I shivered at the words coming from a news conference at the University of Leicester in early 2013: “Beyond reasonable doubt, the individual exhumed at Grey Friars is indeed Richard III, last Plantagenet king of England,” Richard Buckley, director of the University of Leicester Archeological Services, explained to a media-packed audience that DNA taken from the skeleton matched that of a 17th-generation descendant of Richard’s sister, providing a positive identification. After 528 years of his grave being lost, Richard was finally found and exhumed for study.

Standing on Richard’s grave in July 2017, the thick glass all that lay between me and the 500-year-old crude hole into which his mutilated body had been shoved, I was profoundly moved. Not a week before, I had finished describing Richard’s leaving Leicester on his fateful march to Bosworth. Looking down on the eerie light projection of the skeleton in its original position, it was as though I, too, had dug through those layers of earth and medieval tiled floor to reveal the bones I have spent four years adding flesh to. Only then could I return to my manuscript and write Richard’s ignominious end.

How well I understood Philippa Langley’s emotions as she watched the painstaking uncovering of Richard’s remains. It is a testimony to the world-wide interest the dig generated that the trench, in its humble car-park locale, has been respectfully preserved in a quiet room of its own, only the faint sound of monks chanting to accompany the experience. I was so lucky to be in the space alone on that mid-week rainy morning. Not one to believe much in psychic phenomena, I had goosebumps as I meditated on his shabby treatment at the hands of Henry VII, and I could almost feel Richard’s restless spirit in that place.

Besides, after five decades of an obsession with this maligned man from history, and five books inspired by his fascinating life and family, why shouldn’t I have rejoiced? Perhaps this astonishing archeological discovery might bring him peace and spark reparation of the black reputation that has shadowed his name since his death in 1485.

Who do we have to blame for Richard III’s villainous notoriety? Mostly William Shakespeare, who wrote a damn fine play based on Tudor distortions of history, but he had so many facts wrong it is a wonder Richard didn’t rise up from his paltry grave and sue the Bard for libel—or at least haunt his dreams! The real culprit wasn’t Will, however. After all, he had simply resorted to standard sources of his day, such as the chronicles written by Raphael Holinshed, the court historian Polydore Vergil, and The Historie of King Richard III, a shameful piece of Tudor propaganda written by a pandering Sir Thomas More, councilor and Lord High Chancellor to King Henry VIII.