Richard at rest

By DAVID HORSPOOL

It wasn't a funeral service. That was emphasized from the beginning. But walking into a packed Leicester Cathedral and milling about, ten feet away from a coffin while someone found me a seat, it certainly felt like one. History editors don't often get to attend global news events, certainly not in any official capacity, so the chance to go to the reinterment of Richard III this morning was too good to miss: especially for me, as I also happen to be putting the finishing touches to a book about the king (yes, I know the world probably doesn't need another book about him, but I'm afraid what the world needs and what the world gets aren't necessarily the same thing).

The two and a bit years since Richard's remains were discovered in the most celebrated car park in England (a little more time than he spent on the throne), yards away from the cathedral, have been filled with fractiousness.

First, we had the doubts about the accuracy of the identification. Then there was the spat over where the bones should go, which led to a court case started by the "Plantagenet Alliance", who wanted him to be reburied in York (I attended a day of that, too: a bizarre mixture of formality and on-the-hoof historical blether). Next came the inevitable signs of strain in the awkward marriage of enthusiasm and academe that had made the discovery possible. Representatives of the Richard III Society, and in particular Philippa Langley, whose inspired detective work and advocacy had persuaded University of Leicester archaeologists to start digging, began to complain that their contribution to the great discovery was being written out. All that, before we even begin to contemplate the awkward fact of Richard's reputation. You wouldn't know it in Leicester, but historians still tend to categorize him as a usurper and probable child murderer. (Why, you may ask, when the camera picks out the smiling faces of children from Richard III Primary School, did someone think it was a good idea to name a school after such a person? Even if he was innocent of the charge, it seems an odd association to make.)

The Church might say that God welcomes all, but did that mean the nation had to grind to a halt for Richard? This morning, however, on the first day of the new year as it was reckoned in the Middle Ages, the capacity of British pageantry, and a bit of star quality to smooth over the cracks, was on impressive show. I have never seen quite so many different uniforms up close. As well as a riot of chasubles and copes on bishop, archbishop and dean, there was the Orator of the University of Leicester in academic gown and one of those hats that Mark Rylance's Thomas Cromwell doffed with such elegance; there were two Yeomen of the Guard (aka Beefeaters); I sat behind two army officers, one Royal Air Force Squadron Leader (I know his rank because his seat card fell on the floor and I got a glimpse) and a senior naval personage. There was a man in a full-bottomed wig, and men in spurs (but no armour, though some women behind the barriers outside wore full medieval head-dresses) and a surpliced choir forty strong.

Across the aisle from me, Benedict Cumberbatch (Richard's cousin sixteen times removed) and Robert Lindsay (no relation, yet) appeared to be comparing Yorkist lapel badges, while around the cathedral men and women who have become much bigger stars in Ricardian eyes could be spotted: Langley pretty much wearing widows' weeds (again); John Ashdown-Hill, the historian and geneaologist who first traced the king's bloodline, and who had donated a crown for the occasion (apparently he had one spare; he was the man who happened to have a royal standard in his boot to wrap the cardboard box containing Richard's as yet unidentified remains, so we shouldn't be surprised).

And, I suddenly realized, two seats away was Dominic Smee, the young star of a documentary about Richard who has been described as his body double – he suffers from the same spinal condition, scoliosis, to the same degree as the king. It was a chance to confirm that, contrary to a Ricardian claim I had heard only the night before, Richard's disability would have been clearly, if only slightly, visible through clothing.

It was not a time to revisit Richard's own contested reputation, though the swiftness with which both eulogy and sermon vaulted over those fraught weeks in which Richard seized (or "was offered") the throne was a wonder to behold. I was slightly confused by the idea that only in 2009 had an account of a medieval reinterment been found, in the British Library, as a very full narrative of the ceremonies to transfer Richard's own father and brother, killed at the Battle of Wakefield, to a more honourable resting place at Fotheringhay, has long been known. I plan to look into that. (Update: I have. What hadn't survived was details of the service -- and music -- at such a ceremony, so the discovery by Dr Alexandra Buckle of a transcription of the reinterment rite for Richard Beauchamp, fourteenth-century Earl of Warwick, certainly was a uniquely useful find.)

One more reinterment troubled me: when workmen found bones at the foot of a staircase in the Tower of London in the seventeenth century, and it was concluded that these were the remains of the "Princes in the Tower", Edward V and Richard of York, these too were offered a more dignified reburial, in Westminster Abbey, but nothing like the orgy of commemoration that has attended the man accused of their murder. And, pace Carol Ann Duffy, whose poem cousin Benedict read so stirringly, Richard's name had been carved before. Henry VII paid for a tomb and epitaph in 1494, years after Bosworth. It wasn't a showy thing, just £10 worth of alabaster (around £5,000 today). But perhaps it was more in proportion with the achievements of a man who sat on the throne for two years, and spent a large proportion of that time desperately trying to hold on to it.

On the train down from Leicester, I expected real life to return with a bump, but a little bit of the surrealism persisted. The Countess of Wessex swept past me in the waiting room in her killer heels, attended by a Sikh railwayman and one of those spurred officers, as well as an indeterminate number of brittle ladies-in-waiting. They had a carriage to themselves. Perhaps the Countess might have been asked to make room for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who squeezed past me as he said to a member of his staff, "No, I don't think I do have a seat reservation".