Cities of Leicester and York Argue Over Where to Rebury Richard III
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Version 0 of 1. LEICESTER, England — Just days after the yellowed bones found in a municipal parking lot here were declared to be those of King Richard III, a less-than-seemly tug of war has broken out between the cities of Leicester and York to claim the remains. While others have revived the centuries-old dispute about Richard — whether he was Shakespeare’s “poisonous, hunchbacked toad” and ruthless murderer of two princely nephews he imprisoned in the Tower of London, or champion of the common man and author of reforms that channeled charity to the poor — it took Leicester and York little time to compute the benefits in having him buried in their precincts, generating revenues from tourists eager to see the burial site and tour the visitors’ centers the two cities have planned. Though barely 100 miles apart, Leicester in the English Midlands and York in the country’s northern reaches have widely differing claims. Leicester notes that it is a couple of hours away by horse from where Richard was killed in 1485, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and that he lay for centuries in a shallow grave in the heart of the city. York’s riposte has been to depict Leicester as little more than a way station in Richard’s life. The city’s officials have noted, edgily, that Richard’s ancestral roots lay in the House of York, a protagonist in the Wars of the Roses that lasted 30 years and pitted the Yorkists against the House of Lancaster in rival claims to the Plantagenet monarchy, which disappeared into history with Richard’s death. It was in York, the city’s champions say, where Richard spent much of his youth, and where he told contemporaries that he wished to be buried. As matters stand, Leicester seems likely to win, since it is where the skeleton now affirmed by a team of scientific and historical experts to be Richard’s was discovered last fall, in a corner of the parking lot of the city’s social services department. The sheer mundanity of the location has, if anything, elevated Leicester’s profile and given rise to a feast of newspaper cartoons and lame Twitter jokes, many about the size of the unpaid parking ticket awaiting Richard’s heirs. The king’s remains were buried in a corner of the chapel of a Franciscan monastery, the Greyfriars Priory, that like Richard fell victim to the Tudor kings when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and seized their wealth about 50 years after Richard’s death. Long before there was a parking lot, the priory had disappeared, its stone walls and tiled floors looted, until all that remained were the trace foundations that were discovered when the dig supervised by a team of experts from the University of Leicester uncovered Richard’s bones in September. Leicester’s case for retaining the bones and reburying them at the city’s Anglican cathedral, a stone’s throw from the parking lot, is anchored in a provision in the exhumation license granted last summer by the British government, which specified that the reburial take place at the cathedral, as the university proposed. Perhaps anticipating a challenge, Leicester’s mayor unveiled plans this week for the excavated corner of the parking lot to become part of a larger visitors’ site, including the new burial plot in the cathedral precincts and an exhibition on Richard’s life, already opened temporarily, in an old school building the city has acquired for the purpose. The cities have lost no time in starting their campaigns. By midweek, York had drawn 7,000 signatures to an online petition for the government to support its bid; Leicester’s petition lagged with only 2,000 signatures. Leicester, though, could celebrate that Chris Grayling, the justice minister in Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet, had affirmed in the House of Commons that the exhumation license required the reburial to take place in Leicester. But even that cut little ice with the Yorkists. “Let’s not have another war on this matter,” said Kersten England, chief executive of York’s City Council, who said she would write to Queen Elizabeth II asking for support. “Possession may be nine-tenths of the law,” she said, referring to Richard’s bones, now under tight guard in Leicester. “But we definitely have the moral high ground.” She was backed by Paul Toy, an official at York’s Richard III Museum, which has long existed in the Monk Bar gatehouse at the entrance to the old city. “It’s purely by chance that Richard III was in Leicester, because he got killed at Bosworth,” he said. |