The Last English King to Die in Battle Was Killed at Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 and His Skeleton Was Found Under a Leicester Car Park in 2012

The Wars of the Roses between the Yorkist and Lancastrian branches of the English royal family had been running intermittently since 1455. By summer 1485 the Yorkist king Richard III — who had taken the throne in June 1483 after the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower — was facing an invasion by the Lancastrian claimant Henry Tudor.

Henry had been in exile in Brittany and France for 14 years. He landed at Milford Haven on the southwest coast of Wales with approximately 2,000 men on 7 August 1485 and marched east into England gathering supporters. His army numbered approximately 5,000 by the time it reached the central English Midlands.

Richard III’s army of approximately 8,000 to 12,000 met him near the village of Sutton Cheney, Leicestershire, on 22 August 1485.

The battle

The decisive feature of the battle was the conduct of Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William Stanley, who commanded approximately 6,000 troops nominally on Richard’s side but actually waiting to see which way the fight would go. Stanley was Henry Tudor’s stepfather (Henry’s mother Margaret Beaufort had married Stanley as her third husband in 1472). Stanley’s loyalty to Richard III was, at best, conditional.

The opening engagement was an artillery exchange followed by an infantry advance by Henry’s vanguard under the Earl of Oxford. Richard’s vanguard under the Duke of Norfolk took heavy casualties; Norfolk was killed. Richard then made the strategic decision that ended his reign — and his life.

He saw Henry Tudor’s banner in the open ground beyond the main engagement, with only a small bodyguard around it. Henry was vulnerable. Richard decided to charge directly at Henry with his household cavalry to kill him personally and end the battle.

The charge nearly succeeded. Richard killed Henry’s standard-bearer Sir William Brandon in the initial impact. He was within feet of Henry himself when Sir William Stanley committed his 3,000 reserve troops to Henry’s side. Richard’s household cavalry was surrounded and cut down. Richard was killed in the melee.

He was the last English king to die in battle. He had reigned for 26 months. He was 32.

What happened to the body

Richard’s body was stripped, slung over a horse, and carried 14 miles back to Leicester. It was displayed for two days at the Newarke church in Leicester to confirm the death to the public. It was then buried in an unmarked grave at the Greyfriars Priory in central Leicester — without coffin, without ceremony, in a hastily dug pit too small for the body.

The Greyfriars Priory was dissolved during the Reformation in 1538. The church was demolished and the site was progressively built over. The location of Richard’s grave was forgotten by approximately 1600. By the 19th century the conventional belief was that his body had been exhumed during the Reformation and thrown into the river Soar from Bow Bridge.

September 2012

The Looking for Richard project, a partnership between the Richard III Society and the University of Leicester, identified the most likely original location of the Greyfriars choir from medieval documentary evidence. The location was under the Social Services car park on Greyfriars Street in central Leicester.

Excavation began on 25 August 2012 — almost exactly the 527th anniversary of the battle. On the first day of digging, the team uncovered a human skeleton in the area identified as the Greyfriars choir. The skeleton had a sideways curvature of the spine (idiopathic scoliosis, which would have made one shoulder visibly higher than the other) and ten battle-related wounds including two potentially fatal blows to the back of the skull. The skeleton was in an unusually small grave dug at an angle.

Three months of analysis followed. Mitochondrial DNA was extracted from the skeleton and matched against two living descendants of Richard III’s older sister Anne of York (the cabinetmaker Michael Ibsen, and a second confidential donor). The mitochondrial DNA match was confirmed. Radiocarbon dating placed the death between 1455 and 1540. The combination of context, age at death (32 to 34), male sex, scoliosis, battle wounds, and DNA matched Richard III at conclusive confidence.

The University of Leicester announced the identification on 4 February 2013.

Reburial

The skeleton was reburied at Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015 with ceremony. The ceremony included representatives of the British royal family, both contemporary archbishops, and approximately 35,000 members of the public lining the procession route through Leicester. The body was placed in a new oak coffin made by Michael Ibsen — the cabinetmaker descendant whose DNA had confirmed the identification.

The grave site under the Social Services car park is now a small museum, the King Richard III Visitor Centre, with the exposed original grave visible through a glass floor.

The Stanley brothers were rewarded by Henry VII. Lord Stanley became Earl of Derby. Sir William Stanley became Lord Chamberlain. Sir William was beheaded for treason in 1495 for supporting Perkin Warbeck. Lord Stanley lived another 19 years and died in 1504.

The Tudor dynasty that began at Bosworth ruled England for 118 years and produced six monarchs (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I, plus the nine-day reign of Lady Jane Grey). The line ended with Elizabeth I’s childless death in 1603.