In a car park in the center of Leicester, under the pavement, a king of England lay lost for over five hundred years. The King Richard III Visitor Centre is built on the spot where he was found. It tells one of the strangest stories in British history: how a king was killed, buried, forgotten, lost, and then dug up from beneath a parking space in 2012.

Who Richard III was

Richard III was the last medieval king of England. He was born in 1452, a member of the House of York, one of the two royal families fighting a long civil war for the throne known as the Wars of the Roses. That war is a big story, too big for this post, and we will come to it properly another time in a historical primer. What matters here is that Richard came out of it as king.

He took the throne in 1483. He is remembered as a villain by the way he conquered the throne. His older brother, King Edward IV, had died and left two young sons. The elder boy, only twelve, was meant to become king as Edward V. Richard was made Lord Protector, the man who would govern until the boy grew up. Instead, Richard declared the boys illegitimate, took the crown for himself, and placed his two nephews in the Tower of London. The boys were never seen again. They became known as the Princes in the Tower, and most people then and since have believed Richard had them killed to secure his throne. It has never been proven, and historians still argue about it, but the suspicion has followed his name for five hundred years.

Richard was king for only two years. In 1485 a rival, Henry Tudor, landed with an army and challenged him. The two met at the Battle of Bosworth, a short drive from Leicester. Richard was killed in the fighting. He was thirty-two. He was the last English king to die in battle, and the last of the Plantagenet family, who had ruled England for over three hundred years. Henry Tudor became King Henry VII, the first of the Tudor kings, and the Wars of the Roses were over.

Richard’s reputation was then shaped by the winners. The Tudors had every reason to blacken the name of the king they had overthrown. Part of that picture was his body. People at the time said Richard had a crooked back, one shoulder higher than the other, and the Tudor writers made the most of it, because in those days a twisted body was taken as the outward sign of a twisted soul. A hundred years later, William Shakespeare turned this into something far greater. Around 1593 he wrote Richard III, one of his history plays, which shows Richard as a deformed hunchback who lies, schemes, and murders his way to the crown, delighting in his own wickedness. It is one of the most powerful villain roles ever written, and it gave the world lines still quoted today, “Now is the winter of our discontent” and, as Richard’s horse is killed under him at the end, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” The play was a work of drama, not history, but it fixed Richard in the public mind forever as a crook-backed monster. Whether any of that is fair to the real man is one of the great arguments of English history. It made him one of the most famous kings of all, and one of the most hated.

How his grave was lost

After the battle, Richard’s body was stripped, carried back to Leicester, and put on public display for a few days so people could see the king was truly dead. Then the Grey Friars, an order of Franciscan monks, buried him in the church of their friary in the middle of the town. It was a hasty burial with no fine tomb.

Then the place that held him was destroyed. Fifty years later, King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and closed down the monasteries across England, seizing their land and pulling their buildings down. The friary at Leicester was demolished around 1538. Its stones were carted away, its church vanished, and over the following centuries the ground was built over, sold off, and forgotten. A mansion went up on the site, then that too was gone, and the land was divided into ordinary streets and yards. The exact place where Richard lay was lost. Some people said his bones had been dug up and thrown into the local river. His grave became one of the great missing places of English history.

The search

Old records held a clue. They said Richard had been buried in the choir of the Grey Friars church. The problem was that nobody knew where the church had stood, because the whole friary had been erased from the map. Modern researchers, led by Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society, studied the old maps and worked out roughly where the lost friary must have been. The answer landed on a most unlikely spot. The one piece of open ground in the right place, the only place you could actually dig, was a council car park.

In August 2012 a team from the University of Leicester began to dig. What happened next is almost unbelievable. In the very first trench, only a few hours into a dig planned to last two weeks, they hit human bones. As they carefully uncovered the skeleton, they saw the two things that mattered most. The spine was severely curved, exactly the crooked back the old accounts had described. And the skull and bones carried the marks of violent injuries. They had found a man with the deformity attributed to Richard, who had died in battle, buried where the lost church should have been.

How they proved it was him

Finding a likely skeleton is not the same as proving it is a king. This is where modern science took over, and it took five months of work.

The bones were examined with full-body CT scans. The curved spine was a real condition called scoliosis, which had raised one shoulder higher than the other, just as people had said of Richard in life. The skeleton had eleven wounds inflicted at or around the time of death, nine to the head and two to the body. The injuries to the head showed the man had lost or removed his helmet in the fighting. The blow that most likely killed him was a great slice taken out of the base of the skull, cut clean through the bone by a bladed weapon. A section of the back of the skull had been sheared away. The wounds matched, in a general way, how fifteenth-century writers had described Richard’s death. There were also injuries that looked like insults dealt to the body after death, the kind of thing done to a hated enemy once the battle was won.

The curved spine matched. The wounds matched. The age and build matched. But the proof came from DNA. Scientists took genetic material from the bones and compared it with living people descended from Richard’s family. They traced the female line down from Richard’s elder sister, Anne of York, across seventeen generations, to a man named Michael Ibsen, a Canadian-born furniture maker living in London. His DNA matched the skeleton. A second living descendant matched too. Combined with everything else, the University of Leicester announced that the bones were Richard III “beyond reasonable doubt,” with a confidence of 99.999 percent. In February 2013 they told the world: the king in the car park was Richard III.

One small mystery remained in the grave. The skeleton was almost complete, but the feet were missing. They had not been taken as a wound of battle. They were lost much later, disturbed and destroyed by some building work dug into the ground in the centuries after his burial, cutting away the lowest part of the grave without anyone knowing what lay there.

His final destiny

Once the king was found, the question was what to do with him. After five hundred years under a car park, Richard III was given the royal burial he never had. In March 2015 his remains were carried through Leicester and reburied in Leicester Cathedral, a short walk from where he was found. A new stone tomb was made for him. The service was attended by royalty and watched around the world, and the poet laureate wrote a poem for the occasion. The last Plantagenet king, killed by the Tudors and erased by them, was laid to rest with honour at last.

The whole story, the dig, the science, and the identification, was filmed and has been told in several television documentaries, including one made at the time called Richard III: The King in the Car Park.

Visiting

The King Richard III Visitor Centre stands on the site of the dig. Inside, you can see the story of his life and death, the science of the search, and, through a glass floor, the actual grave where he was found, the hole in the ground under the old car park. His tomb is in the cathedral directly across the road. The two together, the grave and the tomb, tell the whole story in a few hundred feet: where a lost king was found, and where a found king was finally laid to rest.