The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA (17 page)

As for the fact that Richard's body was reported by Virgil to have been transported from the field to Leicester slung over the back of a horse, this also requires careful evaluation. For those who wished to remove bodies from medieval battlefields the available resources were probably somewhat limited, and we know that in most cases such bodies were not removed at all, but were simply interred on or very near the spot where they fell. Medieval warlords would not routinely have taken with them into battle such items as coffins and hearses – the presence of which might have been liable to misinterpretation by one's supporters! Thus the obvious possible ways of transporting a body from the field would have been to have it dragged by men or by beasts, to throw it into a wheeled vehicle of some kind, or to drape it across the back of a horse. Where, on a battlefield, would anyone have chanced upon a stray coffin, a hearse, or mourners?

The very fact that Richard III's body was removed from the field at all, and carried back to Leicester, is a clear sign that it was being accorded quite special treatment. As for the means of its transportation, it may well have been considered by Henry ‘Tudor' that the back of a horse was actually the most honourable of the limited available options – and fitting for a vanquished warrior of royal blood. This brings us back to the interesting point that, according to Holinshed's later account, Henry also ordered that Richard's body should be accompanied by the dead king's
Blanc Sanglier
pursuivant of arms.
²⁰
Perhaps, in his own way, and within the limits of the resources available to him on the battlefield, Henry VII was, in fact, treating Richard's body as a royal corpse.
²¹
And if a rope remained around Richard's dead neck from its earlier hauling across the battlefield by Henry's search party, this may now simply have been used to help tie the body in place on the horse's back, thereby avoiding accidents.
²²

At this point it will, perhaps, be instructive to introduce two further kinds of evidence, which may throw light on what we know of the fate of Richard's remains in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth. The second such category of evidence (which we shall come to in a moment) is literary and cultural evidence bearing on fifteenth-century attitudes to such matters as death in battle. First, however, let us examine late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century evidence from beyond the boundaries of England, which relates to the deaths of two other European leaders who were likewise defeated and killed.

Richard III's brother-in-law, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was vanquished and slain at the Battle of Nancy in 1477, eight years prior to the Battle of Bosworth. ‘Refusing to fly, and fighting desperately to cover the retreat of his scattered forces, [he] was surrounded and was cleft through helmet and skull by the tremendous blow of a Swiss halberd … all his face was one gash from temple to teeth.'
²³
Subsequently, ‘it took two days to find his body and then only after a patient and macabre search over the battlefield. It appeared that his horse had fallen while trying to jump a frozen stream and the duke had been killed by a mighty blow to the head, which left him totally unrecognisable except to his Italian valet who knew him by his long fingernails, and to his Portuguese doctor who identified him by the old battle scars on his stripped and frozen corpse.'
²⁴
Thus, like Richard III's remains, Charles' body was found naked, having likewise been stripped by looters. It was clearly in much more of a mess than Richard's when it was finally removed for burial, for in Richard's case it does not seem to have been unduly difficult to identify his remains once they were found, and this suggests that Richard's features had not been heavily disfigured.

About thirty years later, in 1513, King James IV of Scotland was defeated and killed by English forces at the Battle of Flodden. After the battle James' body was recovered, carried initially to Berwick,
²⁵
and embalmed. It was then sent to London with the intention that it should be buried there, but initially the body remained above ground because James had been excommunicated before his death, so a religious burial was not possible. Later, Henry VIII arranged for it ‘to be given honourable burial by the monks at Sheen, after he had persuaded the Pope to assume that James had given some sign of repentance as he lay dying on the battlefield, which enabled the Pope to release him from excommunication and to allow him to be buried in a church'.
²⁶
It is not absolutely clear whether James' body had also been stripped on the battlefield, but this seems probable, because afterwards there was considerable debate as to whether the correct body had really been recovered, and it seems unlikely that this would have been the case if the remains were still clothed in their royal garb. James IV's bloodstained plaid or tunic, at least, seems to have been separated from his corpse after his death but before the body was recovered, for this garment was later delivered to the queen regent, Catherine of Aragon, who then sent it as a token of victory to Henry VIII in France.
²⁷

