Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Mankie Listener Discretion advised King Richard
Speaker 1: the Third was preparing for battle. After three decades of
Speaker 1: the civil conflict that have come to be known as
Speaker 1: the Wars of the Roses, the fighting between two rival
Speaker 1: claimants to the throne of England was finally reaching its head.
Speaker 1: Richard knew as he was preparing to face off against
Speaker 1: his rival, Henry Tudor, that this would be the end
Speaker 1: of the fighting.
Speaker 2: This battle at.
Speaker 1: Bosworth Field would be, as Richard remarked, the end of
Speaker 1: either wars or his life, though pop culture portrayals in
Speaker 1: the Senate curies since Richard's death have often painted him
Speaker 1: in the imagination as a middle aged man. On August
Speaker 1: twenty second, fourteen eighty five, Richard the Third was only
Speaker 1: thirty two years old. He would lead his men into battle,
Speaker 1: descending into the fray himself, and so he wore heavy
Speaker 1: armor and a helmet covered his face. And whether it
Speaker 1: was a symbolic decision or whether it was a strategic
Speaker 1: one meant to inspire and rally his troops atop his helmet,
Speaker 1: Richard the Third secured his actual crown on that morning
Speaker 1: at Bosworth Field. Henry Tudor's men approached first. They had
Speaker 1: the advantage of readying themselves on the field of battle
Speaker 1: before Richard's men. But soon the king descended on Tudor
Speaker 1: with full strength, and its seemed like Richard the Third
Speaker 1: would be victorious. His men knocked over the Tudor standard bearer,
Speaker 1: the man holding the banner which marked the position of
Speaker 1: their commander. It was an incredibly powerful and symbolic move
Speaker 1: that would have alerted Tudor soldiers to the fact that
Speaker 1: their captain might be dead. But then the tide shifted.
Speaker 1: Tudor had reserve men led by a noble named Lord Stanley,
Speaker 1: and Stanley's fresh army overwhelmed the exhausted Riccardian men. At
Speaker 1: some point, King Richard was thrown from his horse. Shakespeare
Speaker 1: famously imagined him in the heat of battle shouting my
Speaker 1: kingdom for a horse, and then the king, fighting on foot,
Speaker 1: lost his helmet. King Richard the Third, the last English
Speaker 1: king to die in battle, was struck down by a
Speaker 1: blow to the back of the head strong enough to
Speaker 1: dislodge bone and brain. Word of his death spread across
Speaker 1: the battlefield Like a ripple. The crown that Richard had
Speaker 1: been wearing into battle had fallen among the dirt and blood.
Speaker 1: It was recovered, and Lord Stanley, as kingmaker, whose soldiers
Speaker 1: had turned the tide of the battle, had the honor
Speaker 1: of placing it atop Henry Tudor's head. From the dead
Speaker 1: temples of this bloody wretch have I plucked off to
Speaker 1: grace thy brows withal Stanley says of the crown in Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: And though the real Stanley almost certainly had found the
Speaker 1: crown in the mud and had not actually pulled it
Speaker 1: off of Richard's dead body, it was a profound moment
Speaker 1: of symbolism. There would be no rush for Henry Tudor's
Speaker 1: official royal coronation. He was crowned on the battlefield Henry
Speaker 1: the seventh, As for Richard, while history is told by
Speaker 1: the victors, and history was being written very quickly in
Speaker 1: real time after the Battle of Bosworth Field. For Henry
Speaker 1: the Seventh's claim to the throne to be legitimate, his
Speaker 1: narrative that Richard the third was a villainous usurper needed
Speaker 1: to be legitimate as well. Richard's dead body was stripped
Speaker 1: and paraded publicly, after all, as many people as possible
Speaker 1: needed to know that the former king was actually dead.
