Confirming that a particular medieval skeleton is a particular person is not something that
archaeologists tend to do, so you can actually treat this as sort of a missing person's case.
We know that Richard's remains are likely to lie in the remains of the Grey Friars
and we find skeletal remains of somebody that look like it could be him.
So you have to take the characteristics that you know about, in this case by looking at the DNA
of living individuals and comparing that with DNA samples,
should we be able to extract them from the skeleton.
I feel it, it's moving. I was particularly interested in extracting three different sort of
sections of DNA from Richard. So the first of these was mitochondrial DNA. Now mitochondrial
DNA is interesting for this project for two reasons: first of all it's in lots and lots
of copies in each of our cells so if you're going to find any DNA left in skeletal remains it tends
to be mitochondrial DNA. The second reason why it's really useful for this case is it just has
a really simple pattern of inheritance. It just goes down through the female line, so mum passes
it down to all of her children - boys and girls - but only daughters pass it on. So it means that
if I can find a female line relative of Richard, and it can be a boy or a girl, as long as it's all
female line all the way through the rest of that line, I can use them to act as a comparator. I can
look at the living individuals mitochondrial DNA and see if it matches those of the remains. The
second bit of DNA I was interested in was the y chromosome. So the y chromosome also a very
simple pattern of inheritance - it has on it the gene for maleness so it only goes down
through the male line, so all men who were related through the male line should have an identical or
near identical y chromosome type. And the third bits of DNA that I was interested in are bits of
DNA that we know can be used to predict quite accurately somebody's hair and eye colour. The
reason why that's interesting is because there's no contemporary portraits of Richard. All of the
portraits of Richard post-date his death by about 25 to 30 years onwards. So what I was interested
in doing is looking at what the DNA tells us about what his hair and eye colour looks like
and then comparing that against the portraits that we've got and seeing which is the closest match.
Importantly, we had a lead right from the start because of the important work of John Ashdown-Hill
who had been researching Richard and his family over a number of years.
He had previously identified a lady called Joy Ibsen who was a direct female line descendant
from Richard's sister Anne of York. What we want to do in this project, however, is not take things
shall we say at face value. Because we knew that this work would be scrutinised and
heavily challenged we felt that would be very important to independently verify the work that
John had already done. Now in order to do that, we had to look at a whole range of documents
and basically for the earlier period there are two critical sources that are important here. One
are what are called the visitation returns. These are established under Henry VIII and carried out
retrospectively. In addition to that we have probate information - essentially wills - and
wills are very important because of course they pass down wealth and possession to further
generations and therefore invariably will mention the living sons and daughters of the will maker.
The other source that we rely on very heavily are parochial registers of baptisms marriages
and burials. So putting all of these things together helps us to reconstruct the lineage and
give documentary proof, as far as you can obtain it, that x was indeed the son or daughter of y.
And that was really crucial actually because what if I didn't find a match between the DNA from
Michael Ibsen and the skeletal remains. How do we know it's not just because the tree isn't right?
In addition to having that one-to-one link we also found another female line relative
so that we could triangulate the results. So we set about trying to look for another branch
of the family to do that and indeed eventually identified somebody called
Wendy Duldig who, thankfully, agreed to take part in this important work.
It's important to understand that Richard had no living direct descendants
so all of the current day living relatives are essentially a descendant in one form or another
of one of Richard's own relatives. So Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig are 14th cousins
twice removed. They are both descended from Anne of York who is Richard's eldest sister
and they share the same common ancestor for a couple of generations and then they split off and
it's all female line as you'd expect down through the generations until you get to the both of them.
So I was able to take DNA samples from them, look at their mitochondrial DNA.
First and foremost they matched each other which meant that the tree was correct
and then they matched the skeletal remains which again showed that the DNA evidence
as well was pointing to these being the remains of Richard III.
The work on the y chromosome and the male line in some respects is much more difficult
than the mitochondrial and the female line. So I was interested to see whether or not there
was a genetic link between Richard and male line relatives who are alive today. Now we always knew
at the outset that there might not be a genetic link and that's because we know from previous
research that I and others have done that you get the possibility of non-paternity. So this is
where the father - the biological father - is not who you think it is and that's going to break the
y chromosome link. We know that that's a there's a percentage for that that hovers around the one
to two percent mark. Still we thought that this would be an interesting thing to do, just bearing
in mind that given the number of generations that there might not be a match on their y chromosomes.
