The Richard III [del]apologists[/del] historians are hoping to get a re-examination of ol’ “Crookback Dick” without the filter of Tudor-slanted slander. I’m not quite sure how having his skeleton helps with this, but hey, it’s cool. I’ve read Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time and dug it. (Though there’s also the rebuttal by Guy Townsend, which I read a billion years ago in The Armchair Detective, and he makes a good argument too.) Either way, I’m up to learning he wasn’t nearly as vile as Shakespeare and the Tudorites claimed.
Either way this is astonishing news and it legitimately gave this Anglophile chills.
I look forward to the unearthing of Jimmy Hoffa in 2678 or so.
You could practically see the DNA lady (Dr King, I think) peeing herself with excitement over it all.
Very good fortune to have found the second maternal DNA line to confirm the hypothetical lineage from Anne of York. Also very good luck to have found DNA to test in the bones.
I think back to my Shakespeare courses now and think about how it was ‘common knowledge’ that he was only portrayed as a hunchback as shorthand for being a awful person.
I am well acquainted with one of the academics who is an international authority on Richard III; when all this came out last autumn, he was bombarded with questions from people at the Richard III Society wanting him to be indignant on their behalf (re: concerning new burial place). He did do some interviews with the BBC at the time, but he also spent a lot of time hiding in his office.
Apparently they’ve already decided he’ll be buried in Leicester Cathedral.
An old school friend of mine reads the news on BBC Radio Leicester and is BEYOND EXCITED.
BTW, I don’t really get what motivates the Richard III Society. Having read many histories on the subject, he really doesn’t come over well, even if he didn’t kill the Princes in the Tower (and I thought majority opinion was that he probably did).
Annoyingly, the press conference on the BBC this morning was interrupted for the exciting news bulletin that Huhne admitted to speeding. Numpty-twat MPs are a dime a dozen; it could have waited for confirmation of a king, I expect.
SanVito, R3 is still very popular up north York way; it’s a long holdover from the days when Henry Tudor was seen as a usurper (which of course he was). As I recall from the news when all this came out last autumn, there was a lot of interest in having Richard buried in York if it turned out to be him.
(1) It is a parking lot, not a parking garage.
(2) It would not have been a parking lot in the 1800s, since no one would have needed to park their cars then – they didn’t have cars.
The juxtaposition of these lines produced a moment of mis-parsing. I first read “excitement” as “excrement”, and made a confused (and mercifully brief) effort to connect it to MickNickMaggies’ comment.
Interesting that his feet were missing, and the archeologists say they were probably destroyed when the previous building’s foundations were laid.
Can you imagine that? You’re digging out an area to set a foundation in, and you find skeleton feet. “Hey, boss, what do you want to do about this?” “Eh, just get rid of what’s sticking out.”
Notwithstanding the continued campaign of the R3 Society, I’ll take my Ruchard III the way Shakespeare wrote him, as the first and most excellent super-villain of all time.
What goes around comes around. It was the University of Leicester that pioneered the use of DNA identification twenty odd years ago. It’s that same university which has led this investigation using those same techniques.
Leicester is an old city – there are the remains of Roman baths a short walk away from where the Greyfriars Church was located – so if you dig anywhere in the centre of the city you are going to find archeological remains up to 2,000 years old. A few bones would be nothing.
