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?