Richard III: Middleham to Leicester

Richard spent several years of his childhood here in Wensleydale, in the household of his cousin Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, later called the Kingmaker. Warwick supervised his training as a knight, and it is likely that Richard met two people who mattered later: Francis Lovell, his firm supporter, and Warwick's younger daughter Anne Neville, his future wife. As king he spent little or no time here. The ruins are now cared for by English Heritage.

訪問のヒント: Ruins in the care of English Heritage.

On 4 May 1471 Richard held the vanguard for his brother Edward IV against the Lancastrians. Most of the Lancastrians who fled were cut down, and a meadow by the field is known to this day as Bloody Meadow. Edward of Westminster died in the battle. Two days later Richard, as Constable of England, sat in the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured after it. A pair of green-oak sculptures now mark the battle.

場所の精度: The pin marks the battlefield area at Tewkesbury; the exact positions of the armies are not pinned down.

In May 1483 the young Edward V was lodged in the Tower. A contemporary account records that he and his brother were taken into the "inner apartments of the Tower" and then seen less and less. There are no recorded sightings of either after the summer of 1483, and the facts of their disappearance remain unknown, though Richard is the primary suspect. In 1674 workmen found two small skeletons; they were widely accepted as the princes, but that has not been proven.

訪問のヒント: A major historic site open to visitors.

On 22 August 1485 Richard met the outnumbered forces of Henry Tudor at Bosworth. In the traditional account his army deployed on the hilltop. He led a charge at Henry himself and came within a sword's length before being surrounded and killed; a chronicler wrote that he died "fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". The Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre stands on Ambion Hill near Richard's Well, though surveys now place the core battlefield about three kilometres south-west.

場所の精度: Historians disagree on the battle site; the pin marks Ambion Hill, the traditional viewpoint, while surveys point about three kilometres south-west.

訪問のヒント: The heritage centre stands on Ambion Hill near Richard's Well.

After Bosworth, Richard's naked body was carried back to Leicester tied to a horse and buried hastily at Greyfriars. More than 400 years of development then hid the spot. In 2012 the search began under a city-centre car park: the church was found and a skeleton lay beneath its choir, with 11 wounds, eight of them to the skull. The former Alderman Newton's School beside the dig is now the King Richard III Visitor Centre, with a covered area over the original grave.

訪問のヒント: The visitor centre is in the former Alderman Newton's School beside the grave site.

Richard was reburied here on 26 March 2015, at a religious service where poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy's poem was read. Some wanted York Minster instead. The tomb is a rectangular block of white Swaledale fossil stone, quarried in North Yorkshire, bearing his motto Loyaulte me lie, "loyalty binds me". The last burial of a former king before it had been that of Edward VIII, 43 years earlier, in 1972.

訪問のヒント: The tomb is inside Leicester Cathedral.