Stuff You Should KnowEver since Shakespeare wrote his tragedy on Richard III the world has thought of him as an evil king with a shriveled soul. But is that actually unjust?
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and that makes this a good old fashioned episode of stuff you should know.
That's right. This is where we well, we don't debate, because we don't really do that. We're going to talk about the merits of Richard the Third and the people that say that Richard the Third was a lousy king and terrible person, and other people will say, nah, that was rewritten by people who didn't like him, and he was actually a pretty great king. And we'll get into all that right now.
Wow, that's a great intro. So Richard the Third is that you may his name may ring a bell if you're not already familiar with him, because there is a very very famous play by Shakespeare called The Tragedy of Richard the Third. And in this play, Richard the Third has a hunch back, he is a withered arm, he has a horrible, dark soul at his core. He's a terrible person, a murderer of children, a usurper to the throne. And because this is Shakespeare, you know Shakespeare. That's how everybody's thought of Richard the Third publicly or popularly for hundreds of years.
Yeah, Like Shakespeare wouldn't have a hit piece on somebody right.
No way, if there was even one Shakespeare. I was thinking back to our episode on I think it was like, did Shakespeare really write all that stuff? That is one of my all time favorite episodes because I knew nothing about it, and yet there's this huge, rich subculture of people who like talk about this and investigate it and debate it. I love that one totally. But Shakespeare did basically write this play, probably at least in part to flatter Queen Elizabeth, who is the reigning monarch at the time, and he was a very loyal subject her. Queen Elizabeth was related to the guy who took over from Richard I after Richard the Third was killed before that guy's very eyes.
That's right, And this story will get a little confusing as we go back and go through it, because there's a lot of Richard's, there's a lot of Edwards. Yeah, but it's not the hardest thing to keep straight. We're going to do our best, but we if in order to talk about Richard the Third, we have to talk a little bit about the War of the Roses, which were these bloody civil wars fought over the fourteen hundreds basically in England, like, hey, who's in control here? Which family has a right to the British throne? Most of it was between the House of York and the House of Lancaster, whose symbols were the White Rose for York and the red Rose for Lancaster. There we go were the roses white versus red.
Yes, that also explains that movie with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito and Kathleen.
Turner, one of my favorite all time movies.
That is a great movie.
It is great and holds.
Up, does it? I haven't seen it in a loi.
It's still so very funny.
Okay, So, the Houses of York and Lancaster were both part of the Plantagenet dynasty, and that dynasty had been ruling England from eleven to fifty four up to the point where we pick up our story. So like it was a big deal that these two houses were warring one another for control and even bigger deals. We'll see that somebody who was basically unrelated to either one would come in and end the Plantagenet dynasty. Richard the Third was the last Plantagenet king.
Yeah, so he was born in fourteen fifty two. He was Team York. His dad, Richard was the third Duke of York, and it was his dad who was a big player in the early part of the War of the Roses. In fourteen fifty five he went to dethrone King Henry the sixth, who was a Lancaster, and that really kicked off the Wars of the Roses. I think I've been saying singular like the Danny de Vido movie, but technically it's the Wars of the Roses.
I think it's all combined collectively under the umbrella the War of the Roses. And you could consider each of these skirmishes or battles in it.
Oh okay, so we're right and wrong.
Yeah so, but the thing to remember is that these were incredibly vicious, bloody battles being fought by ultimately two different sides of the same large family. But like the term machiavellian is just perfectly used in this era. Like these people were like, you're my brother in law, and I'm gonna cut your head off because I want to get this other guy who's my cousin to the front throne so I could take over my brother in law's land like stuff like that. This was like the War of the Roses. And to give you an example of how brutal it was, when Richard the Third's father, Richard the third, Duke of York died, he died in battle and his head was cut off and displayed on a pike, and they put a paper crown on it. Yeah, and he was king at the time. The king had his head cut off and a paper crown put on because the other house had won and now they were the kings.