Richard had no living descendants so we can't trace either mitochondrial DNA or Y-chromosome DNA
directly from Richard but what we can do in search of a y chromosome is to go up the tree
and then back down again and that allowed us to identify a number of people by going
up from Richard to Edward III and then back down again to John of Gaunt and that goes on through
the Earls and Dukes of Somerset and eventually to the Dukes of Beaufort.
So doing the y chromosome work I found that there wasn't a link between Richard III and
the male line relatives who are alive today, so clearly though the genealogy says that they're
male line related the DNA is telling us that there has been a non-paternity or break in
that y chromosome chain between the fifth duke of Beaufort who is their common male line ancestor
and Richard III which is 19 generations. The fact that we have a break means just that:
we have a break. It doesn't mean that the skeleton isn't Richard because what we have
is the very strong evidence triangulated with two living day relatives with the mitochondrial DNA.
So that in itself is very strong compelling evidence that the skeleton is Richard III.
The break, however, does raise other questions more of a historical nature than
is this skeleton Richard? Now depending which link in the chain is broken, and of course there's a
possibility there could be more than one break, this asks questions about the Plantagenets and
indeed the claims to the throne of both the houses of York and Lancaster. The majority of links in
the chain - 13 out of the 19 - do not affect royal descent at all. Additionally, one does indirectly.
Now of the remaining five links the critical one is between Edward III and his son John of Gaunt.
If the break occurs here, then this asks questions about the legitimacy of John's son Henry IV and
his subsequent heirs, Henry V and Henry VI. In addition, since the Tudor dynasty was descended
also from John of Gaunt. there's an indirect influence over the Tudor's claim to the throne.
Likewise if the break is in the part of the chain from Edward III to Richard III,
this would also ask questions about the legitimacy of the claims of both
Richard and, of course, his brother Edward. But we have absolutely no proof for that.
As I've said, there are 19 links in this chain. 5 of them could affect royal descent
so statistically the chances are it actually has no effect at all but it would be worthwhile
investigating further to try and understand more fully where that breakage occurred.
Much of the focus on the DNA analysis is obviously to do with proving his lineage
but of course DNA tells us a lot more than just whether or not you have
a certain y chromosome inherited from your father or mitochondrial inherited from your mother. It
also tells you something about genetic makeup. So I've been really interested in looking at, as part
of this DNA analysis, bits of our DNA which we know can help us tell eye and hair colour.
The reason why that's interesting is because there's no contemporary portraits of Richard
they all post-date his death by about 25-30 years onwards. We know there are bits of DNA
that can be used to pretty accurately predict what somebody's hair and eye colour is and what
we've been able to show is that we can say with pretty high probability that Richard had blue eyes
and that at least his childhood hair colour was probably blonde and it can darken with
age. But if you take this as our genetic data, we suggest that the most closely matching portrait
is the one in the Society of Antiquaries in London known as the Arched Frame Portrait.
What we're focused on is talking about the DNA evidence but it's important to remember that this
is just one strand - one piece of a complex jigsaw - and actually what we have to do in
answering the question ‘is this Richard III?’ is put all of the bits of the jigsaw together.
We know that Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in battle, brought back to Leicester
and buried in the choir of the church of the Grey Friars. He was age 32 when he died and we
know that within his lifetime he was described as having one shoulder as being higher than the
other. So we do the excavation and we find the remains of a young man, he is in his late 20s to
early 30s. He has got battle injuries and severe scoliosis of the spine and he's in the choir of
the church of the Grey Friars. Now you can add the radiocarbon data to this and the DNA analysis and
you can bring all of those strands together and do what's known as a Bayesian analysis to put a sort
of statistical number on how likely this is to be who you think it is. We've done just that and
we've calculated a probability of these being the remains of Richard III at their most conservative
being 99.999. The evidence is overwhelming that these are the remains of Richard III.