Richard III Unburied: Tudor Propaganda vs the Leicester Car Park Bones

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In September 2012, archaeologists digging beneath a council car park in Leicester found a skeleton with a curved spine and severe battle wounds about two feet under the painted lines. It was Richard III, the king the Tudors and Shakespeare turned into a hunchbacked villain. This episode rebuilds his real life: born at Fotheringhay Castle in 1452, the 11th of 12 children of the Duke of York, exiled to the Low Countries at eight after his father and brother Edmund died at Wakefield in 1460, then made Duke of Gloucester when his brother became Edward IV. Raised at Middleham under Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, he developed idiopathic scoliosis that padded clothing and armor would have hidden.

Loyal to Edward through the 1470 exile, he led the vanguard at Barnet and Tewkesbury at 18, married Anne Neville, and governed the north for a decade. When Edward died in April 1483, Bishop Robert Stillington's claim of a pre-contract with Lady Eleanor Butler made the 12-year-old Edward V illegitimate, and Richard was crowned on July 6, 1483. The princes in the Tower vanished, and the episode weighs Richard against Buckingham and Henry VII as suspects before following him to Bosworth in 1485 and the Tudor rewriting that followed.

• The skeleton carried 11 wounds made at or near death, nine of them to the skull, suggesting he had lost his helmet.
• A pelvic stab wound is read as a humiliation injury inflicted after his body was stripped of armor.
• Chronicler John Rous praised Richard in life, then wrote under Henry VII that he spent two years in the womb and was born with teeth.
• Genealogists traced the female line from his sister Anne of York across 17 generations to two living descendants whose mitochondrial DNA matched.
• Philippa Langley's project with the University of Leicester led to his reburial in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.