Philippa Langley discusses her hunt for the king’s grave as we mark ten years since his rediscovery

Interview by Emily Staniforth

The spot in Leicester where Richard III’s remains were found

EXPERT BIO

PHILIPPA LANGLEY

Philippa is a writer and honorary president of the Scottish branch of the Richard III Society. She led the search that discovered the remains of Richard III in a car park in Leicester in 2012.

What first inspired your fascination with Richard III?

It was reading a book about the real man, from the contemporary source materials, by Paul Murray Kendall. Up until that point I thought Shakespeare’s Richard III was who he was. Reading about Richard from his own lifetime utterly fascinated me. That book was what really ignited it because I thought how come we don’t know this guy? It was a really big gap in our storytelling. I think the most valuable source material is from someone’s own lifetime and I understand that with many historians they want to take everything that the Tudors said about [Richard] when he was dead. I think if you do an experiment and just look at what we have while the man was alive and look at what it tells us about who he was, then you see a very different kind of man. There are four clear tenets in his life that we can see across the board in that he was loyal, brave, devout [and] just, and we have evidence to prove that.