The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA (22 page)

As for Richard's youngest sister, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, the current whereabouts of her remains present major problems of their own.
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Nevertheless, it was the confusion regarding Margaret's burial that provided the immediate impetus for my research which finally led to the establishment of a mitochondrial DNA sequence for Richard III and his brothers and sisters.

At her own request, Margaret of York's body was buried in the Fransciscan Priory Church at Mechelen (Malines), in modern Belgium.
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This building lies just to the west of Mechelen's cathedral church of St Rombout. The Priory Church, sacked during the religious conflicts of the ensuing centuries, is now a cultural centre, and all trace of Margaret's once splendid tomb has vanished. A manuscript copy of Margaret's memorial inscription tells us that she was buried ‘beneath the threshold of the doorway of this chancel'.
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This rather odd location, which now appears to reflect precisely the burial location of her brother Richard at the Franciscan Priory in Leicester, may not have been accidental. Perhaps Margaret deliberately requested burial in a priory church of the same order as her slaughtered brother, and deliberately asked for her tomb to be placed in an identical position, just inside the entry to the choir. Until Richard's burial was discovered, however, the exact meaning of the somewhat imprecise description had been debated, owing to the fact that the choir of the Mechelen priory church may have had more than one entrance. Originally, of course, the meaning had presumably been clarified by the physical location of the bronze memorial plaque within the church. Sadly, however, this vital evidence was lost to us. As a result, doubts had been expressed as to where exactly Margaret's corpse had been laid to rest.

In 2003 Dr Paul De Win published in Mechelen a paper on the multiple possible remains of Margaret of York.
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He explained the circumstances of Margaret's burial, explored the subsequent vicissitudes of her tomb, and catalogued twentieth-century attempts to find her body. He also highlighted the problem of resolving which (if any) of the various female remains disinterred from the former Franciscan church in Mechelen might really be Margaret's bones.

As reported in Paul De Win's paper, three sets of female remains of approximately the right age were found in the former Franciscan church of Mechelen during the course of the twentieth century, and in locations which could potentially be interpreted as consistent with the approximate site of the lost tomb of Margaret of York.
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These remains were found respectively in 1936 (excavations led by Vaast Steurs),
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1937 (excavations associated with the name of Maximilien Winders)
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and 1955 (accidental discovery, subsequently examined by Professor François Twiesselmann).
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Until recently these remains were stored in five boxes at the Mechelen Town Archives. They have recently been transferred to the Archaeology Service,
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and are now stored in two boxes (but reportedly a record of their former numbering has been retained). The bones from the 1955 discovery were photographed at the time, and these bones were subsequently coated with varnish. As a result, they can still be relatively easily identified. It is not currently possible to distinguish for certain which of the other female remains from Mechelen's Franciscan Priory site were discovered in 1936, and which in 1937.
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In 2003, following discussions with Dr De Win, I began the attempt to establish a mitochondrial DNA sequence for Margaret of York and her siblings. Since mtDNA is normally inherited unchanged in the female line, the methodology adopted was to seek a living all-female-line descendant of Margaret's mother, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, or of one of Cecily's close female relatives. We shall follow this research in a moment. First, however, it may be useful to summarise briefly what DNA is, and how it can currently be used in historical research.

The letters ‘DNA' are an abbreviation for ‘deoxyribonucleic acid'. All living beings have DNA, which functions rather like an order pad. It lists, in coded form, the materials required to make the components of living bodies, and it specifies the order in which they must be assembled in order to create these components. In 1953 two Cambridge scientists, James D. Watson and Francis Crick, first worked out the structure of DNA, and demonstrated its significance as the basic coding material of life. ‘Watson and Crick had discovered that each molecule of DNA is made up of two very long coils, like two intertwined spiral staircases – a “double helix”. When the time comes for copies to be made, the two spiral staircases of the double helix disengage.'
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DNA has a very complicated molecular structure, but four principal components are the heterocyclic bases which are known by their initial letters: A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine and T for thymine. In 1988, thirty-five years after the original discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick, an Oxford University team discovered that it was sometimes possible to extract, replicate and analyse DNA from ancient bones.
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While our present focus is on human DNA, the same basic rules apply to animals and plants, for all living things have DNA. Their cells contain two kinds of DNA: nuclear DNA, which resides in the cell nucleus, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Self-evidently, the latter is the DNA of the mitochondria: tiny structures which reside outside the cell nucleus in the surrounding cushion of cytoplasm and which help the cell to use oxygen in order to produce energy. The division in our cells between the two kinds of DNA is by no means equal. Each cell contains far more nuclear DNA than mitochondrial DNA. The latter represents a mere 0.5 per cent of our total.
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Nuclear DNA is a mixture, fifty per cent of which is inherited from each parent. Conversely, mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother, and is normally transmitted unchanged to the child. In addition, ‘mitochondrial DNA mutates at a much higher rate than nuclear DNA … Two organisms will therefore be far more similar in their nuclear DNA than in their mtDNA'.
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For both of these reasons mtDNA is generally more useful than nuclear DNA in tracing genetic relationships in historical contexts. With one exception, nuclear DNA is at present useless for genealogical research over a wide time-gap, because there is currently no way of determining which components of the nuclear DNA are derived from which ancestor. In fact, many ancestors may be represented by no nuclear DNA components in their living descendants. The one certain exception to this rule is the Y-chromosome – and we shall return to this point later, because it is of potential interest in the attempt to establish an overall picture of the DNA of the Yorkist princes.

