Every school pupil knows Richard III’s apocryphal cry of ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’. But what happened next? This school pupil was taught that after being dragged through the streets of Leicester the slain king’s corpse was pitched into the River Soar. Not so, it seems. While the tradition that Richard III was denied burial has a long pedigree, various Tudor writers place his final resting place at Greyfriars in Leicester. Such sources are not unbiased. Hellbent on blackening Richard’s reputation, even if victor’s justice baulked at dumping Richard’s body in a river, it certainly ran his reputation through the gutter.

Either way it should be no more than an interesting historical footnote. Over half a millennium later Richard’s body was surely as untraceable as if it had been hurled into the Soar. After being demolished during the Dissolution, the friary disappeared beneath Leicester, to be truncated by later buildings and riddled with services. Even if Richard’s remains survived the Dissolution they were likely to have been obliterated by more recent development. At best he would be just another anonymous skeleton. This is what made the press conference held by the University of Leicester on 12th September so electrifying. As five reasons for interest in the skeleton of an adult male were read out, the similarities with the missing monarch became more and more tantalising, building to the revelation that a spinal condition made his right shoulder visibly higher than his left.

Is it him? We will not know for a few months yet, but if Richard has been found, it will be a stunning conclusion to an audacious piece of archaeological detective work.