So after Richard's father, Richard once again died and his head was put on a pike, his big brother Edward I think he had three kids total, took up the mantle to take up the fight and he defeated the Lancasters at the Battle of Tauton, in which I think it's the bloodiest battle in British history. Twenty eight thousand deaths man, which is just remarkable loss of life in any war, much less one in the fifteenth century. So after that happened, Henry six goes to Scotland. He's like, I'm out of here and Richard's brother was crown King Edward, so all of a sudden he's King Edward the Fourth. The Yorks are in power, and Richard is second in line at this point, behind only his older brother George.
And George is a great example of what kind of duplacitousness and maneuvering was prominent in this era. He was executed under his brother's orders by being drowned in a that of wine, executed for treason. And this wasn't like saying I want to take the throne. He really was treason is and plotting against his own brothers. So like that was just something that happened in this family at the time during the War of the Roses.
Yeah, for sure. Previous to that, when the Yorks were in power, it was only for a couple of years because in fourteen sixty nine Henry the six was reinstalled. He's like, I've been to Scotland for a while. I'm coming back because my wife, Margaret of Andrew led a orchestrated a rebellion that worked, so thank you for that. Now I'm back in charge. But then Edward and both Richard and George, because George was not dead at this point right, they came back defeated Henry the six again, and this was basically for good in fourteen seventy one.
Yeah, So Edward the fourth, Richard's brother, is now on the throne. He has two sons, Edward and Richard. We're going to put them to the side for a little bit because he could not get more confusing if you try to bring them in right now, we call him.
Eddie and Rick, yeah, or Eddie and Dick, how about that.
Yeah. And Edward the fourth, this is when he has his brother George executed to drowning a vat of wine, and Edward the Fourth died and I was looking into it. It's mysterious how he died. He just died suddenly. It wasn't violently. He died of some sort of illness. But in his will he named his brother Richard Richard the Third lord and protector over Edward's son Edward, who was going to now become King Edward the fifth. He was twelve, though Richard the Third was thirty at the time, and Richard the Third was like, I actually think that I would make a better king. Yes, I know that through royal lineage, Like Edward the Fifth is in line to take the throne. He's twelve, and I don't really like his jokes. He's terrible joke teller. I tell great jokes. I should be king. So he started to do some maneuvering and kept putting off the coronation, putting off the coronation until he was able to produce a rumor. As we'll see, that said the King Edward the fifth, the twelve year old was illegitimate, his father had not borne him or his father was illegitimate, and he didn't have any real claim to the throne. Hence Richard the Third did and it worked, so Richard the Third became king.
Yeah, so he had to do a little bit of other maneuvering to get this done. At one point he met up with two of his deceased brother's closest advisors, a guy named Anthony Woodville and a guy named Richard Gray, and this was like, Hey, the coronation's coming up for this twelve year old to be king. And the very next day he had Richard the Third had Woodville and Gray arrested on charges of trying to usurp the throne, and they were executed very quickly, along with another close friend of his brother's William Hastings, so like he was, you know, if it looks as if it appears to look Richard the Third was just kind of cleaning house of anyone from his brother's old team that would have supported the boy king.
Basically, yeah, and this was basically his brother's in laws that he was killing off. He didn't want them to try to vie for power because the mom of Edward the Fifth, the young twelve year old, she could have a ton of power, and so so could her brothers and all that kind of stuff. So they were basically like wiping out the other side of the family. Remember, I said, Richard the Third kept putting off the coronation and putting it off. Well, typically if you're waiting to be coronated king, you would hang out in the Tower of London. And since he was able to keep putting off the coronation, Edward the Fifth, who the kid who would be Edward the Fifth, was basically locked away in the Tower of London, and like a month or so after he got there, his younger brother, Richard, who was nine at the time, showed up and they were kind of compartmentalized away in the Tower of London, out of public view, just held off to the side while Richard was doing his maneuvering.
Yeah. So while this is going on, these two boys in line in front of Richard the Third are basically hidden away in the Tower of London, and all of a sudden, the Church of England says, you know what, that marriage wasn't even legitimate, King Edward the fourth, your older brother and his wife Elizabeth. It was an illegitimate marriage because Edward. I think there were a couple of things. One was Edward had supposedly been engaged to another woman when they married, which would be big of me at the time. But didn't they also say that Elizabeth had a previous marriage or something like that.
No, they said that Edward the fourth and Richard the Third's father right, that he had had an affair that bore Edward the fourth.
Yeah.