For the moment, however, let us consider only mitochondrial DNA. Occasional spontaneous mutations occur in mtDNA, and these are then passed on to descendants, though they may take up to six generations to become firmly established. Such mutation occurs on average once every 10,000 years. Thus it is possible, by comparing the mitochondrial DNA of two individuals, to establish roughly how much time has elapsed since the lifetime of their last common ancestress in the female line. It has been calculated that all human beings now living are descended in the exclusively female line from one single woman, known as Mitochondrial Eve, who lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago. It is argued that every human being now living on the planet can trace his or her mitochondrial DNA back to Mitochondrial Eve. Of course, the latter was not the only living woman of her time and place. What is unique about her is the fact that she is the only one of her contemporaries to have living descendants in the female line.

It is likewise posited that most of the historic native population of Europe can trace their female line ancestry back to one of only seven ‘clan mothers' who lived between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago. Each of these clan mothers was a descendant of Mitochondrial Eve. The seven clan mothers of Europe are usually referred to by letters, or names, as follows:
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U (‘Ursula') – ancestress of about eleven per cent of the European population. She probably lived in Greece about 45,000 years ago. Her descendants are especially to be found in western Britain.

X (‘Xenia') – probably lived in Russia about 25,000 years ago. Her descendants (about six per cent of the population) are to be found today mostly in central and Eastern Europe.

H (‘Helena') – lived in the Bordeaux region of France about 20,000 years ago. Hers is the most widespread European clan, with about forty-seven per cent of the modern population descending from her in the female line.

V (‘Velda') – probably lived 17,000 years ago in northern Spain, near Santander. About five per cent of native Europeans belong to this clan, which is found mainly in Western Europe.

T (‘Tara') was more or less a contemporary of Velda. She probably lived in Tuscany. Her descendants, who account for about nine per cent of the modern population of Europe, live mostly along the Mediterranean coast or the western edge of the continent, including western Britain and Ireland.

K (‘Katrine') – probably lived 15,000 years ago, in the Venice region. She is the clan mother of six per cent of modern Europeans who are most likely to be found around the Mediterranean. ‘Ötzi' the ‘iceman' was one of her descendants.

J (‘Jasmine') – thought to have lived in Syria about 10,000 years ago. Her people were the ones who introduced farming to Europe. Her descendants are found today either in Spain, Portugal and western Britain, or in central Europe. They seem to represent about seventeen per cent of the European native population.

When DNA is being used to attempt to identify long-dead bones, the first thing to note is that it cannot
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the identity of an individual. Mitochondrial DNA has to be compared with a sample from a known relative, as was done recently in the case of the bones thought to be those of the Russian Imperial family. A mismatch proves for certain that the bones cannot be the person sought, but a match does not prove identity, merely that the bones are those of a person with similar mitochondrial DNA to – and thus a relative in some degree of – the person being searched for. Depending on factors such as how widespread the resulting mitochondrial DNA sequence is in the modern European population, and on the precise set of mutations present, that information will be of greater or lesser significance.

However, the final decision about the identity of archaeologically recovered remains will also depend on a variety of other factors: such as location, age at death, the era from which the remains date, and other evidence suggesting identity. Thus, for example, in the case of the Russian Imperial bones, evidence of ages at death, the location of the remains, how the individuals had died, and how their bodies had been treated after death, all supported the identification of the bones as Romanov remains, in addition to the DNA evidence from multiple sources, which confirmed their possible identification.