CHAPTER 18

Reburying Richard III: is it the right body?

The skeleton of Richard III was reburied in a grand ceremony in Leicester Cathedral. Behind the scenes, many questioned whose body was actually being interred. This piece sets out the lingering doubts. 

Away from the Leicester-York battle or the Anglican-Catholic liturgical debate, the biggest question about the reburial of Richard III—the most unutterable one—is whether we are even burying the right bones. The evidence, you may be surprised to learn, is very far from clear.

The way you normally hear it is that the skeleton has a bent spine, is related to the House of York, died violently, and was buried in Grey Friars, the lost church of Leicester. Therefore, it is Richard. 

However, there are major—and I do mean major—problems with this.

Richard died in 1485, but the two carbon dating tests performed on his bones gave dates of 1430–60 and 1412–49. These were then adjusted with a ‘statistical algorithm’ because he ate a lot of fish, resulting in a new range of 1475–1530. Really, you might as well stick your finger in the air.

The DNA analysis has also been controversial. The skeleton’s mitochondrial DNA shows descent from the same female line as Richard. But every mother passes the same mitochondrial DNA to her sons and daughters, and her daughters pass it to their sons and daughters, and so on. Over generations and centuries, that means a large group of people in different places with different surnames.

The other usable DNA from the bones is the Y-chromosome DNA, which passes from father to son. Unfortunately, the Leicester car park bones do not have Richard’s expected male-line DNA. This means either the skeleton is not Richard, or that the Plantagenet line has, at an unknown date, been broken by illegitimacy. This male-line DNA is therefore worthless, as it does not prove one way or another whether the skeleton is Richard.

Then there is the fact his DNA codes are for blond hair and blue eyes, when we know Richard almost certainly had black hair and brown eyes. Although blond hair can darken to a degree during childhood, blue eyes do not mutate into brown ones.

So the carbon dating and genetic evidence is a bit of a mess. Professor Michael Hicks, a leading Richard III scholar, has challenged Leicester University’s claim that we can be 99.999 per cent certain it is Richard. The most we can conclude, he points out, is that the bones belong to someone with the same female-line DNA group as Richard. No more.

Away from the science, there are other difficult questions. Nothing actually links the bones to the Battle of Bosworth Field. In fact, the skeleton’s fish-adjusted date range covers the entire Wars of the Roses as well as a number of other conflicts. Richard was a war veteran—but the bones show no healed wounds.

Nor can we know who else may have been buried at Grey Friars. Some believe that even if Richard had been buried there, his body was most likely exhumed at the Dissolution and thrown into the nearby river.

So, as we prepare for a week of royal spectacle, the sort England always does stirringly well, it is worth pausing during the pageantry to wonder if it is indeed King Richard III being given such a glittering reburial, or whether his cold, battle-scarred Plantagenet bones still lie out there, somewhere, undiscovered and unrecognized.