The Guardian view on Richard III: he should be reburied with dignity

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/guardian-view-king-richard-reburied-dignity

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It is more than half a millennium since King Richard III of England was killed at the battle of Bosworth in 1485. At the end of Shakespeare’s play, the victorious Earl of Richmond, soon to be Henry VII, stands amid the dead and orders his men: “Inter their bodies as becomes their births.” Yet the slain king, the last English monarch to die in battle, was not allowed such a dignity. His remains were hastily buried in a local chapel which was later demolished. Richard’s bones were not rediscovered until 2012. Finally, on Sunday, the last Plantagenet monarch will be carried to Leicester cathedral, ready for a reburial ceremony on Wednesday.

By coincidence, Spanish forensic scientists announced this week that they have rediscovered, in Madrid, the remains of Spain’s supreme literary master, Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Not all the bones have yet been definitively identified from many that were moved from the convent in which he was originally buried in 1616. But it would be surprising, when they are identified, if the great writer was not to be reburied in a place of honour so that admirers of the indomitable Knight of the Sad Countenance could pay their respects. How the Viennese must hope that somehow the remains of Mozart, lost in a common grave since 1791, could similarly come to light and become a place of musical pilgrimage.

The urge to bring a life to full circle with a dignified ceremony when a lost person is found is a deep one. In the modern era, military reburials are frequent. Only last year, British soldiers whose bodies were discovered on the western front where they died in battle in 1914 were still being buried with honours, their identities established by DNA sampling. Similar reburials have taken place when mass graves of Napoleonic-era soldiers have been unearthed. Reburials with political meaning are charged with special significance, too. In 1965, Sir Roger Casement’s remains were returned from London to Dublin. Tsar Nicholas II was reinterred in St Petersburg 80 years after his execution. To this day, Spain is grappling with what to do about the mass graves of its civil war era. But politics and soldiery are not the only reasons for dignified reburials. When climbers found the body of George Mallory in 1999 on Everest, 75 years after his disappearance, they held a short service and built a cairn around the remains.

The English royal reburial is not by any stretch a significant historical event. It changes nothing. And yet, when we speak of someone receiving a proper funeral and having a last resting place, these words mean something, especially to those whose loved ones have been lost or missing in this way. No one today pines for closure over Richard III. But when the missing person is a king of England, even when he is one of the most notorious monarchs in England’s history, there is something a bit more at stake. This is not witless royalism. It would be just the same if the scattered remains of Oliver Cromwell, England’s greatest republican, were discovered and reunited. In some small but significant way, next week will mark the completion of a piece of unfinished national business.