Noble Blood - The Resurrection of the Parking Lot King

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

After the Battle of Bosworth Field, Henry Tudor became King Henry VII. But what happened to the king he replaced, King Richard III? Well, we weren't quite sure. Not until 2012, when a group of archeologists galvanized by an amateur named Philippa Langley made a momentous discovery in a Leicester parking lot.  Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. King Richard III was preparing for battle. After three decades of the civil conflict that have come to be known as the Wars of the Roses, the fighting between two rival claimants to the throne of England was finally reaching its head. Richard knew, as he was preparing to face off against his rival Henry Tudor, that this would be the end of the fighting.

This battle at Bosworth Field would be, as Richard remarked, the end of the fighting. of either wars or his life. Though pop culture portrayals in these centuries since Richard's death have often painted him in the imagination as a middle-aged man, on August 22, 1485, Richard III was only 32 years old. He would lead his men into battle, descending into the fray himself, and so he wore heavy armor and a helmet, covered his face. And whether it was a symbolic decision or whether it was a strategic one that

meant to inspire and rally his troops, atop his helmet, Richard III secured his actual crown. On that morning at Bosworth Field, Henry Tudor's men approached first. They had the advantage of readying themselves on the field of battle before Richard's men. But soon the king descended on Tudor with full strength. And it seemed like Richard III would be victorious. His men knocked over the Tudor standard bearer, the man holding the banner which marked the position of their commander. It was an incredibly powerful and symbolic move

that would have alerted Tudor soldiers to the fact that their captain might be dead. But then the tide shifted. Tudor had reserve men, led by a noble named Lord Stanley, and Stanley's fresh army overwhelmed the exhausted Ricardian men. At some point, King Richard was thrown from his horse. Shakespeare famously imagined him in the heat of battle, shouting, my kingdom for a horse. and then the king fighting on foot lost his helmet.

King Richard III, the last English king to die in battle, was struck down by a blow to the back of the head, strong enough to dislodge bone and brain. Word of his death spread across the battlefield like a ripple. The crown that Richard had been wearing into battle had fallen among, the dirt and blood. It was recovered, and Lord Stanley, as Kingmaker, whose soldiers had turned the tide of the battle, had the honor of placing it atop Henry Tudor's head. From the dead temples of this bloody wretch have I plucked off to grace thy brows withal, Stanley says of the crown

in Shakespeare. And though the real Stanley almost certainly had found. the crown in the mud and had not actually pulled it off of Richard's dead body, it was a profound moment of symbolism. There would be no rush for Henry Tudor's official royal coronation. He was crowned on the battlefield, Henry the 7th. As for Richard, well, history is told by the victors, and history was being written very quickly in real time after the Battle of Bosworth Field. For Henry the 7th's claim to the throne to be legitimate, his narrative, that Richard III was a villainous usurper,

needed to be legitimate as well. Richard's dead body was stripped and paraded publicly. After all, as many people as possible needed to know that the former king was actually dead. The dead Richard parade, to the nearby town of Leicester, where it underwent whatever humiliations and mockery would have felt fitting for a murderous tyrant struck down. But from there, sources petered out.

Some say that Richard's bones had been thrown in the river soar. Others wrote that he was buried in the chapel of Greyfriars Priory. But over the centuries, the exact fate of the lost king. body, even the exact location of the priory itself, disappeared from record. A king, one of the most famous kings of England, was just gone. But not forever. Five hundred and twenty-seven years after Richard III was struck down in battle, a team of archaeologists galvanized by a passionate amateur named Philippa Langley would uncover his final resting place in one of the most exciting archaeological discoveries of the 21st century. From under the staff parking lot of a municipal

building, the bones of Richard III were brought to the surface, and with them a fascinating conversation about how history is written and who gets to write it. Because this isn't just the story of a man from the 15th century. It's a story about Philippa Langley and the University of Leicester scientists. A story of a mid-century detective novel and a King Richard III fan club. It's the story of a team of genetics researchers and bureaucrats and a furniture designer in Canada. For years, Richard III had been there, buried, just. just beneath two feet of earth in a parking lot, waiting for his story to be rediscovered.

