Image: Lisby/Flickr

For the body of King Richard III, this winter continues to be one of discontent.

One minute—in 1485—you’re the king of England, the next you’re dying in a battle, your line is losing the throne to the Tudors and Shakespeare makes you look like a huge d-bag. Just when your troubles appear to be over, your corpse gets dug up from under a Leicester city council car park and scientists want to grind up some of your bones and map your genome.

Reuters reported the British scientists hope that sequencing Richard III’s DNA will shed light on the king’s ancestry and health, and provide a genetic archive for historians, researchers, and the public.

All I really knew about Richard III before his body was uncovered was that he had clubfeet, a hunch, and a dubious legacy. Since the exhumation and confirmation in February 2013 that the body found under that car park was in fact Richard III’s, the curved spine was confirmed but everything else became more complex. The body’s feet were missing, so the clubfeet thing could’ve been an embellishment added in by William Shakespeare. I also learned that there are people who feel like Richard III gets a bad rap because history is written by the winners and the Tudors won, and Shakespeare was sucking up to them.

The corpse has already revealed how King Richard III, the last English king to die in battle, was felled at the Battle of Bosworth Field during the War of the Roses in 1485. The body bore eight battle wounds around the head, a sword had hacked off the back of his skull, and there was a metal fragment found in his vertebrae.

The body of Richard III. Image: Wolf Gang/Flickr

It’s somewhat serendipitous that Richard III should resurface where he did thanks to the work of the University of Leicester, which boasts of being the 1984 birthplace of DNA fingerprinting. The university’s school of psychology is working on further insight into Richard III’s personality, trying to sort fact from fiction from smear campaign, especially with regards to rumors that he had his young nephews, who were heirs to throne, locked away in a tower.

The age of the DNA meant that the lab work had to be done at the Universities of York and Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. Depending on how acidic the soil that surrounded the bones was, at over 500 years old, it’s possible that the king’s DNA has fragmented too much for the scientists to create a complete genetic map. Their goal though to uncover Richard’s genetic make-up, including his susceptibility to certain diseases and his hair and eye color.

“One of the things I’m going to be particularly interested in is … can we see whether or not Richard III was predisposed towards scoliosis (a condition that causes curvature of the spine), for example,” Turi King of the University of Leicester genetics department, who will be grinding down the other king’s bones and extracting the DNA, told Reuters.

“There may be gaps,” she said of the DNA map, “but we’ll just have to go with what we can get. That’s science, unfortunately.”

After the DNA is sequenced, Richard III’s remains will be reburied—perhaps in the Leicester cathedral, or maybe in his historical seat of power in York. Five hundred years wasn’t long enough to settle everyone’s opinions on Richard III.