The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA (16 page)

Apparently the infanta had been granted supernatural help in resolving her (and her country's) dilemma. The earliest extant written account of her vision dates from 1621, by which time Joana was, of course, also dead, and indeed, well advanced upon the path to sainthood. She was finally canonised in 1693 by Pope Innocent XII, and it is as St Joana of Portugal, Princess, that the Catholic Church remembers her today. Her mortal remains now lie splendidly enshrined at the Dominican monastery to which this princess, who came so close to being Queen of England, finally and definitively retired after Richard III's death in order to cultivate the religious life.

9
‘A Sorry Spectacle'
¹

After Richard III's death, his body, stripped and slung over a horse's back, was carried back to Leicester: a distance of some 15 miles.
²
This journey was accomplished during the afternoon of 22 August, for it was the evening of that day when Henry VII and his army reached the city with their ‘bag and baggage',
³
which now included Richard III's remains. If we assume the new king and his entourage set out from the battlefield at about two o'clock in the afternoon, the tail end of Henry VII's baggage train would probably have reached the city by about six in the evening, an hour or two before sunset.
⁴
Thus, it may well be the case that the arrival of Richard's corpse was greeted by the sound of bells from the city's churches. But these would not have been the ‘great bells', which were traditionally tolled solemnly for the passing of a soul.
⁵
Rather, the sound would have been the bright chiming of little
Sanctus
bells, sounding from the parish churches for the evening
Angelus
, combined with the bells of Leicester Abbey and of the various Leicester friary churches, calling their respective communities to the evening office of Vespers.

The basic facts of the transportation of Richard's corpse to Leicester, and the manner of it, are fairly well known, and the interpretation usually applied to this event is to see it as a major example of Henry VII's vindictive nastiness. Thus Kendall, writing in the 1950s, chose to amplify the very basic information available from contemporary sources as follows:

Stark naked, despoiled and derided, with a felon's halter about the neck, the bloody body was slung contemptuously across the back of a horse, which one of the king's heralds was forced to ride. As it was borne across the west bridge of the Soar, the head was carelessly battered against the stone parapet. For two days the body lay exposed to view in the house of the Grey Friars close to the river. It was then rolled into a grave without stone or epitaph.
⁶

The adjectives, of course, are Kendall's own. Moreover, his highly coloured account certainly contains errors. The Franciscan (Greyfriars) Priory was not close to the River Soar.
⁷
Nor is there any evidence that it was at that priory that Richard's body was exposed to public gaze.
⁸
Indeed, a religious house, parts of which were certainly closed to public access, would not have been a very suitable location for such a public display of the dead king's body. Kendall's account also contains other errors and misinterpretations, as we shall see in due course.
⁹

The whole thesis that the treatment accorded to Richard's body represents gratuitous horror, personally inflicted upon Richard's corpse by his successor, is open to question. We must not forget that, whether or not he was held to be the
rightful
king, Richard III was certainly the
de facto
king in August 1485, and it was a political necessity for Henry VII to acknowledge that fact, since his claim to the throne, as subsequently embodied in an act of Parliament, was based first and foremost on conquest, which implied defeat of the previous
de facto
sovereign.

Henry VII is often portrayed by Richard III's defenders as an innately unpleasant character. One piece of evidence adduced in support of this portrayal is Henry's reported cynical attempt to date his reign from the day
before
the Battle of Bosworth (21 August).
¹⁰
Another is his supposedly barbaric treatment of Richard III's body. In fact, there is no evidence that Henry VII antedated his succession. Certainly it was subsequently 22 August, not 21, which was counted as the new king's accession day for the purpose of calculating his regnal years.
¹¹
Nor was there, from Henry VII's point of view, any possible political or financial advantage to be gained from gratuitous nastiness in respect of Richard III's corpse – indeed, rather the reverse, since Henry needed to try to conciliate the defeated Yorkists if he was to reign in peace. In this context, it is significant to note that our two main written sources for the battle – Vergil's account and that of the Crowland Chronicle – are in complete agreement in consistently referring to Richard III as ‘the king' up to, and indeed beyond, the point of his death. At the same time both sources consistently call Henry ‘Tudor' ‘the earl' until
after
his victory.
¹²
Bearing this important evidence in mind, let us now carefully re-examine the facts in this case.

Vergil offers an early sixteenth-century account of the sorry spectacle of Richard III's return to Leicester after the battle:

Interea Ricardi corpus, cuncto nudatum vestitu, ac dorso equi impositum, capite et brachiis et cruribus utrimque pendentibus, Leicestriam ad coenobium Franciscorum deportant, spectaculum mehercule miserabile, sed hominis vita dignum, ibique sine ullo funeris honore biduo post terra humatur.

[Meanwhile, they took Richard's body to the Franciscan Priory in Leicester, stripped of all clothing and placed on a horse's back with the head, arms and legs hanging down on either side; a sorry sight by Hercules, but one worthy of the man's life; and there, after two days, he was buried in the ground without any funerary honours.]
¹³

An earlier but briefer statement is supplied by the Crowland Chronicle:

Inventa inter alios mortuos corpora dicto Richardi regis … multasque alias contumelias illatas ipsoque non satis humaniter propter funem in collum adjectum usque Leicestriam deportato.

[King Richard's body having been discovered among the dead … many other insults were offered and after the body had been carried to Leicester with insufficient humanity (a rope being placed around the neck)].
¹⁴

Although there are no other contemporary or near contemporary written accounts, attempts to flesh out this basic story begin with the later sixteenth-century writer Holinshed. His authority (if any) is unknown, and parts of his fuller account may very well have been based upon nothing more than his own imagination. However, for what it may be worth, he tells us that Richard's body ‘was naked and despoiled to the very skin, and nothing left about him, not so much as a clout to cover his privy parts: and [he] was trussed behind a pursevant of arms, one Blanch Senglier, or White-boar, like a hog or calf; his head and arms hanging on one side of the horse, with his legs on the other side; and all besprinkled with mire and bloud'.

