Leicester, September 5, 2012—Eleventh day of the dig

At the trench, the DSP cameras roll as osteologist Jo Appleby bends down and removes a light covering of earth from the chest cavity and upper vertebrae. The spine has the most excruciating ‘S’ shape. ‘Whoever this was,’ she states, ‘the spinal column has a really abnormal curvature. This skeleton has a hunchback.’…

Are they saying this is Richard? If this is Richard, how can he have worn armor with a hump on his back? I flop down onto the spoil heap behind me. I feel as if I’ve been hit by a train. The others want me to be excited because it looks as though we may have found Richard, but all I can hear is the pounding in my ears and the awful word ‘hunchback’ in my brain….

(Later) At the 12 September press conference, the University of Leicester confirms the discovery…On initial examination…it is revealed that the skeleton had acute spinal abnormalities, confirming severe scoliosis—a form of spinal curvature. This would have made the right shoulder visibly higher than the left, consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard’s appearance. Finally, the skeleton did not show signs of kyphosis—a different form of curvature. The man did not have the feature sometimes inappropriately known as a hunchback, and he did not have a withered arm.

—Philippa Langley, The King’s Grave

Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

Summer 1461

“Vivat Rex! Long live King Edward!”

Jubilant cries mingled with the clamoring bells and rang around Edward as he rode through the welcoming London crowds on his way to the Tower the day before his coronation. To the strife-weary citizens, the young and handsome Edward of York gave them promise of better governance and a more stable way of life than had the weak, manipulated Henry.

Riding on a richly caparisoned black stallion alongside George in a place of honor directly behind Edward, Richard glanced left and right at the smiling Londoners waving kerchiefs and throwing flowers in the path of the riders, who were followed by the scarlet-clad lord mayor and aldermen and hundreds of London’s most prominent men, uniformly dressed in green.

All the windows of the three-story merchant houses that lined London Bridge were flung open and jammed with spectators. A girl about his own age caught Richard’s eye, and he could not help smiling at the frank expression on her pretty face, her amber eyes full of merriment as she waved to him—merely a face in the crowd today, certainly, but a face he was to come to know again intimately in only a very short time.