Now is the winter of our discontent!

Recently, a skeleton was found under a "car park", the British term for parking lot, in Leicester, England. Careful scrutiny and DNA evidence has now unequivocally proven that this skeleton belonged to none other than the long lost King Richard III of England, who lost his life at Bosworth Field in 1485, defeated by Henry Tudor, later King Henry VII of England. Richard was only King of England for a short two years and thanks to William Shakespeare, has been portrayed through history as a deformed murderer and schemer. However, there is a group in England called the Richard III Society that has striven to exonerate this King's image in history and paint him with a more sympathetic brush. As it turns out, this King was far nicer than Shakespeare wrote of him. Naturally, the old saying goes that history is written by the victors. The House of Tudor was victorious in the Battle of Bosworth, so naturally they did their level best to portray the man they defeated in an antagonistic way and spread that negative propaganda to boost their own fortunes. It has taken researchers, novelists and historians centuries to undo the damage that was done by William Shakespeare and retool Richard's image in a more favorable light.

We are fortunate for the many advances in forensic science in that a skull found can have the face that once occupied it reconstructed to show what it might have looked like. This is the reconstructed image of the face of the lost King Richard III, which looks remarkably like the portraits of him from the period. This is a young face, a gentle face, not that of the monster portrayed by Shakespeare. I find that I rather like it and would like to have known this person. I find this ability to reconstruct faces on skulls to be absolutely fascinating. It's the closest thing we have to an actual time machine that can take us back in time and show us what someone long dead looked like in life. It has also gone a long way to solve age old crimes. The bones of the skeleton on which this skull sat showed some gruesome war wounds and some curvature of the spine, probably scoliosis. Apparently, the "car park" under which this skeleton was found was once the site of a monastic community known as "Greyfriars" which disbanded in the late 1530s during the reign of King Henry VIII and it was demolished, and now a "car park" sits on top of it. Now that the long lost body of this oft maligned King has been found after it went missing centuries ago, word has it that it will be interred in a proper ceremony at Leicester Cathedral sometime next year. I think that he should be interred with other Kings of England at Westminster, but oh, well, at least now he will have a proper burial that tourists can visit to pay tribute to this last of the Plantagenet Kings.