After 500 years, Richard III finally gets a king’s burial

 

The coffin of England's King Richard III is carried on a gun carriage through Leicester, central England, on Sunday March 22,2015

Richard III's remains were carried in a procession through the city to the cathedral where they will be reburied

Thousands of spectators lined the streets to see the coffin of England’s Richard III taken in procession to his final burial, five centuries after his death on the battlefield.

The remains of the last English monarch to die in battle were discovered buried under a municipal parking lot in 2012, almost 530 years after he was killed in 1485.

The medieval king will be laid to rest Thursday in Leicester Cathedral, central England, in the presence of royalty in a service broadcast live on national television.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, presided over the reburial of King Richard III at Leicester Cathedral. Richard III's skeleton was found under a car park in Leicester in 2012.

 

Note
Richard, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, ruled England from 1483 until he was killed near Leicester by soldiers loyal to Henry Tudor, later Henry VII.
It was the last major conflict in the Wars of the Roses, and Richard’s defeat saw the crown pass from his House of York to the House of Tudor.
The slain 32-year-old was buried without fanfare at Greyfriars monastery, which was demolished in the 1530s during Tudor King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Richard’s remains were thought lost.
But members of the Richard III Society teamed up with Leicester University archaeologists to excavate the site, rightly predicting where in the old church he would have been buried. They found a skeleton consistent with contemporary descriptions of the king, notably his curved spine, and battle injuries. Radiocarbon dating showed the man died between 1455 and 1540.
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