Yeah, but Richard the third was legitimate, So he was saying, like, my brother wasn't even a legitimate king while he was alive, so his sons definitely aren't. I am though, because my parents bore me legitimately. And so there were two illegitimate rumors that were being bandied about at the time, and I guess one of them got picked up on by the Pope I believe, who said, yeah, we're cool with this, and an Act of Parliament was passed that basically said Richard the third has gone now from Lord Protector, he's now king because he's the legitimate heir to the throne.
Right, And that was June twenty sixth, fourteen eighty three. And maybe we'll take a break and talk about what happened to these boys.
Yeah, yeah, I need to take a breath.
All right, we're going to figure all these Dixon eddies out and we're going to come back and talk about it right after this.
So, Chuck, you asked before we left, what happened to the two princes? That is one of the greatest mysteries, one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in English history. Still today, we don't know what happened to them, And there's a lot of great answers, and there's evidence that suggest one way or the other, but there's nothing definitive, so we can't really say what happened. But all we know is that while he was sequestered, that was the word I was groping for earlier. While he was sequestered, away or while they were Edward the fifth and his younger brother Richard, they like, they were seen increasingly less in public, usually walking around the grounds of the Tower of London because they're basically being held hostage until I think in the fall of fourteen eighty five, I've they just disappeared from public view. No one ever heard of them again as far as the historical record is concerned.
Yeah, I mean, the spin doctors even wrote a song about it.
Yeah, I mean, and they gave some pretty great advice.
I agree. Uh. Oh, now that stupid song is going to be in my head. It's been in my head for a while, has it really, Yeah, because of this episode.
Yes.
Oh, I didn't even think about it until two seconds ago. So you were on that already.
For a long time.
Yes, So, like you said, they were last seeing summer of fourteen eighty three. Of course, they're the you know, we'll just call him team Antie Richard. They were the ones that were saying, like, this guy clearly murdered these boys, and everybody knows it. He got his henchman, Sir James Terrell, to do so. In Shakespeare's play, he whispers to that henchman, come to me, Terrell soon act to have to supper and now shout tell the process of their death. So Shakespeare certainly bought that.
Yeah, and we should say Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of Richard the Third about one hundred years after Richard died, and the idea that rich of the Third murdered directly because if he if they were murdered, he almost certainly did it himself. A lot of people argue. Other people say, yes, Sir James Terrell probably had somebody do it, and the ideas that they were smothered with pillows, But this idea doesn't pop up in writing until after Richard's death. And the whole idea is is that he he had really great motive to kill these kids because they even if they were illegitimate, they could go off grow up train. Yeah, there would probably be a montage of some sort as their training, and they could come back and try to topple him from the throne through battles and violence, and he was just wiping out this, you know, future challenge to his rule. He was not the only one who had that motive. There were a handful of other people around the time who had just as good a motive of wiping those two kids out for the exact same reason. So that alone is not that's not like the most damning evidence.
Yeah, I could see the montage.
Bit bit dip was that two princes?
Yeah, you know that one part where he's kind of scatting.
Yeah, that was good.
Actually, so the montage could have happened for sure. Uh, if you are team Richard, they will likely say, man, there's no way he would have been fool enough to do that. He didn't kill those guys. Maybe he moved him up to the north and hid them away because he wanted them to be safe for something. Uh, but Richard never said anything about it. Uh. There was no evidence for centuries, like literal evidence tying anything there. But fairly recently there was a British TV historian that discovered a will that included a necklace that belonged to Edward the Fifth, the boy who would be king. This will was drawn up thirty three years after he disappeared, and it belonged to a wealthy London widow named Margaret Capel, who just so happened to be the sister in law of that henchman James Terrell. So the man who either possibly murdered those two guys or at least was in on the plot ended up with this necklace that was given to his wife thirty three years later. So it's not like, hey, this is literal evidence, but it's pretty shady.
It is, especially if you combine it with other evidence people have generated over the years. But can we talk for a second about why we don't know any of this, from the murder mystery to whether they were legitimate or not.
Yeah, I mean one reason is just that history wasn't recorded the same and there's just a lot of stuff that wasn't noted at the time, right.
