Only expensive cars should be allowed to park over him...

Finds such as this make archeology and history come alive. Imagine, finding a king´s remains under a parking lot. Or we might have been punked.

Sorry, but I still believe Henry VII killed the princes in the tower. He had motive and means. Richard certainly had means, but no motive. He had effectively removed the princes from inheriting the throne through Titulus Regius, a statute enacted by Parliament, declaring the princes illegitimate, thus rendering them ineligible to inherit and removing any motive Richard would have for killing the boys.

Pretty weird you have a parking lot that´s been unchanged since the 1400´s.What exactly were parking lots used for way back then? Chariots?

Very interesting story.

If the Teamsters order a whack on Richard III, you would have never found him, either.

... had ordered ...

I am in full history geek-out. This is the most interesting story I´ve seen in a very long time. I think I´ll go back and re-read Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. She makes a very good case for the Richard´s innocence in the matter of the princes in the tower murder.

Does this mean that in 500+ years we´ll find Hoffa´s body?

#10, not even Alfred the Great (871-899):

http://lucianne.com/thread/?artnum=722089

I should have said that both Richard III and Henry VII had opportunity to kill the princes. But only one had all three.....motive, means, and opportunity....Henry VII. I wonder if they will now re-bury Richard in Westminster Abby. Josephine Tey´s "Daughter of Time" does present a great case for the innocence of Richard. And it´s a fun read.

So how does a King of England´s grave go missing? Was this a former cemetery of old that someone just paved over?

Who´s Shakespeare? Signed, The LoFoVo

And Shakespeare´s descriptions are accurate. After 400 years. The half-life of a Fauxbama statement is less than 4 minutes.

Fascinating story. I´ve been reading articles all over the internet since this appeared. The most interesting one was in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumation_of_Richard_III

It answers some of the questions posed above. Yes, he was killed in battle. His horse leapt into a march from which it could not retrieve itself. One of the Welshmen then came after him, and struck him dead with a halberd, and another took his body and put it before him on his horse and carried it, hair hanging as one would bear a sheep. According to a contemporary account, The body of King Richard, naked of all clothing, and laid upon a horse´s back, with the arms and legs hanging down on both sides, was brought to the abbey of Franciscan monks at Leicester, a miserable spectacle in good truth, but not unworthy for the man´s life, and there was buried two days after without any pomp or solemn funeral.

Richard III was buried without coffin or shroud in a grave too small for him under the choir section of the Greyfriars monastery church in Leicester. That would have been a Roman Catholic monastery, among those demolished when Henry VIII established the Church of England. It´s not surprising that it eventually became a parking lot.

The Wiki article also answered my question about Richard III´s feet, which are missing from the skeleton. After the destruction of the monastery, eventually a street, houses and public buildings were erected on the site. It appears that the feet were destroyed by Victorian building work, not by postmortem humiliation wounds.

#13 - the burial site was originally a choir wall abutting a cloistered monastery garden. The monastery was "decommissioned" and demolished during the English Protestant Reformation (Henry VIII) and a private house was built next to it, with burial site becoming a private garden. This property was later torn down, and eventually, in the 20th century, was paved over and used as a parking lot.

As for the princes in the tower, their disappearance and presumed murder is much more in keeping with the M.O. of Henry VII Tudor (who defeated Richard). Henry arranged to have most of the surviving Plantagenets arrested and executed for treason, keeping a few of the younger ones imprisoned until they were old enough to be executed. Historians almost universally praise Henry for this, seeing it as an example of his poltical shrewdness. On the other hand, they execrate Richard for his supposed murder of the two princes in the Tower. Incidentally, Richard´s illegitmate son, John of Middleham, the Governor of Calais at the time of Bosworth, was mysteriously murdered a few years afterward.

I want to know where they got the DNA to prove that bones is Richard III. Sometimes is ain´t good to be King.

As a long-time Ricardian, I´ve been following this story closely. Richard had scoliosis,which would have made him appear shorter but did not interfere with his military activities - which were considerable.
As far as the Princes in the Tower, there is no evidence they were killed by anybody. They were last seen in the Tower (then a royal residence, not a prison - that was later)in late summer of early autumn 1483. They then disappear from history. I´m convinced from Henry VII´s actions that he didn´t know what happened to them. And if he couldn´t find out, at the time, all the resources of the kingdom at his disposal and the strongest motivation - what chance do we have? The DNA testing was done from matrilineal descendents of one of his sisters (Univ. of Leicester pioneered DNA analysis). All the work seems to have been done very professionally and is convincing.

I saw the picture of Alfred and wondered if my family decended from that line...he looks like my brother!



Patrice d´Estawelle

I belong to that group of people who think Richard III got a bad rap from history. And I agree that Henry VII had the motive and opportunity to kill the princes in the Tower... or had Buckingham do it.

When visiting the Tower, however, one must be careful, as an American, to avoid expressing an opinion on the matter. I managed to irritate one of the guards with my defense of Richard III. I don´t really blame him. What do Americans know anyway?

I´ve been following this story, too, and find it fascinating.

Perhaps the reason Richard III may have gotten a bad rap from history is because, as the saying goes, history is written by the winners.