Honour for Richard III, tomorrow Cromwell and James IV?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/23/today-richard-third-tomorrow-james-fourth

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David Priestland (Leicester deserves better than the bones of Richard III, 23 March) is the one stuck in the past with his distasteful, non-PC opinion of hunchbacks and people who limp. Add to that his outdated view of Richard III as a child-killer, an accusation which was never made by Henry Tudor in case they turned up alive. Richard III was in fact at the cutting edge of reform in his time (action against corruption in high places, the bail system, laws written in English). He was arguably brought down by the deliberate inaction of those whose vested interests were threatened by Richard’s zeal for justice for the common man and the rule of law.

Leicester has embraced the so-called hullabaloo, as have people who travelled there from all over the world. Many were open-minded and would welcome a reassessment of the king’s reputation. I note that Mr Priestland is a historian – what price history, if we can’t celebrate our medieval past alongside the technology that proved the bones were the king. Anne AyresHuthwaite, Nottinghamshire

• You say (Editorial, 21 March), referring to the reburial of Richard III: “It would be just the same if the scattered remains of Oliver Cromwell were discovered and reunited.” This should be perfectly possible. It is generally believed that Cromwell’s skull is at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where it was taken after being displayed on a spike above Westminster Hall at the Restoration. His body is thought to lie in a vault in an attic in Newburgh Priory, in the North Yorkshire village of Coxwold, where it was taken by his daughter, Mary, who married Lord Fauconberg. But no outsider has been allowed to look in the vault, not even Edward VII when he stayed at Newburgh once. It is said that he crept up to the attic in the middle of the night with the intention of verifying the story, but was caught and prevented by his host.

Coxwold is also the home of the skull of Laurence Sterne, who was vicar there in the 18th century, and who lived at Shandy Hall. He died in London, and was buried in Bays water, but his skull was rediscovered during building works in the 1960s, and returned to Coxwold, where it now resides in the churchyard. And so Coxwold possesses the body of Oliver Cromwell but not the skull, and the skull of Laurence Sterne but not the body. An antithesis worthy of Tristram Shandy.Harland WalshawLympstone, Devon

Embarrassed at the 10 petal Tudor rose on the coffin instead of the five petal wild rose of York

• The pomp and ceremony which marked the arrival of the body of Richard III at Leicester cathedral, as the last English king to be killed in battle, at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, was a truly historic occasion. It would now be fitting to focus attention on discovering the remains of the last Scottish king to be killed in battle. That was of course James IV, who was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. Following the battle his disfigured corpse was taken to Berwick, where it was embalmed and placed in a lead coffin before being transported to London. The body was left to moulder in the woodshed of Sheen monastery and the corpse was forgotten about.

His head was however taken to the church of St Michael , Wood Street in the City of London, where it was dumped into a charnel pit. The monastery of Sheen was eventually demolished and whether the king’s headless corpse was buried there we shall probably never know, as it is now the site of a golf course. The church in Wood Street was also done away with and today, after several redevelopments, the site is occupied by a pub. It was a sad, ignominious end for one of Scotland’s most charismatic warrior kings, but perhaps it is he who will have the last laugh, as the pub under which his head is said to rest is not called The King’s Head, but The Red Herring.Alex OrrEdinburgh

• Richard III was buried in consecrated ground, even if that several centuries later became a car park. His predecessor and nephew, Edward V, was deposed by him, imprisoned in the Tower, and died almost certainly on his watch, and very possibly on his orders. Edward’s remains and those of his younger brother were discovered two centuries later, under a stairwell, I think. Could we not have some sense of proportion about the allegedly “unfairly maligned” Richard, who seems on the verge of quasi-canonisation?Cliff DaviesEmeritus fellow, Wadham College, Oxford

• Let us not forget how Richard III became king. When King Edward IV died in 1483, he left his heir, the 12-year-old King Edward V, in the care of his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester. But Richard declared that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth née Woodville (from whom I am descended by her previous marriage) was invalid, an accusation he had not made in the elder Edward’s lifetime. Edward V was therefore illegitimate, and not rightfully king. Richard then seized the throne for himself. He confined young Edward to the Tower of London, together with the latter’s younger brother Richard Duke of York, and after a few months the two boys were never seen again. Two skeletons were found in the tower in 1674 and reburied in Westminster Abbey. It is time that their DNA was matched to that of their uncle.Nick FloyerLondon

• Delighted to see public respect being paid to King Richard III but embarrassed at the 10-petal Tudor rose on the coffin instead of the five-petal wild rose of York.Adrian LewisBlackburn, Lancashire