Maverick historian whose persistence helped find bones of Richard III in a city car park
John Ashdown-Hill, who has died aged 69, was an independent, some would say maverick, historian whose research helped lead to the discovery of Richard III’s remains beneath a car park in Leicester, in England’s Midlands, in 2012.
He also traced an all-female line of direct descendants from Richard’s sister, Anne of York. This meant that, when the bones were uncovered, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) could be used to demonstrate that they were indeed those of the last Plantagenet king.
Richard III, who reigned from 1483, died in August 1485 during the Battle of
Bosworth, one of the last significant battles in the Wars of the Roses.
His body was taken to Leicester where Henry VII, the new Tudor king, ordered that it be displayed naked.
According to Ashdown-Hill, Richard was later buried in the city’s Greyfriars Church without ceremony. Any tombstone was probably removed during the dissolution of the monasteries. Many years later it was discovered that the site had become a car park for the city’s social services staff.
Ashdown-Hill was meticulous in his research, in particular his forensic analysis of contemporary source material. This led him to uncover credible evidence that there was no reliable basis for the popular account that Richard III’s remains had been disposed of in the River Soar, known as the ‘‘bones in the river’’ story.
He was already working on identifying the possible site of Greyfriars Church when he was contacted by Philippa Langley, a writer behind the Richard III Society’s ‘‘Looking for Richard Project’’, which was researching the king’s death and burial.
Once the University of Leicester’s archaeologists had been persuaded this was a worthwhile cause, the dig began in 2012. On the very first day a skeleton was found. A month later Ashdown-Hill ceremoniously carried a box containing the bones from the car park. It was draped with a flag bearing the royal standard of the House of Plantagenet.
For a time campaigners from an organisation called the Plantagenet Alliance argued that, because of his connections with York, Richard should be re-interred in York Minster, although this was rejected by the High Court. Meanwhile Ashdown-Hill, who was Catholic, suggested that Leicester’s Dominican priory might make a suitable resting place. Finally, Leicester Cathedral was selected as the appropriate site for the burial.
In March 2015 Richard III’s mortal remains were transported in a lead-lined oak coffin through the city, taking in Bosworth field, before arriving at the cathedral for a service led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. A message in the order of service from the Queen read: ‘‘Today we recognise a king who lived through turbulent times and whose Christian faith sustained him in life and death.’’ Ashdown-Hill was in the congregation.
Louis John Frederick Ashdown-Hill was born in London. He spoke several languages, and went on to read history and French at the University of East Anglia. For many years he taught languages and classical civilisation, both in Britain and overseas. In 1981 he completed an MA in applied linguistics at the University of Essex.
After several years of voluntary work in the archaeology section of the Colchester Museums Service, his long-standing passion for latemedieval history came to the fore. In 2008 he completed a PhD at the University of Essex, his thesis being on Sir John Howard, the first duke of Norfolk and a cousin of Richard III, who also died at Bosworth.
Before this, in 2003, Ashdown-Hill had been at a conference in Belgium commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of Richard III’s sister, Margaret of York, whose possible bones had been found in Belgium. Colleagues there asked if he could help to identify them by finding an mtDNA sequence for Richard and his siblings. During that research, Ashdown-Hill located a living female descendant of Anne of York, Joy Ibsen, in Canada, who agreed to take part. He published his findings in late 2005.
Ashdown-Hill’s interests extended beyond Richard III. In 2010 he published Eleanor Talbot:
the Secret Queen, which described the clandestine marriage of Edward IV, Richard III’s elder brother.
By implication, the descendants from Edward IV’s official marriage to Elizabeth Woodville (the uncrowned Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, the ‘‘Princes in the Tower’’) were illegitimate. Until this point, many historians were not convinced that Eleanor had even existed.
Ashdown-Hill’s penultimate book, about the Princes in the Tower, will be published this year, while a collection of his poetry was published two days before his death. His final work, on Elizabeth Woodville, is due to be published next year.
He was a cheerful contributor to local history events. After speaking about his search for Richard III’s remains for the University of Essex’s annual Dudley White Local History Lecture, one organiser remarked that ‘‘the lengthy queue for admission looked more like that for a pop concert than a history lecture’’.
Away from his work, Ashdown-Hill, a quiet, gentle and unassuming man who was unmarried, was a lover of wildlife. At home in Manningtree, Essex, he kept chickens rescued from battery farms, although being vegetarian he would only eat their eggs. He would often take himself to a nearby beach where he could process his thoughts while sitting on the sand and staring out to sea.
He received an honorary doctorate from Essex in 2014, and in 2015 was appointed MBE. –
He was a gentle and unassuming man . . . At home he kept chickens rescued from battery farms, although being vegetarian he would only eat their eggs.