Free The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds by Philippa Langley

and his popularity in the north – particularly Yorkshire – and closed with the rebuttal: ‘such a monster [as presented by Gairdner] is impossible in real life. Even Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are nothing to it.’ Interest in Richard has continued unabated. In 1924 the Richard III Society was founded, and continues to flourish, with the aim ‘to promote in every possible way research into the life and times of Richard III and to secure a re-assessment of the material relating to this period, and of the role in English history of this monarch’. In 1936 historian John Armstrong discovered the only strictly contemporary account of the beginning of Richard’s reign, that of an Italian visitor to London, Dominic Mancini. In 1951 Josephine Tey brought out a bestselling novel, The Daughter of Time, in which her detective hero, Inspector Grant, inspired by an early sixteenth-century portrait of Richard III, puts his investigative talents to unorthodox use, eventually acquitting Richard of all the charges made against him by More and Shakespeare.
    Yet for the general public, the dark power of Shakespeare’s villain is never far from the scene, even if few would fully agree with the historical accuracy of his portrayal. The accepted view of Richard’s early career is now more positive, paying tribute to his courage, loyalty to his brother Edward IV, and his genuine piety and chivalric aspirations. Yet with all the wealth of new material that is being unearthed, we still struggle to make a connection with the real man, and to understand why he took the throne. As Paul Murray Kendall wrote in 1955, in a more sympathetic biography of this much maligned king, a succession of hostile Tudor paintings had distorted his physical appearance in the same way as they had twisted his character: ‘If we cannot see his portrait clearly, we can at least choose its painter.’ In a major study of Richard III in 1981, Charles Ross saw him in many ways as a strikingly conventional medieval prince, and also very much a product of a brutal and ruthless era. But his taking of the throne, and the violence that accompanied it, was still depicted as ‘an unashamed bid for personal power’.
    We do not come to terms with the reality of the man either by blackening his reputation or whitewashing him. Tudor sources that progressively twisted his appearance and motivation have to be treated with caution, but cannot simply be disregarded. They built on hostility that was already present during his reign, as our earliest sources, those of Dominic Mancini and the Croyland Chronicle – written by an official well-placed within the Yorkist government – make clear. And yet Richard’s reign was all too short, and his death at Bosworth left him unable to give us his own version of his life and account for the motivation that drove him. It is indeed telling that even the most critical Tudor commentators were moved to praise his exemplary courage at the end of the battle. It is sometimes said that we end our life in the manner we have hoped to have lived it.
    Retrieving the remains of this king, whose body was stripped naked and violated after his death, put on public display and then hurriedly buried at Leicester, as the victorious army of his challenger, Henry Tudor, moved south to London to claim the throne, would give vital tangibility to his life – a tangibility that could at last counterpoint the power of Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare, and the hostile Tudor tradition that he drew upon, tell us only one half of Richard’s story.
    The great debate we have charted really began in 1484, in the last year of Richard III’s reign. His rival, Henry Tudor, an exile in France, was now claiming to be king in his own right, and sending out letters to his supporters in England explaining this on the basis of the character of his opponent, ‘an unnatural tyrant and homicide’. Henry was employing character assassination to justify his right to rule, a