Leicester does a better job of burying a Plantagenetking at the second attempt
二葬金雀花王朝國王,萊斯特市更勝一籌
Top this, Tudors
看看人家,都鐸王朝
IT WAS reckoned to be Leicester's biggest turnout in decades—maybe since the footballer GaryLineker was made a freeman of the unfashionable Midlands city in 1995. But the 35,000people who lined its streets on March 22nd had not come to honour a living son of Leicester.They were honouring the bones of a medieval king, Richard III, dug up in a car park in 2012.
Wearing expressions of curiosity, respect, even grief, and in a few cases also doublet-and-hose, the mourners watched as the remains of a king who had ruled England over half amillennium ago were transported in splendour beyond the city to Bosworth Field; which wasperhaps the last place Richard would have wanted to revisit. That was where, in 1485, hebecame the last English king to die in battle, thus ending his Plantagenet dynasty and usheringin the Tudor age. After a further three days of pageantry and public prayer in LeicesterCathedral—which 20,000 visited to see Richard's coffin lying in state—the bones were reinterredthere on March 26th. The ceremony was televised live and attended by bishops, royals andcelebrities, including the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, a second cousin of Richard's, 16 timesremoved.
The discovery of the bones was even weirder. The dig was partly instigated by a group ofenthusiasts who consider Richard, depicted by Shakespeare as a nephew-killer and “poisonousbunch-backed toad”, to have been slandered by Tudor propagandists. They point to hisachievements, including making courts use English. They also pointed, absurdly, of course, to alarge letter “R”, randomly painted onto the tarmac of the car park, which was thought possiblyto be the site of a Medieval abbey, in which Richard's corpse was thought possibly to have beenburied. The king's skeleton—complete with a staggeringly telltale scoliosis—was discovered inthe first exploratory trench, right under the letter “R”. It was authenticated by DNA testing,through a link to one of Richard's living relatives, a Canadian furniture-maker, who then madethe king's coffin.
There followed a legal battle involving Leicester's authorities and another group of enthusiasts,The Plantagenet Alliance, who said the bones should be buried in Richard's ancestral city ofYork. “Over my dead body!” said the mayor of Leicester, Peter Soulsby, scenting a terrifictourism opportunity. Leicester does not have too many of those. One of its main historicalattractions, hitherto, was a suit of clothes belonging to Daniel Lambert, an early-19th-centuryjailer, who was considered the fattest man in England and is still feted as “one of the city's mostcherished icons”. Happily for Leicester, it got the nod. There is now hope that tourism willrekindle interest in Bosworth Field and other nearby historic places—including the battlefield atNaseby, in Northamptonshire, which marks one of the main clashes of the English Civil War, orthe ruined castle of Lady Jane Grey, who ruled for nine days in 1553. More important forLeicester City Council, it reckons Richard has already made £45m ($67m) forthe local economy—and is advertising city breaks to discover the “dynasty, death and dramatic discovery of theking's remains”, for £129 for two.