Speaker 1: The Dead Richard Parade proceeded to the nearby town of Leicester,
Speaker 1: where it underwent whatever humiliations and mockery would have felt
Speaker 1: fitting for a murderous tyrant struck down, But from there
Speaker 1: sources petered out. Some say that Richard's bones had been
Speaker 1: thrown in the River Sore. Others wrote that he was
Speaker 1: buried in the chapel of Greyfriars Priory. But over the centuries,
Speaker 1: the exact fate of the lost King's body, even the
Speaker 1: exact location of the priory itself, disappeared from record. A king,
Speaker 1: one of the most famous kings of England, was just gone,
Speaker 1: but not forever. Five hundred and twenty seven years after
Speaker 1: Richard the Third was struck down in battle, a team
Speaker 1: of archaeologists, galvanized by a passionate amateur named Philip A. Langley,
Speaker 1: would uncover his final resting place in one of the
Speaker 1: most exciting archaeological discoveries of the twenty five first century.
Speaker 1: From under the staff parking lot of a municipal building,
Speaker 1: the bones of Richard the Third were brought to the surface,
Speaker 1: and with them a fascinating conversation about how history is
Speaker 1: written and who gets to write it. Because this isn't
Speaker 1: just the story of a man from the fifteenth century.
Speaker 1: It's a story about Philippa Langley and the University of
Speaker 1: Leicester scientists, a story of a mid century detective novel
Speaker 1: and a king Richard the Third fan club. It's the
Speaker 1: story of a team of genetics researchers and bureaucrats and
Speaker 1: a furniture designer in Canada. For years, Richard the Third
Speaker 1: had been there, buried just beneath two feet of earth
Speaker 1: in a parking lot, waiting for his story to be rediscovered.
Speaker 1: Incredibly enough, Richard was found on most beneath a reserved
Speaker 1: parking space marked plainly with the letter R. I'm Danish
Speaker 1: Schwartz and this is noble blood. Pretty much as soon
Speaker 1: as Henry the seventh became King of England, he set
Speaker 1: about stabilizing his claim to the throne. Whether you believe
Speaker 1: that includes him killing two princes imprisoned in the Tower
Speaker 1: of London who may or may not have already been
Speaker 1: dead by the time Henry became king is not something
Speaker 1: I will be weighing in on on this particular episode,
Speaker 1: but Henry the seventh did begin solidifying his power through propaganda.
Speaker 1: Even the nomenclature of the Wars of the Roses is
Speaker 1: a bit of Tudor trickery. Though the Yorks did occasionally
Speaker 1: use the White World as their sigil, it was used
Speaker 1: much more frequently after the fact, in order to give
Speaker 1: Henry's claim to the throne a clean, digestible narrative. On
Speaker 1: one side, there was the red Rose of Lancaster, on
Speaker 1: the other the white Rose of York. Henry, taking up
Speaker 1: the Lancastrian claim, married Elizabeth of York and united England
Speaker 1: under a new dynasty, the Tutors with a new sigil,
Speaker 1: a rose that's red and white. But as I've alluded
Speaker 1: to before, though Henry was a descendant of King Edward
Speaker 1: the Third, his claim to the throne through lineage was,
Speaker 1: to put it, mildly shaky, especially compared to Richard the
Speaker 1: Third's claim. There's a fine line between hero who just
Speaker 1: claimed his throne legitimately and opposed a tyrant and guy
Speaker 1: who just murdered the rightful king, and Henry was determined
Speaker 1: to land on the side of the former. A young
Speaker 1: page in the household of Henry's Lord Chancellor proved to
Speaker 1: be exactly what Henry Tudor needed. This young page wrote
Speaker 1: a book entitled The History of Richard the Third, which,
Speaker 1: in the words of Stephen Greenblatt at The New Yorker quote,
Speaker 1: wove together every dark rumor about Richard's brief life into
Speaker 1: a brilliant narrative which paints a portrait of a bold, gifted,
Speaker 1: and ineradicably evil man whose evil was marked in his
Speaker 1: very body end quote. The history described Richard as short,
Speaker 1: crooked backed, with one shoulder higher than the other, and
Speaker 1: a personality that matched with the author saw as God's
Speaker 1: judgment made visible.
Speaker 2: Quote. He was close and.
Speaker 1: Secret, a deep, dissimilar lowly of continents end quote. In
Speaker 1: other words, this man was born evil, a despicable man,
Speaker 1: and a worse king, and the fact that he was
Speaker 1: short and twisted was evidence of that.
