King Richard III revisited
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King Richard III revisited Roger W. Byard 1 Accepted: 3 December 2019 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Forensic examination of skeletal remains exhumed in 2012 from the site of the former Church of the Greyfriars in Leicester, United Kingdom, revealed a gracile adult male of around 30 to 34 years of age with 11 perimortem injuries. These were consistent with descriptions of injuries sustained by King Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England, at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Combining these features with DNA analyses proved that the remains were those of Richard. The finding of a severe thoracic scoliosis with a raised right shoulder confirmed that the king did have a” hunchback” which was not a later invention of Tudor and subsequent chroniclers. This investigation provides an excellent demonstration of how contemporary forensic techniques can answer historical questions. The remains of the last Plantagenet king have been identified, his vertebral disease confirmed, and the nature of his last moments verified. Keywords King Richard III . Bosworth field . Plantagenet . Henry Tudor . Scoliosis . DNA
God cannot alter the past, though historians can Samuel Butler (1835–1902) In a previous editorial the role that contemporary investigations may play in explaining and exploring questions of historical forensic interest was discussed [1]. In an Australian context historical forensic analyses have been very useful in shedding light on police interactions with nineteenth century outlaws, or bushrangers, and on conditions and events that were reported from isolated convict settlements in Vandieman’s Land (now known as Tasmania) in the early days of the colony [2, 3]. An issue which constantly arises when historical cases are re-examined, however, is the consistent lack of reliability of records and recollections of events. Churchill summarized the “moveable feast” of history perfectly when he proclaimed his
* Roger W. Byard [email protected] 1
Discipline of Anatomy and Pathology, The University of Adelaide, Frome Road, Level 2 Helen Mayo Building North, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia
Fig. 1 Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III (Royal Collection of the United Kingdom)
Forensic Sci Med Pathol
Fig. 2 “The Princes in the Tower”, an 1878 portrait by Millais
Fig. 3 A nineteenth century frontispiece to Shakespeare’s play “Richard the Third” depicting Richard as a slightly sinister boar standing astride the bodies of the murdered princes
complete lack of concern at having a negative historical record, as he was going to write it himself [1]. History has in fact been claimed to be as much a work of imagination as is the future. This unfortunately leaves us with the conundrum of being only able to suggest a likely sequence of events and outcomes, while acknowledging that there may be many other possibilities. It is somewhat reminiscent of situations in court when an array of possible events ranging from
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