History works slowly and indirectly. The evidence about a fifteenth-century king arrived not through any single document or artifact but through the patient accumulation of details from dozens of sources, each partial, each subject to error or bias, converging over years of work by dozens of researchers. The DNA did not by itself identify the king. The location did not by itself identify him. The wounds, the scoliosis, the diet, the radiocarbon dating, the genealogical documentation — none of these alone was sufficient.
Together, they were.
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## The Name Beneath the Tarmac
There is something instructive about the physical fact at the center of this story: England’s last Plantagenet king lay beneath a parking lot for most of the twentieth century.
The car park was built in the 1940s. For several decades, council employees parked their cars over the choir of the medieval Greyfriars Friary, walked to their offices, completed their workdays, and returned to their cars without any awareness that a few meters below their feet lay the bones of a king who had died 500 years earlier. History does not always announce itself. It waits under the tarmac.
The discovery changed the coordinates of the story — gave it a physical address, a set of GPS coordinates, a glass floor that visitors can stand on. It gave the bones a verified identity, established through the most sophisticated genetic analysis available at the time and through the patient work of historians and genealogists who had spent years establishing the documentary foundations on which the genetic analysis rested.