United Kingdom: Finding Richard III’s skeleton

A 500-year-old mystery has been solved, said Nick Britten and Andrew Hough in The Daily Telegraph. King Richard III, famously portrayed by Shakespeare as a wicked hunchback, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, ending both the Wars of the Roses and the Plantagenet dynasty, but nobody knew where his grave was. This week, his body was finally identified after being found underneath a parking lot built on the ruins of the Grey Friars Church in Leicester. DNA tests proved a match to a Canadian-born man who is a direct descendant of Richard’s sister, and the skeleton clearly showed Richard’s reported curved spine from scoliosis. Scientists from Leicester University say he would have held one shoulder much higher than the other and stood much shorter than his full height of 5 feet 8 inches. The skeleton also showed 10 battle-related injuries, including an ax wound to the skull and a metal arrowhead still lodged in its back. There was, however, no evidence of the “withered arm” that Shakespeare repeatedly invoked.

The discovery was eerie, said Martin Fricker in the Daily Record. Screenwriter Philippa Langley, secretary of the Scottish branch of the Richard III Society, was wandering the site in 2009 as she researched a play she was writing about the former king. “I walked past a particular spot and absolutely knew I was walking on his grave,” she says. “It was a hot summer, and I had goose bumps so badly and I was freezing cold.” Langley convinced the society to raise the money for an excavation. The society hopes the discovery will aid its quest to rehabilitate the image of Richard, portrayed in histories and plays as a hideous and evil man who murdered his own nephews to usurp the throne. Those histories were written by the Tudors, who succeeded the Plantagenets and had every incentive to demonize the hunchback king.

The body reveals that Tudor outrage, said Troy Lennon in The Daily Telegraph (Australia). The new Tudor king, Henry VII, “had Richard’s body hung naked in a square in Leicester and subjected to various forms of humiliation”—and those marks, including a stab wound to the buttock, are visible on the skeleton. Richard actually did much good. He introduced “ways for the poor to have their legal grievances heard,” and pioneered the posting of bail so accused criminals could remain free before trial. He also lifted restrictions on printing and selling books. Yet this man was given “an ignominious burial, without coffin or clothing.”

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Now we must pay respect to his remains, said The Times in an editorial. We are not France, where the bones of kings are considered mere curios to be handed over to descendants. Such behavior may be acceptable in a republic. “But we are still a monarchy, and this man was once our king.” His body should not stay in Leicester, as the government has proposed, or go to York, as that city’s council has demanded. He deserves a solemn reburial alongside our other monarchs-—“in Westminster Abbey.”