Michael Ibsen was present. He had built the coffin that held the bones that his own mitochondrial DNA had helped identify. Whatever the genetic relationship between a fifteenth-century king and a twenty-first-century furniture maker amounts to in biological terms — and across 19 generations of descent through female relatives, the connection is real but distant — his presence at the reburial carried a significance that required no explanation.
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## After the Discovery: Historical Revisionism and Its Limits
The discovery and identification of Richard III’s remains has reinvigorated interest in his historical reputation and produced renewed scholarly and popular debate about how he should be assessed. This is welcome, but it comes with risks that deserve attention.
One risk is the overcorrection: the replacement of Tudor vilification with Ricardian hagiography. The Richard III Society and various popular writers sympathetic to the king have argued, often persuasively, that the historical evidence is more ambiguous than the Shakespearean tradition suggests, and that Richard deserves a more balanced hearing. This is correct. It does not mean that Richard was innocent of everything attributed to him, or that the negative aspects of his reign should be minimized.
The fate of the princes in the Tower remains genuinely unknown. The circumstantial case against Richard remains substantial: he had the motive, the means, and the opportunity. No alternative theory has produced evidence that meets a comparable standard. The cases for alternative suspects — Henry Tudor, Buckingham, Margaret Beaufort — rest on speculation and circumstantial possibility rather than documented evidence. The possibility that the princes survived into adulthood remains historically alive but is supported by no contemporary evidence of their existence after 1483.