MY KINGDOM FOR A CORPSE! [via Nina Reznick]

By JOHN F. BURNS

 LEICESTER, England — For more than 500 years, King Richard III has been the most widely reviled of English monarchs. But a stunning archaeological find this month here in the English Midlands — a skeleton that medieval scholars believe is very likely to be Richard’s — could lead to a reassessment of his brief but violent reign.

A council worker fixed a camera at the parking lot in Leicester, England, where archaeologists unearthed a skeleton, very likely Richard III’s, amid the remains of an ancient priory. 

The New York Times

If 12 weeks of DNA and isotope testing confirm that the remains found amid the ruins of an ancient priory are the 15th century king’s, those who believe that Richard has been the victim of a campaign of denigration — begun by the Tudor monarchs who succeeded him and deeply entrenched over the centuries in British popular consciousness — hope the renewed attention will spur scholarship that will correct the injustice they say has been done to his reputation.

It is a debate that has raged with varying intensity since at least the late 18th century. And at its heart is this: Was Richard the villain his detractors expediently made him out to be, or was he, as supporters contend, a goodly king, harsh in ways that were a function of an unforgiving time, but the author of groundbreaking measures to help the poor, extend protections to suspected felons and ease bans on the printing and selling of books?

The version that has prevailed since his death, initially nurtured by the Tudors to entrench their legitimacy, has cast Richard’s 26 months on the throne as one of England’s grimmest periods, its excesses captured in his alleged role in the murder in the Tower of London of two young princes — his own nephews — to rid himself of potential rivals.

In Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” and in movies shaped by it, he is depicted as an evil, scheming hunchback whose death at 32 ended the War of the Roses and more than three centuries of Plantagenet rule, bookended England’s Middle Ages, and proved a prelude to the triumphs of the Tudors and Elizabethans.

Even Richard’s burial place was left uncertain, an ignominy deemed fitting by Tudor successors whose dominion was secured when Richard was killed — poleaxed, according to witnesses — at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, then bound, naked, to a horse for two days of public display in Leicester, about 100 miles north of London.

Over the next century, the foundations of the modern British state were laid by Henry VIII, son of the Bosworth victor Henry VII, and by Henry VIII’s daughter, Elizabeth I, and it was during their reigns that Richard’s wretched place in history was set by chroniclers loyal to the new rulers.

It was there that things stood, more or less, until three weeks ago, when a University of Leicester archaeologist working in a trench cut into a parking lot uncovered what could turn out to be one of the most remarkable finds in modern British archaeology. Judging from the clamor that has met the discovery in Britain, it may lead to demands for Richard to be buried, like other British kings, in a place of honor like Westminster Abbey. Read More