12

‘Here Lies the Body’¹

When Henry VIII dissolved the religious houses of England, the fate of the burials within the monastic and conventual churches varied. Occasionally, surviving relatives took steps to rescue their loved ones. In such rare instances coffined bodies – or even entire tombs – were moved elsewhere. In other cases, empty tomb superstructures alone may have been salvaged without their accompanying bodies, and re-erected as cenotaphs. This seems to have occurred in the case of three tombs from Earls Colne Priory, which once housed the de Veres (Earls of Oxford). As we shall see in greater detail below, King Henry VIII himself had the body of his sister, Mary, moved from Bury St Edmunds Abbey to St Mary’s church in the same town. The Earl of Essex had the monuments and remains of his father and grandparents moved from Beeleigh Abbey to the parish church at Little Easton in Essex. Later, following the death of the third Howard Duke of Norfolk, his heirs transferred the remains of his father and grandfather (the two preceding Howard dukes) from Thetford Priory to Framlingham church. The bodies and tombs of the Howards’ Mowbray forebears, however, were left behind in the ruins of Thetford Priory, and theirs was the more common fate by far. The superstructure of their tombs subsequently pillaged and lost, the mortal remains of the Mowbrays still lie buried where they were originally interred.

In the case of Richard III there were no close relatives on hand to rescue his remains when the Leicester Greyfriars were expelled in 1538. The superstructure of his tomb probably remained for a while in the roofless ruin of the choir. Indeed, it is even remotely possible that Richard’s tomb effigy survives to this day, having eventually been salvaged and relocated in another church, like the de Vere tombs from Earls Colne.² As for Richard’s body, as recent excavation at the Greyfriars site has proved, it simply remained lying where the friars had buried it in 1485. Even before the excavation, the available evidence strongly suggested that this was so. In due course the friary site was acquired by the Herrick family. Robert Herrick, one-time mayor of Leicester, constructed a house and laid out a garden on the eastern part of the site, where once the choir of the priory church had stood. Here in 1612 Christopher Wren (future dean of Windsor and father of the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral), who was then tutor to Robert Herrick’s nephew, saw ‘a handsome stone pillar, three foot high’, bearing the inscription: ‘Here lies the body of Richard III, some time King of England’.³ This pillar had been erected by Robert Herrick when he redeveloped the site in order to preserve the location of Richard’s grave. What subsequently happened to this ‘handsome stone pillar’ is unknown. ‘It may not have survived the taking of Leicester by the Royalists [during the English Civil War], when desperate fighting took place near St Martin’s Church [Cathedral] which was immediately north of the Grey Friars’ grounds.’⁴ Part of Robert Herrick’s former garden now comprises three Leicester car parks. Indeed, remains of Herrick’s garden paths were discovered just to the south of the church choir ruins, in trench 3, during the recent excavation of the Greyfriars site. Until 25 August 2012, Richard’s bones remained lying a short distance to the noth-west of this paved area. In the alderman’s garden their location had been pinpointed by Herrick’s pillar. More recently, they were concealed beneath the modern tarmac. But for more than 500 years they simply remained lying in the very spot where they had been buried in August 1485.⁵

Despite the fact that the site of Richard’s grave was both known and clearly marked in the early seventeenth century, that same century was to witness the growth of an extraordinary and macabre fantasy which we must pause briefly to consider, since until very recently it continued to mislead incautious historians. The earliest recorded hint of this farrago was published in 1611 by Speede, whose text is reproduced in appendix 4 (below). This version stated that following the Dissolution, Richard’s tomb was completely destroyed, and that his remains were then dug up and reburied at one end of Bow Bridge. Speede cites no source for his curious account other than ‘tradition’ and, as we shall see in due course, quite apart from the fact that it is very difficult to see how any burial would have been possible under the low stone arches of the old Bow Bridge (see illustration) there were also other excellent reasons for doubting Speede’s accuracy.

