Richard III deserves a Catholic reburial – at the Oratorian church in York

It may seem strange that Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet Kings and head of the House of York, should be buried in Leicester. There is an explanation for this odd occurrence, but it illustrates the religious ignorance and insensitivity of the secular establishment.

In 2014, the High Court decided to support the Lord Chancellor’s decision to leave the reburial of Richard in the hands of the University of Leicester, which had been running the excavation through which his body had been discovered. The university (rather unsurprisingly) chose to have the body buried in Leicester itself, and arrangements were made for him to be buried at the city’s cathedral.

This decision was a nonsensical one from the point of view of what ought to be the first concern for any burial: the wishes of the person who has died.

Richard III was, according to the historical record, a pious Catholic. Songs of Praise show-cased for part of its pre-recorded programme on the reinterment a Book of Hours from which Richard might have read before his last battle, containing prayers that he would have said fittingly based on Psalms of lament whilst surrounded by enemies. The historian Dominic Selwood has also pointed out that the endowment that Richard had made for 100 chantry priests, for whom six altars had been built by the time of his death, clearly indicates the King’s desire for prayers and Holy Masses to be offered up for his soul there.

We may also note that he left such an endowment at York Minster, the ancient cathedral of a city with which his family had a profound connection, and not St Martin’s parish church in Leicester, which was only elevated to be a cathedral in 1927. It is a church with which his only association is that it is near the fields where he was violently murdered and through which his naked body was dragged before it was anonymously buried.

Leicester Cathedral is, moreover, an Anglican cathedral, and not an especially “high” one. Though they have a resident German ‘Old Catholic’ Priest, Johannes Arens, no sign exists that Holy Masses will be said there, or that prayers will be offered for the dead. Even if they were, modern Anglicanism, out of communion with the See of Rome, is not the English Catholic Church that Richard would have recognised.

If historic justice were to be done, and the evident wishes of King Richard himself were to be respected, he would have been reinterred at York, in a church where the offerings he desired could be made for his soul. Maddeningly, there exists a place that perfectly fits those specifications: St Wilfrid’s Church.

Located in the centre of York, lying in the shadow of the Minster itself, a church has been on the site of St Wilfrid’s since medieval times, and the current church is built in the Gothic Revival style closer to that of King Richard’s own time. Moreover, the Oratorians to whom St Wilfrid’s was entrusted in 2013, would have undoubtedly been willing (and could easily have been granted permission) to celebrate a Requiem Mass according to the more ancient Use of York in honour of the fallen King. Well-known for the faithfulness, piety, and beauty of their liturgies, this would have been a truly right and fitting offering in the communion of the Church that he would have recognised and accepted.

Instead, however, a legally easy procedural judgement allowed the decision of a university to keep King Richard’s remains with an ecclesial community he never knew, outside of the Rites he would have wanted, and, in possibly the least appropriate city in all the land. A sad display of the spiritual tone-deafness and religious illiteracy that prevents serious consideration of the piety of the past, and the propriety we owe towards those who held it.

Peter D Williams is a Catholic commentator