Since they are based upon no known contemporary source, Holinshed's details cannot be relied upon. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that, while in general he apparently sets out to depict disgraceful treatment of the corpse – trussed like a dead animal, soiled with blood and mire (details absent from Vergil's account) – he also adds one snippet which may tend in a different direction: he informs us that Richard's naked body was transported to Leicester accompanied by the dead king's pursuivant of arms. We shall return to this point presently.

On arrival in Leicester the corpse seems to have been exposed to the public gaze in the Newark so that all might know for certain that the king was dead.
¹⁵
This can only have been done on Henry VII's instructions, and it is certainly probable that Henry VII would have wished as many people as possible to see for themselves that Richard III was indeed dead. We have no account of what preparation might have been accorded the remains before their public display. However, from Henry VII's point of view it would have been important that the body should be recognisable. It is likely, therefore, that the corpse was washed and that the cuts to the face and head were pressed shut rather than being left as gaping wounds.

Since it was late August and the weather was probably hot, one might suppose that some preservative measures would have been taken in order to retard the natural process of decomposition. In similar circumstances the body of James IV of Scotland was embalmed in 1516 by the enemies who had vanquished him. Incidentally, the treatment of the dead body of James IV, and the light which this may throw on the events of August 1485 and how we should judge them, will be considered in fuller detail below.

Against embalming, however, we have two pieces of evidence. First, there is the fact that the body of Richard's friend and supporter, John Howard, Duke of Norfolk (which must have been brought to Leicester at about the same time as the king's), seems not to have been embalmed. Howard's body cannot currently be identified for certain, but it seems possible to narrow it down to one of two sets of remains now interred at Framlingham church in Suffolk. Although we cannot be sure which of these two possible bodies belongs to John Howard, both were found to be preserved only as skeletons, and no traces of cere cloth were reported when the vaults containing these remains were opened in 1841.
¹⁶
The second piece of evidence is that, when Richard III's own grave was open in August 2012, as in the case of John Howard, no signs of cere cloth were found.

First, let us return to the treatment that is reported to have been accorded to Richard's body immediately after the battle. We have seen that, based on the Crowland chronicler (who was almost certainly not present in Leicester in August 1485), followed by Holinshed and other later accounts, this treatment has generally been categorised as barbarous. But perhaps we need to pause at this point and consider carefully what happened. We shall then be in a position to observe that, in terms of the burial arrangements for expelled English medieval monarchs, only in two respects does the treatment of Richard's remains appear to have been unique, and that is the stripping of his body and its transport from the battlefield slung over a horse. The funeral arrangements made for other deposed medieval English monarchs by their conquerors are considered in greater detail at the end of this chapter. For the moment, let us concentrate on the unique features: the stripping and transportation of Richard III's corpse. We need to remember that amongst the displaced medieval monarchs of England, the
manner
of Richard's death was in itself unique, a fact which cannot fail to be significant when we consider how his remains were handled.

Richard III is often described as the
last
English king to die in battle, but in point of fact he is the
only
English king to die in battle after the Norman Conquest, so the circumstances surrounding his burial were bound to be unique in some respects. It is also a well-known fact that bodies on battlefields were routinely stripped – not by their conquerors in person, but by looters (see below). It is highly improbable that Henry ‘Tudor''s men would have stopped to strip Richard's body in mid-battle. It is far more likely that the stripping was carried out by local people routinely picking over the field in the wake of the victorious army. The king's body, which was probably more richly attired than most, would have been particularly susceptible to the attentions of such looters as soon as the tide of battle moved on in pursuit of his retreating army. In this context it is interesting to note that the crown from Richard's helmet (which was made of gold or gilded metal, perhaps set with jewels or paste) was reportedly found in a thorn bush after the battle. Had it perhaps been pushed there by a looter, intending to conceal it for later retrieval when things had quietened down? The fact that in the aftermath of the battle Richard's corpse was naked is probably not to be attributed to the innate nastiness of Henry ‘Tudor' and his men, but was rather the normal and inevitable concomitant of battlefield death. Thus we know, for example, that when the first Earl of Shrewsbury was killed at the battle of Castillon, his corpse could subsequently only be identified by his missing left molar. Clearly, like Richard's, his body after the battle was heavily disfigured by blood and mire, and had been stripped of every particle of armour and clothing that might have been recognisable.
¹⁷
Further apposite examples of this common battlefield phenomenon will be cited presently.

Meanwhile, Vergil tells us that the battle itself lasted for two hours, in the course of which time the tide of the fighting will have swept on to areas far distant from the spot where Richard's battered remains were lying, thus allowing ample opportunity for looters to make off with the king's ruined but rich attire. Later, Henry ‘Tudor' – now acclaimed as Henry VII – will have had to send a search party in quest of Richard III's corpse, which was eventually ‘discovered among the dead'.
¹⁸
When it was found the corpse had almost certainly already been stripped. It is at
this point
that the body was subjected to post mortem injuries and obscenity, as reported by the Crowland chronicler. Naked, undefended, and in the hands of a group of fighting men who may well have been foreigners, vulgar jokes were probably made and wounds were inflicted on the face, chest and buttocks, before the body was carelessly hauled off to the new king.
¹⁹
This was probably when a rope was tied around the corpse's neck. Had Henry VII been present, he would surely have prevented the infliction of post mortem facial injuries, since he needed Richard's face to be recognisable.