Speaker 2: The page who.
Speaker 1: Wrote this history, in case you were wondering, was Thomas Moore.
Speaker 1: The Tudor propaganda train continued on with Shakespeare's famous History
Speaker 1: that sees Richard as no less of a villain, but
Speaker 1: a more complicated one, a man lonely and plodding and
Speaker 1: all too aware of how his hunchback and disfigured arm
Speaker 1: hold back his ambitions. It's a distinction between the two
Speaker 1: texts that I think is interesting enough to consider for
Speaker 1: another minute. Back to Greenblatt at the New Yorker quote.
Speaker 1: In Moore's history, Richard's physical deformity is an uncanny sign
Speaker 1: of his viciousness, a kind of preternatural portence or emblem.
Speaker 1: In Shakespeare, it is the root condition of his psychopathology.
Speaker 1: There is nothing mechanical in this conditioning, certainly no suggestion
Speaker 1: that all men with twisted spines become cunning murderers. But
Speaker 1: Shakespeare does suggest that a child unloved by his mother,
Speaker 1: mocked by his peers, and forced to regard himself as
Speaker 1: a monster, will develop certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of
Speaker 1: them both destructive and self destructive.
Speaker 2: End quote.
Speaker 1: Complexly motivated or not. Thanks to tudor writers, Richard the
Speaker 1: Third's reputation as a ruler in the popular culture was
Speaker 1: well established by the twentieth century, to the degree that
Speaker 1: to defend him, or even point out the way his
Speaker 1: tutor propaganda misinformed our perceptions of him, was outside of
Speaker 1: academic circles. The contrary position, if you asked the average
Speaker 1: person on the street about Richard the Third, they would
Speaker 1: almost certainly come back with words like hunchback, scheming, murderer.
Speaker 1: Though Edinburgh based screenwriter Phil B. Langley would lead the
Speaker 1: charge of uncovering Richard the Third's body in twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: she was not the first person to suggest that maybe
Speaker 1: the King's reputation was unwarranted as far as modern popular
Speaker 1: culture goes. One of the biggest pillars in the Richard
Speaker 1: the Third Reclamation movement was actually a nineteen fifty one
Speaker 1: detective novel by Josephine Tay called The Daughter of Time.
Speaker 1: In the book, Tay's recurring detective Alan Grant, not to
Speaker 1: be confused with Jurassic Parks. Alan Grant is stuck in
Speaker 1: bed with a broken leg, bored without his job. Grant
Speaker 1: sees a portrait of Richard and is struck by the
Speaker 1: man's apparent kindness. Grant is a detective with a preternatural
Speaker 1: talent for judging people's guilt and innocence based on their
Speaker 1: face and his gut feelings, and so upon seeing Richard's face,
Speaker 1: Grant thinks, well, that man couldn't have murdered his two
Speaker 1: nephews with the help of a research archivist, Grant pours
Speaker 1: through every book and text available to him, very real
Speaker 1: books and texts, I might add, as he builds an
Speaker 1: argument that the reader can follow along with every step
Speaker 1: of the way, that Richard Third was not in fact
Speaker 1: the likeliest culprit for the murder of his nephews. Tay's
Speaker 1: book made a massive impact on popular and intellectual culture,
Speaker 1: and it was the first in a wave of books
Speaker 1: and media in the fifties and sixties revisiting.
Speaker 2: The history of Richard the Third.
Speaker 1: Though a group of amateur historians and Richard the Third
Speaker 1: defenders had formed a group in nineteen twenty nine calling
Speaker 1: themselves the Fellowship of the White Boar, after Richard's heraldic badge,
Speaker 1: the group had mostly fallen by the wayside in the
Speaker 1: preceding decades. A daughter of Time Reader named a Soulda
Speaker 1: Wygram was galvanized enough by the book to reform the
Speaker 1: group under a new name, the Richard the Third Society.