Yes, that's part of it. I read also that the Tutors when they took over after killing Richard the Third, destroyed a lot of the Platagenet like document in England. And then also there's not a lot of historians working at the time. Luckily, there were a couple of chronicles that were created. One was by a monk named Dominic Mancini or Mancini. He happened to be in England at the time while this is going on, and went back to Italy and wrote about it. So he had a pretty good in what you would think impartial chronicle of the whole thing. He didn't really have a dog in the fight. And then there's something else called the Krolin Chronicle, which was a chronicle that had been added to over hundreds of years by some local monks at a nearby abbey. And these two don't always agree. Sometimes they contradict each other. Sometimes one talks about an event, the other one doesn't mention it, so you can kind of piece it together. But like if you take Edward the forces will for example, where he made Richard the third lord protector, that will's gone. We don't know if Richard made that up. We don't know what the deal is. Without firsthand evidence and sources, primary sources, all of this is essentially conjecture and up for debate.
Yeah, for sure. And that's you know, that's why people still debate this stuff today. And there's you know, pro Richard team an anti Richard team. As far as his rule, he only ruled for a couple of years, from fourteen eighty three to fourteen eighty five. And this is again where people will debate what kind of king he is because some people will say that, you know, he fought for the rights of the poor, he only convened one parliament that he used to pursue like some pretty progressive agendas for the time, like presumption of innocence was created under his watch.
And universal pre k Yeah, yeah, that's right.
A lot of his rule was pretty tragic, though there was a lot of war. One of his closest allies ended up turning against him. The Duke of Buckingham switched over in aligned with the Tutors Henry Tudor. Specifically, they were a different family who had this you know, they said they had a claim to an ancestral line that was I guess to our modern eye seems fairly big, but back then it seemed important enough to go to war over.
Yeah. The Lancasters were basically like looking anywhere for somebody who had a legitimate claim. So they went to a cousin's, cousins, next door, neighbors, friends, dog's brother to find Henry Tudor, who you could connect the dots to the throne. So he did have a legitimate claim, but he was, like you said, essentially a different family. He was just barely a Lancaster. He was a tutor. But this is who they brought to bear has claimed to the throne to challenge the Yorks in the form of Richard IID for this throne and his former friend, the Duke of Buckingham. They staged the Buckingham Rebellion and it just got squashed almost immediately, So within months of being coronated, his rule was challenged right away. But he managed to get rid of that and I think another one and hang in there for a couple of years before fortune turned against him.
Yeah, and you know, he also had personal tragedy a few months after that. His only child, Edward died, his wife died not long after that, and then Henry Tudor comes to knocking again. He is, you might have stopped me once, but you're not going to stop me again. And on August twenty second, fourteen eighty five, they went to battle again at Bosworth Field outside of Leicester, and this is where Richard as King fought and was killed in battle. I think the last English king to actually die on the battlefield, right, yes, but he was the last king, and he by all accounts died in a pretty brutal way if you consider, like you know, blunt force trauma and head damage to be a brutal way to go and I do.
Yeah. So, as we'll see, they found his skull and they examined it and found that he had not one, but two potential death blows delivered to his head. One was a sold thrust, so imagine sticking his sword into somebody's head, through their skull and into their brain. That happened to him. And then somebody came up with a pike or a halberd, which is a very sharp axe on one side and a point, very sharp point on the other opposite the axe blade. And apparently a pikeman came up and cut off essentially the lower part of his skull and took a big chunk of his brain stem with it. So either one of those, which everyone happened first, killed them virtually instantly. That was not the end of the torment to his poor body, though.
No, they he didn't get the hat on a pike with a paper crown. They instead stripped him down nude and paraded him through town on the horse. And apparently people were like you know, jabbing and stabbing at his body on the horse, and he was literally had stab wounds in his butt. He was buried, historically speaking, he was buried in a place called Greyfriars Franciscan Church in Leicester, and other people say, no, it was. He was exhumed by a mob. They threw him into a river, and that was sort of we'll get to that, but it was. I guess we've already ruined the fact that it's not a mystery anymore, but it was a mystery for a while.
