Archaeologists are DNA testing some bones they've found to see if they might be the remains of Richard III. Are there any other members of the Royal Family....

[seeker]

where DNA testing might produce interesting results?

I saw something about this recently. Didn't they dig up a car park in Leicester?

It is said that no one listed in Burke's peerage would undertake DNA testing for fear of what it might reveal

Doing it as we speak, blackberry ice!

At the risk of sounding like a total idiot, who are they going to test the results against? How will they prove the DNA from those bones is him or not?

Also I thought they were digging that car park up because they thought it was a priory, surely there would be loads of old bones under there?

Apparently there are living descendants the DNA can be tested against. Joking apart- it is incredibly interesting. The bones show a spinal deformity and a damaged skull.

They are talking about this on radio 4 now, fascinating! I'm sure there would be no suspicious results in today's royals at all...!

I think they managed to find a woman in Canada who was a direct descendent on the female line? Apparently there were a lot of false starts along the way though.

When my dad was researching our family tree he was working from a really detailed version that my grandfather had done which went back 200 years. Unfortunately, it's easier to fact check these things now and my dad discovered that an ancestor 5 generations back was born 2 years after his father died. So we had lots of info about people from the 1800s but none of them were actually related to us...

I don't think today's royals are particularly direct descendents of the Plantagenets are they? So they wouldn't go for them anyway.

A spinal deformity? So Horrible Histories will have to rewrite their Richard III song! (They are firmly in the 'all the hunchback stuff was Tudor propaganda' camp.)

change world history, as that is what got Rasputin involved with the russian royals

one gene changes the world

blog.catherinedelors.com/queen-victoria-irish-illegitimate/

I'm a nice guy!

I think the "hunchback" thing is Tudor propaganda, but isn't the fact that he had one shoulder higher than the other pretty well documented?

Cf The Daughter of Time.

Alan Grant was my first love.

I always thought Henry VII did in the princes. He looks shifty in the paintings (whereas RIII looks lovely).

Watching with interest.

However much one might wish it to be so, it isn't really likely that Henry VII did for the Princes. They were declared illegitimate by Richard, imprisoned in the Tower by Richard and the last known sighting of them was in 1483, and rumours of their death were in widespread circulation by the end of the year.
Having said that, if Richard hadn't had them killed, Henry would have had to.

Is this going to be the prrgnant polar bear or the norwegian parcel unwrapping sll over again?

Waiting with bated breath for DNA results.

It was Buckingham most likely. Henry didn't have the opportunity (though actually his massively overbearing mother, Margaret Beaufort was in London at the time and was in moving in court circles). Buckingham had a very tenuous claim to the throne (though actually slightly better than Henry's) and rebelled against Richard shortly after the princes were missed. Theory is that he was after the throne himself, and the princes' illegitimacy was spurious so they needed to be dead for him to claim. Richard however, was widely thought to be the culprit at the time. Contemporary sources (not Tudor) point the finger at him.

To be fair Elizabeths Grandmother was sister to those Princes in the Tower.

If the belief that Richard III had the Princes killed had been widespread at the time, how likely is it that Elizabeth Woodville would have released her daughters from their safe sanctuary into Richard's keeping?

The timing of the Princes' disappearance was not useful to Richard, who was promoting his claim to the throne as a matter of legitimacy - he was very keen not to be seen as a usurper.

Keeping the Princes alive and visible and in comfort (they were in the Royal apartments at the Tower, not in a dungeon) would have been a help to him. Their deaths made it a lot easier for his enemies to stir up support.

Can you tell I'm a bit of a Richard fan? :D

It was widespread at the time, though, as evidenced in several contemporary documents. And he had a very powerful motive for killing them, because as long as they were alive they would inevitably have been the focus of attempts to remove him from power.