Richard III is reburied at Leicester Cathedral

One of England’s last Catholic kings has been reburied three years after his skeleton was discovered in a coffin beneath a car park.

King Richard III – the last monarch of the Plantagenet dynasty and the last English king to die in battle – was originally buried by Franciscan friars in Leicester, after he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

The priory was dissolved during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and it was widely believed that the king’s bones had been thrown into a river.

But excavation work on the site of the priory in 2012 unearthed the remains, and on Thursday they were re-interred in Leicester Cathedral after five days of commemorations.

The events began with an interfaith service of compline in the Anglican cathedral last Sunday during which Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster preached a homily.

Cardinal Nichols described King Richard as a “child of war” who spent much of his early life as a refugee before he seized power “on the battlefield and only by ruthless determination, strong alliances and a willingness to employ the use of force, at times with astonishing brutality”.

But he also said the king was “a man of prayer, a man of an anxious devotion” who founded chapels, or “chantries”, where Mass was offered specifically for the souls of those who died in the battles of what were later called the Wars of the Roses.

On Monday Cardinal Nichols celebrated a Requiem Mass for the repose of the soul of the king at the Holy Cross Priory of the Dominican order. He wore the Westminster Vestment, a chasuble dating from the reign of Richard, which might have been seen by him during Masses at Westminster Abbey in London.

Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury said after the Mass that “what was most striking was that King Richard III received the same funeral Mass as any other Catholic. We prayed for the eternal repose of his soul, commending him to God’s mercy”.

“It also seemed appropriate that a king who insisted that prayers and Masses be offered for all who had died on each side of the violent conflicts which marked his lifetime should have been likewise remembered in the prayer of the Mass in Leicester,” he told Catholic News Service.

More than 20,000 people visited the king’s coffin in Leicester Cathedral over the following days.

The reburial service on Thursday was presided over by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. It was attended by Sophie, Countess of Wessex, representing the Queen, and by actor Benedict Cumberbatch, a distant relation of Richard III, who read a poem.

During the service the Anglican Bishop of Leicester, the Right Rev Tim Stevens, said: “People have come in the thousands from around the world to this place of honour, not to judge or condemn but to stand humble and reverent.”

He added: “Today we come to give this king, and these mortal remains, the dignity and honour denied to them in death.”

Richard III, whose skeleton revealed the spinal deformity depicted by William Shakespeare in his history play, seized power in 1483 when he declared the children of the late King Edward IV to be illegitimate. His reign lasted a little more than two years.