It was as well Anne could soothe him, because Richard was soon lamenting the dangerous position in which the king had left his crown and his kingdom. For Richard it meant more uncertainty, because, according to Will Hastings’ missive, on his deathbed Edward had relinquished the protectorate of the new king and the realm to his younger brother. For so many years, Edward had counted on Richard; now, Richard thought somberly and the enormous responsibility loomed, England would have to count on him.

PART FIVE

PART FIVE

Richard, Protector and King

Sunday, 3 February 2013

A sample of Michael Ibsen’s DNA had been taken at the beginning of the dig and [Dr. Turi] King had sequenced it in her labs, identifying its particular code. If Richard’s DNA matched that of his alleged seventeenth-generation nephew [Ibsen], it would be the final piece of evidence that the Greyfriars remains were those of the king. The test would also check for the male Y-chromosome…

Michael Ibsen had asked for the result of the investigation to be revealed to him first privately. Turi King met him in an office in the university then brought him to meet Simon Farnaby, Richard Buckley and me.

As Michael entered he was in shock, his face ashen. King began with the news that a Y-chromosome had been found…She then revealed that the mitochondrial (female line) DNA was a complete match…

Was I surprised the DNA was a perfect match? Yes and no. The project had run so smoothly, from the finding of Richard’s remains on the first day, exactly where I thought they would be, to the carbon-14 date, the osteology, scoliosis, insult wound and facial reconstruction. Although I believed from the very beginning that the remains were those of Richard, I had been assailed by fears and doubts throughout the process…

At 11 a.m. on Monday, 4 February 2013, Richard Buckley made the historic announcement: “It is the academic conclusion of the University of Leicester that the individual exhumed at the Greyfriars in August 2012 is indeed King Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England.”

—Philippa Langley, The King’s Grave

Chapter 23

Chapter Twenty-Three

April–May 1483

In the bat of an eye, Richard’s ordered life was at an end.

He knelt at his prie dieu and opened the little book of hours King Henry had given him—still a favorite and which forced him to pray for the murdered king nightly—and found a prayer for the dead. As he recited its comforting words, images from his childhood with Edward were conjured, and it suddenly struck him that only three York siblings remained, and he was the only male. Edmund, George, and now Ned had all deserted him, overwhelming him with melancholy.

Protector. The word at once thrilled and terrified Richard. It was not lost on him that his father, too, had been the protector of the realm in the ’50s, when King Henry had lost his mind for almost a year.