Article content continued

The DNA analysis has also been controversial. The skeleton’s mitochondrial DNA shows descent from the same female line as Richard. But every mother passes the same mitochondrial DNA to her sons and daughters, and her daughters pass it to their sons and daughters, and so on. Over generations and centuries, that means a large group of people in different places with different surnames.

The other usable DNA from the bones is the Y-chromosome DNA, which passes from father to son. Unfortunately, the Leicester car park bones do not have Richard’s expected male-line DNA. This means either the skeleton is not Richard, or that the Plantagenet line has, at an unknown date, been broken by illegitimacy. This male-line DNA is therefore worthless, as it does not prove one way or another whether the skeleton is Richard.

Then there is the fact his DNA codes are for blond hair and blue eyes, when we know Richard almost certainly had black hair and brown eyes. Although blond hair can darken to a degree during childhood, blue eyes do not mutate into brown ones.

So the carbon dating and genetic evidence is a bit of a mess. Professor Michael Hicks, a leading Richard III scholar, has challenged Leicester University’s claim that we can be 99.999 per cent certain it is Richard. The most we can conclude, he points out, is that the bones belong to someone with the same female-line DNA group as Richard. No more.

There are other difficult questions. Nothing actually links the bones to the Battle of Bosworth Field. In fact, the skeleton’s fish-adjusted date range covers the entire Wars of the Roses, as well other conflicts. Richard was a war veteran – but the bones show no healed wounds.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Nor can we know who else may have been buried at Grey Friars. Some believe that even if Richard had been buried there, his body was most likely exhumed at the Dissolution and thrown into the nearby river.

So, as we prepare for a week of royal spectacle, the sort England always does stirringly well, it is worth pausing during the pageantry to wonder if it is indeed King Richard III being given such a glittering reburial, or whether his cold, battle-scarred Plantagenet bones still lie out there, undiscovered and unrecognized.

—Dominic Selwood, author of ‘Knights of the Cloister”