It was. And we should say when he was buried at Greyfriars too, it was hastily. There was like I saw that he was basically put in a shallow grave that his legs were sticking out of when they finished, so they had to break his legs, so like put him in there like it wasn't. It was the kind of grave that could very easily be lost to history. So Richard the third is dead. He just died in battle. Apparently Henry Tudor is crowned King Henry the seventh. On the battlefield, they took the crown off of Richard's dead body and put it onto Henry. So there's now a new, entirely new family running the show, the Tutors. And almost immediately they did they they started a propaganda campaign against Richard the Third that culminated later on in Shakespeare, Like I said, Elizabeth was a relative granddaughter I think of King Henry the seventh, so he was trying to basically curry favor, show appreciation for her. But long before him, I mean basically overnight they started slamming Richard the third, I think is what it's called slamin him.
Yeah, the earliest historical records we really have on Richard the third are from that Tudor period. They are not flattering at all. One guy named John Rousse. He was a guy, and this is kind of pretty decent evidence that it was a smear campaign. He was a historian who wrote about him before and after his death. While he was alive, he was saying, great leader, he helped the rich and the poor. I'm up with King Richard after Henry the seventh and the Tutors take over. He's like, no, Actually, he was a monster, and like maybe a literal monster because he was born at two years old, he spent two years in the womb. He came out with a full set of teeth, he had hair down to his shoulders. He was accessively cruel. He's basically the Antichrist, and he actually used that word then a guy and named Sir Thomas Moore picked up where Rouse left off. He was alive when Richard died. He was only eight years old, though, but he was a close advisor to Henry the Seventh, that Tudor king, and he wrote that Richard was a malicious, wrathful, envious person from before his death. Ever, Perverse said he was, and this is where you get the idea of him being you know, deformed or something what we would now call, you know, like a body physical difference. He was little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crooked backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favored an appearance.
Yeah. And also so if you're like, why are they picking on this guy's appearance. At the time, physical differences were equated with moral failings, right, So if you hunched back in a withered arm, it meant you were really dark on the inside, like you're outside reflected your inner self. And Shakespeare relied very heavily on Thomas Moore's account. But Chuck, I think the fact that the tutors found it necessary to launch a smear campaign immediately against Richard the Third to me strongly suggests that he was not hated in fury and considered a cruel monster while he was alive.
I agree, because otherwise they'd be like, hey, we're good. Everyone hated that.
Guy, exactly.
I was just thinking how awful it would have been. I mean up until recently really, but back then, if you had some sort of physical difference, you were just born a certain way for people to think, like, hmm, that means they're like an evil, awful person on the inside as well.
Yeah, exactly, until like the nineteen nineties. Basically, it was like then.
I did want to mention quickly. I saw The Goodbye Girl the other day, the Richard Dreyfuss movie, the Neil Simon movie.
Okay, whose movie was it?
Well, Richard Dreyfus star and Neil Simon wrote it. Okay, Marcia Mason was in it too. It's just a classic film. But Richard Dreyfus very famously is in New York to play Richard the Third and is trying to do this very very strange or he's sort of forced into doing this very strange portrayal of Richard the Third after he was ready to play it straight as it already weird.
Richard the Third, Oh yeah, I've got to see that. Then, that sounds great. Neil Simon's wonderful.
Oh, it's such a classic film. I love it. Back when somebody like Richard Dreyfus could be a leading man in Hollywood.
Another movie I have not seen, but I want to is a documentary that al Pacino made because he's apparently a huge Shakespearean and was basically obsessed with the tragedy of Richard the Third, so much so that he made a documentary about Richard. Have you seen it?
Oh? Yeah, I saw it in the theater. That's when I was living in New York or New Jersey. So I saw it in New York. Yeah, it's good, very good.
I will see it. Then if Chuck says it's very good, everybody that means see it.
So Shakespeare's play, like you said, was hugely popular. So this was really the image that we were stuck with. Maybe we should take our second break, let's do it, all right. Well, we're going to come back and talk about people that tried to redo that redo right after this, all right, So I mentioned that people came to redo the redo of Richard the Third's reputation. They are called Ricardians and This happened in nineteen twenty four where a group of people finally stood up and said, you know what, We're tired of this rewriting of history. We're going to form an actual society called the Richard the Third Society, and our goal is to redeem his reputation. To quote, strip away the spin, the unfair innu window tutor, artistic shaping, and the lazy acquiescence of later ages and get at the truth end quote.
