People’s King
City gives Richard royal funeral treatment
Avillainous Plantagenet monarch was transformed into the People’s King — for a few days at least — as thousands witnessed Richard III turn in his graves.
They were respectfully solemn, with only muted cheering and applause along the winding 20km route through verdant middle-England countryside as Richard’s recently unearthed mortal remains were transported with military-timed and detailed pomp and ceremony behind two armoured medieval knight outriders for his public reinterment in a £2.5 million ($5 million) cathedral tomb.
His story, and bones, had come full circle. Richard now lies in repose barely 50m across the lane from where he was found, famously twisted and evidently buried with scant ceremony, beneath a Leicester carpark, more than 500 years after he was slain at the battle of Bosworth Field.
His body was ripped asunder by 11 ferocious blows as his crown was torn from him that August day in 1485 by Henry Tudor’s forces after trusted allies, prudently sensing which way the wind was blowing amid the melee, deserted him at a key dynastychanging, Machiavellian moment.
There were faint echoes of Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997 as onlookers stepped forward to toss white roses on to the hearse as it journeyed from Ambion Hill, where Richard had met his violent end, to the quaint 150-seat church at Sutton Cheney, where he prayed before battle. It then went past Dadlington village church’s tiny graveyard, where many of his loyal troops were buried, and back into Leicester, where he had formulated his battle plans and spent his last nights at the Blue Boar Inn, long gone and now a budget hotel.
Back then, the king’s corpse had been stripped naked and slung ingloriously over the back of a horse, as proof of his demise.
As the cortege approached the city centre yesterday, crowd numbers swelled rapidly and the pomp was ratcheted up when, after stopping at St Nicholas Church, on what is now a busy inner-city ring road that services railway and bus stations, his coffin was transferred after a short ceremony from motor hearse to a flatbed conveyance drawn by four imposing horses.
It was pure theatre — Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole musical, on stage at the city’s Curve, which the procession later passed, was now a mere sideshow.
For a few hours in bright afternoon spring sunshine, the debate over whether this was all a Carry On Dick- type stunt, multi-ringed media circus or a praiseworthy piece of research archaeology using all manner of newfangled tech goodies was — aptly, given where Richard’s body had been found — parked.
Nor was it a time to mull over whether he had murdered those cute little princes in the tower. Pub quiz organisers were doubtless listening hard to the live TV feed, picking up little titbits about Richard being the last English monarch to die in battle on home soil and the first since Harold II got an eyeful at the Battle of Hastings. And how Richard, Duke of Gloucester, providing a royal touch to proceedings yesterday, was the first Duke of Gloucester named Richard since Richard III. And that this was the first royal “funeral” since that of George VI in 1952.
Leicester put on a show fit for a king — though the Queen had no plans to be present at any of this week’s formalities. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, took her place at Thursday’s cathedral interment. Some wondered caustically if the Queen’s absence was because the DNA path from Richard’s bones cast suspicion on her claim to the crown, given hints of illegitimacy in the line of descent. Perhaps she feared opening up another War of the Roses of the kind that threatened when the city of York laid claim to the king’s remains but was denied by the High Court. But the focus yesterday was all on Richard, not his heirs, rightful or not.
It will have mightily impressed the impressionable. Children from the King Richard III Infant School a few hundred metres from the city centre, past King Richard’s Rd, were here for a day of history brought alive as they may never experience again. It is a tale they have not just studied but contributed to, having made small woollen bags that now contain some of the king’s smaller bones for his reinterment.
They will doubtless have been bored with how Richard was the 12th of 13 children, and that his death ended the Wars of the Roses. This was the proper stuff. On their own doorstep.
Other children made white roses, Richard III’s Yorkist symbol, and tied them to the gates of their school, which the cortege passed as it approached a crammed city centre, where every decent vantage point was taken.
This old city of around 350,000, once an iron-age and Roman settlement and now a vibrant, multicultural mix of old and new, hadn’t seen anything quite like it — even last May, when the local footballers celebrated Leicester City’s promotion as champions to the Premier League and their open-top bus tour brought the centre to a standstill.
One man, in a replica blue City shirt, suggested the $200,000 the club’s Thai owners had donated to the burial fund made Richard III their most successful signing this year.
Amid the formality and pageantry, which few do better than the British, there were smiles and curious children perched on dads’ shoulders, little ones dressed as medieval princesses, even the odd authentic Richard lookalike. And, of course there was commercial exploitation — like the flower shop barely 50m from the cathedral’s front door doing a roaring trade, the parlour selling icecream “infused with white-rose essence” — and a mayor with big personal legacy hopes rubbing his hands at the knowledge Richard’s discovery had so far been worth more than $90 million to a local economy that has struggled since the demise of the hosiery industry.
There were Plantagenet cocktails, all manner of shopfronts with crowns and bunting. The city has been given a costly makeover. There is the new, high-tech RIII (yes, he’s a brand now) Visitor Centre, telling of his discovery and life. It is built, very tastefully, partly over the king’s original carpark grave site, visible below toughened glass.
Then there’s the new $8 million Jubilee Square, around the corner from the cathedral. And, yes, that had been a carpark.
Through it all, you could not help but be struck by the passage of time since Richard’s days — and the strangest irony of the proceedings. Richard has, after all, been left in a Church of England building. Yet there was no Anglican Church until years after his death.
That only came about when Henry Tudor’s oft-married son Henry VIII’s lust for Anne Boleyn got the better of him and the Pope would not allow him a divorce.
Royals, divorces, dalliances, treachery . . . not much has changed in 530 years.