LEICESTER: Dug out of a municipal car park five centuries after his battlefield death, England’s Richard III began his final journey on Sunday before finally receiving a burial fit for a king this week.

Some 530 years after he was killed in 1485, the last English monarch to die in battle will be laid to rest on Thursday in Leicester Cathedral, central England, across the street from where his remains were found in 2012.

In an unprecedented event, the medieval king will be reinterred in the presence of royalty in a service broadcast live on national television.

Five days of events leading up to the burial got under way on Sunday when his coffin was seen in public for the first time before being taken by hearse to a spot near where he was killed during the Battle of Bosworth.

Archaeologists who worked on excavating Richard III’s remains and his descendants laid white roses — the symbol of his royal house — on the coffin before it set off.

The Bishop of Leicester, Tim Stevens, said Richard’s death marked an “extraordinary moment” in English history.

“It was a change of dynasty, an end of a period of violent civil war, the beginning of the period in which Shakespeare was to write his great tragedies, including Richard III, and a different way of governing the country,” he said. 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 swiftly buried without fanfare at Greyfriars monastery in Leicester. Greyfriars was demolished in the 1530s during Tudor king Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and Richard’s remains were thought to be lost.

Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2015

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