King Richard III

So, it's really him! Exciting!

And of course, all the jokes have already started flowing - from how much he owes in car parking fees to 'I love it when a Plan-tagenet comes together'....

I have always had a great sense of history, particularly history connected with place: it's what underpins my interest in psychogeography. At the age of ten I was taken to the Tower of London and was found wandering up and down Princess Elizabeth's Walk in the Bloody Tower, transfixed by the thought that she once took her daily exercise in exactly the spot I was walking. I was lost in the trance of history.

And I love to visit the places associated with historical figures of interest and pay homage at their graves, whether Keats in Rome or TS Eliot in East Coker.

So the idea of finding the last resting place and seeing the actual bones of Richard III fascinates me. I went to the site of the Battle of Bosworth a few years ago and even that took me closer to the King and the events surrounding his downfall, and all the while the man himself - or hhis mortal remains - were lying only a few miles away, under a car park.

And that's another thing. It transpires that when he was buried, the area was a church, which was consecrated ground. Sacred land which all this time later is sacred only to the worship of the Devil's Horse. Nice irony there.

Much as I adore Shakespeare I have never really bought the villainous child killing hunchback of Tudor mythology. Too obvious a scheme to blacken the name of the last representative of the preceding dynasty - although let's not forget that Henry Tudor cannily married Richard's sister Elizabeth to underpin his extremely shaky claim to the throne - other than that, apart from distant connection through his mother to the royal family his main claim to kingship was the fact that he - or one of his henchmen - had killed the rightful king.

And the way the proof of who the bones belonged to, beyond reasonable doubt, through DNA and so on, is better than an episode of Silent Witness - and real!

Of course, over five hundred years after his death, it is now possible to be completely objective about the man and the myths perpetrated about him. We can now confirm that while he had curvature of the spine he was not a hunchback and was, if the facial reconstruction which bears a striking resemblance to existing portraits is to be believed, he was actually a delicately featured, handsome man. Not at all the way the Tudors had an interest in portraying him.

But because history is written by the victors, Richard's reputation has been severely dented by his immediate successors and it is wonderful that a more enlightened and scientific age has been able to right the wrongs done to him.

And maybe in five hundred years time, our more objective descendants will be able to finally piece together who Jack the Ripper was and why five women were murdered?

Do we need a Church of England?

So there is, as reported today, a back bench revolt against the Prime Minister introducing and supporting the idea of marriage being opened up to gay people.


Whatever your view on the actual issue, the MPs' objection seems to be largely that this was originally a Lib Dem policy with which David Cameron happens to agree, but that it did not form part of the Coalition agreement and there was no discussion or consultation with Conservative MPs before the bill was introduced.


OK, so much for inter-party warfare: I see their point, but that is between the MPs and their leader.


More importantly, the bill itself seems to be a huge mish mash in an attempt to placate everybody and offend no one.


Religion is always a difficult area, because our society traditionally accepts it as a genuine belief system. If I claimed that an alien had landed from Mars and ordered me to brush my teeth twenty times a day, I would be viewed with sympathy, indulgence and a measure of ridicule. If my claimed beliefs involved me refusing to carry out my job or displaying prejudice, I would be sacked, and possibly sectioned.


Yet the claim of thousands that their own particular Holy Scripture makes it necessary for them to denigrate people whose lifestyle is apparently condemned by that book, written hundreds of years ago, is considered in itself sacred.


Yes, the Bible - or a page in it somewhere -  may state that man should not lay with man, but other bits also say that certain meats are inedible (Jewish people still accept this, as do Moslems - so to quote Mr Minchin, 'why not, not eat pigs together'? But Christians, at the forefront of those condemning gay marriage, have conveniently forgotten that their parent religion forbids their bacon and egg breakfast and Sunday roast pork). 


Still other Bible passages label menstruating women as unclean, instruct them to keep to their homes and not mix with polite society until they have ritually bathed themselves once their period is over. Logical and hygienic when you are living in a desert-dwelling tribe four thousand years ago - as indeed is the notion of circumcision, but rather outdated in these days of tampons, flushing toilets and showers. 


So quite rightly, most Christians, and a lot of Jewish sects, view these instructions as outmoded, yet quote the Bible chapter and verse when it appears to support their own particular prejudice. Pretty easy, as a lot of the Bible is self-contradictory anyway. Other religious texts may be more or less so: I am not qualified to judge.


And the notion of accepting gay marriage for all English people, but then banning it within the state Church of England, sounds crazy. I accept the reasoning - an individual Quaker church is free to marry or refuse to marry any couple, while an Anglican parish church, by virtue of its status as the representative of the national religion, is obliged to marry any Tom Dick or Harry who requests the sacrament, irrespective of their personal belief or religious affiliation. As long as he is marrying any Thomasina, Diana or Harriet, of course. 


But the prospective ruling means that even if your local Anglican vicar is quite happy to perform a marriage ceremony for a gay couple - he or she may even be gay and in a civil partnership him/herself - this is strictly verboten. Yet if - however unlikely this may sound - the local Roman Catholic priest is not averse, he may perform the ceremony. Yet he must be male and celibate.



There is also the separate outdated law currently under review: that stating that those in direct line to the throne of England may not marry a Roman Catholic. At any time in the last few hundred years the way has been open for us to have a Queen or Prince Consort who is a Hindu, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist..... and in a way I am slightly disappointed that has never happened, for it would call into question this law. Yes, I know the history of the English fear of a Catholic monarch but would we be totally sanguine about the heir to the throne being brought up as a Buddhist, even though his destiny was to lead the Church of England?



And the answer to both the conundrums above seems to me obvious: dis-establish the Church of England. If the monarch is no longer the Head of the Church (ironically, the title the Queen still holds of Defender of the Faith was awarded by the Pope to Henry VIII in recognition of his defence of Catholicism!) then it will not matter two hoots whether the child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge espouses atheism or Hinduism and who he/she marries; equally, if the Anglican Church has the same status as the rest we can no longer demand to be married in it, and it will therefore have the right to accept or reject a request for marriage from a same sex couple.


Sinple, eh?