The Late Mr. Plantagenet

So it looks as if the body of Richard III may have been found.

One is tempted to write “Shakespeare’s Richard III,” because that’s our impression of the character.

After Richard was killed at Bosworth, his body was supposedly stripped and displayed for a few days, then buried at Grey Friars church, some distance from the battlefield.

The hard job for archaeologists wasn’t finding Richard’s body so much as locating Grey Friars, which has vanished over the centuries, but which has now obligingly reappeared beneath a Leicester car park.

The body has been shot in the back with an arrow, and the back of the head bashed in with a bladed weapon, which is reasonably consistent with the reported death of Richard at the hands of Welsh soldiery in 1485.  (Supposedly he was hit so hard that his helmet was bent into the wound.)

There are any number of bodies lying around England with heads bashed in, but this one is afflicted with scoliosis, which would account for legendary Richard’s crooked back.

The body fortunately has very good teeth, which will provide DNA that can be compared with latter-day Plantagenets, at least one of whom lives in Canada.

Another body was found in the remains of the church, a young woman who had been dismembered.  (Whether before or after death, the account does not say.)  Unfortunately the woman was not immortalized by Shakespeare, and we know nothing more about her.

(For my own part, I am willing to forthrightly state that I stand ready to be immortalized by Shakespeare, whenever he cares to go about it!   Hero or villain, it matters not to me!)

Even if the body is found to be that of Richard, it still won’t answer the biggest question about Richard, which is whether he liquidated his two nephews in order to take the throne.

Pretty clearly, he did.  He denied it, of course, but nobody believed him— and all he had to do, in order to refute the stories, was to let the children be seen by the public.  If he’d done that, he would have turned instantly from Twisted Dick to Kindly Uncle Richard, to the acclaim of all.

(Sorry about that, Miss Tey.)