The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA (18 page)

In this case, the reported lack of ceremonial would not mean that the offices of the dead and Requiem Mass were never celebrated for Richard. It would merely mean that the liturgies which were celebrated were accomplished without ‘solemnity' – a word which, in a religious context, has quite specific connotations. In ‘solemn' celebrations the officiating priest is supported by assistants and a full range of vestments is worn. Music and tapers are also extensively employed in solemn liturgies, and incense is offered.

Of course, not one of the trappings of a ‘solemn celebration' is essential. Clearly, based upon Vergil's account, we would have to imagine that some – and perhaps all – of these ceremonial trappings were lacking in the case of Richard's burial. This would not be surprising. However, while Speede's account emphasises the lack of ‘funeral
solemnity
', and Baker, later in the seventeenth century, says that Richard was buried ‘with
small
funeral pomp', in the case of burial by the friars this could hardly mean that there were no religious rites.
⁸

If the friars buried the body, representatives of the priory must have called upon the new king, probably on Wednesday 24 August. Either the friars requested leave to bury Richard's remains, or King Henry VII ordered them to take on this task.
⁹
Buck's later account speaks of a royal command, but it may be that the initiative actually came from the friars, whose order had enjoyed the patronage of the royal house of York.
¹⁰
These friars certainly had a Yorkist history. Earlier, their Leicester priory had opposed the accession of Henry IV, and two of its friars had been hanged as a result!
¹¹
In either event, it must have been Henry VII who made the final decision about the disposal of Richard's remains.

Early on the morning of Henry VII's departure a small group of friars would then have gone to collect Richard's remains. The body had not been coffined.
¹²
It had probably been displayed at the Newark on a kind of hurdle or stretcher, possibly partly covered by a cloth. The friars who went to collect the corpse will have merely covered the body completely or placed it in a shroud, and lifted the hurdle between them. Then, without any of the usual royal funerary pomp their simple little cortege will have made its way through the streets of Leicester on foot, at an hour when most of the citizens were probably still in bed. There will have been few, if any, witnesses in the streets or at the windows from whom Vergil or others could later have obtained the essential information for any detailed account of what took place.

Likewise, what happened at the priory church would have been private, unseen by any but the friars themselves. We can be certain of this because Rous reports that the burial took place in the choir, and the recent excavation at the Leicester Greyfriars site confirms this. The choir was an enclosed part of the church, which was not usually accessible to lay people. No great royal hearse with mountains of candles will have been prepared before the high altar, and the stretcher bearing Richard's body must just have been placed on trestles before the altar, perhaps with tapers burning on either side.

There may have been a brief period of vigil after the reception of the body, with one or two friars watching over the corpse and praying silently. At some time during the morning, Requiem Mass will have been celebrated. There will have been no mourners in attendance with torches: only the friars themselves, standing in their choirstalls. At the end of the funeral mass, the body will have been lowered into a new grave, which had been opened in the floor the day before near the centre of the western end of the choir, close to the point where an archway gave access to the walkway and the nave beyond it. Here some of the coloured, glazed floor tiles had been lifted up and a shallow hole had been dug in the earth beneath. There, Richard III's shrouded body was laid. It proved a tight fit. The body had not been measured, and the grave was barely long enough for it.

But we must also consider the alternative possibility: that Richard III's remains were not buried by the friars but by servants of Henry VII. In this case, the friars may not even have been warned in advance of the plans. On the morning of 25 August, as the new king was preparing to leave Leicester, some of his servants would simply have been sent to pick up the body from the Newark and cart it to the Fanciscan Priory. The friars may only have become aware of these arrangements when they were summoned by the banging on their door. The king's servants would then have dragged the body into the choir and rapidly dug a simple pit to receive it. Into this they would have thrust the body, shovelled the earth back on top of it, and then left the astonished and probably appalled friars to deal with the sequel in whatever way they saw fit. Unfortunately, there is some evidence from the excavation of the grave site that this kind of burial may have been accorded to Richard's remains. Even so, it is hard to imagine that the religious community would not have offered prayers for the dead once the new king's servants had departed.

