Pave Paradise And Put Up A Parking Lot, or, My Kingdom For A Car

In time, all things are forgotten.

Richard III, once king of England, would seem to be important enough of a man to have his burial place remembered. It's not as if he's some fictional character that Will Shakespeare concocted for some drama. He was a real man, of real flesh and blood. And a real curvature of the spine.

Poor Richard fell to the forces of Henry Tudor, and don't we all know that history is written by the winners.

Being a wise playwright, Shakespeare chose to portray Richard as the bad guy in the power struggle that was won by the Tudors, who just happened to still be ruling when all those plays were getting written and performed in London.

What supporters Richard might have had were not enough to keep his resting place alive in common memory. All that remained was speculation and rough estimates, all of it growing muddled as the city of London spread beyond its boundaries.

It's now official.

Richard III has been found. Buried under the concrete of a car park.

Ignominious ending, indeed.

Through scientific tests, a skeleton that was uncovered during excavation was determined to be that of the former ruler of England. The curved spine was the first clue, and then there was the gap in the skull where the King's head was split during the battle. DNA analysis using a descendant of Richard's sister Anne of York provided further proof.

Not that Richard was buried where he fell at Bosworth Field. He was interred at a friary, a suitable religious burial ground.

But those Tudors just wouldn't leave things be. Henry Tudor's descendant, the eighth Henry, destroyed all the Catholic institutions he could when he started up his own religion, and without the monks or the church there, with the mania to eradicate Catholicism, the site slipped away until it was just another empty field filled with stones and bits of foundation.

No more hard feelings between the Tudors and Plantagents, as neither house is in existence.

Perhaps the present Queen of England, of noble Germanic stock, will organize a little memorial service and have those old bones laid to rest with other ancient British royalty.

Although she may not attend the Mass.

Richard III was, after all, a Catholic. And we wouldn't want to send the wrong message to the hard-pressed loyalists in Northern Ireland who would start up a new round of rioting if their Queen were to set foot in a Catholic church.