Epilogue

I am not ashamed to say that I cried happy tears when I heard the news that DNA taken from bones found under a car park in September 2012 proved to be Richard’s. It had taken ten years, a team of archeologists, a lot of money and a frisson of intuition from a determined Scotswoman to find Richard’s grave at last. Now, with DNA technology, the identity of the bones could be verified.

I shivered at the words coming from a news conference at the University of Leicester in early 2013: “Beyond reasonable doubt, the individual exhumed at Grey Friars is indeed Richard III, last Plantagenet king of England,” Richard Buckley, director of the University of Leicester Archeological Services, explained to a media-packed audience that DNA taken from the skeleton matched that of a 17th-generation descendant of Richard’s sister, providing a positive identification. After 528 years of his grave being lost, Richard was finally found and exhumed for study.

Standing on Richard’s grave in July 2017, the thick glass all that lay between me and the 500-year-old crude hole into which his mutilated body had been shoved, I was profoundly moved. Not a week before, I had finished describing Richard’s leaving Leicester on his fateful march to Bosworth. Looking down on the eerie light projection of the skeleton in its original position, it was as though I, too, had dug through those layers of earth and medieval tiled floor to reveal the bones I have spent four years adding flesh to. Only then could I return to my manuscript and write Richard’s ignominious end.

How well I understood Philippa Langley’s emotions as she watched the painstaking uncovering of Richard’s remains. It is a testimony to the world-wide interest the dig generated that the trench, in its humble car-park locale, has been respectfully preserved in a quiet room of its own, only the faint sound of monks chanting to accompany the experience. I was so lucky to be in the space alone on that mid-week rainy morning. Not one to believe much in psychic phenomena, I had goosebumps as I meditated on his shabby treatment at the hands of Henry VII, and I could almost feel Richard’s restless spirit in that place.

Besides, after five decades of an obsession with this maligned man from history, and five books inspired by his fascinating life and family, why shouldn’t I have rejoiced? Perhaps this astonishing archeological discovery might bring him peace and spark reparation of the black reputation that has shadowed his name since his death in 1485.

Who do we have to blame for Richard III’s villainous notoriety? Mostly William Shakespeare, who wrote a damn fine play based on Tudor distortions of history, but he had so many facts wrong it is a wonder Richard didn’t rise up from his paltry grave and sue the Bard for libel—or at least haunt his dreams! The real culprit wasn’t Will, however. After all, he had simply resorted to standard sources of his day, such as the chronicles written by Raphael Holinshed, the court historian Polydore Vergil, and The Historie of King Richard III, a shameful piece of Tudor propaganda written by a pandering Sir Thomas More, councilor and Lord High Chancellor to King Henry VIII.

Two years passed after the discovery of the grave before a ceremony worthy of a king was envisioned. Even after being rescued from his paltry plot, Richard could not rest in peace. As it has had since Richard’s death, controversy swirled about him as Leicester and York fought for the privilege of entombing him nobly. Months of media hype, letters to the editor, petitions from various groups, and even a lawsuit postponed the reburial of the last Plantagenet.

Most Ricardians favored York, a place where, as you have seen in the pages of this book, Richard felt most at home. The Minster and its governing body was ready to receive its “good king Richard.” But so was Leicester’s St. Martin’s governance. It was often expedient to bury a nobleman in the abbey or church closest to his place of death, and who could blame Leicester City Council for protesting they had already kept Richard safe for 500 years (albeit, in ignorance).

As anyone who was able to be at or watch on TV the beautiful and respectful week of ceremonies that culminated in Richard’s reburial in his own chapel inside St. Martin’s, Leicester put on quite a show. The city was unprepared for how many interested or curious people lined up for hours to file past his bier: more than twenty-thousand of them from all over the world. How fitting it was that his simple, but beautifully wrought coffin was made by Michael Ibsen, the very descendant whose DNA had revealed the bones as Richard’s. A comforting cocoon for Richard to lie in for eternity beneath the massive slab of Swalestone, with a deeply carved cross its only decoration.

I watched the funeral in my living room in U.S. at an ungodly early hour and marveled at the respect that Richard was finally accorded. His modern-day namesake, the duke of Gloucester—another Richard—read a prayer from Richard’s own book of hours, on loan from the British Library. Then, at the evocative words of England’s poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, spoken by Benedict Cumberbatch, I wept all over again. I knew then, this was the book I was meant to write.

My bones, scripted in light, upon cold soil,

a human braille. My skull, scarred by a crown,

emptied of history. Describe my soul

as incense, votive, vanishing; your own

the same. Grant me the carving of my name.

These relics, bless. Imagine you re-tie

a broken string and on it thread a cross,

the symbol severed from me when I died.

The end of time—an unknown, unfelt loss—

unless the Resurrection of the Dead…

or I once dreamed of this, your future breath

in prayer for me, lost long, forever found;

or sensed you from the backstage of my death,

as kings glimpse shadows on a battleground.