I didn’t queue to file past the coffin of Elizabeth II, but I did for Richard III. He lay in repose at Leicester Cathedral for three days in March 2015, then his bones were taken around the villages associated with the Battle of Bosworth and brought back for reburial. The plan sounded primitive yet proved unexpectedly moving. A king who had last entered Leicester naked, his dead body slung over a horse, was returning before welcoming crowds.
That tour of the battlefield villages, covered live by BBC News, revealed a civic England – councillors and ex-servicemen, Scouts and Brownies – you feared had been lost to centralisation and turbo-capitalism. The day, it turned out, was not just about honouring Richard III: it was about celebrating our pride in Leicester and indeed the whole of Leicestershire too.
And the day, in fact the whole process of finding Richard, was also great for the University of Leicester. The dig, which took place in the autumn of 2012, was carried out by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), an independent company spun off from the university some years before. Later, the DNA profiling that proved the skeleton was Richard’s was also carried out at the university, using techniques pioneered there in the 1980s.
York or Leicester? Where should Richard III be buried?
For such a feel-good project, the finding of Richard III generated a remarkable amount of controversy. First it was the question of where he should be reburied: “Not in Leicester presumably,” said Kirsty Wark on BBC2’s Newsnight the evening the discovery was announced, ignoring Leicester’s history and visible heritage dating back to Roman times. There were also online racists who raged against the reburial of a king of England in a proudly multiracial city.
The most substantial challenge to a Leicester reburial came from the Plantagenet Alliance, a group of people claiming descent from one of Richard III’s siblings – Richard himself has no direct descendants. As calculations suggest there may be millions of us descended from those siblings, the courts may not have been too impressed by the Alliance, but it was allowed to challenge the burial plans for Richard.
The Alliance wanted him to be buried in York, but its case proved thin when it came to court, and the challenge was lost. Having lived in both cities, I know that, in terms of pub and street names, Richard has always had a greater presence in Leicester than York. You will even find a King Richard III Infant and Nursery School in Leicester – Ofsted rates it as “Good”, but would you send your nephews there?
The Lost King and its unfair picture of archaeology
Then there was the controversy over the film The Lost King, which told the story of the finding of Richard III from the point of view of Philippa Langley, the catalyst for the project. It was she, an amateur historian enthralled by the figure of Richard and the suggestion he might still be lying under the streets of Leicester, who persuaded ULAS to take on the search for him. This was some achievement, because hunting for the remains of a single person is very much what today’s scientific archaeologists do not do.
But The Lost King stretched Langley’s story to fit a pre-existing template of the individual who takes on the establishment. It relied upon destructive tropes about academics living in ivory towers and engaging in conspiracies against the rest of us, when in actual reality the finding of Richard was a model example of interest and involving the public in archaeology. So unfair was the film that a former senior administrator at the university sued the producers for libel over the way it portrayed him and won a substantial out-of-court settlement.
In an angry statement issued after the settlement, Steve Coogan, the head of the production company, said, “if it wasn’t for Philippa Langley, Richard III would still be lying under a car park in Leicester.” He was right, but if it were not for the ULAS archaeologists, he would still be there too. And if it was not for the university’s geneticists, we would not know it was Richard they had found.
If you want to judge for yourself, you can relive the whole extraordinary story via the Richard III: Discovery and Identification pages on the University of Leicester website. Mike Pitts’ book Digging for Richard III also offers an archaeologically informed and fair-minded account.
Richard III in Leicester today
Visit Leicester today and you can visit Richard’s plain and dignified tomb in the cathedral.
Across the road you will find the King Richard III Visitor Centre, which tells the story of his life and death and incorporates the grave in which he was found. It was created in a former school by Leicester City Council, which was keenly aware of the possible economic benefits. One estimate from as early as 2015 suggested the finding of Richard had brought almost £60mn to the city. What is it about this story that brings people to Leicester? Hilary Mantel once wrote: “Perhaps because the present is paying some of the debt it owes to the past, and science has come to the aid of history. The king stripped by the victors has been reclothed in his true identity. This is the essential process of history, neatly illustrated: loss, retrieval.”
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