But you have to imagine a nineteen twenties British aristocrat saying right.
Well, yeah, that was my best job.
This group is known as Riccardians. Informally, this group has chapters all over the world, particularly in parts of the world that England has touched, like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and of course in the UK. There's plenty of them, but they are really dedicated to this. If you go on their website, they're the essays and the articles that they have are really detailed, so much so that I would almost advise them to maybe dial it back to Okay, average person, it's it's it's a lot because they're so intensely into it. This era was so intensely complicated and complex, but like they are very much dedicated to reforming his image. Apparently they'll hand out pamphlets that are critical of the Tragedy of Richard. I at performances of the Tragedy of Richard the Third, like they're rabble rousers when it comes to Richard the Third's reputation.
You know, it would be funny as if you went to the website and it was like one of those early aughts, it's like black background with like shaking pink letters and it's got the spin doctors.
Playing with comic sands of course wit it.
So that would mainstream in the nineteen fifties because of a book. It was a very popular detective novel called a Daughter of Time in which they reimagine the disappearance of the two princes as a modern murder mystery where scotland Yard gets involved and scottland Yard says, Henry the seventh was the guy who murdered these two boys. It wasn't rich It was a very big book, bestseller in fact, and it kind of helped shape the narrative starting or reshape the narrative, I guess starting in the nineteen fifties by saying Stikett Shakespeare.
Yeah, it was really critical of received wisdom in general. Like this Scotland yard inspector who's laid up in the hospital and is just amusing himself by solving this cold case mystery, comes to the conclusion that he can't show at all that Richard the third was responsible. In in fact, he thinks it might have been Henry the seventh and or his mother who killed these kids, because remember I said, a lot of people had a reason to off them or get them out of the way and along the way. This detective is very critical of historians and how they just basically will rely on rumor and unsubstantiated stuff as fact and that becomes history. And this really changed people's views about historians and history, but also especially about Richard the third, and that was the thing that really kind of turned the for him somewhat.
Yeah, somewhat. The other interesting thing and this is where like again we sort of gave it away, but there was a mystery for a long time of what actually happened to Richard. I was that body really buried? Was it tossed into the river? When a really well balanced biography came out in the nineteen fifties from Paul Murray Kendall called Richard the Third. A woman named Philippa Langley read it and got very interested. She's a historian and a screenwriter obviously a Ricardian, and she was like, I want to figure out what happened to this body. That's still the mystery of what happened to Richard the third. And so I'm gonna get on the case and sort of mountain amateur which turned into, you know, sort of a professional investigation.
She's gonna sniff them off the case.
Sniff them off the case.
I still, after all these years, do not know how to use that correctly in a sentence.
It's always correct. That's the beauty of the phrase.
Oh oh good good. I love it even more so. Her whole thing was to basically use like cold case investigative methods like the fictional detective did and a daughter of time to finding where Richard the Third's body was. And by this time historians have basically narrowed it down to a handful of blocks in the downtown part of Lester. Like they knew Greyfriars was a real place. There was a really good chance that he was in fact buried at Greyfriars after his death. And even though Greyfriars had been demolished like fifty years after Richard died, there were still historical recordings that it was generally in this area of downtown Leicester. One of the areas was under an apartment building. Just so happened that that apartment building was demolished at some point I think in the early two thousands, two thousand and seven, and they were able to excavate beneath it and found no evidence of Greyfriars, So basically attention turned to the parking lot, and when they turned to the parking lot, they found Philip A. Langley standing there saying I've been telling you for two years now that this is where this guy's buried. I just know it.
Yeah, I mean she had been there in two thousand and four, in two thousand and five, and I guess just had a feeling like he's under this friggin parking lot, I'm telling you, Except she didn't say friggin because she's from England. She said they're fracking, fracking, that's right. So she approached the University of Leicester and said, hey, how about this. I think Richard the thirds of her in that parking lot, under that parking lot, why don't we excavate that thing at great cost? And it's going to be expensive, and it's in the middle of a big city and probably won't find him. But I feel pretty sure that we will. But other people are saying that there's no way, and the University of Leicester said sure. I think she was pretty doggedly persistent. Took a few years and a lot of calls and a lot of meetings, but finally she got the permissions, She won the support of the city council, even those Riccardians. The Richard the Third Society chipped in thousands of pounds to make this happen. University of Lester also pitched in a little bit. They finally had enough money five thousand pounds to rent a ground penetrating radar system to survey that parking lot and they went, something's down there, you guys.