Speaker 1: Philippa Langley would form the society's Edinburgh chapter. Langley had
Speaker 1: first encountered Richard Third in a biography written by Paul
Speaker 1: Murray Kendall, and since then she had been devoted to
Speaker 1: rehabilitating the image of an English ruler she believed had
Speaker 1: been wrongfully maligned. The legacy of King Richard the Third's
Speaker 1: missing body nagged at her. Langley was research reaching a
Speaker 1: screenplay that she wanted to write about Richard, and so
Speaker 1: she went to Leicester to scope out the scene where
Speaker 1: it was rumored the king's body was taken after he
Speaker 1: was killed. Langley described walking over the car park where
Speaker 1: she believed Richard was buried, lingering at the reserved spot
Speaker 1: with the painted R quote. I just felt like I
Speaker 1: was walking on Richard the Third's grave. I can't explain
Speaker 1: it end quote. A medieval historian named John Rouse had
Speaker 1: written a few years after the Battle of bosworth Field
Speaker 1: that Richard the Third was buried in Greyfriars Priory, but
Speaker 1: even though that area in modern Leicster was called Greyfriars,
Speaker 1: the church itself was gone somewhere under a parking lot,
Speaker 1: a school yard, a street. The church had been demolished
Speaker 1: in fifteen thirty eight after Henry the eighth Henry the
Speaker 1: seventh son dissolved the monasteries the Tudor dynasty, inadvertently adding
Speaker 1: insult to injury. I suppose Langley's intuition wasn't pulled out
Speaker 1: of thin air. In the nineteen eighties, an academic named
Speaker 1: David Baldwin suggested that Richard might be buried under that
Speaker 1: parking lot, but no one seemed that interested in while
Speaker 1: doing anything about it. It would be a lot of
Speaker 1: money and a lot of trouble for something that was
Speaker 1: basically a theory, a historical rumor. A dig would cost
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more experts would need
Speaker 1: to be galvanized. Off site parking would have to be arranged,
Speaker 1: and even if they found some random bones, which again
Speaker 1: was no guarantee at all, who could even say if
Speaker 1: they were Richard the Third's. But Langley's mission was now
Speaker 1: officially underway. She would pick up the man of finding
Speaker 1: justice for Richard by finding Richard himself. After all, to
Speaker 1: quote Alan Grant, the detective in A Daughter in Time,
Speaker 1: if you can't be a pioneer, what's wrong with leading
Speaker 1: a crusade? There's that old saying about constant water and
Speaker 1: its effect on stone end quote. It took Langley years,
Speaker 1: literal years years of repeatedly requesting that the University of
Speaker 1: Leicester undertake the dig in the Social Services Department parking
Speaker 1: lot aka the best guess for where the buried former
Speaker 1: location of Greyfriars Priory would be where Richard might be
Speaker 1: buried nothing. But then a miracle of science and research occurred.
Speaker 1: A historian named John Ashton Hill was doing research on
Speaker 1: Richard the Third's sister and he made a breakthrough. He
Speaker 1: had been able to trace the matrilineal line of descent
Speaker 1: mother to daughter from Richard's mom and sister to a
Speaker 1: modern woman named Joy Ibsen who lived in Canada. Richard
Speaker 1: the Third had no living descendants and being able to
Speaker 1: trace his matrilineal line of descent was a huge deal.
Speaker 1: One because it's a fun cocktail party conversation starter for
Speaker 1: that family in Canada, but also because now if a
Speaker 1: body was unearthed in Leicester, there would be a way
Speaker 1: to determine whether or not it actually was Richard the
Speaker 1: Third using mitochondrial DNA.
Speaker 2: This is a podcast on.
Speaker 1: History, not genetics, but in very very simplistic terms, the
Speaker 1: mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Kidding, but basically,
Speaker 1: most human DNA is located in a cell nucleus, but
Speaker 1: a tiny part of the genome is located in the
Speaker 1: mitochondria and the DNA of people from the same matrilineal
Speaker 1: line will have identical sequences. Langley invited Ashton Hill to
Speaker 1: give a lecture in Scotland through the Richard the Third Society,
Speaker 1: and the two of them, along with a couple of
Speaker 1: their fellow Ricardians, officially formed the Looking for Richard project.
