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## The Lost Burial
Richard III died at the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485, making him the last English monarch to be killed in armed combat. His body was taken to Leicester, a day’s march from the battle site, and displayed publicly for two days at the Church of St Mary in the Newarke. The display served a political purpose: Henry Tudor needed witnesses who could confirm that the previous king was genuinely dead.
On August 25, 1485 — exactly 527 years before the excavation team began its first trench — Richard was buried at the Greyfriars Friary in Leicester without, according to Polydore Vergil’s account, any funeral ceremony or solemnity. He was placed in a grave in the friars’ choir. No monument was erected.
Henry VII rectified this to some degree in 1495, when he paid for a marble and alabaster tomb at the friary. Several sixteenth-century writers described visiting the tomb and the effigy. But in 1538, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the Greyfriars Friary was dissolved, its property was dispersed, and its buildings were demolished or converted to secular use. The tomb was lost. The effigy was reportedly destroyed.
The question of what happened to Richard’s actual remains after the Dissolution is where the historical record becomes unclear and contested. The most dramatic version of events was provided by the antiquarian John Speed, writing in 1611, who claimed that the king’s bones had been dug up and thrown into the River Soar near Bow Bridge. This became the standard account and was repeated in local Leicester tradition well into the nineteenth century. A plaque marking the supposed riverside location was erected in 1856, and a skeleton found near Bow Bridge in 1862 was briefly and incorrectly associated with Richard.