After 500 years, a burial fit for a king

WATCH ABOVE: 16X9’s “Old Bones”

A royal ruckus about what to do with the 500-year-old bones of Richard III, England’s last warrior king, has been resolved. His skeleton will be reburied in a cathedral not far from the parking lot in the city of Leicester where the bones were discovered in 2012.

That decision by a panel of High Court judges rejected a bid by a group of Richard III’s distant relatives—the Plantagenet Alliance—to have a say in where the skeleton should be laid to rest. They wanted him buried in the town of York Minster.

As a 16×9 story reported last season, the bones were positively identified as those of Richard III when DNA from his remains were compared with the DNA of a Canadian man, a 17th-generation descendant of Richard’s sister Anne.

It was an archeological team from the University of Leicester that unearthed the twisted skeleton among the ruins of an old priory. King Richard was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and his death marked the end of the Middle Ages. He was the last British monarch to die on a battlefield. The location of his grave remained a mystery for five centuries.

READ MORE: A Battle Over Old Bones

Richard III was subsequently vilified by historians, and by William Shakespeare himself, as a homicidal tyrant – a hunchbacked monarch who would do anything to keep his throne. But a group of supporters, the Richard III Society, who financed the project to find his bones, insist that he has been unfairly portrayed, and they hope to rehabilitate his reputation.

The remains will be buried in Leicester Cathedral next spring.