BURIAL FIT FOR A KING
Richard III laid to rest
A maligned monarch found under a parking lot was buried in pomp Thursday, as Britain embraced King Richard III, a long- reviled ruler who is experiencing a remarkable posthumous renaissance.
Royalty, religious leaders and actor Benedict Cumberbatch joined archeologists, distant relatives and curious Britons for a service in Leicester Cathedral that saw Richard’s bones buried with dignity, 530 years after his violent death.
“Richard’s posthumous reputation has been less than glorious,” Gordon Campbell, the University of Leicester’s public orator, noted about a man whose name was long a byword for villainy.
But now, Campbell said, he has “the greatest following of all English monarchs” apart from Queen Elizabeth II.
Britain has embraced the story of the medieval king whose battlescarred skeleton was found under a car park in Leicester in 2012.
Thousands came to view his coffin ahead of Thursday’s service, which was televised.
In his sermon, Bishop of Leicester Tim Stevens said the discovery of the skeleton “has broken open not just a car park, but a nation’s story.”
Stevens said Richard was found just 40 metres from where he was being reburied — but his journey from ignominy to honour was evidence that “reputation does not have the last word, for Richard or for any of us.”
The service was the culmination of a wave of Richard- mania that has been building since archeologists looking for Richard dug up a skeleton with a distinctively curved spine.
Scientific sleuthing — including radiocarbon dating, bone analysis and DNA tests — confirmed the remains belonged to the long- lost ruler, who died at the Battle of Bosworth, near Leicester, in 1485.
The victor, Henry Tudor, went on to reign as King Henry VII and founded the Tudor dynasty.
Richard was buried without a coffin in a church that was later demolished. For centuries his image was defined by William Shakespeare’s Richard III: a hunchbacked, powerhungry tyrant who murdered his two young nephews because they were rivals for the crown.
Some historians argue that Richard was a relatively enlightened monarch whose reign from 1483 to 1485 saw reforms including the introduction of the right to bail and the lifting of restrictions on books and printing presses.
Richard’s fans and foes alike agreed the service was a historic occasion. Elizabeth has ruled for 63 years, and most Britons have never seen a king buried. The service — not a funeral, organizers stressed, since he probably had a simple one in 1485 — borrowed from 15th- century rites, with Latin and plainsong amid more modern hymns.
There was star power, too, as Cumberbatch — who plays Richard III in the BBC’s Shakespearean TV series The Hollow Crown — read a poem by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
University of Leicester genealogists, leaving no Richard- related stone unturned, have identified Cumberbatch as the late king ’s second cousin, 16 times removed.
In a climax of simple dignity, the king ’s oak coffin was lowered by a group of soldier pallbearers into a grave in the cathedral floor, surrounded by a black marble plinth carved with his name: Richard III.