The Last King To Die In Battle, Buried In A Car Park

On 22 August 1485, King Richard III led a last, desperate charge at the Battle of Bosworth Field, aiming straight for Henry Tudor in the hope of killing him and ending the war in a single blow. He fought his way close enough to cut down Tudor’s standard‑bearer and unhorse one of his bodyguards before he was surrounded, pulled from his horse, and cut down in the melee.

He was the last English king to die in battle. He was thirty‑two years old and had worn the crown for barely two years. His corpse was stripped naked, slung over a horse and paraded into Leicester as proof that the Yorkist king was truly dead. Someone arranged for him to be buried, without pomp, in the church of the Greyfriars friary. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries fifty years later, the friary was demolished and its graveyard lost beneath later streets and buildings.

For more than five hundred years, no one knew precisely where Richard III’s bones lay.

The Horror

In 2012, archaeologists from the University of Leicester, working with members of the Richard III Society and using old maps to estimate the friary’s position, opened trenches in a council car park on New Street. On the very first day of excavation, they uncovered human remains.

The skeleton lay directly beneath a painted parking bay. On the tarmac above, in white block letters, the space was marked “R” — a routine designation that had been there for years, never intended as a marker for a king.

The bones were male, of slender build, and from someone in his early thirties. Most striking was the spine: pronounced scoliosis, a sideways curvature that would have raised one shoulder higher than the other and slightly twisted the torso. Shakespeare’s “bunch‑backed” Richard was an exaggeration, but not pure invention; the skeleton showed a real deformity, just not the grotesque hump of legend.

The skull and upper body told the story of his death. There were multiple weapon injuries to the head: a sharp cut that had sliced away part of the base of the skull, likely from a sword, and a deep puncture wound from a polearm such as a halberd that had driven through bone into the brain. Either blow would have been instantly fatal.

Other wounds were different. One stab wound entered through the right buttock and passed into the pelvis; another cut marked the jaw or cheek. These came from angles that suggest his armour had been removed. They look less like combat injuries and more like post‑mortem blows — humiliation wounds inflicted on a naked corpse, the kind of “extra” violence men sometimes inflict on a fallen enemy they particularly hate.

Analysis of the bones, the dating of the site and artefacts, and historical records all pointed toward Richard. To be certain, scientists turned to DNA. Mitochondrial DNA, passed down the maternal line, was compared with that of living descendants of Richard’s sister Anne of York. A match to a Canadian‑born carpenter, Michael Ibsen, and another distant relative confirmed the identification. The king under the car park was Richard III.

Ibsen, once identified as a modern descendant, was asked to build the coffin. He crafted an oak casket by hand, fittingly giving the reburial a literal family connection.

The Modern Relic

On 26 March 2015, more than five centuries after Bosworth, Richard III was buried again — this time in Leicester Cathedral, with full ceremony. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided; crowds lined the streets as the coffin, carried by soldiers and watched over by armoured honour‑guards, was taken past the same routes where his naked body had once been displayed.

The council car park where he was found has been transformed into the King Richard III Visitor Centre. Inside, displays explain the dig, the forensic work and the historical context. Outside, beneath a glass floor and interpretive panels, the outline of the excavation trench is marked. The “R” that once simply indicated a reserved parking bay has been preserved as part of the exhibition, still visible on the relaid surface — a faded letter over the place where a king lay for 527 years while commuters parked their cars above him.

Richard’s curved spine, recorded in scans and 3D reconstructions, is now a teaching tool rather than a weapon in a Tudor propaganda campaign. The pattern of weapon injuries is mapped and explained in public reports. The man whom Shakespeare turned into a monstrous caricature turns out, in bone, to have been around 5’8”, lightly built, with a crooked spine and the kind of brutal death you might expect for a king who chose to go down fighting and whose enemies weren’t satisfied until they had stabbed him even after he was already dead.

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