Incredibly enough, Richard was found almost beneath a reserved parking space, marked plainly with the letter R. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Pretty much as soon as Henry V. became king of England, he said about stabilizing his claim to the throne. Whether you believe that includes him killing two princes imprisoned in the Tower of London, who may or may not have already been dead by the time Henry became king, is not something I will be weighing in on on this particular episode. But Henry the 7th did begin solidifying his power through propaganda. Even the

nomenclature of the Wars of the Roses is a bit of Tudor trickery. Though the Yorks did occasionally use the White Rose as their sigil, it was used much more frequently after the fact in order to give Henry's claim to the throne a clean, digestible narrative. On one side there was the Red Rose of Lancaster. On the other, the White Rose of York. Henry, taking up the Lancastrian claim, married Elizabeth of York and united England under a new dynasty. The Tudors, with a new sigil, a rose that's red and white. But as I've alluded to before, though Henry was a descendant of King Edward III, his claim to the throne through lineage was, to put it mildly shaky, especially compared to Richard III's claim. There's a fine line between Hero who

just claimed his throne legitimately and deposed a tyrant, and guy who just murdered the rightful king, and Henry was determined to land on the side of the former. A young page in the household of Henry's Lord Chancellor proved to be exactly what Henry Tudor needed. This young page wrote a book entitled The History of Richard III, which, in the words of Stephen Greenblatt at the New Yorker, quote, wove together every dark rumor about Richard's brief life into a brilliant narrative

which paints a portrait of a bold, gifted, and ineradically evil man whose evil was marked in his very body, end quote. The history described Richard as short, crooked-backed, with one shoulder higher than the other,

and a personality that matched, what the author saw as God's judgment made visible. quote, he was close and secret, a deep dissimilar lowly of continents, and quote. In other words, this man was born evil, a despicable man and a worse king, and the fact that he was short and twisted was evidence of that. The page who wrote this history, in case you are wondering, was Thomas Moore. The Tudor Propaganda Train continued on with Shakespeare,

famous history that sees Richard as no less of a villain, but a more complicated one, a man lonely and plodding and all too aware of how his hunchback and disfigured arm hold back his ambitions. It's a distinction between the two texts that I think is interesting enough to consider for another minute. Back to Greenblatt at the New Yorker, quote, In Moore's history, Richard's physical deformity is an uncanny sign of his viciousness, a kind of preternatural portance or emblem. In Shakespeare, it is the root condition of his psychopathology. There is nothing mechanical in this conditioning. Certainly no suggestion that all men with twisted spines become cunning murderers,

but Shakespeare does suggest that a child, unloved by his mother, mocked by his peers, and forced to regard himself as a monster, will develop certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of them both destructive and self-destructive, end quote. Complexly motivated or not, thanks to Tudor writers, Richard III's reputation as a ruler in the popular culture was well established by the 20th century, to the degree that to defend him, or even point out the ways Tudor propaganda misinformed our perceptions

of him, was outside of academic circles the contrarian position. If you asked the average person on the street about Richard III, they would almost certainly come back with words like hunchback, scheming, murderer. Though Edinburgh-based screenwriter Philip Langley would lead the charge of uncovering Richard the Third's body in 2012, she was not the first person to suggest that maybe the king's reputation was unwarranted. As far as modern popular culture goes, one of the biggest pillars in the Richard the Third Reclamation movement was actually a 1951 detective novel by Josephine Taye called The Daughter of Time. In the book, Tays, recurring detective Alan Grant, not to be confused with Jurassic Parks, Alan Grant, is stuck in bed

with a broken leg. Bored without his job, Grant sees a portrait of Richard III and is struck by the man's apparent kindness. Grant is a detective with a preternatural talent for judging people's guilt and innocence based on their face and his gut feelings, and so upon seeing Richard's space, Grant thinks, well, that man couldn't have murdered his two nephews. With the help of a research archivist, Grant pours through every book and text available to him. Very real books and texts, I might add, as he builds an argument that the reader can follow along with every step of the way that Richard III was not, in fact, the likeliest culprit for the murder of his nephews. Tay's book made a massive impact on popular and intellectual culture, and it was the first in a wave of books and media in the 50s and 60s, revisiting the history of Richard III.

