A Canadian family’s ancient royal bloodline has proven crucial in finally resolving a 528-year-old mystery surrounding the whereabouts of King Richard III’s remains, which a team of British and Canadian scientists — including Vancouver geneticist Turi King — revealed Monday have been conclusively identified as the skeleton dug up last summer from beneath a parking lot in the British city of Leicester.
University of Leicester officials have announced that they did indeed discover the burial site of the notorious 15th-century monarch in September, the drama of Monday’s revelation having been stoked by months of speculation and a steady striptease of scientific disclosures about the evidence dug up at the paved-over site of the medieval Grey Friars churchyard where the deposed king — killed during the nearby Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 — was long believed to have been interred.
The epic “puzzle,” as King described the identification challenge, was finally solved when DNA extracted from the unearthed bones was compared with a genetic sample supplied by London, Ont.-born Michael Ibsen — a 55-year-old furniture maker now living in Britain and known to have descended from the same maternal line as Richard III.
At the climax of Monday’s hour-long press conference at the University of Leicester, it was King — now a U of L geneticist — who showed matching graphic representations of the two men’s DNA signatures and finally declared: “In short, the DNA evidence points to these being the remains of Richard III.”
The archeological excavation at the historic religious compound had already yielded compelling signs that the well-preserved skeletal remains belonged to Richard III, who reigned for just 26 months as the last of the Plantagenet kings before he was overthrown by forces loyal to the future Henry VII — first monarch of a Tudor dynasty that would rule until the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603.
The smashed skull, an arrowhead found embedded in a backbone and a deformed spine consistent with Richard’s legendary “hunchback” posture all seemed to point to the king known to have been violently killed in the climactic clash of the War of the Roses.
“It was an extraordinary discovery that stunned all of us,” lead archeologist Richard Buckley recalled during Monday’s press conference, which was packed with media from around the world.
Project osteologist Jo Appleby added that her studies on the dead man’s bones had shown that the “mostly well-preserved” skeleton had been struck at least 10 times with various kinds of “bladed weapons” — including battle-axes and daggers — that left signs of injury consistent with those suffered by a “medieval battle victim.”
Furthermore, she said, tests suggested that the approximate age of the individual at death would have roughly matched Richard’s 32 years when he was struck down on Bosworth Field.
The bone evidence by itself, Appleby concluded, offered a “highly convincing case” for identification of the individual as Richard III.
Significantly, project genealogist Kevin Schurer stated that he had confirmed the validity of earlier research by British historian John Ashdown-Hill — author of The Last Days of Richard III — that had traced the king’s maternal lineage to Joy Ibsen, Michael Ibsen’s late mother, in 2004.
Earlier on Monday, Ashdown-Hill had told a BBC interviewer how his genealogical sleuthing had led him from a line of descent starting with Anne of York — Richard III’s sister — to a long-sought “living link”: a British-born, retired journalist living in Canada, Joy Ibsen.
“It took me about two years, and an enormous family tree grew on my computer, because obviously one has to trace every possible line of descent — you don’t know which one’s going to die out in 1745, and which one is going to carry on to the present day, so you have to trace them all,” Ashdown-Hill recalled. “And it was a lady in Canada. The person we’re dealing with now is Michael Ibsen, but it was his mother, Joy, that I contacted in 2004, and fortunately her background was in journalism and she had an inquiring mind. She was also interested in her family history, but she had no idea about this connection. She was fascinated to be told this.”
Joy Ibsen died in 2008 at age 82, but the so-called “mtDNA” marker she shared with Richard III is also carried by her children: Michael, who now lives in London, England, Jeff of Toronto and Leslie of Vancouver Island.
“It’s just unbelievable,” Michael Ibsen, identified as the 17th great-grand-nephew of Richard III, told Postmedia News after the skeleton was discovered in September. “You couldn’t have written a movie script better than this. They find a skeleton with an arrow in its back, a spine with scoliosis and a head wound from a sword. They might as well have found him with a plaque saying HERE I AM.”
But members of the research team had resisted declaring Richard’s remains definitively identified until the completion of all osteological, genetic and archeological research on the bones and the burial site.
At the time of the September announcement, King had only stated that, “We are hopeful that we will recover DNA from the skeleton.”
On Monday, at the press conference streamed live on the Internet by the BBC, the Canadian researcher calmly walked the world through the steps she’d taken to verify the identity of the individual buried more than half a millennium ago at the Leicester churchyard.
“I can now tell you,” she said with a suppressed smile, “there is a DNA match between the maternal DNA from the descendants of the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains that we found at the Grey Friars dig.”
Richard had been king during a turbulent time for the English monarchy. His brother, Edward IV, had ruled from 1461 to 1483. The eldest of Edward’s two sons was expected to assume power upon his death, but in an infamous sequence of events remembered as the “Princes in the Tower” episode, Edward’s sons were declared illegitimate, disappeared from their royal rooms at the Tower of London and — according to most historical accounts — were never seen again.
Richard, a suspected killer of his own nephews, seized the crown. To this day, historians debate what exactly happened and whether the two-year reign of Richard III from 1483 to 1485 was a tenure of pure tyranny won by murder or an enlightened reign ended by a proven act of treason: the Tudor revolt that put Henry VII and his heirs on the throne.
In William Shakespeare’s famous play Richard III — considered historically inaccurate by most historians — the doomed king is portrayed as having been knocked from his horse and left vulnerable to enemy attack at the climax of the 1485 battle.
In the end, Shakespeare has Richard crying out one of the most famous lines in theatrical history just before his death: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”