'My kingdom for a horse ... and a helmet'

Shakespeare's King Richard III famously offers "my kingdom for a horse" before meeting his death in battle, while the study published in medical journal The Lancet on Wednesday suggests he might more sensibly have cried out for a helmet.

Forensic evaluation of the last Plantagenet king's skeleton, discovered under a car park in 2012, suggests he most probably died from one of several brutal blows to his bare head.

"The wounds to the skull suggest that he was not wearing a helmet, and the absence of defensive wounds on his arms and hands indicate that he was otherwise still armored at the time of his death," said Sarah Hainsworth, a professor of materials engineering at the University of Leicester, who co-led the study.

The authors also said that the forensic evidence appeared to support contemporary tales - later immortalized by Shakespeare - that the king had abandoned his mount prior to his death. Legend has it that the horse became stuck in the mire.

Cranial blows likely cause of death

King Richard III died at the Battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, central England, on August 22, 1485, after just two years on the throne. His death and defeat marked the culmination of the three-decade English civil war called the War of the Roses, between Richard's House of York and the rival House of Lancaster. The county of Yorkshire has a white rose as its emblem; Lancashire's is a red rose.

Using X-ray computed tomography (CT) to analyze the 15th-century skeleton, the authors identified nine blows to the head at or around the time of death - saying two of them could have killed him very quickly.

"The most likely injuries to have caused the king's death are the two to the inferior aspect [lower part] of the skull - a large sharp-force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or a bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon," Guy Rutty, a University of Leicester pathologist, said.

Halberds were medieval battle axes with a spiked point, and bills were long spear-like weapon also boasting a secondary hooked blade. Both weapons were popular against cavalry, suited to bringing down horses or dismounting riders.

The authors also reported two wounds to the torso, one of which could have proven fatal, but said they were likely inflicted post-mortem.

Curved spine, but not spineless

After the War of the Roses, Henry Tudor became King Henry VII; his direct Tudor descendants retained the crown until the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. This change in power could help explain Richard III's heavily besmirched reputation, as the Tudor family sought to sully the name of their predecessors.

Some contemporary accounts of the last Plantagenet king were considerably more flattering than the later rumors of Richard locking his two nephews in the Tower of London and then killing them to guarantee that he took the throne. Only circumstantial evidence supports the theory, although motive and means can easily be demonstrated for the legend of the Princes in the Tower.

Shakespeare's Richard III largely fits the Tudor image: murderous, deceitful, borderline mad and hungry for power - the character is often described as the Bard's "pantomime" villain. Picking up on accounts of the monarch's twisted spine - another finding verified by the study in The Lancet this week - Shakespeare also made his Richard III a hunchback, a "lump of foul deformity." Shakespeare is thought to have written the play in the early 1590s, late in Elizabeth I's reign.

The study's co-author Hainsworth said her team's findings could support one historical premise about the king, that he fought until the end in a battle he is often blamed for tactically botching.

"This doesn't tell us anything about what kind of king he was or the controversy surrounding his nephews," she said. "Whatever else people think about him, he fought bravely until he died."

msh/jr (AFP, AP, Reuters)