Richard the Third DNA results

[Pruitt]

Originally Posted by PhilipLaos

You're probably right.

But what led them to the council car park in the first place? Presumably, the location of the King's burial place was not known about when the car park was being developed.


Philip

They knew there was a chance he was buried in a certain church. The church is long gone, but they do recall it was under that parking lot.

Pruitt

[PhilipLaos]

Originally Posted by Pruitt

They knew there was a chance he was buried in a certain church. The church is long gone, but they do recall it was under that parking lot.

Pruitt

Well, what an incredible piece of good luck that a mammoth Woolworths (or whatever shopping complexes they have in the UK these days) hadn't been built over his burial location.


Philip

[Robbie Lynne]

It was Greyfriars where one of the records of the time said King Richard III was buried but others said he was thrown in a ditch and his bones were supposedly dumped into a river.

[DARKPLACE]

Originally Posted by PhilipLaos

Well, what an incredible piece of good luck that a mammoth Woolworths (or whatever shopping complexes they have in the UK these days) hadn't been built over his burial location.


Philip

Hi Phillip. If you can find a complete photo of the bones his feet are missing as the Victorians ran the foundation of a wall through him.

[Cicero]

Originally Posted by Pruitt

They knew there was a chance he was buried in a certain church. The church is long gone, but they do recall it was under that parking lot.

Pruitt

They paved over a perfectly good church to put up a parking lot...European secularism has run-amok.

[Selous]

I think the church was demolished in the 1500s. The place was very much not secular in those days.

Hey Tudor, Tudor, put away your C of E, don't care about hunches on my nobles, just give me the graves and the keys.
Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
The day the Leicester diocese put up a parking lot.

A ten pound book token, redeemable in 1996, to the person who can put in a line about kingdoms for a horse.

[DARKPLACE]

Originally Posted by Cicero

They paved over a perfectly good church to put up a parking lot...European secularism has run-amok.

The church was part of a friary and most of them were pulled down in the reformation. It wasn't a secular thing our 'enry was skint and horny. So he went C of E.

[Charger]

This is so fascinating. This kind of technology opens up whole new fields of history and I'd love to see more analyses done on remains. Of course, there is something to be said for not turning up every grave from every interesting historical figure. This was a unique situation.

[BattlefdsTrust]

he Battlefields Trust congratulates Richard Buckley and his team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester on their excellent work to discover the remains of Richard III and identify the remains as definitively his. This is a triumph for archaeology. This find comes hard on the heels of the discovery of the true topography of the battlefield at Bosworth (1485) by archaeologists from the Battlefields Trust and Leicester County Council in 2010. That work pinpointed the spot where Richard was unhorsed in a (since drained) marsh and where he then received the wounds that can now be studied on his skeleton. Putting the two pieces of archaeology together means that we can reconstruct in detail the events that led to the end of the Yorkist dynasty and the start of the Tudors. They reinforce and inform each other.



The Trust has no views on the next stage – Richard III’s reinterment - other than to make some observations. Richard was buried in hallowed ground with Christian rites even though – several times over– it was not the funeral he had intended. His burial site, although not his actual tomb, was desecrated later. He should be reinterred now according to the proper rites obtaining in 2013. The important point is for a dignified and appropriate commemoration.

[Mycroft Holmes]

The case of the Princes in the Tower is an odd one. You often seem to get a situation where A invalidates B, B invalidates C, and C invalidates A, so it goes round and round without getting anywhere. However, my reason for believing that Henry murdered the princes is based on what happened when he took control of the Tower of London in 1485 - absolutely nothing.

If the princes were dead, why not announce the fact and produce the bodies? It would certainly have improved his claim to the throne, since many people only supported him because they thought he'd restore Edward V to the throne.

If he arrived at the Tower and found the boys there, he could hardly just execute them because too many people would have known that they were still alive when he took over.

If the princes were missing, why was there no enquiry into what had happened to them? As pointed out, the Tower was a royal palace - almost a small town - with hundreds of people living there and much coming and going at all hours of the day and night. It would be extraordinarily difficult to get the princes out without someone seeing something, yet there is a deafening silence. It's hardly plausible that Henry could claim to have been too busy: these children were the rightful monarch and the heir apparent, so it was vital for Henry to find them, whether he wanted to put Edward back on the throne (ha ha) or planned to usurp it.

All-in-all there seems good reason for a policy of masterly inactivity!

Additionally, why did Henry undertake a deliberate policy of destroying inconvenient documents? Titulus Regius only survived by a fluke, and we'll never know what else was committed to the flames.

It's also interesting that it was about 20 years later that Henry finally announced that Richard had killed the princes and produced Tyrell's (rather dodgy) confession. We know that part of Henry's Modus Operandi was to keep people in prison for long periods before executing them - so I wonder if he'd spirited the boys away from the Tower in 1485 and had only just got up the nerve to execute them. Also, by this time, many of the people who had been at the Tower in 1485 would have been dead, or retired, and their memories would have faded.

Lastly, Elizabeth Woodville, the boys' own mother, actually seems to have believed that Perkin Warbeck might be her son Richard, which hardly supports the view that everyone thought the boys were dead and welcomed Henry as their saviour from the wicked King Richard!

[calger14]

It is all very interesting and I managed to go to the dig site on my open day to Leicester University! But have to admit I probably won't be going there.

[Rojik]

[Parzival]

I've just seen, on telly, the descendant who gave the DNA sample.

He's a Canadian carpenter.

Would he not have some kind of claim?


Philip

Can anyone answer the above question?

[Pruitt]

Whether he has a claim or not is superfluous. The British Armed Forces will back the present set of monarchs. It isn't the quality of the claim it is the people backing you up.

Pruitt