The High-Tech Miracle That Found King Richard III

On Bosworth Field he lost his life, England's most infamous monarch, the supposed killer of princes. His body was taken from the battle and rushed by monks, the Red Cross of the Middle Ages, to the nearest monastic institution, the Gray Friary in nearby Leicester.

There it was buried, perhaps in an unmarked grave to prevent tomb-robbing retribution from the new king, the Welsh usurper Henry Tudor. There the body remained, despite rumors that the Tudor king had exhumed it and used his coffin as a horse trough.

Richard's body was undisturbed 50 years later, when Henry Tudor's son and his minister Thomas Cromwell started knocking down monastic buildings, including the Friary. The dead Plantagenet king remained unmoved by the construction of a 20th century parking lot, even as scandalous movies of his life played nearby.

But historians had not forgotten him. By the time I was growing up in the North of England — Richard's ancestral home, where he was always popular — a full-scale revival of the monarch's reputation was underway. The search for him was kept alive by a book, catalyzed by a screenwriter, and finally made possible by some very modern technology.

SEE ALSO: Bones of King Richard III Found Beneath Parking Lot

I was one of the first generations of English schoolchildren to be taught that the brilliant Tudor propagandist William Shakespeare had turned Richard into a cartoon villain for the ages.

There had been a very successful novel from 1951 by Josephine Tey, called The Daughter of Time. In the book, a bed-bound Scotland Yard detective and his American sidekick investigate the killing of the Princes in the Tower, tear apart the Tudor lies and propaganda — and conclude that Richard III could not have done it.

The Daughter of Time was so popular, then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill felt he had to huffily refute it. Regardless, it became a classic. Christopher Hitchens' brother, author Peter Hitchens, last year called it a "masterpiece" and "one of the most important books ever written ... [because] you will never again believe anything you're told until you've checked it personally."

It was a detective novel, then, that kept a King's flame alive. Generations of historians (and journalists) read it. It was one of the books that led me to study history at Oxford. It almost certainly helped inspire screenwriter Phillipa Langley, who became the next link in the chain to finding Richard when she was researching a movie that would present him as a misunderstood man.

Langley went on a detective hunt of her own, investigating the parking lot in Leicester where the Gray Friary was supposed to have stood — and sneaking into the closed lot next door. It was there, she says in a UK Channel 4 documentary screened Monday, that she got the "strongest sensation" that Richard was buried beneath a stall marked "R" (for reserved, of course.)

"I know how mad this sounds," Langley said. "But I had the strongest sensation that I was walking on Richard’s grave."

Most of us would dismiss such hunches. But Langley swung into action. She got the city's permission for an archeological dig, hired the University of Leicester to do it, and personally raised the £13,000 ($20,000) needed, much of it from Richard III believers around the world, in just two weeks.

Well done, Internet. You did it again! You paid to find Richard III!

So here we are, one year later: Richard has finally been unearthed, his slumber disturbed after half a millennium. Sudden and uncomfortable questions present themselves to British authorities: Where should this King in the North be buried? The nearby cathedral? Westminster Abbey? Should he finally be granted the state funeral due to a monarch?

None of that delicious disruption would have been possible without modern technology and historical knowledge working hand in hand. Researchers did radiocarbon dating on the rib bones, which showed they were from a man who died between 1455 and 1540 (Bosworth was 1485).

They also did a DNA test on the bones and compared it to two of Richard's descendants on the female line, 17 generations later. They got two matches.

As if that weren't enough, the bone structure was found to be consistent with that of a man who ate a lot of animal protein — which, historians knew, made him a man who spent a lot of time at court. He also evidently died in battle, covered in sword wounds. And he had scoliosis, which would have given him a nasty-looking curved spine. Not all of what Shakespeare wrote was propaganda; he was Richard Crookback.

We may have found his body, but Richard's character is very much up in the air. Recently unearthed documents show that the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower was being talked about during Richard's reign, making it less likely that Henry Tudor did the dirty deed. The Daughter of Time, for all its inspirational power, does not reflect current historical thinking.

The fact is, we simply don't know what manner of man Richard III was. He could have been a murderous usurper himself, a man capable of ordering the deaths of children who stood between him and the throne. Contemporary accounts are minimal. There's no radiocarbon dating for his soul.

Modern science lets us play CSI on a 518-year-old regicide, seeing the angle of the sword blows that ended his life. It also lets us digitally reconstruct his face (something the Richard III society has been working on, and will be officially unveiled tomorrow).

But the verdict on his death? Was it the justified killing of a child-killer, or the slaughter of a maligned, disabled man? That's entirely up to you.

Image via Dan Kitwood/Getty Images News/Getty Images