Posted on 08/16/2013 6:49:10 AM PDT by xzins
Descendants of Richard III won a court battle on Friday over where to bury the medieval monarch, whose bones were found under a car park last year, but were urged not to embark on a legal version of the Wars of the Roses in which the king died.
In one of the most remarkable archaeological finds in English history, a skeleton with a cleaved skull and a curved spine was formally identified as Richard's remains by DNA testing in February this year.
Depicted by William Shakespeare as a deformed tyrant who murdered his two young nephews to strengthen his grip on power, Richard was killed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, the last king of England to perish on a battlefield.
The University of Leicester, which led the quest to find, exhume and identify Richard's remains, obtained permission from the Ministry of Justice to reinter the king at the cathedral in Leicester, which is close to Bosworth in central England.
But descendants of the monarch, who was the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty, went to court arguing that Richard should instead be laid to rest in the cathedral in York, the northern English city with which he had close links during his life.
In a ruling delivered on Friday, High Court Judge Charles Haddon-Cave said the ministry had been wrong to give the green light to the Leicester burial plan without engaging in wider consultation on a matter of wide public interest.
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(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
I read a book a couple of years ago which put forth the theory that Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother was the one who arranged for the the ‘death’ of the two boys. Then, when Richard III was ‘wasted’, there would be no other contenders.
Margaret was in England always plotting for her son (Henry VII) to return from France and battle Richard for the throne.
We will never know the facts or truth!
..she was quite the conniver.
I think it was determined that they were not related and even the wrong ages and from the wrong time. Lots of small children murdered and buried in London.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Two skeletons were discovered buried in urns near the White Tower of the Tower of London in 1674. Charles II (the King at the time) ordered their burial in Westminster Abbey on the assumption that they were probably the bones of Edward V and Prince Richard, Duke of York. In 1933, the bones were disinterred and examined, and were found to be those of two children of approximately the right ages. They were then reinterred. They have remained so ever since.
With modern scientific methods, more information might be gained than was possible in 1933, especially if DNA could be extracted, but so far this has not occurred.
Two bodies of children found buried in the tomb of Edward IV and his Queen in St George's Chapel, Windsor in the late 18th century, have also been identified at times as possibly being the Princes from the Tower (they were after all, the sons of George IV) but the information about these is much more murky.
Source?
The Monastery at Greyfriars had long been identified as the likely burial site for Richard III, but when the monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII, there were rumours that the body had been disinterred and disposed of in a number of different ways, and the monastery was demolished, and new streets and buildings built on the site and its precise location was lost. It was only in 2007 when a building was demolished that archaeologists were able to dig and began to pin down the location of the monastery again (slightly west of the modern street called Greyfriars which had been the assumed location until then). That lead to the more detailed, more recent archaeological digs, which found the bones, and then worked out where in the old church they had been located.
I’m a history teacher and am pulling this out of my memory - can’t remember where I learned it at this point, but it’s not exactly obscure knowledge - I think any decent encyclopedia with a relevant entry, or any book covering the history will mention it.
The large blue boxed text at the bottom of this page, pretty much gives the same information I gave, about the bodies interred in the Abbey.
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