Subsequently, Speede’s story grew vastly and luridly in the telling. In its fully developed, modern form, the tale related that at the time of the Dissolution, Richard’s body was dug up and dragged through the streets of Leicester by a jeering mob, being finally hurled into the River Soar near Bow Bridge. It is worth noting that this later version of the story does not at all accord with Speede’s original report. Nor was there a single shred of contemporary (that is to say, mid-sixteenth-century) evidence in support either of Speede’s account, or of the later version of the exhumation story. On the other hand, there was evidence that, even as late as the 1620s, Leicester inhabitants and visitors were unaware of these accounts.⁶ This strongly suggested that the story of Richard III’s exhumation was far from being a matter of universal ‘common knowledge’. It is also relevant to remark that there seem to be no recorded instances, at the time of the Dissolution, of dead remains being treated in the sacrilegious way which the tale purported to describe.⁷ Nor was there any reason to suppose that Richard III was the target of popular hatred in Leicester (or anywhere else for that matter) in the 1530s. In fact, it is a matter of record that the House of Commons defended Richard’s reputation at this very period before a bemused Cardinal Wolsey.⁸

But the lurid tale was colourful and memorable. It appeared to accord with later perceptions of Richard III’s reputation. Moreover, as we have already seen, it was apparently backed up in the eighteenth century by the existence and display in Leicester of the old stone coffin, reputed to be Richard’s, and then in use as a horse trough. Despite the obvious fact that this object dated from many centuries earlier than King Richard’s time, it was displayed to eighteenth-century tourists as ‘Richard III’s coffin’. This improbable but visible relic, combined with the fact that an existing tradition linked Richard III with Bow Bridge (see chapter 7), helped to popularise the post-Speede story that Richard’s body had been thrown into the river close by the bridge. Both coffin and legend were widely reported in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Implicitly reinforced in the nineteenth century by the erection of a prominent and well-meaning (if regrettable) commemorative stone plaque, the tale of ‘ the body in the river’ became so widely accepted that a skull of unknown age, dredged up from the Soar, and exhibiting damage which was thought to be attributable to sword cuts, could not fail to be hailed, on its appearance, as ‘King Richard’s skull’.⁹ Meanwhile, as redevelopment took place in Leicester, the king’s authentic gravesite, once well known and clearly marked, became quietly lost to view.

The Dissolution of the English religious houses led inevitably to the secularisation of the Franciscan Priory site in Leicester. The last guardian, William Gyllys, together with the six remaining friars, surrendered the priory to the king in 1538.¹⁰ Henry VIII had already granted the site to John Bellowe esquire and John Broxholme, gentleman. The general practice in such cases was that the lead and timbers from the church roof and other materials of value were removed and sold for the benefit of the crown before the site was handed over to its new owners, so although some of the domestic buildings of the priory may have been left intact, the former church probably changed hands as a ruin. The surviving ruins of Franciscan priories in other parts of the country give some idea of what the Leicester Greyfriars might have looked like in about 1540.¹¹

Writing in the early seventeenth century, Weever reports that following the Dissolution and Reformation there was widespread destruction of funeral monuments in those churches which continued in use, where the main targets were inscriptions inviting prayers for the dead. Since this defacing of monuments was chiefly motivated by religious considerations, the monuments left behind in the ruins of monastic and conventual churches were probably less of a target for the zeal of reformers (as they did not offend the gaze of the reformed faithful during worship). Moreover, such monuments now stood on private property, and indeed, were themselves part of that private property. They may thus have escaped the iconoclasts. Nevertheless, they will inevitably have suffered from the elements now that their church buildings were roofless, and in most cases they will gradually have had their materials sold off for the profit of the new owners. Gradually their tomb superstructures will have disappeared.

