In October this year, Steve Coogan settled a claim made by a former employee of the University of Leicester relating to the depiction of the employee in the 2022 film The Lost King, for which Coogan co-wrote the screenplay. Coogan told the court he had paid compensation to avoid a lengthy legal battle but that he ‘would not apologise’ and would “welcome any inquiry which affords the opportunity to look in detail at… the University of Leicester’s behaviour”.
This is only the most recent controversy in a long line of disputed issues that have attached themselves to Richard of York, briefly King Richard III of England. I don’t have sufficient information to comment on the issue that Steve Coogan has raised, but I have long thought that my adopted county of Yorkshire should have more say in the final resting place of Richard, for reasons I outline below.
Richard Plantagenet, last Yorkist King of England
Born on 2 October 1452, Richard was the youngest son of the Yorkist ‘pretender’ to the English throne, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York. Young Richard spent much of his childhood at Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, being trained by his cousin, the Earl of Warwick, to become a royal knight.
Richard was born at a time when what we now know as ‘the War of the Roses’ (then the ‘Cousins’ War’) was about to begin. Two separate lineages emanating from Edward III (1312–1377), all Plantagenets but known by their ducal designations York and Lancaster, bitterly disputed their respective rights to inherit the English throne.
The Yorks fought under the banner of a White Rose, while the Lancasters fought under the banner of a Red Rose, hence the ‘Roses’ war.
In 1472, Richard married Warwick’s daughter Anne Neville and they made their family home in Middleham Castle. They had one son, Edward, who died in mid-childhood.
Richard’s elder brother Edward eventually became king and reigned over England (with a short gap) between 1461 and 1483. Although Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 at the age of nine, he never spent any significant time there. His role during Edward’s reign was to administer Northern England, which he did, by all accounts efficiently, until Edward died suddenly at the age of 40.
Richard reigned for slightly less than two years before being killed at Bosworth in Leicestershire in battle with his distant cousin Henry Tudor, who subsequently became Henry VII. Henry brought the ‘Roses’ wars to an end by marrying Richard’s niece – the eldest daughter of Edward. This united the Yorkists and Lancastrians in the resulting offspring, one of whom became Henry VIII. Henry VIII’s banner carried a Tudor Rose: a red rose with a white centre.
Why was Richard so unpopular?
The evidence seems to indicate that he was not, until he claimed the throne via an apparently treacherous route or possibly until Shakespeare sullied his reputation in order to shore up Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne. Henry was, of course, the grandfather of Shakespeare’s patron Elizabeth I.
As the ruler of Northern England, Richard modernised its administration by introducing a ducal council for the North, a civil and criminal court system, and a primitive version of legal aid for poor people accused of committing a crime. He also ensured that all laws were translated from Norman French into English.
His reputational issues emerged from the fact that he disrupted the line of succession to depose his brother Edward’s son, the 12-year-old King Edward V, to take the crown for himself. This was swiftly followed by the disappearance of young Edward and his ten-year-old brother, Richard. While their bodies could not be found (at least at the time), it became widely assumed that King Richard must have had them murdered.
Many theories have been put forward over the intervening centuries about why this happened. One sympathetic to Richard is that he feared the boys would be used to empower the widowed Queen Consort’s power-hungry Woodville family, so he arranged for the boys to live under secret, assumed identities away from the court. This theory was formally outlined in the Desiderata Curiosa in 1779.
However, the discovery of two children’s bodies hidden in the Tower of London in 1674 would seem to offer a challenge to that possibility. DNA testing is the only way to move an investigation forward and Royal permissions were refused in 2013.
The continuing controversies of Richard III
History recorded that Richard died in battle, but records were scant on where he had been laid to rest. Amateur historian Phillipa Langley, from whose perspective The Lost King narrative is constructed, had long insisted that his body was recoverable. She spent years persuading historians and archaeologists that she had a credible case and, thence, to raise the necessary funds. Against all odds, the excavation team subsequently found Richard’s remains during their first dig.
The DNA of the remains matched that of two indirect matrilineal descendants and the skeleton indicated scoliosis, as had been suggested by historical records. The skeleton also revealed eleven separate wounds, including a blow to the head that would have killed Richard instantaneously. A wound on his pelvis was caused after death, most likely due to being stabbed in the right buttock “as an act of humiliation”.
Adding this information to the historical data, it appears that Richard’s body was taken from the battlefield, tied to a horse and paraded, probably naked, through the streets of Leicester. He may have had a sword lodged in his right buttock at some time before the parade or during it. He was then buried by the monks of the nearby Greyfriars church, in the vicinity of the choir. The church was subsequently demolished in 1538 during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
There was a report in 1612 of a memorial stone existing for Richard in the gardens of Herrick Place, which was built on the site of the church. Over the years, after Herrick Place was demolished and several other buildings were successively built and demolished on the site, the exact location of the Herrick Place garden was lost.
Reburial and further controversy
After the 21st-century examinations of his body concluded, Richard was buried in Leicester Cathedral in a ceremony resembling a state funeral, despite a challenge from several descendants of the Plantagenets who had wished for him to be interred in York Minster.
It seemed to me at that time to be an odd decision to bury a royal general (which was what he effectively was) in a place that had been unfamiliar to him in life, and where his dead body had been paraded through the streets to be mocked and humiliated. But while York Minster seemed a little more appropriate, it did not seem quite the right resting place, either.
The resting places of Richard’s wife, Anne Neville, and their son, Edward, are known. So, might all three, in the knowledge of these centuries of circumstances, have wished to be buried together at Middleham? This was their home, in which all had spent the greatest number of their days before being propelled into the epicentre of the vicious family quarrel that had blighted all of their lives since birth.
Finding peace in Yorkshire
Steve Coogan’s response to his claimant suggests that Richard III’s controversies are not yet over. Add to this the possibility that the current, or a future king, will at some point allow the Tower of London children’s bones to be analysed. The probability of this seems quite high, given that the current king has given indications that he might be more amenable to this than his mother.
What if the evidence of such an analysis points towards Richard being a child killer? This seems the most likely outcome, given the flimsiness of alternative possibilities. In today’s mass culture and social media-driven climate, would he then be permitted to continue to lie in his sumptuous Leicester tomb?
Such media maelstroms would be unlikely to take into account the fact that the ‘Cousins’ War’ was fought in a culture that lies so far in our past that we are unable to fully comprehend the pressures that drove the combatants or the options that they were able to pursue.
Burying Caesar, not praising him
Shakespeare has Mark Antony say of Julius Caesar:
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
This seems a very fitting epitaph for Richard III, too.
Even if DNA testing indicates that children’s remains found in the Tower of London are Edward V and his brother Richard, more than five hundred years later, there would be no indisputable evidence to indicate who murdered them and why, or if Richard III had ordered the murders. But this would be of no consequence to tabloid and social media; anachronism would be piled upon anachronism.
Leicester Cathedral should of course keep its visitor centre; it tells an important tale of historical and recent events in the area. But might it not be most appropriate to bring Richard and his family back together to lie in the still beautiful, peaceful Yorkshire town that they inhabited in life? Middleham could give them a simple, dignified burial in a respectful but not sumptuous tomb, where they could finally rest in peace, together.
After more than 540 years, the living world would then be able to conduct future debates without any further rattling of ancient bones.
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