Though a group of amateur historians and Richard the Third defenders had formed a group in 1929, calling themselves the Fellowship of the White Boar after Richard's heraldic badge, the group. had mostly fallen by the wayside in the preceding decades. A daughter of time reader named Asold Oygram was galvanized enough by the book to reform the group under a new name, the Richard the Third Society. Philippa Langley would form the Society's Edinburgh chapter. Langley had first encountered Richard III in a biography written by Paul Murray Kendall. and since then, she had been devoted to rehabilitating the image of an English ruler, she believed, had been wrongfully maligned.

The legacy of King Richard III's missing body nagged at her. Langley was researching a screenplay that she wanted to write about Richard, and so she went to Lester to scope out the scene where it was rumored the king's body was taken after he was killed. Langley described walking over the car park where she believed Richard was buried, lingering at the reserved spot with the painted R. Quote, I just felt like I was walking on Richard III's grave. I can't explain it, end quote. A medieval historian named John Rouse had written a few years after the Battle of Bosworth Field that Richard III was buried in Greyfriars prior.

But even though that area in modern Leicester was called Greyfriars, the church itself was gone. Somewhere under a parking lot, a school yard, a street, the church had been demolished in 1538, after Henry VIII, Henry the 7th son, dissolved the monasteries. The Tudor dynasty inadvertently adding insult to injury, I suppose. Langley's intuition wasn't pulled out of thin air. In the 1980s, an academic named David Baldwin suggested that Richard might be buried under that parking lot. But no one seemed that interested in, well, doing anything about it. It would be a lot of money and a lot of trouble for something that was basically a theory, a historical rumor.

A dig would cost tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more. experts would need to be galvanized, off-site parking would have to be arranged, and even if they found some random bones, which again was no guarantee at all, who could even say if they were Richard the 3rds? But Langley's mission was now officially underway. She would pick up the mantle of finding justice for Richard by finding Richard himself. After all, to quote Alan Grant, the day. detective in a daughter in time, if you can't be a pioneer, what's wrong with leading a crusade?

There's that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone, end quote. It took Langley years, literal years, years of repeatedly requesting that the University of Lester undertake the dig in the Social Services Department parking lot, aka the best guess for where the varied former location of Greyfriars Priory would be, where Richard might be varied. Nothing. But then, a miracle of science and research occurred. A historian named John Ashton Hill was doing research on Richard III's sister, and he made a breakthrough.

He had been able to trace the matrilineal line of descent, mother to daughter, from Richard's mom and sister, to a modern woman named Joy Ibsen who lived in Canada. Richard III had no living descendants, and being able to trace his matrilineal line of descent was a huge deal, one because it's a fun cocktail party conversation starter for that family in Canada, but also because now if a body was unearthed in Leicester, there would be a way to determine whether not it actually was Richard III using mitochondrial DNA. This is a podcast on history, not genetics, but in very, very simplistic terms. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, kidding, but basically most human DNA is located in a cell's nucleus, but a tiny part of the genome is

located in the mitochondria, and the DNA of people from the same matrilineal, line will have identical sequences. Langley invited Ashton Hill to give a lecture in Scotland through the Richard III Society, and the two of them, along with a couple of their fellow Ricardians, officially formed the Looking for Richard Project. The funding was the most important hurdle, but eventually by securing documentary television interest and raising considerable funds through donations of members of the Richard III Society, both in Europe and in the United States, the requisite institutions in Leicester agreed on the Dig. The University of Leicester archaeologist Richard Buckley, who was the dig's project manager,

knew that success was unlikely. He told Langley to keep her expectations in check. 50-50 at best for finding the church. and nine to one against finding the grave, he said. After a few months of preparation of testing the site and researching possible trench dig locations, the dig officially began on August 25, 2012. After just one day, they found human bones.

