Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor who had played Richard III in a BBC television adaptation and who is a distant relative of the king, read a poem written specifically for the occasion by the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. The earth gathered from places associated with Richard’s birth, life, and final battle was scattered over the coffin during the ceremony.
On March 27, a Service of Reveal unveiled the tomb to the public for the first time.
The reburial gave Richard III what he had not received after Bosworth Field: a formal religious ceremony, a permanent and marked grave, and the attention of thousands of people who had come specifically because they wanted to be present when the longest-missing king in English history was finally put to rest.
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## What the Science Established
The Nature Communications paper published in December 2014 represented the formal scientific consensus on what the identification established and what it left open.
What was established, at high confidence, was that the skeleton found under the Leicester car park in August 2012 was the remains of Richard III. The convergence of multiple independent lines of evidence — the burial location consistent with historical records, the male sex and approximate age consistent with historical facts, the scoliosis and asymmetric shoulders consistent with a contemporary description, the battle injuries consistent with historical accounts, the radiocarbon dating consistent with the historical date of death, the rare mitochondrial haplogroup matching two independently identified living descendants — produced a combined identification probability that the researchers described as overwhelming.