Guys, Britain’s history is so cool. But how cool is it? It’s still happening.
“DNA tests have confirmed that human remains found buried beneath an English car park are those of the country’s King Richard III,” according to a CNN report out of England.
Yeah, now think of how amazing a “CSI: Wham Bottom Lane” series would be.
“The three most commonly known facts of his life are that he stole the Crown, murdered his nephews and died wailing for a horse at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485,” wrote Dan Jones, a London-based historian and newspaper columnist.
“Like any black legend, much of it is slander,” Jones said. “Richard did indeed usurp the Crown and lose at Bosworth. He probably had his nephews killed too — it is unknowable but overwhelmingly likely.”
This dude had a whole bunch of lies thrown around about him while he was alive — so much so that he became one of Shakespeare’s darkest villains.
“What was initially thought to be a barbed arrowhead found among the dead king’s vertebrae turned out instead to be a Roman nail, disturbed from an earlier level of excavation,” according to CNN.
How awesome is that? A piece of history fell on top of another piece of history and combined into a weird force of rumor.
“So the discovery of Richard’s bones is exciting,” Jones wrote. “But it does not tell us anything to justify changing the current historical view of Richard: that the Tudor historians and propagandists, culminating with Shakespeare, may have exaggerated his physical deformities and the horrors of Richard’s character, but he remains a criminal king whose actions wrought havoc on his realm.”
Imagine what rumors, either true or not, are spread about our current world leaders and how that may affect our future’s history. Future-history, which is almost an abstract concept, depends on how we chronicle things today. It’s up to us to write the articles and create the broadcasts that will shape how the next generations learn history and form their own opinions.
“Despite today’s discovery, we Brits are likely to remain split on Richard down the old lines: murdering, crook-backed, dissembling Shakespearean monster versus misunderstood, loyal, enlightened, slandered hero,” Jones wrote. “Which is the truth? Somewhere in between. That’s a classic historian’s answer, isn’t it? But it’s also the truth.”
People could slander your name and reputation tomorrow, and it could affect your livelihood later on in life. Richard III had some horrible stuff said about every aspect of his life, and where did he end up? Buried under a church — and later a car park — with a horrible legacy to his name.
Half of that legacy was kind of hearsay. Some of it seems to be true.
Let’s work together and prevent our current leaders’ fates.
Immortalize them in tweets before historians have to dig them up years later.
