Sophie, Countess of Wessex speaks with a school girl after the reinterment service of King Richard III at Leicester Cathedral, central England, yesterday.
AFP/London
England’s slain King Richard III, exhumed from an undignified grave under a car park, was finally buried with honour yesterday, 530 years after his death on the battlefield.
In a ceremony filled with pageantry and poignancy, a coffin containing his bones were lowered into the ground at Leicester Cathedral in central England as thousands of well-wishers gathered outside.
Many of those outside the cathedral, which was draped in Richard’s personal standard, were clutching white roses, the symbol of the former king’s House of York dynasty.
“I feel he was badly treated at the time of his death and all through history,” said May Doherty, a 62-year-old pensioner from Coleraine in Northern Ireland who was dressed in full medieval costume.
“We believe he was innocent and this is the burial he deserved. This is a once in a lifetime occasion. It’s brilliant to be here and be part of history.”
The last English king to die in battle, Richard will now lie in a new tomb inside the cathedral, across the street from where his remains were located in 2012.
The story of the king in the car park captivated Britain in the build-up to yesterday’s spectacle and caused people to reconsider the tale of a man long caricatured as a villainous tyrant.
Queen Elizabeth II sent a written message for the service, saying Richard would now “lie in peace in the City of Leicester in the heart of England”.
He was “a king who lived through turbulent times and whose Christian faith sustained him”, she said, hailing “an event of great national and international significance”.
The Queen’s daughter-in-law Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, attended the ceremony on her behalf, along with the Queen’s cousin Prince Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, patron of the Richard III Society and a blood relative of the slain king.
Packed in with wool and linen, Richard’s battle-scarred bones were sealed inside a lead ossuary contained within an oak coffin made by Canadian carpenter Michael Ibsen, one of his closest living relatives.
“He is, at last, being given the burial that he ought to have been given in the first place, regardless of his reputation,” said Ibsen, Richard’s nephew 16 times removed.
After the coffin was lowered into the grave by six soldiers in uniform, Oscar-nominated actor Benedict Cumberbatch read a specially-commissioned work by the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Cumberbatch, who is due to play Richard in an upcoming BBC television series, is also the king’s third cousin 16 times removed.
