10

The Franciscan Priory

Precise and detailed information as to the arrangements made for the final disposal of Richard’s remains is not recorded by any contemporary source. Writing more than one hundred years after the event, George Buck (c. 1563–1622?), the descendant of a Yorkist family, and the first writer to attempt a re-evaluation of the ‘Tudor’ image of Richard III, states that ‘they gave his corpse a bed of earth, which was done by commandment and order of King Henry VII, and honourably in the chief church of Leicester, called St Mary’s, belonging to the order and society of the Greyfriars’. It is clear at once that Buck’s account is somewhat muddled. A dedication to the Blessed Virgin Mary was quite common for medieval priory churches of the Franciscan Order, so it would not be surprising if the Leicester Greyfriars had been so dedicated. Nevertheless, in the case of the Leicester priory, a dedication to St Francis himself has also been alleged. Surviving impressions of the priory seal, however, actually depict St Mary Magdalene in the scene noli me tangere.¹ This strongly suggests that the Greyfriars church may indeed have been dedicated to St Mary – but to St Mary Magdalene rather than to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even so, it was certainly not ‘the chief church’ of Leicester. Leicester Abbey (which was indeed dedicated to the Blessed Virgin) had a better claim to pre-eminence, and would arguably have been a more prestigious place of interment for Richard’s corpse. This, together with the fact that there is no contemporary evidence that Henry VII took any initiative whatsoever in the matter of Richard’s burial, means that Buck’s account leaves us with certain questions.

Nonetheless, Richard’s burial location is confirmed as the Franciscan Priory Church by the fifteenth-century Warwickshire antiquary, John Rous. Moreover, Rous states specifically that, as one would expect for a person of such rank, the interment took place in the choir of the church. However, he has been perceived by some authorities as complicating the issue somewhat by his use of the word finaliter (ultimately) to describe the friary burial. Based on this evidence, and on the account given in the Frowyk Chronicle, Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs have suggested that Richard’s body was initially interred elsewhere (possibly in the church of St Mary-in-the-Newark) and was only moved to the Franciscan Priory Church at a later date. Yet it seems difficult to account for such a change of location. Why should Richard’s body have subsequently been moved in this way? In the case of the other deposed kings, whose remains were later reburied (Richard II and Henry VI), these were taken from a priory church to a more publicly accessible place of burial. The removal of Richard III’s body from the Newark to the Greyfriars would have run counter to this trend. It seems more likely, therefore, that the burial took place directly at the friary, and that the word finaliter refers simply to the brief delay representing the time during which Richard’s body had been exposed to public view. The wording of a document referring to the construction of Richard’s tomb at the Greyfriars certainly appears to imply that his body was already buried there at the time when the tomb was commissioned.²

It is known that ‘Henry stayed two days at Leicester, and then pursued his course to London’. The new king’s stay in Leicester presumably coincided with the period during which Richard’s dead body was on public show. On the morning of Thursday 25 August, having formally been proclaimed king before the army, the nobility and representatives of Leicester, Henry VII prepared to ride away in the direction of the capital.

Without actually giving a precise date for the interment, Polydore Vergil indicates that Richard’s burial took place on the same day as Henry VII’s departure from Leicester, namely Thursday 25 August. Coincidentally, this happened to be the feast day of Richard’s (and Henry’s) sainted ancestor, King Louis IX of France. The English translation of Vergil’s text reports the burial to have been ‘without any pompe or solemn funerall … in thabbay [sic] of monks [sic] Franciscanes at Leycester’.³ Vergil’s account is in several respects remiss, and we can discern in it the seeds of George Buck’s later confusion between the Franciscan Priory and Leicester Abbey. As we have already seen, the Franciscan house in Leicester was in fact a priory, not an abbey, and of course members of the Franciscan Order are friars, not monks.⁴

Bearing in mind that some of his wording regarding Richard’s burial is rather careless, we can now review the rest of Vergil’s very brief account. His reported lack of ‘ pompe’ and solemnity may imply that Richard’s remains were simply tipped into a grave with no religious rites at all.⁵ Everything will have depended upon who made the decision to inter Richard at the Franciscan Priory, and upon who exactly carried out the burial. There are two possible scenarios. In the first, the friars themselves would have requested the new king’s leave to inter the body of his predecessor, and carried out his burial. However, it is also possible that the burial was carried out by servants of the new king. In that case, the arrangements are likely to have been less respectful.