Yeah, there's somebody wearing a T shirt that says Greyfriar. So I think this is the place.
I fought in the Four of Roses and all I got with this les T shirt.
I don't want to gloss over, like what Philip A. Langley contributed, she really got this thing going, like, I don't Chee's one. I don't think the University of Lester would have done this ever had it not been for her. She obtained permits to do this dig. Like she really went to town, but she wasn't an ARCHAEOLOGI just the University of lesterhead archaeologists. After that ground penetrating radar, she was like, I'm telling you, I told you guys, let's dig here. So then on August twenty twelve, they started that dig, and this was it's a you know, a car park, a parking lot. It's big enough that if you're excavating it with brushes like toothbrushes and dental picks, it's going to take you a while. The longer it takes, the more expensive it's going to be. So they dug in for a really long dig. Within hours, they discovered Richard.
The Third Yeah, or you know, they just discovered a skeleton and they excavated the rest of the area. They found all right, this is definitely beneath the former Greyfriars Church here, and so everyone's getting pretty excited at this point. Yeah, A few weeks later September twelfth, they finally call a press conference and they say, everybody, we have a skeleton that's an adult male in his thirties. Richard died at thirty two. It's got severe curvature of the spine that looks like scoliosis, which you know, is consistent with maybe one shoulder being higher than the other. Had some serious head trauma, looks like a death blow to the head. And the date, you know, matches the historical record, so we are pretty sure we have Richard the third year.
Yeah, it was a it was a big deal. There's a good movie that came out in twenty twenty two called The Lost King that's about Philippa Langley and.
This this Oh I didn't know about that.
It's really good. Steve Coogan plays her husband. It's a great movie. But it's definitely it's based on her book Looking that's based on her project, the Looking for Richard Project, so it's very sympathetic to her and it's very critical of the University of Leicester and it really kind of became prominent in the movie, at least at this press conference where she showed up expecting to be part of this whole thing and she was just sidelined from that point on by the university who had this huge press conference, really well done press conference, and they announced this to the world. This was an enormous deal, especially in the UK obviously, and then I think just a couple of weeks after that or within the next several months, they did some more tests. These were DNA tests, and they were like, they held another press conference, they like, this is definitely Richard the third Yeah.
I mean it was one of those ninety nine point nine percent certainties. Basically through DNA they got him, they found him. Some people say they called it the luckiest archaeological dig in history, which to me like sells her a little short, because she did a lot of good It didn't seem like luck to me. She literally found the place and said dig there. That's not luck, that's like good work.
I think sure.
I mean, they did say it was like a one in a million thing. But again, I don't know call it a great discovery. But when someone says I think he's buried under this and he is, that's not.
Luck, that's guidance.
That's selling her short. Who played her in the movie.
Sally Hawkins, I think I don't I'm pretty sure that was her name.
I love Sally Hawkins.
Oh good, then that's who it was.
Wouldn't she The Shape of Water? That weird movie?
I did not see that movie.
Oh well, it won the Oscar and it was a little weird. But yeah, that's that's Sally Hawkins. I love her. She's great.
Okay, well, then you would like this movie even more now because she is great, isn't it.
She was in the Paddington movies, which are fantastic if you haven't seen them.
I saw the first one in the theater.
Yeah. The second one's even better.
Oh really, yeah, I was not expecting that, chuck.
Yeah it was. It's like one of the sequels out did the first kind of things like well, there's not many, but yeah.
So you may be sitting there, especially if you're genealogically mine, and be like, well, how did they know? How did they do a DNA test on the skeleton? Like did they swab its tooth and then its toe and compare them. No. There was a group of genealogists who got to work tracking down descendants of Richard the Third. His only son died long before he could have had kids, so he had no heirs whatsoever. So this is a bit of work. And they tracked down two different people. One guy was in Canada and they said, you are definitely a direct descendant of Richard the Third. Can we stick this cotton swab in your mouth and swirl it around for thirty seconds?
