Richard III and the Lost World of Greyfriars
By Nancy Bilyeau Memorial detail, Greyfriars cemetery in Edinburgh The discovery in a Leicester carpark of the remains of an adult male with a "cleaved skull" and "spinal abnormalities" prompted all sorts of impassioned debate until it was agreed that this indeed was the body of Richard III, the last Yorkist monarch, slain in the Battle of Bosworth on August 22, 1485, his corpse exposed to the public for all to see by orders of the victor, an obscure, exiled Lancastrian earl named Henry Tudor. As argument rages anew over Richard III's role in the disappearance of the princes, or whether Sir Thomas More and William Shakespeare defamed Richard with their descriptions of deformity of body and spirit, the location of his burial—the church of a Franciscan friary—and the actions of those who bravely took custody of a battered and naked royal corpse have gone largely unremarked. Richard III Why has Richard rested there? Clearly the last Plantagenet ruler did not design...