Today’s Indignified Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Although English King Richard III (1452-85) died bravely in battle on Bosworth Field, against the forces of his rival Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), gross indignity was to follow. Early on it became clear that many on Richard’s side had little stomach for the fight, and many important noblemen were conspicuously biding their time waiting to see which way the battle would go before committing their forces to either Richard or Henry Tudor. After his horse was killed under him, Richard, ignoring advice to flee the field and return to fight another day, decided that he would lead a direct attack on the usurper. Courageously he launched himself at Henry and his bodyguard but was soon surrounded and killed, ‘fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies.’
On this gallant showing and considering his rank, it might have been expected that Richard’s corpse would have been treated with respect by the victor. Such was not to be the case. Henry had the body subjected the grossest indignity. The corpse was stripped naked and bundled across the back of a horse: ‘And Richard late king as gloriously as he in the morning departed from the town [Leicester], so as irreverently was he that afternoon, brought into that town, for his body despoiled to the skin, and nought being left about him, so much as would cover his privy member, he was trussed behind a pursuivant called Norroy as a hog or other vile beast, and all to besprung with mire and filth.’ Thus was the body taken to the church of the Grey Friars, where it was exposed to public view for two days. Richard was buried in an unmarked grave, the body being tipped out of a coffin that later served as a horse trough and which was finally broken up and used to construct the cellar steps at the White Horse Inn. (After the dissolution of the monasteries, the corpse was exhumed and thrown in the River Soar.)
Culled from: Death: A History Of Man’s Obsessions and Fears