On the morning of August 25, 2012, a small team of archaeologists began digging a trench in a Leicester city council car park. Within hours, they had found bones. By afternoon, they were looking at a skeleton, face-down in what appeared to be a hastily dug grave. The spine was curved in a pronounced S-shape. The skull showed deep cuts consistent with medieval weapons. The remains lay at a depth of about four and a half feet, beneath layers of gravel, tarmac, and five centuries of accumulated urban development.
The car park sat on ground that had once been the site of the Greyfriars Friary, a Franciscan religious house founded in the thirteenth century. Historical documents recorded that a king of England had been buried there after dying in battle in 1485. The king was Richard III — the last Plantagenet, the last English monarch to die in combat, and, for more than five hundred years, a figure whose burial place had been lost, disputed, and occasionally declared impossible to recover.
The bones found on August 25, 2012, were, as analysis would confirm the following February, the remains of Richard III.
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## A King Made Villain
Richard III ruled England for just over two years, from July 1483 to August 1485. In that time, he managed to accumulate a reputation that would outlast him by centuries, largely through the efforts of the writers and historians who served the dynasty that replaced him.
He was born at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire on October 2, 1452, the youngest surviving son of Richard, Duke of York, and Cecily Neville. He grew up during the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster that shaped English political life through the mid-to-late fifteenth century. His father died in battle when Richard was eight, and the family briefly went into exile in Burgundy.