probably not enveigling its way into the Spectator

The apparent discovery of the remains of King Richard III in a Leicester car park has already set several majestic funeral plans in motion. Chris Skidmore, a Tory MP and historian of Richard’s downfall, has put forward a resonant, if vague, proposal, which ‘calls upon the government to arrange a full state funeral for the deceased monarch, and for his remains to be interred appropriately.’ The Labour member for Leicester South, Jon Ashworth, plays to the local gallery with the more pragmatic and specific observation that a burial at Leicester Cathedral ‘has the potential to hugely benefit the city of Leicester in terms of tourism’. And Westminster Abbey possesses claims both on grounds of tradition and of compassion: it is already the resting place of Richard’s Queen Anne, at whose death the King is said to have wept openly (though on the other hand Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare say he had her poisoned).

But Richard III happens to be one of the few Kings of England who still commands a considerable personal cult, the movement the BBC once called the ‘Ricardian lobby’, and they are tempted by a third location – York Minster. The Leicester dig was supported by the most high-profile group of these enthusiasts, the Richard III Society. Their spokeswoman said: ‘I hope we do find him because I want to give him a proper resting place and also to explode a lot of myths around Richard III.’ By myths, the Society means the More/Shakespeare details – that Richard was hunchbacked, born with teeth, and so on – but also the mainstream historical account that pins upon Richard the murder of his nephews, the ‘Princes in the Tower’.

The Richard III Society point to evidence that the King arranged for a chantry to be established at York for his final repose, but their spokesman judiciously recognises that the decision does not lie in their hands, that the authorities may well prefer Leicester, or the public and press Westminster. Not so the Society’s fierier breakaway American rivals, Richard III Foundation Inc. They are driving full-throttle for York Minster; as their chief executive has announced:

…we have the opportunity to right the many wrongs that have been done to him, and one is to bring his remains to Yorkshire, and to York.

Fundamental to this position is the idea that Richard III is a regional hero, a King in, of, from, or for the North. Richard as Northerner is a package that pleases almost everyone except historians. Since William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North, northern England has been precious short of Kings with whom it can identify; almost all are irredeemably ‘London-centric’. The idea of the ‘last English king’ also being the first and the last Northern king, a glint of heroic potential into whose downfall subsequent sufferings can be sublimated, is attractive for many camps – whether Northern regionalists, Tories seeking to woo their votes, or anti-monarchists looking for a narrative of decline. In fact the House of York was if anything rather less northern than the House of Lancaster (English titles are rarely what they seem; Yorkshire itself was usually under Lancastrian control in the Wars of the Roses, and most of York’s possessions were Irish). Richard was powerful in the North, but only in right of his wife Anne Neville, Warwick the Kingmaker’s daughter, plunged from a bloodstained widowhood into a mercenary marriage. Betrayed on his last battlefield by a northern magnate, the Earl of Northumberland, Richard died without any great reason for gratitude or affinity with the North.

That anyone should want to honour Richard’s bones at all would astonish his contemporaries. Some late-blooming Ricardophilia can no doubt be put down to a very British distrust of victors’ history, of Party Lines and Black Legends alike; but there is plenty of objective fact behind Richard III’s dark repute. His nephews, the ‘Princes in the Tower’ – actually a King and a Prince, Richard’s brief predecessor Edward V and his younger brother the Duke of York – vanished from history while under his care. In the matter of their disappearance or death the burden of proof falls on Richard’s defenders. Behind all the alternative scenarios deployed by the ‘Ricardians’ – reminiscent of the various ‘anti-Stratfordian’ candidates for the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare – can be traced a single, animating, rather Agatha Christie belief – Richard can’t have done it; that would be too obvious. But Richard had, after all, already had his nephews declared bastards and usurped the throne. The French diplomat Philippe de Commines recalls the view from across the channel in 1483; to him Richard is:

…the Duke of Gloucester, who had made himself King, styled himself Richard III, and barbarously murdered his two nephews.

It was thus widely and naturally assumed, at the time and throughout Europe, that a man ambitious enough to usurp his nephew’s throne would as a matter of course take the job to its logical conclusion, just as an earlier King, John, had done with his nephew Arthur. Nor is this crime the only reason to count Richard an unsavoury figure; there remains his marital history. By the fratricidal standards of his period, it’s perhaps forgivable that he married Anne Neville, the very rich widow of a murdered cousin, the Lancastrian Prince Edward, who may have been executed on Richard’s orders after the Battle of Tewkesbury. Even so, the reports that he later wanted to marry his brother’s daughter – the sister of the murdered Princes – to gain her stronger claim on the throne are unavoidably distasteful, and they gathered so much credence that Richard had to deny them in Parliament. The King was then warned that the North would rebel if he married his niece – another motive for Richard to regard his supposedly most beloved region with less than entire affection.

The Ricardian party is not mistaken in insisting that the evidence against Richard is (though strong) circumstantial. But it is still enough to make the idea of a state funeral, and especially a Westminster burial, unsettling, especially in light of an earlier royal discovery. In 1674, builders renovating the Tower of London at the behest of Charles II discovered what were thought to be the bones of the murdered Princes. Sadly these bones were granted only limited pomp. The pathetic fragments were put in a marble urn in Westminster Abbey and blessed by the Bishop of London, while Charles read an address that gave Richard III no quarter:

It is right and meet that we commend the bones of these young princes to a place of final rest. Their fates at the order of Richard III grieves us, and though almost two centuries have passed, the vile deeds of that villain shall never be forgotten.

Three and a half centuries after that, Charles’s collateral relation the Queen seems to agree. The putative Princes were disturbed in 1934 out of a mixture of scientific and historical curiosity that produced no clear results, but since Elizabeth II’s accession all further requests for tampering with the bones have been declined. In the same spirit of respect for the victims, word has recently percolated from the Palace that the Princes’ uncle Richard is not welcome in Westminster or Windsor, and just as well. Mr Skidmore may well argue that anointed Kings of England are entitled to state funerals, but the hole-in-corner affair little Edward V and his brother got does not merit that term, and the man probably responsible should not have one.

Yet Richard’s story has two points in its favour: it is memorable, for better or worse, and it is the tale of an underdog. A Shakespearean villain, complete with telling curvature of the spine, makes for a better story than some straight-backed, martial Harry or Edward. To such post-modern perversity is added a more romantic element: that Richard lost. For Simon Heffer writing in the Daily Mail, this is enough to canonise Richard Plantagenet as ‘the last English king’, on the doubtful grounds that Richard III’s French ancestry is somehow more English than Henry VIII’s Welsh ancestry or Charles II’s Scottish ancestry: all three vocally identified themselves as English. Even better for Heffer, Richard ‘died like a hero in battle’. ‘The case against Richard III is far from proven, but there is much that we know of the good he did in a turbulent age, he deserves, with due ceremony, a decent burial.’

A decent burial is a decent aim, even for an indecent man, and Leicester Cathedral without overmuch fuss sounds like a sensible solution, a worthy reward for that city’s archaeologists and a delicious touristic prize for Mr Ashworth’s constituents. But perhaps another contender should be mentioned, if briefly. In the forgotten parish church of Sheriff Hutton, Ryedale, was buried Richard and Anne’s only son and heir, the short-lived consumptive Edward of Middleham, Prince of Wales. The exact location of the boy’s remains is no longer known, but here would be a fitting place for Richard, somewhere near his dynasty’s failed hope, learning, like another allegedly defamed Shakespearean monarch, the bitter lesson of a fruitless crown.