If the friars were in charge, surely no fifteenth-century religious community of friars, carrying out a private burial, well away from the eyes of the public,⁶ would have failed to pray for the soul of the deceased person whom they were burying, whoever this might have been. Such prayers are an important part of Catholic tradition, and were considered extremely important at this particular period, when the cult of the dead was very strong. Moreover, late fifteenth-century evidence suggests that friars were considered by the general public to be particularly reliable and assiduous in carrying out this religious duty.⁷

In this case, the reported lack of ceremonial would not mean that the offices of the dead and Requiem Mass were never celebrated for Richard. It would merely mean that the liturgies which were celebrated were accomplished without ‘solemnity’ – a word which, in a religious context, has quite specific connotations. In ‘solemn’ celebrations the officiating priest is supported by assistants and a full range of vestments is worn. Music and tapers are also extensively employed in solemn liturgies, and incense is offered.

Of course, not one of the trappings of a ‘solemn celebration’ is essential. Clearly, based upon Vergil’s account, we would have to imagine that some – and perhaps all – of these ceremonial trappings were lacking in the case of Richard’s burial. This would not be surprising. However, while Speede’s account emphasises the lack of ‘funeral solemnity’, and Baker, later in the seventeenth century, says that Richard was buried ‘with small funeral pomp’, in the case of burial by the friars this could hardly mean that there were no religious rites.⁸

If the friars buried the body, representatives of the priory must have called upon the new king, probably on Wednesday 24 August. Either the friars requested leave to bury Richard’s remains, or King Henry VII ordered them to take on this task.⁹ Buck’s later account speaks of a royal command, but it may be that the initiative actually came from the friars, whose order had enjoyed the patronage of the royal house of York.¹⁰ These friars certainly had a Yorkist history. Earlier, their Leicester priory had opposed the accession of Henry IV, and two of its friars had been hanged as a result!¹¹ In either event, it must have been Henry VII who made the final decision about the disposal of Richard’s remains.

Early on the morning of Henry VII’s departure a small group of friars would then have gone to collect Richard’s remains. The body had not been coffined.¹² It had probably been displayed at the Newark on a kind of hurdle or stretcher, possibly partly covered by a cloth. The friars who went to collect the corpse will have merely covered the body completely or placed it in a shroud, and lifted the hurdle between them. Then, without any of the usual royal funerary pomp their simple little cortege will have made its way through the streets of Leicester on foot, at an hour when most of the citizens were probably still in bed. There will have been few, if any, witnesses in the streets or at the windows from whom Vergil or others could later have obtained the essential information for any detailed account of what took place.

Likewise, what happened at the priory church would have been private, unseen by any but the friars themselves. We can be certain of this because Rous reports that the burial took place in the choir, and the recent excavation at the Leicester Greyfriars site confirms this. The choir was an enclosed part of the church, which was not usually accessible to lay people. No great royal hearse with mountains of candles will have been prepared before the high altar, and the stretcher bearing Richard’s body must just have been placed on trestles before the altar, perhaps with tapers burning on either side.

There may have been a brief period of vigil after the reception of the body, with one or two friars watching over the corpse and praying silently. At some time during the morning, Requiem Mass will have been celebrated. There will have been no mourners in attendance with torches: only the friars themselves, standing in their choirstalls. At the end of the funeral mass, the body will have been lowered into a new grave, which had been opened in the floor the day before near the centre of the western end of the choir, close to the point where an archway gave access to the walkway and the nave beyond it. Here some of the coloured, glazed floor tiles had been lifted up and a shallow hole had been dug in the earth beneath. There, Richard III’s shrouded body was laid. It proved a tight fit. The body had not been measured, and the grave was barely long enough for it.

