LONDON — History lesson time. Richard III is the most famous English king to be found under a parking lot. But what do we know about him?
After effectively being lost to history for over 500 years, his remains were found by researchers near a church in the regional city of Leicester in 2012.
On Thursday, after Britain spent about a week commemorating the last English king to die on a battlefield, his coffin will be formally re-interred at Leicester Cathedral in a ceremony attended by members of the current royal family and other dignitaries.
Essentially, he's having a second burial in a different place from where he was first laid to rest — under that parking lot.
But here's the thing that most people want to know: Who was he and what he did do? Why is he famous, in other words (apart for being an English medieval king, which should be enough in itself).
The first thing to realize is that much of his reputation actually rests on a fictionalized portrayal of him by Britain's great bard William Shakespeare, who in his play Richard III characterized him as a tyrannical ruler responsible for a bunch of murders, including those of his two young nephews. They represented a theoretical challenge to the throne.
In the play, Shakespeare paints a villainous picture of Richard III with a hunched back and various bodily deformities.
A really bad guy, who was greedy, brutish and ugly.
However, more recently scholars have come around to the idea that this account is probably not that accurate. First of all, it's a play, it's drama and Shakespeare was after all looking to tell a gripping story and entertain Elizabethan audiences.
But perhaps more importantly, the playwright may have been writing to please his Tudor patrons. And it was Henry Tudor — he would later become King Henry VII — who in 1485 defeated the real King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth.
That defeat effectively ended the War of the Roses, a violent period of English history that saw a series of wars between two factions of the royal House of Plantagenet.
Richard III belonged to the house of York. Henry Tudor was from the house of Lancaster.
With Richard III's death, Henry Tudor united the two houses and became the first king of the new Tudor dynasty that ruled England for over a century until it gave way to the House of Stuart. The House of Stuart itself gave way to several other royal houses over the years that in turn did the same right on down until the current House of Windsor with Kate, Wills and all that.
So, basically, it seems like Richard III drew a short straw.
He was only king for two years and academics now think that in that short time he probably made some important legislative reforms, for example to the legal system. But nobody remembers him for that. They think Shakespeare, or perhaps Laurence Olivier or Al Pacino, who played him on screen and stage.
As sometimes happens, a writer with a big imagination, a fine turn of phrase and possibly a pocketbook motivation left us with a not very flattering depiction that stuck.