It took another week to carefully dig back and unearth what was soon revealed to be an un-earned. undisturbed human skeleton, missing its feet, but almost entirely complete, near what would have been the choir of the church, buried in a place of honor. The body wasn't buried in a coffin, and it wasn't covered by a shroud. It had been hurriedly dumped into a grave that was too small. Most astonishing of all, the body's spine was curved in a visible, pronounced S shape. This man, when he had been alive, must have been hunched over, one shoulder taller than the other. They had found Richard III. At least they hoped they had.

Now they just needed to prove it. Analysis of the body determined that it was a man in his late 20s or early 30s who died in battle between 1455 and 1540. All of that was in line with Richard, who died at 32 in 1485. The scientists also proved that the body would have had a high protein diet with plenty of meat and expensive fish, which would have been available to an incredibly privileged class of person in the 1400s. They also digitally reconstructed the body's face based on its skull, and it looked at a

like portraits we have of Richard. And then there was the hunchback. Some Richard the third supporters had dismissed the idea of Richard having a hunchback as pure tutor fiction, but no, here it was. The body that they found in the parking lot had a pronounced visible S-shaped, severe scoliosis, which, if it hadn't given Richard an outright hunchback, certainly would have made one shoulder sit higher than the other. This detail thrills me. It makes the discovery of Richard III's body so much more interesting in my mind. Because really, what does the fact that Richard had scoliosis or even a hunchback say about his personality? Absolutely nothing. Yet for centuries, it's been a primary factor in our understanding of Richard III. Tudor writers

attempted to use the hunchback as a metaphor or motivator, and Ricardians tried to dismiss it in their quest to repaint Richard as a straight-backed hero. History is storytelling, and stories love metaphors. Heroes are handsome and tall. Princesses are beautiful. Villains have crookbacks and shriveled hands. But that's not how to be. how the real world works. Richard might have been guilty of killing his nephews, or he might have been entirely innocent, or he might have been guilty of a slew of other terrible things.

But none of that would be because of how his spine was shaped. I find it fascinating. Anyway, back to the scientific research. The matrilineal DNA proved to be the most conclusive piece of evidence, in conjunction with all of the other evidence. The researchers at the University of Leicester had also tested DNA from the patrilineal line, father to son, for 15 generations.

But even though the two modern descendants they found had DNA patterns that matched each other, neither of them matched the body that was supposed to be Richard. Well, that's a problem, but not really a big problem. You see every generation there's a risk of false paternity, someone identifying someone as the father who wasn't. And in the 15 generations between Richard III and now, among feuding nobles, there are plenty of historians who can point to specific cases that might have thrown off the patrilineal line. But matrilineal DNA? Well, it's much harder to misidentify someone as the mother.

Dr. Tori King at the University of Leicester was able to extract the mitochondrial DNA from the body they dug up and compare it to the DNA of two of the living descendants of Richard's sister. One of the descendants was a cabinetmaker named Michael Ibsen, son of the Canadian Joy Ibsen who had been identified years. years earlier. All of the DNA samples from the matrilineal line shared a rare type of mitochondrial DNA carried by only 1 to 2 percent of the population. It was a match. According to the New York Times, when Dr. King saw the results, she, quote, went very quiet, then did a little dance around the laboratory." So, as the universe,

The diversity of Lester made clear beyond a reasonable doubt, the body did belong to Richard III. The next question was, what could it teach us? The killing wound had been a blow to the head, most likely from a halberd that hit Richard from behind, below his left ear, with enough force that it knocked away bone and brain. Richard's helmet, evidently, had fallen off or been removed at some point in combat, which gives credence to the way that Shakespeare painted the scene, with Richard having fallen from his horse and fighting on foot in the fray. There were a number of other wounds on Richard's body,

but because they were in places that armor would have been covering, scientists and historians determined that they were what's known as humiliation wounds, committed to Richard after he was already dead, possibly when they were carrying the body from Bosworth Field to Lester. Most news outlets and historians, when they're speaking about it publicly, leave it just there, just describing them as humiliation injuries. But in case you're curious, and my apologies in advance for this, in this case it means that Richard had wounds to the face,

