Historian airs doubts over discovery of King Richard III in Leicester
A body discovered in a Leicester car park in 2012 may not have been King Richard III, a historian has claimed.
Dominic Selwood told GB News: “The science is actually quite surprising. The carbon dating of the body shows that the skeleton in the car park died either 25 or 35 years before the Battle of Bosworth, but the research team accounted for that by saying he probably had a fish rich diet, so they changed the numbers.
“The paternal line DNA, which is the most important one for Richard, that’s his Plantagenet DNA – he doesn’t have it. He’s not a Plantagenet.
“The researchers said, ‘well, that’s probably because there was an illegitimacy somewhere in the line of succession’, the eye colour and the hair colour in the DNA code are for blonde and blue, but actually all the earliest pictures we have of Richard show him dark.”
“And the researchers said, ‘well, that’s because the tutors changed the paintings because they thought dark was bad.
“Then finally, the scoliosis you mentioned, there’s no account in Richard’s lifetime that had any sort of spinal or back deformity, that came later with the Tudors, who also said that he gestated for two years in the womb, he was born with hair down to his shoulders, and teeth.”
Speaking to Michael Portillo on GB News, he said: “What we see with the skeleton in the car park is not a hunchback, it is mild scoliosis, which actually, in all likelihood, would have been covered by clothes or armour, so actually, the science is a long way from proving it definitively.
“What we do have is the mitochondrial DNA showing that it came from the right maternal group, but all mothers give it to all their children, so in a very small period of time, you have a large number of people who have it.
“When you’re talking about the aristocracy of the late mediaeval periods, someone buried in a friary somewhere, it’s really not unlikely that there were many people who shared that group, even at the Battle of Bosworth.”
Questioned on the historic depiction of King Richard as a hunchback, he said: “There’s no contemporary description of it at all. It comes with the writers who had been saying very nice things about Richard during his lifetime, what a wonderful king he was,what a magnificent leader but then as soon as Henry VII comes in, he changes his tune and says that Henry VII is the saviour, Richard was evil.
“And then we start seeing these physical descriptions because in mediaeval minds, physical deformity or infirmity, spelled some sort of inner moral corruption and so that’s when that began. So the hunchback dates from that period, not from his lifetime.”
He added: “I wouldn’t say categorically it’s not Richard, but I don’t think you can say as the researchers did, that they’re 99.99% certain it is, the science simply doesn’t back that up.”