But we must also consider the alternative possibility: that Richard III’s remains were not buried by the friars but by servants of Henry VII. In this case, the friars may not even have been warned in advance of the plans. On the morning of 25 August, as the new king was preparing to leave Leicester, some of his servants would simply have been sent to pick up the body from the Newark and cart it to the Fanciscan Priory. The friars may only have become aware of these arrangements when they were summoned by the banging on their door. The king’s servants would then have dragged the body into the choir and rapidly dug a simple pit to receive it. Into this they would have thrust the body, shovelled the earth back on top of it, and then left the astonished and probably appalled friars to deal with the sequel in whatever way they saw fit. Unfortunately, there is some evidence from the excavation of the grave site that this kind of burial may have been accorded to Richard’s remains. Even so, it is hard to imagine that the religious community would not have offered prayers for the dead once the new king’s servants had departed.

Certainly no coffin was employed for Richard’s burial. This was confirmed by the excavation of August 2012. A little more needs to be said about coffins, because unfortunately a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition in Leicester ascribed to Richard III a stone coffin, which was displayed to visitors at that period, at a Leicester inn. The normal pattern for royal and aristocratic burials in the fifteenth century was to use either a lead coffin (as attested by the cases of Edward IV and Lady Anne Mowbray) or a wooden coffin (as in the cases of Eleanor Talbot and Elizabeth Woodville). In Richard III’s case, however, it is clear that no coffin was used.

The supposed ‘stone coffin of Richard III’ was a much later red herring, pressed into service by a canny innkeeper simply to generate tourist interest. Stone coffins had certainly been used in the early Middle Ages, but they were not used in the fifteenth century. The one displayed at the Leicester inn in the eighteenth century very probably came from a genuine priory site – perhaps even from the Greyfriars. No doubt it was unearthed by chance during the redevelopment of the site after the Dissolution, and was then immediately seized on by a quick-thinking entrepreneur with an eye to business as a potential ‘tourist attraction’. Unfortunately, this story has recently resurfaced with the discovery of a similar stone coffin in the Leicester area, in use as a garden water feature. This ‘new’ stone coffin has subsequently been transported to, and placed on display at, the Bosworth Battlefield Centre, where it is now apparently playing a very similar tourist role to that of its eighteenth-century predecessor. The ‘new’ coffin probably also came originally from a priory site. However, the recently discovered coffin is certainly not identical to the one which was displayed in Leicester as ‘King Richard’s’ in the eighteenth century, for we know that by the end of the eighteenth century that one had been broken into fragments which later disappeared – probably used as rubble in the foundations of later buildings. On the other hand, the ‘new’ coffin is more or less intact. It is also important to stress that it is absolutely certain that neither the old stone coffin nor the new ever had any genuine connection with Richard III.

We can summarise and conclude our review of the burial arrangements made (or at least approved) for Richard by Henry VII in August 1485 by observing that they present no surprising or unexpected features. Henry exposed the corpse to public view, and then had it buried with basic funeral rites in a priory church. As we have already seen, this corresponds very closely to the treatment accorded to the corpses of England’s other displaced monarchs. Based upon those earlier examples we might then anticipate that at some convenient later date – possibly after the accession of Henry VIII – a royal tomb for Richard would have been commissioned. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is more or less exactly what happened. The reburial of Henry VI at Windsor had taken place twelve years after the king’s death and original burial, and it had to wait for the death of Edward IV and the accession of Richard III. The upgrading of Richard II’s burial had taken about fourteen years, and also had to wait for Henry V to succeed his father. However, in Richard III’s case the provision of his new royal tomb took only nine years, and Richard did not have to wait for the accession of the second ‘Tudor’ king.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Bosworth, the news of Richard III’s death slowly crept its way around the courts of Europe. On 20 October 1485, the Bishop of Imola wrote, in a letter to Pope Innocent VIII:

According to common report as heard by me on my way, the King of England has been killed in battle.¹⁴