Lavish send off for the hunch-back’d king
The eyes of the world will be on Leicester when it reburies the remains of Richard III, says Florence Waters
This week – two-and-a-half years after one of the most sensational archaeological finds of the past century – the remains of King Richard III will be placed into a lead-lined coffin in a forensics lab at Leicester University. The last Plantagenet king of England – Shakespeare’s “poisonous bunch-back’d toad” – who resided forfive centuries in an ignominious, unmarked grave, is about to receive a lavish burial, presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury and attended by members of the Royal family and descendants of the Plantagenet line. Tens of thousands are expected to crowd the streets of Leicester next Sunday to watch the coffin arrive on a horse-drawn gun carriage, before it is covered with a magnificent pall and put on public display in the city’s cathedral. The king will then be reinterred in a specially constructed stone tomb in one of the cathedral’s ambulatories on March 26, in front of the world’s media. There will be an intimate vigil to allow those who led the search for Richard’s lost grave to bid a last farewell. And then Richard III will finally rest in peace. Or will he? On a visit to the city earlier this month I happened to see Leicester’s mayor, Peter Soulsby, proudly posing for a photograph next to a new bronze statue of the king. When the mayor turned to admire Richard, standing in his knightly armour, sword erect, lifting his weighty crown to the skies, a bearded man in a hoodie cycled past on a BMXshouting, “Down with tyrants!” Mayor Soulsby laughed nervously. “He’s just talking about me,” he said. The joke hints at concerns latent in next week’s unprecedented events. How should we approach the burial of a medieval king half a millennium after his death? Who can say who this man was? And, if indeed Richard was the embittered king of legend who had his nephews murdered in the Tower of London to keep his title, why is his body being lauded in such a lavish fashion? “It is the burial of an individual,” says the Rt Rev Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester. “We’re not suggesting it’s his virtue that earns him a right to be buried in a Christian church. In the end, we are all sinners, even kings and queens.” At his address, Bishop Stevens intends to dwell on how human lives and the stories associated with them resonate through time. Indeed, who could have predicted that, 530 years after his death, the ghost of Richard III would be so alive? So far nearly 250,000 people from all over the world have been to the hastily built £4million visitor centre erected on the site of the archaeologists’ trench – the location of an abbey in 1485, when Richard died, and a council car park in 2012, when the dig began – where, for £7.95, you can see the dusty pit in which Richard’s skeleton was found. It’s been estimated that Richard could be worth as much as £150million a year to the city. Meanwhile, emotions have run high over the fate of the king’s remains. Descendants of the Plantagenet line went to the High Court to defend the last King of York’s rights to be reinterred at York Minster, but were overruled in May last year. It’s not only the living Plantagenet descendants who have an interest in how and where the burial happens. In a January episode of Radio 4’s Great Lives, Richard’s biographer Annette Carson was invited to defend the maligned king, and took the opportunity to curtly conclude the programme saying, “I’m not sure the week-long event in March is going to be very dignified.” But Leicester City Council has been working alongside passionate “Ricardians”, historians and enthusiasts intent on repairing the image of the man mythologised as Shakespeare’s murderous villain, and organising a “fitting” tribute. Michael Ibsen, a carpenter, and Richard’s 17th great-grandnephew, was asked to make the coffin, and the final design, made of English oak from the Duchy of Cornwall, will contain a rosary and will be adorned with a gold-plated crown set with enamelled white roses, garnets, sapphires and pearls. It will also contain soil from three locations: Fotheringhay where the king was born, Middleham Castle in Yorkshire where he grew up, and End of the line: Richard III was the last Plantagenet monarch the Bosworth field where he died. The cortège, which leaves the university on Sunday, will retrace the movements of his final days, including the site where he allegedly said his final Mass and the spot where he was struck down. The route will be lined by 5,929 white roses in ceramic, plastic and paper, with each flower representing a person who went missing in Leicestershire in 2012, the year the remains were found. The Dean of Leicester Cathedral says the reinterment planning has involved some “conflict”, particularly over the question of whether “the king in the car park” should have a Roman Catholic burial. There have also been suggestions that Richard should have a knight’s effigy, a medieval-style reinterment ceremony, or a place in the line of royal tombs atWestminster Abbey. Among those who are disappointed is Philippa Langley, an amateur historian who after seven-and-ahalf years of research and dogged persistence managed to persuade a sceptical Leicester City Council to go ahead with the car park dig to find Richard in the first place. “This project was about retrieving Richard’s remains from an obliterated and undignified place, and giving him a reburial that befits a king,” she told the Telegraph last year before the skeleton was identified. “I don’t understand why he isn’t getting a state funeral if he’s an anointed monarch,” says Langley. “I get emails constantly asking me this question.” Money for the burial has come primarily out of private donations and trust funds, with most of the £2.5million being spent on craftsmanship for the tomb and adjustments to the fabric of the cathedral, including four white roses of York to be engraved on floor tiles around the tomb. Langley raised doubts about the tomb, a modernist minimal stone slab cut through with a deeply carved cross. “He was the last medieval king, the tomb should be fitting. The cross slash in the top is inappropriate given the nature of his death,” she said, referring to the fact that historians now know, from Richard’s skull, that he was slashed and stabbed through the head by the spikes of two halberdiers. It is the visceral human frailties revealed by Richard’s skeleton that will have the most profound impact on history and on our memory of the king, according to DrTobias Capwell, one of the historians and weapon experts involved in piecing together the details of Richard’s death. These realities, he says, take us closer to medieval history, a period Capwell believes is “still obscured by knightly romance and fiction”. “I’ve had a hard time accepting they discovered Richard actually, purely because it’s just so ridiculously unlikely,” says Capwell. But now he’s had time to let the news sink in he knows what the single most significant discovery associated with the find will be. “Above all I love the fact that Richard had scoliosis. It’s a reminder that history is human, and that all myth comes from reality.” Channel 4’s week of live programming for the burial of Richard III begins on Sunday March 22 with a procession of the king’s remains from 5.30pm, and culminates on Thursday March 26 from 10am with ‘Richard III: The Burial of the King Live’ from the Cathedral.