where Richard's body had been hastily buried without pomp in 1485, its foundations identifiable beneath a modern-day city centre car park.

The excavators announced on 5 September 2012 that they had identified Greyfriars Church and two days later that they had identified the location of Robert Herrick's garden, where the memorial to Richard III stood in the early 17th century. A human skeleton was found beneath the Church's choir.

After his death in battle in 1485, Richard III's body was buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester. Following the discoveries of Richard's remains in 2012, it was decided that they should be reburied at Leicester Cathedral, despite feelings in some quarters that he should have been reburied in York Minster. His remains were carried in procession to the cathedral on 22 March 2015, and reburied on 26 March 2015 at a religious re-burial service at which both Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester, and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. The British royal family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who later portrayed him in The Hollow Crown television series, read a poem by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

Accounts note that King Richard fought bravely and ably during this manoeuvre, unhorsing Sir John Cheyne, a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry's standard bearer Sir William Brandon and coming within a sword's length of Henry Tudor before being surrounded by Sir William Stanley's men and killed. The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet says that a Welshman struck the death-blow with a halberd while Richard's horse was stuck in the marshy ground. It was said that the blows were so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull. The contemporary Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn implies a leading Welsh Lancastrian, Rhys ap Thomas, or one of his men killed the king, writing that he "killed the boar, shaved his head". The identification in 2013 of King Richard's body shows that the skeleton had 11 wounds, eight of them to the skull, clearly inflicted in battle and suggesting he had lost his helmet. Professor Guy Rutty, from the University of Leicester, said: "The most likely injuries to have caused the king's death are the two to the inferior aspect of the skull—a large sharp force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon." The skull showed that a blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle. Henry Tudor succeeded Richard as King Henry VII. He married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's niece.

On 4 February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed that the skeleton was beyond reasonable doubt that of King Richard III. This conclusion was based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, soil analysis, and dental tests (there were some molars missing as a result of caries), as well as physical characteristics of the skeleton which are highly consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard's appearance. The team announced that the "arrowhead" discovered with the body was a Roman-era nail, probably disturbed when the body was first interred. However, there were numerous perimortem wounds on the body, and part of the skull had been sliced off with a bladed weapon; this would have caused rapid death. The team concluded that it is unlikely that the king was wearing a helmet in his last moments. Soil taken from the remains was found to contain microscopic roundworm eggs. Several eggs were found in samples taken from the pelvis, where the king's intestines were, but not from the skull and only very small numbers were identified in soil surrounding the grave. The findings suggest that the higher concentration of eggs in the pelvic area probably arose from a roundworm infection the king suffered in his life, rather than from human waste dumped in the area at a later date, researchers said. The mayor of Leicester announced that the king's skeleton would be re-interred at Leicester Cathedral in early 2014, but a judicial review of that decision delayed the reinterment for a year. A museum to Richard III was opened in July 2014 in the Victorian school buildings next to the Greyfriars grave site.

The proposal to have King Richard buried in Leicester attracted some controversy. Those who challenged the decision included fifteen "collateral [non-direct] descendants of Richard III", represented by the Plantagenet Alliance, who believed that the body should be reburied in York, as they claim the king wished. In August 2013, they filed a court case in order to contest Leicester's claim to re-inter the body within its cathedral, and propose the body be buried in York instead. However, Michael Ibsen, who gave the DNA sample that identified the king, gave his support to Leicester's claim to re-inter the body in their cathedral. On 20 August, a judge ruled that the opponents had the legal standing to contest his burial in Leicester Cathedral, despite a clause in the contract which had authorized the excavations requiring his burial there. He urged the parties, though, to settle out of court in order to "avoid embarking on the Wars of the Roses, Part Two". The Plantagenet Alliance, and the supporting fifteen collateral descendants, also faced the challenge that "Basic maths shows Richard, who had no surviving children but five siblings, could have millions of 'collateral' descendants" undermining the group's claim to represent "the only people who can speak on behalf of him". A ruling in May 2014 decreed that there are "no public law grounds for the Court interfering with the decisions in question". The remains were taken to Leicester Cathedral on 22 March 2015 and reinterred on 26 March.

On 5 February 2013 Professor Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee conducted a facial reconstruction of Richard III, commissioned by the Richard III Society, based on 3D mappings of his skull. The face is described as "warm, young, earnest and rather serious". On 11 February 2014 the University of Leicester announced the project to sequence the entire genome of Richard III and one of his living relatives, Michael Ibsen, whose mitochondrial DNA confirmed the identification of the excavated remains. Richard III thus became the first ancient person of known historical identity whose genome has been sequenced. In 2016 contemporary British artist Alexander de Cadenet presented a skull portrait of Richard III in conjunction with Leicester University. The portraits have been produced using University of Leicester forensic X-ray scans of the king.

Richard's cathedral tomb was designed by the architects van Heyningen and Haward. The tombstone is deeply incised with a cross, and consists of a rectangular block of white Swaledale fossil stone, quarried in North Yorkshire. It sits on a low plinth made of dark Kilkenny marble, incised with Richard's name, dates and motto (Loyaulte me lie – loyalty binds me). The plinth also carries his coat of arms in pietra dura. The remains of Richard III are in a lead-lined inner casket, inside an outer English oak coffin crafted by Michael Ibsen, a direct descendant of Richard's sister Anne, and laid in a brick-lined vault below the floor, and below the plinth and tombstone. The original 2010 raised tomb design had been proposed by Langley's "Looking For Richard Project" and fully funded by members of the Richard III Society. The proposal was publicly launched by the Society on 13 February 2013 but rejected by Leicester Cathedral in favour of a memorial slab. However, following a public outcry, the Cathedral changed its position and on 18 July 2013 announced its agreement to give King Richard III a raised tomb monument.

During his adolescence, and due to a cause that is unknown, Richard developed a sideways curvature of the spine. In 2014, after the discovery of Richard's remains, the osteoarchaeologist Dr. Jo Appleby, of Leicester University's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, imaged the spinal column and reconstructed a model using 3D printing, and concluded that though the spinal scoliosis looked dramatic, it probably did not cause any major physical deformity that could not be disguised by clothing.

In November 2014, the results of the testing were announced, confirming that the maternal side was as previously thought. The paternal side, however, demonstrated some variance from what had been expected, with the DNA showing no links to the purported descendants of Richard's great-great-grandfather Edward III of England through Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort. This could be the result of covert illegitimacy that does not reflect the accepted genealogies between Richard and Edward III or between Edward III and the 5th Duke of Beaufort.

Celebrate RIII's birthday at a family activity day tomorrow

Make your own crown and extract DNA from a banana