Certainly no coffin was employed for Richard's burial. This was confirmed by the excavation of August 2012. A little more needs to be said about coffins, because unfortunately a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition in Leicester ascribed to Richard III a stone coffin, which was displayed to visitors at that period, at a Leicester inn. The normal pattern for royal and aristocratic burials in the fifteenth century was to use either a lead coffin (as attested by the cases of Edward IV and Lady Anne Mowbray) or a wooden coffin (as in the cases of Eleanor Talbot and Elizabeth Woodville). In Richard III's case, however, it is clear that no coffin was used.

The supposed ‘stone coffin of Richard III' was a much later red herring, pressed into service by a canny innkeeper simply to generate tourist interest. Stone coffins had certainly been used in the
early
Middle Ages, but they were not used in the fifteenth century. The one displayed at the Leicester inn in the eighteenth century very probably came from a genuine priory site – perhaps even from the Greyfriars. No doubt it was unearthed by chance during the redevelopment of the site after the Dissolution, and was then immediately seized on by a quick-thinking entrepreneur with an eye to business as a potential ‘tourist attraction'. Unfortunately, this story has recently resurfaced with the discovery of a similar stone coffin in the Leicester area, in use as a garden water feature. This ‘new' stone coffin has subsequently been transported to, and placed on display at, the Bosworth Battlefield Centre, where it is now apparently playing a very similar tourist role to that of its eighteenth-century predecessor. The ‘new' coffin probably also came originally from a priory site. However, the recently discovered coffin is certainly not identical to the one which was displayed in Leicester as ‘King Richard's' in the eighteenth century, for we know that by the end of the eighteenth century that one had been broken into fragments which later disappeared – probably used as rubble in the foundations of later buildings. On the other hand, the ‘new' coffin is more or less intact. It is also important to stress that it is absolutely certain that neither the old stone coffin nor the new ever had any genuine connection with Richard III.

We can summarise and conclude our review of the burial arrangements made (or at least approved) for Richard by Henry VII in August 1485 by observing that they present no surprising or unexpected features. Henry exposed the corpse to public view, and then had it buried with basic funeral rites in a priory church. As we have already seen, this corresponds very closely to the treatment accorded to the corpses of England's other displaced monarchs. Based upon those earlier examples we might then anticipate that at some convenient later date – possibly after the accession of Henry VIII – a royal tomb for Richard would have been commissioned. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is more or less exactly what happened. The reburial of Henry VI at Windsor had taken place twelve years after the king's death and original burial, and it had to wait for the death of Edward IV and the accession of Richard III. The upgrading of Richard II's burial had taken about fourteen years, and also had to wait for Henry V to succeed his father. However, in Richard III's case the provision of his new royal tomb took only nine years, and Richard did not have to wait for the accession of the second ‘Tudor' king.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Bosworth, the news of Richard III's death slowly crept its way around the courts of Europe. On 20 October 1485, the Bishop of Imola wrote, in a letter to Pope Innocent VIII:

According to common report as heard by me on my way, the King of England has been killed in battle.
¹⁴

11
‘King Richard's Tombe'
¹

As has just been noted, the one slightly unusual feature which we encounter in the upgrading of the burial of Richard III, is the fact that he did not have to wait quite so long for his royal tomb as his dethroned predecessors. We shall explore possible reasons for this shortly.

As a matter of fact, although it has usually been assumed that Richard's burial place was initially left unmarked, we actually have no surviving evidence on this point. It is possible that, once the earth had settled and it was possible to reinstate the paving at the western end of their choir, the friars themselves marked King Richard's burial site in some way. In any case, the lapse of time was relatively short, so that knowledge of the precise burial location would certainly not have been lost when the time came to install the new royal monument.