Speaker 1: The funding was the most important hurdle, but eventually, by
Speaker 1: securing documentary television interest and raising considerable funds through donations
Speaker 1: of members of the Richard the Third Society both in
Speaker 1: Europe and in the United States, the requisite institutions in
Speaker 1: Leicester agreed on the dig. The University of Leicester archaeologist
Speaker 1: Richard Buckley, who was the dig's project manager, knew that
Speaker 1: success was unlikely. He told Langley to keep her expectations
Speaker 1: in check. Fifty to fifty at best for finding the
Speaker 1: church and nine to one against finding the grave, he said.
Speaker 1: After a few months of preparation of testing the site
Speaker 1: and researching possible trenched dig locations, the dig officially began
Speaker 1: on August twenty fifth, twenty twelve. After just one day
Speaker 1: they found human bones. It took another week to carefully
Speaker 1: dig back and unearth what was soon revealed to be
Speaker 1: an undisturbed human skeleton, missing its feet, but almost entirely complete,
Speaker 1: near what would have been the choir of the church,
Speaker 1: buried in a place of honor. The body wasn't buried
Speaker 1: in a coffin, and it wasn't covered by a shroud.
Speaker 1: It had been hurriedly dumped into a grave that was
Speaker 1: too small. Most asonishing of all, the body's spine was
Speaker 1: curved in a visible, pronounced s shape. This man, when
Speaker 1: he had been alive, must have been hunched over one
Speaker 1: shoulder taller than the other. They had found Richard the third,
Speaker 1: at least they hoped they had. Now they just needed
Speaker 1: to prove it. Analysis of the body determined that it
Speaker 1: was a man in his late twenties or early thirties
Speaker 1: who died in battle between fourteen fifty five and fifteen forty.
Speaker 1: All of that was in line with Richard, who died
Speaker 1: at thirty two in fourteen eighty five. The scientists also
Speaker 1: proved that the body would have had a high protein
Speaker 1: diet with plenty of meat and expensive fish, which would
Speaker 1: have been available to an incredibly privileged class of person
Speaker 1: in the fourteen hundreds. They also digitally reconstructed the body's
Speaker 1: face based on its skull, and it looked like portraits
Speaker 1: we have of Richard. And then there was the hunchback.
Speaker 1: Some Richard the Third supporters had dismissed the idea of
Speaker 1: Richard having a hunchback as pure Tudor fiction, but no,
Speaker 1: here it was. The body that they found in the
Speaker 1: parking lot had a pronounced visible s shape severe scoliosis, which,
Speaker 1: if it hadn't given Richard an outright hunchback, certainly would
Speaker 1: have made one shoulder sit higher than the other. This
Speaker 1: detail thrills me. It makes the discovery of Richard the
Speaker 1: Third's body so much more interesting in my mind, because really,
Speaker 1: what does the fact that Richard had scoliosis or even
Speaker 1: a hunchback say about his personality? Absolutely nothing. Yet for
Speaker 1: centuries it's been a primary factor in our understanding of
Speaker 1: rich Id. Tudor writers attempted to use the hunchback as
Speaker 1: a metaphor or motivator, and Riccardians tried to dismiss it
Speaker 1: in their quest to repaint Richard as a straight backed hero.
Speaker 1: History is storytelling, and stories love metaphors. Heroes are handsome
Speaker 1: and tall, princesses are beautiful villains have crookbacks and shriveled hands,
Speaker 1: But that's not how the real world works. Richard might
Speaker 1: have been guilty of killing his nephews, or he might
Speaker 1: have been entirely innocent, or he might have been guilty
Speaker 1: of a slew of other terrible things, but none of
Speaker 1: that would be because of how his spine was shaped.