What exactly happened at the Leicester Greyfriars is unknown. John Speede (widely followed by incautious later writers) stated that Richard’s tomb ‘was pulled downe and utterly defaced’.¹² For reasons which will emerge presently, Speede’s account was completely unreliable and despite the fact that it enjoyed widespread credence, it had no evidential value whatever. Nevertheless, by 1612 Richard III’s 1495 tomb superstructure had certainly gone, for by that date, as we have seen, it had been replaced by a new monument: the commemorative pillar set up by Robert Herrick, a former mayor of Leicester, who had acquired the Greyfriars site and laid out a house and garden there. Our informant in this matter is Sir Christopher Wren’s father and namesake, who was an eye-witness.

At the dissolution [of the Greyfriars] the place of his [Richard III’s] burial happened to fall into the bounds of a citizen’s garden, which being (after) purchased by Mr Robert Herrick (some time mayor of Leicester) was by him covered with a handsome stone pillar, three foot high, with this inscription, ‘Here lies the body of Richard III, some time King of England’. This he shewed me walking in the garden, Anno 1612.¹³

When precisely Herrick’s pillar was erected is unknown, but in all probability it was set up immediately after the clearance of the final remains of Richard’s ruined tomb of c. 1494. Thus there was probably no time-gap during which the grave’s location was unmarked.

IMAGE 1: Conjectural reconstruction of Herrick’s pillar, based on an architectural engraving of 1596.

As for John Speede’s unreliability, he reported that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the gravesite was ‘overgrowne with nettles and weedes … very obscure and not to be found’.¹⁴ Many subsequent writers uncritically repeated Speede’s account. Nevertheless, it was worthless, because Speede’s 1610 map of Leicester wrongly labelled a site well to the north-west of St Martin’s church (now Cathedral) as ‘Graye fryers’. This site had actually belonged not to the Grey friars but to Leicester’s Black (Dominican) friars. The real site of the Franciscan Priory lies to the south of St Martin’s church (Cathedral) (see figure 28). On Speede’s map the authentic Greyfriars site is not labelled at all, but it can still be easily identified. This fundamental error on Speede’s map – which completely misled many subsequent researchers – proves that John Speede sought Richard III’s grave in entirely the wrong location. His nettles and weeds grew not on the site of the Franciscan Priory, but amongst the ruins of the former Dominican Priory. Small wonder, then, that Speed was unable to find any trace of Richard’s tomb. He was looking amongst the wrong priory ruins!

Even if Richard’s grave was unmarked for a time, this can only have been for a very short period. We may guess that Herrick’s commemorative pillar at the former Greyfriars site was put in place by the year 1610 at the latest. Herrick had been born in 1540 – only two years after the dissolution of the Greyfriars priory – and he may well have seen Richard III’s 1495 tomb as a boy, since it is probable that this monument (or the remains of it) had remained standing in the priory ruins until at least the last quarter of the sixteenth century. We know that many other monastic and collegiate church tombs survived until about that time. John Weever – author of Ancient Funeral Monuments – went round in the early years of the seventeenth century and recorded their existence, while only a decade or two earlier, Queen Elizabeth I had found and rescued the remains of her Yorkist ancestors amongst the ruins of the east end of the collegiate church at Fotheringhaye.

It is just possible that by about 1550 the superstructure of Richard’s tomb had been vandalised, though we have no actual evidence to this effect. Even if this was the case, however, it would certainly not imply that Richard’s remains were disturbed, and in this context it is worth noting in passing that the short text carved on Alderman Herrick’s new monument indicated plainly that Herrick’s inscribed column was not a cenotaph. His deliberate choice of the words ‘Here lies the body …’ shows that Herrick was not only certain that his column marked Richard’s burial site, but also that Richard’s physical remains still lay buried beneath it.

Thus, while the Greyfriars’ church may have been gradually demolished, and parts of the priory site may have been redeveloped, the ground where Richard III lay was never built over. Only some building work in the nineteenth century came dangerously close to destroying the original burial. A narrow trench cut by the nineteenth-century workmen cut across the eastern end of the king’s grave, depriving posterity of the bones of Richard III’s feet. Apart from this, the king lay quietly where he had been buried, while above him Alderman Herrick’s garden was eventually transformed into a council car park.