And he's like, do I get anything else? Like can I be king?
They're like, we've brought this Richard the Third tope bag as a thank you gift, and he said, what's in it? And they're like, nothing, it's just the toe bag.
Yeah, with a swab, put that in your mouth. So yeah, I mean they they they tracked down a relative and made that certainty certain which is just remarkable. I mean, that's DNA changed. Was just such a game changer for everything. There was always so much guesswork before, like hey, we're pretty sure, but now with ninety nine point nine percent certainty, like they found their guy.
Even without it. I'm not quite sure what they found that was in controvertible evidence that it was Greyfriars. But if they had found grayfires and then they found this skeleton, yeah, killed in battle obviously Sla Spine had who had scoliosis, who was the right age, Like I think we would still all be like, yeah, that was Richard the third But yeah, the DNA definitely seals it for sure.
They were able to give him like a burial fit for a king. Eventually they had a big He was reinterered at Leicster Cathedral. Benedett, Cumberbatch was there, the Queen was there. Cumberbatch read an original poem that he did not write. But like it was, it was a lot of fanfare. It didn't really I mean, it proved that he wasn't like quote unquote hunchback. He may have had scoliosis, but he wasn't some like deformed monster. It did not answer anything obviously about what happened to the two princes. It's not like he they buried him with a you know, a confessional scroll that he had written down or anything like that.
I didn't do it. I was framed. Yeah, so I think when the remains were found, one of the headlines of the papers in England, Philip A. Langley read said referred to Richard ID as a child killer. And so she was like, you know what, I think I need to come up with another project now that the last one was successful. So she's got the Two Princes project. Now she's trying to figure out a proof that he did not kill the two Princes and or who did? I think? She published a book claiming that it was solved, and everyone's like, this isn't actually solved. But she did come up with some pretty good evidence that suggests that those princes made it out of the tower outside of England and managed to grow up and were not killed by Richard. That's her new jam.
Yeah, but Chris Baron hit him with a cease and desist and shut it all down.
Who oh is that the spin Doctor's guy?
Yeah?
How do you know his name?
I looked it up. Okay, but that is the weird kind of musical stuff that I remember. I just didn't remember that. Emily's always like, how do you remember the bass player from Poison or whatever?
Ricky Rouse?
That was Ricky Rockett. Guitar player Bobby dal was based layer.
Okay, thanks, you got anything else? I'm Richard the third Chuck.
I got nothing else. This is a fun one if you can keep track of all the Edwards and the Richards. It's actually not the hardest thing to follow, and super interesting.
Yeah it is. I love this one. Too well. Since we both loved this episode, I think everybody that means it's time for listener mail.
And you know what, this is another rare shout out because we want to honor a Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout. This from Rebecca Joiner. Hey, guys, my son John just achieve rank of Eagle Scout and we'd like to for you guys to come to his court of honor in Michigan this June. A tradition in the Boy Scouts to invite some of their Scout's favorite celebrities to their court of honor. John is sixteen years old. Part of the troop I told her I wouldn't say the troop on the air, but part of a troop here in Michigan. He has served in the Honor Guard twice, been a week at the Scout ranch, and started a five K to support type one diabetes in honor of his brother Bo. His Eagle Scout project was to retire over six thousand flags from the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans and Cemetery. He also cleaned and organized their outbuilding to protect future flags. We listen to you guys as a family at least once a week and between you and Joe Rogan, I feel like he's getting at least a somewhat balanced view of the world. Please, guys, just let me believe that. So thanks again. That's Rebecca Joiner and Rebecca. We just wanted to give a big shout out to John. Congratulations buddy on the achieving the rank of Eagle Scout. That is quite an achievement and all the work you've done, all the volunteer stuff you've done, is just awesome and I'm sure you're just headed toward great things in life.
Yeah, it sounds like a congratulations. John. Thanks for listening to us. We appreciate you. If you want to be like it's John's mom's name Rebecca Rebecca and send us an email about your kid or somebody you know and love in your life who's just great. We love to hear those kind of things. You can send us an email to stuffs at iHeartRadio dot com.
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