Speaker 1: I find it fascinating.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: Back to the scientific research, the matrilineal DNA proved to
Speaker 1: be the most conclusive piece of evidence in conjunction with
Speaker 1: all of the other evidence. The researchers at the University
Speaker 1: of Leicester had also tested DNA from the patrilineal line
Speaker 1: father to son for fifteen generations. But even though the
Speaker 1: two modern descendants they found had DNA patterns that matched
Speaker 1: each other, neither of them matched the body that was
Speaker 1: supposed to be Richard. Well, that's a problem, but not
Speaker 1: really a big problem. You see, every generation there's a
Speaker 1: risk of false paternity, someone identifying someone as the father
Speaker 1: who wasn't, And in the fifteen generations between Richard the
Speaker 1: Third and now among feuding nobles, there are plenty of
Speaker 1: historians who can point to specific cases that might have
Speaker 1: thrown off the patrilineal line, but matrilineal DNA, well, it's
Speaker 1: much harder to misidentify someone as the mother. Doctor Torry
Speaker 1: King at the University of Leicester was able to extract
Speaker 1: the mitochondrial DNA from the body they dug up and
Speaker 1: compare it to the DNA of two of the living
Speaker 1: descendants of Richard's sister. One of the descendants was a
Speaker 1: cabinet maker named Michael Ibsen, son of the Canadian Joy Ibsen,
Speaker 1: who had been identified years earlier. All of the DNA
Speaker 1: samples from the matrilineal line shared a rare type of
Speaker 1: mitochondrial DNA carried by only one to two percent of
Speaker 1: the population. It was a match, according to The New
Speaker 1: York Times. When doctor King saw the results, she quote
Speaker 1: went very quiet, then did a little dance around the
Speaker 1: laboratory end quote. So as the University of Leicester made
Speaker 1: clear beyond a reasonable doubt the body did belong to
Speaker 1: Richard the Third. The next question was what could it
Speaker 1: teach us. The killing wound had been a blow to
Speaker 1: the head, most likely from a halberd that hit Richard
Speaker 1: from behind below his left ear with enough force that
Speaker 1: it knocked away bone and brain. Richard's helmet evidently had
Speaker 1: fallen off or been removed at some point in combat,
Speaker 1: which gives credence to the way that Shakespeare painted the
Speaker 1: scene with Richard having fallen from his horse and fighting
Speaker 1: on foot in the fray. There were a number of
Speaker 1: other wounds on Richard's body, but because they were in
Speaker 1: places that armor would have been covering, scientists and historians
Speaker 1: determined that they were what's known as humiliation wounds committed
Speaker 1: to Richard after he was already dead, possibly when they
Speaker 1: were carrying the body from Bosworth Field to Leicester. Most
Speaker 1: news outlets and historians, when they're speaking about it publicly
Speaker 1: leave it just there, just describing them as humiliation injuries.
Speaker 1: But in case you're curious, and my apologies in advance
Speaker 1: for this. In this case, it means that Richard had
Speaker 1: wounds the face, and also that someone attempted to stick
Speaker 1: a knife or sword or dagger up his deceased buttocks.
Speaker 1: Richard's naked body was thrown over horseback and brought from
Speaker 1: Bosworth Field to Leicester, where Friars, no doubt terrified at
Speaker 1: the regime change happening in real time, tried to bury him.
Speaker 2: As quickly as possible.