It seems to have been in about the summer of 1494, nine years after the Battle of Bosworth, that King Henry VII initiated the creation of a fitting tomb for his erstwhile rival.
²
The king delegated the responsibility for this project to Sir Reynold Bray and Sir Thomas Lovell, committed ‘Tudor' adherents and well-established servants of the new king. Nevertheless, Richard III's mother, Cecily Neville, dowager Duchess of York, seems to have considered both men trustworthy, since in April–May 1495 – within a year of their being charged by Henry VII with supervising the construction of her son's tomb – she named them amongst the executors of her will.
³
Since one of Cecily's motives was a wish to ensure her own proper entombment at Fotheringhaye, it is reasonable to suppose that Bray and Lovell had dutifully fulfilled their task in respect of Richard III and had commemorated him in a fitting manner.

In fact, they commissioned a Nottingham alabaster man, Walter Hylton, to erect a monument ‘in the Church of Friers in the town of leycestr where the bonys of Kyng Richard the iij
^de
reste'.
⁴
This was probably that same Walter Hylton who served as Mayor of Nottingham in 1489/90 and again in 1496/97.
⁵
We are aware of his commission only because it subsequently gave rise to a legal dispute. The case was presented to the chancellor, Cardinal Morton (though it was not, of course, heard by him in person), at some date between 1493 and 1500, and the plea is dated on the reverse 1 July 11 Henry VII [1496]. Following Hylton's commission, an alabaster tomb monument for Richard III was made in Nottingham and subsequently installed at the Greyfriars church in Leicester. As we shall see, Richard's epitaph appears to date the commissioning of this monument to 1494. The sum paid to Hylton for his work on the tomb is usually reported to have been £50, though in fact the reading of this figure is problematic.
⁶

It is virtually certain that the payment to Hylton (whatever the sum involved) did not represent Henry VII's total expenditure on Richard's tomb. BL, Add. MS 7099 contains extracts from the household accounts of Henry VII in the form of manuscript copies in the handwriting of the antiquarian Craven Ord (c. 1755–1832).
⁷
On folio 126 Ord notes that the original documents which he transcribed were then ‘in the Exchequer, every leaf signed by the king'. However, those original fifteenth-century records are now lost. Ord's surviving copies in the British Library contain tentative attempts at regnal year dating, although these have been subsequently erased, and appear to have been in error. We shall return to the question of dating presently.

Folio 129 (in the modern, pencil enumeration) includes the entry ‘11 Sept. – to James Keyley for King Rich. Tombe – £10. 0s. 12d.'. Superficially the sum specified may appear odd, but the extracts contain other entries where the figure in the pence column is 12 or above, or where the figure in the shillings column is 20 or above. Presumably, therefore, the sum paid to James Keyley was in fact £10. 1
s
. 0
d
.

The unequivocal use of the title of king in relation to Richard in both the Hylton and Keyley texts is interesting, since it appears to confirm that there was absolutely no question as to his status. The Keyley reference includes no royal numeral, but it could not possibly relate to Richard I (who lay buried in France). Some might wish to argue that Keyley's payment could refer to some repair to the tomb of Richard II in Westminster Abbey. In that case, the fact that the date of the payment corresponds with the period at which Henry VII is known to have been arranging a tomb for Richard III would be a remarkable coincidence – for although the payment to James Keyley mentions no year, the precise date can be ascertained. The preceding folio records the payment of £10 to Sir William Stanley ‘at his execution'. This entry is dated 20 February, and Stanley was executed in February 1495. Thus the payment to Keyley was clearly made on 11 September 1495. This, in turn, suggests that the inauguration of Richard III's new tomb may well have taken place on the tenth anniversary either of Richard's death or his burial (22 or 25 August 1495). Moreover, the occasion might perhaps have been marked by some royal ceremonial, since this would have been in Henry VII's interest at that time, as we shall see.