When I was a young man in college, many decades ago, I got interested in a lot of things about which I'd never heard before. Like a lot of college kids, before they get out into the real world, I was passionate about justice and fairness. And one of the causes I took up was rehabilitating the reputation of an English king who'd been cut down a half-millenium before.
Kind of a strange thing for a small-town Illinois boy to care about, right? I don't disagree. All I can say is that from the first time I encountered real historical data about Richard III, and saw how radically it differed from the popular stories about his profound deformity and wickedness, I wanted to tell everybody I came across how rotten a deal I believed he'd been given by both Shakespeare and 'history'. When I was on my semester study tour in England, I made a special point to take the tube to Chelsea, and see a medieval town-house that had been moved there from the city some years before, just because it had once been leased by Richard as his city residence. I started (and never finished, of course) a short play about him for one of my writing classes. And I read everything I could find on the fifteenth century, including a small masterpiece of a detective story called 'The Daughter of Time'.
All this comes back to my mind because the announcement came today - the bones dug up from under the parking lot at the Leicester city council have been proven to be the actual final remains of King Richard III. Not only are they the right period, with the right injuries, but DNA comparison to an actual descendant of Richard's sister shows a match. It almost takes my breath away - for centuries, we've believed that the bones were lost. The friary under which they'd been interred was certainly destroyed by Henry VIII, like so many Catholic foundations, and there was even a story that at the time of the dissolution the king's remains were dug up and pitched into the river. But now, because of historical detective work, archaeology, and scientific analysis, the University of Leicester team has given the whole world a new picture of the last of the Plantagenets.
Was he a hunchback? No, the bones show scoliosis, but no severe deformity. The radio-carbon dating gives the right dates, both for the age of the bones and the age of the individual when he BECAME bones. And the violence that was done to those bones bears out the most flattering details that even the Tudors admitted about his final hours: that Richard III died fighting bravely, within inches of victory, driving toward the enemy command post at the center of the Tudor army, while Henry VII hid behind his captains. There's even a knife-scrape along one buttock, which suggests a 'humiliation' injury post-mortem, when the corpse had been stripped and flung across a horse.
It's a sad way to go, and the Tudors, who had a weak claim to the throne and needed all the bolstering they could get, proceeded to make it worse. They paid every fifteenth and sixteenth-century flack they could to write the most scurrilous stories about Richard III: that he came into the world with teeth already in his mouth, that he drowned his own brother in a butt of wine, that he was the one who dispatched Henry VI in the Tower of London, that he wanted his wife to die so he could marry his niece, and on and on. And of course, the big one, that he sent his servants to murder his nephews, the little 'Princes in the Tower'. Richard III became the original cartoon wicked uncle.
The discovery and identification of a set of bones doesn't mean that their owner and operator wasn't really a villain, of course. The skeleton can't sit up on the table and shout 'I didn't do it!' But maybe, if people start taking more of an interest, someone who's smart and hardworking and lucky will be the one to uncover some real hard evidence that can shine through the Tudor stories. Glamor and propaganda, like that employed by some American political families, shouldn't be allowed to obscure the truth forever. And one final word about the gentleman from the colonies that provided the DNA for comparison - wouldn't it be fun if the English kicked the Windsors to the curb and gave the crown to a Canadian carpenter?
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