and also that someone attempted to stick a knife or sword or dagger up his deceased buttocks. Richard's naked body was thrown over horseback and brought from Bosworth Field to Lester, where friars, no doubt terrified at the regime change happening in real time, tried to bury him as quickly as possible. Richard was buried in a shallow grave at the head, of Greyfriars Priory, ear the choir, naked and with no winding sheet or shroud. The grave was so small that Richard, who had only been five-two, had to have his neck pressed forward and upright so that he would fit in the hole.

The skeleton was also found with its hands close together, pulled over its right hips, which indicates that Richard's hands may have been tied together at the same. the time. Neither arm was shrunken or shrivelled. And there Richard stayed, underground as the world above him changed, until summer 2012, when the archaeologists at the University of Lester announced that the bones exhumed beneath the parking lot were, beyond a reasonable doubt, the last plantagenet king of England. They arranged for Richard to be presented on a black, velvet-lined table under a glass case for journalists and their public to see.

Two chaplains sat in the room as journalists filed in, providing the dignity that the university said that the king was owed. It would be another several years before bureaucratic red tape would allow poor Richard to reach his final resting place. with rival factions vying for power in a way that resembles a much lower stakes, archaeology-based War of the Roses. Members of the Richard III Society had voiced their opinion that Richard should be interred with other English kings at Westminster Abbey,

a group comprised of plantagenet descendants sued for the right to bury Richard near his lands in York. But in the end, the ruling was made that the body would be buried there in Leicester, in an Anglican cathedral, just 200 yards from the parking lot where Richard had been found. It seems the legal system ruled in the manner consistent with the British Museum's approach to possession. Finders Keepers. On March 26, 2015, Richard III was buried in a ceremony with the pomp and circumstance befitting a king. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided. The ancestral research had revealed that the actor

Benedict Cumberbatch was a relative of Richard III, and he read a poem. This was 2015. Benedict Cumberbatch was hot as they came. Both Philippa Langley and John Ashton Hills were present too. The coffin that Richard III was buried in was beautiful. polished to glistening, made of golden English oak and yew. It was constructed by hand for this very occasion to inter a king, but it wasn't built by someone who specialized in coffins. King Richard Third's coffin was constructed by Michael Ibsen, the cabinet maker from Canada,

whose DNA had proved to be instrumental in bringing Richard, to his final resting place. That's the story of the unearthing and reburial of Richard the 3rd, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about Richard the 3rd in pop culture. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodham. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live,

and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best. advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. He goes, but there's so much luck

involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, It's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come, look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot.

He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Thanks in no small part to Shakespeare, there have been plenty of depictions of Richard the 3rd on stage and on screen. One could even argue that in Disney's Lion King, Scar, the scheming, slightly disfigured, Machiavellian uncle, owes as much to Richard III or more as he does to Claudius in Hamlet. Hamlet is, of course, the play whose plot explicitly inspired Lion King. But I think my favorite portrayal of a version of Richard III isn't evil at all, or at least, let's say, not as evil as he could be. The Game of Thrones series is explicitly inspired by the Wars of the Roses,

and some of the parallels are incredibly obvious. The Starks are analogues for the Yorks, the Lannisters, the Lancasters. But not every character and dynamic has a one-to-one equivalent. Tyrion Lannister, who's portrayed by Peter Dinklage in the HBO series, is obviously a Lannister, which should correspond to Lancaster. Richard III was a York. But Tyrion is also scheming and self-serving, the self-aware chess player who sees moves before others make them.

He's also a little person who frequently remarks, not unlike Shakespeare's Richard with a hunchback, that his physical difference is what holds him back from the glory afforded to his brother. And of course, Tyrion is the uncle to a boy king, rumored to be illegitimate. Whether you watched or read Game of Thrones and saw Tyrion as a villain or a hero or somewhere in between, depends, I think, on your point of view. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz,

with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il-Kaali. with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell.

Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.