Speaker 1: Richard was buried in a shallow grave at the head
Speaker 1: of gray Friar's Priory, near the choir, naked and with
Speaker 1: no winding sheet or shroud. The grave was so small
Speaker 1: that Richard, who had only been five to two, had
Speaker 1: to have his neck pressed forward and upright so that
Speaker 1: he would fit in the hole. The skeleton was also
Speaker 1: found with its hands close together pulled over its right hips,
Speaker 1: which indicate that Richard's hands may have been tied together
Speaker 1: at the time. Neither arm was shrunken or shriveled, and
Speaker 1: there Richard stayed underground as the world above him changed
Speaker 1: until summer twenty twelve, when the archaeologists at the University
Speaker 1: of Leicester announced that the bones exhumed beneath the parking
Speaker 1: lot were beyond a reasonable doubt, the last Plantagenet King
Speaker 1: of England. They arranged for Richard to be presented on
Speaker 1: a black velvet lined table under a glass case for
Speaker 1: journalists and their public to see. Two chaplains sat in
Speaker 1: the room as journalists filed in providing the dignity that
Speaker 1: the university said that the king was owed. It would
Speaker 1: be another several years before bureaucratic red tape would allow
Speaker 1: poor Richard to reach his final resting place with rival
Speaker 1: factions vying for power in a way that resembles a
Speaker 1: much lower stakes archaeology based War of the Roses. Members
Speaker 1: of the Richard the Third Society had voiced their opinion
Speaker 1: that Richard should be interred with other English kings at
Speaker 1: Westminster Abbey. A group comprised of Plantagenet descendants sued for
Speaker 1: the right to bury Richard near his lands in York,
Speaker 1: but in the end the ruling was made that the
Speaker 1: body would be buried there in Leicester, in an Anglican cathedral,
Speaker 1: just two hundred yards from the parking lot where Richard
Speaker 1: had been found. It seems the legal system ruled in
Speaker 1: the manner consistent with the British Museum's approach to possession
Speaker 1: finder's keepers. On March twenty sixth, twenty fifteen, Richard the
Speaker 1: Third was buried in a ceremony with the pomp and
Speaker 1: circumstance befitting a king. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided the
Speaker 1: ancestral research had revealed that the actor Benedict Cumberbatch was
Speaker 1: a relative of Richard the Third, and he read a poem.
Speaker 1: This was twenty fifteen, Benedict Cumberbatch was hot as they came.
Speaker 1: Both Philippa Langley and John Ashton Hills were present too.
Speaker 1: The coffin that Richard the Third was buried in was beautiful,
Speaker 1: polished to glistening, made of golden English oak and ewe.
Speaker 1: It was constructed by hand for this very occasion to
Speaker 1: inter a king. But it wasn't built by someone who
Speaker 1: specialized in coffins. King Richard Third's coffin was constructed by
Speaker 1: Michael Ibsen, the cabinet maker from Canada whose DNA had
Speaker 1: proved to be instrumental in bringing Richard to his final
Speaker 1: resting place. That's the story of the unearthing and reburial
Speaker 1: of Richard the Third. But keep listening after a brief
Speaker 1: sponsor break to hear a little bit more about Richard Third.
Speaker 1: In pop culture, thanks in no small part to Shakespeare,
Speaker 1: there have been plenty of depictions of Richard Third stage
Speaker 1: and on screen. One could even argue that in Disney's
Speaker 1: Lion King, Scar the scheming slightly disfigured Machiavellian uncle owes
Speaker 1: as much to Richard the Third or more as he
Speaker 1: does to Claudius in Hamlet. Hamlet is, of course the
Speaker 1: play whose plot explicitly inspired Lion King. But I think
Speaker 1: my favorite portrayal of a version of Richard IID isn't
Speaker 1: evil at all, or at least, let's say, not as
Speaker 1: evil as he could be. The Game of Thrones series
Speaker 1: is explicitly inspired by the Wars of the Roses, and
Speaker 1: some of the parallels are incredibly obvious. The Starks are
Speaker 1: analogs for the Yorks, the Lanisters, the Lancasters, but not
Speaker 1: every character and dynamic has a one to one equivalent.
Speaker 1: Tyrian Lanister, who's portrayed by Peter Dinklage in the HBO series,
Speaker 1: is obviously a Lanister, which should correspond to Lancaster. Richard
Speaker 1: the Third was a York. But Tyrian is also scheming
Speaker 1: and self serving, the self aware chess player who sees
Speaker 1: moves before others make them. He's also a little person
Speaker 1: who frequently remarks, not unlike Shakespeare's Richard with a hunchback,
Speaker 1: that his physical difference is what holds him back from
Speaker 1: the glory afforded to his brother. And of course, Tyrian
Speaker 1: is the uncle to a boy king rumored to be illegitimate.
Speaker 1: Whether you watched or read Game of Thrones and saw
Speaker 1: Tyrian as a villain or a hero or somewhere in between. Depends,
Speaker 1: I think on your point of view. Noble Blood is
Speaker 1: a production of iHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Speaker 1: Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me
Speaker 1: Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston,
Speaker 1: Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The
Speaker 1: show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima
Speaker 1: Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers
Speaker 1: Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.