The second category of external evidence, which may be illuminating in relation to the treatment of Richard III's corpse, is the general evidence of the late medieval chivalric literary and cultural tradition. Late medieval warriors did not exist in a vacuum. They had behind them a whole gamut of written and oral tradition which informed their attitudes. The military heroes of their literature and history were exemplars for their own conduct. Thus, both Richard III and Henry ‘Tudor' will have known stories of Greek and Roman heroes. They will have been familiar with the fact that Achilles had tied the dead body of the vanquished Hector behind his chariot and dragged it round the walls of Troy before eventually surrendering the mangled remains to King Priam for burial.
²⁸
They will also have been familiar with the quasi-historical, quasi-mythological tales of the great Alexander, whose treatment of the dead body of his defeated enemy, Darius III of Persia, was considered quite exceptional and remarkable (Alexander accorded the dead Darius a full royal funeral). As for the typical aftermath of a battle, that had been graphically described in the previous century by the English poet Chaucer:

Whan that this worthy duc, the Theseus,
Hath Creon slayn and wonne Thebes thus,
Stille in that feeld he took al nyght his reste,
And dide with al the contree as hym leste.
To ransake in the taas of bodyes dede,
Hem for to strepe of harneys and of wede,
The pilours diden bisynesse and cure
After the bataille and discomfiture.
²⁹

We have already remarked that Richard III was not the only English king to have been violently deprived of his crown and his life. It is now time to consider briefly the other medieval examples of this phenomenon: Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI. In all three cases, the king's dead body was exposed to the public gaze, before being buried with little funeral pomp in a monastic church: Gloucester Abbey in the case of Edward II; the Dominican Priory at King's Langley for Richard II; and Chertsey Abbey for Henry VI.
³⁰
It therefore seems that we may have evidence of a consistent pattern of what might be described as ‘alternative royal burial' for ousted kings. This pattern consists of exposure of the corpse (to demonstrate publicly that the former monarch is dead), followed by a basic funeral, with discreet burial in a priory or abbey church, which would not be readily accessible to the general public, and where the body would be out of sight and hopefully, for the time being, out of mind.
³¹

In all three cases we find also that after a suitable lapse of time the burial arrangements were subsequently upgraded. Thus Edward III later provided a splendid tomb for his father at Gloucester Abbey. Henry V, soon after his accession, transferred Richard II's remains from King's Langley to the tomb at Westminster Abbey, which Richard had prepared for himself during his lifetime, and, as we have already seen (in
chapter 5
), Richard III, when he came to the throne, transferred Henry VI's remains to a new royal tomb in St George's Chapel, Windsor. We shall explore the later upgrading of Richard III's tomb in
chapter 11
, but let us begin by looking first at what arrangements were made for his interment in August 1485.

10
The Franciscan Priory

Precise and detailed information as to the arrangements made for the final disposal of Richard's remains is not recorded by any contemporary source. Writing more than one hundred years after the event, George Buck (c. 1563–1622?), the descendant of a Yorkist family, and the first writer to attempt a re-evaluation of the ‘Tudor' image of Richard III, states that ‘they gave his corpse a bed of earth, which was done
by commandment and order of King Henry VII
, and honourably in the chief church of Leicester, called St Mary's, belonging to the order and society of the Greyfriars'. It is clear at once that Buck's account is somewhat muddled. A dedication to the Blessed Virgin Mary was quite common for medieval priory churches of the Franciscan Order, so it would not be surprising if the Leicester Greyfriars had been so dedicated. Nevertheless, in the case of the Leicester priory, a dedication to St Francis himself has also been alleged. Surviving impressions of the priory seal, however, actually depict St Mary Magdalene in the scene
noli me tangere
.
¹
This strongly suggests that the Greyfriars church may indeed have been dedicated to St Mary – but to St Mary Magdalene rather than to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even so, it was certainly not ‘the chief church' of Leicester. Leicester Abbey (which was indeed dedicated to the Blessed Virgin) had a better claim to pre-eminence, and would arguably have been a more prestigious place of interment for Richard's corpse. This, together with the fact that there is no contemporary evidence that Henry VII took any initiative whatsoever in the matter of Richard's burial, means that Buck's account leaves us with certain questions.

