Richard III's reburial

I live in Leicester, the city where his skeleton was found under a car park. The funeral cortège passes close to where I live so I could easily walk over and watch it go by. But, I ask myself, why would I want to see a box of old bones on a cart? As a heathen, the point of a ritual reburial ceremony is completely lost on me. Am I missing something?

I would go just for the history aspect. I always thought old Richard got a bad rap.

I'd certainly go. I'd be equally interested to observe a ceremony to the Sun God, a necromantic conjuring, and a festival of spring if it passed right under my nose. What people do and why is a matter of some curiosity to me and has nothing to do with what I believe or don't believe. Aren't pageantry and spectacle fun for their own sake? I don't know that we've changed all that much since the Middle Ages.

On the other hand, I don't like crowd scenes, so I'd prefer to watch from a window or balcony, given a choice.

I'm with >2 varielle: and >3 Meredy: on this. Think of it as a chance to be an anthropologist/historian observing a rare ceremony or event. I'm hoping there will be some sort of broadcast for those of us who can't make it to the UK.

Respect for the dead? Reverence for our ancestors? Birth, puberty/adulthood and death ceremonies are the most human part of religious rituals. A funeral is for the living, and while Richard III may have no one who remembers him alive, a reburial still speaks to the continuity of humanity, that while he may be dead, he (as we all) will be remembered on as part of humanity. It's something of a failure that those who earned a position by blood alone get remembered this way where few others do, but such is life.

Thanks for your comments. I watched the cortège pass by and I was surprised by my reaction. My heathen brain kept telling me it was pointless nonsense but when I saw the armoured horses and riders and the simple wooden coffin with white roses on it, I did feel something I would describe as sadness.

When the coffin entered the cathedral and the Christian rituals and prayers began (I watched that part on TV) my reaction changed. Back to sanity.

On a practical note, he may make a good tourist attraction for Leicester.

Definitely. The council has already spent a lot of money building a new visitor centre, tidying up the area around the cathedral and commissioning a new statue of Richard.

I heard some sour grapes from the folks at York, who thought that as a member of the House of York he should have been buried in the Minster there. But then, most of the earlier Dukes of York were buried at Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, and if Richard wanted to be buried somewhere particular, all he had to do was not be defeated and killed in battle!

Tim Stevens, the outgoing Bishop of Leicester, said: "It has been a wonderful week for Leicester Cathedral but more importantly it has been a wonderful week for the city and county. I feel like we have been touched by God and I hope and believe the area will make the most of the opportunity."

Apart from the "touched by God" bit, I agree with him.

There are a number of relevant items in the current edition of 'Private Eye', and I couldn't help sympathizing in particular with 'The Alternative Rocky Horror Service Book' skit on the commercialisation of the reburial (page 25).

>11 hawkwinds: I gave up History at school after the Third Form (too much Disraeli's Second Foreign Policy, and the Treaty of Utrecht school of history for my taste), but Richard III was my year's Shakespeare play:

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our House are in the deep bosom of the ocean buried ..."

After that, and forty years later, it gets a bit hazy, but "stern alarums", "grim visaged War" and something along the lines of being determined to prove a villain, gripped us in Eng. Lit. in my boy's school, and only let us down with the soppy dream sequences the night before Bosworth.

Well, you know, Billy S. tried to please the Tudors. He couldn't very well portray Richard III as a nice guy. (Might easily have cost him his head).

I see the reburial as interring Richard according to his own beliefs and whether we believe in god or not it was the right thing to do to bury Richard III according to what he would have wanted at the time of his death.

I have always approved of Terry Pratchett's idea that, after DEATH, people got what they believed in life would eventually happen to them.