Nonetheless, Richard's burial location is confirmed as the Franciscan Priory Church by the fifteenth-century Warwickshire antiquary, John Rous. Moreover, Rous states specifically that, as one would expect for a person of such rank, the interment took place in the choir of the church. However, he has been perceived by some authorities as complicating the issue somewhat by his use of the word
finaliter
(ultimately) to describe the friary burial. Based on this evidence, and on the account given in the Frowyk Chronicle, Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs have suggested that Richard's body was initially interred elsewhere (possibly in the church of St Mary-in-the-Newark) and was only moved to the Franciscan Priory Church at a later date. Yet it seems difficult to account for such a change of location. Why should Richard's body have subsequently been moved in this way? In the case of the other deposed kings, whose remains were later reburied (Richard II and Henry VI), these were taken
from
a priory church to a more publicly accessible place of burial. The removal of Richard III's body from the Newark to the Greyfriars would have run counter to this trend. It seems more likely, therefore, that the burial took place directly at the friary, and that the word
finaliter
refers simply to the brief delay representing the time during which Richard's body had been exposed to public view. The wording of a document referring to the construction of Richard's tomb at the Greyfriars certainly appears to imply that his body was already buried there at the time when the tomb was commissioned.
²

It is known that ‘Henry stayed two days at Leicester, and then pursued his course to London'. The new king's stay in Leicester presumably coincided with the period during which Richard's dead body was on public show. On the morning of Thursday 25 August, having formally been proclaimed king before the army, the nobility and representatives of Leicester, Henry VII prepared to ride away in the direction of the capital.

Without actually giving a precise date for the interment, Polydore Vergil indicates that Richard's burial took place on the same day as Henry VII's departure from Leicester, namely Thursday 25 August. Coincidentally, this happened to be the feast day of Richard's (and Henry's) sainted ancestor, King Louis IX of France. The English translation of Vergil's text reports the burial to have been ‘without any pompe or solemn funerall … in thabbay
[sic]
of monks
[sic]
Franciscanes at Leycester'.
³
Vergil's account is in several respects remiss, and we can discern in it the seeds of George Buck's later confusion between the Franciscan Priory and Leicester Abbey. As we have already seen, the Franciscan house in Leicester was in fact a priory, not an abbey, and of course members of the Franciscan Order are friars, not monks.
⁴

Bearing in mind that some of his wording regarding Richard's burial is rather careless, we can now review the rest of Vergil's very brief account. His reported lack of ‘ pompe' and solemnity may imply that Richard's remains were simply tipped into a grave with no religious rites at all.
⁵
Everything will have depended upon who made the decision to inter Richard at the Franciscan Priory, and upon who exactly carried out the burial. There are two possible scenarios. In the first, the friars themselves would have requested the new king's leave to inter the body of his predecessor, and carried out his burial. However, it is also possible that the burial was carried out by servants of the new king. In that case, the arrangements are likely to have been less respectful.

If the friars were in charge, surely no fifteenth-century religious community of friars, carrying out a private burial, well away from the eyes of the public,
⁶
would have failed to pray for the soul of the deceased person whom they were burying, whoever this might have been. Such prayers are an important part of Catholic tradition, and were considered extremely important at this particular period, when the cult of the dead was very strong. Moreover, late fifteenth-century evidence suggests that friars were considered by the general public to be particularly reliable and assiduous in carrying out this religious duty.
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