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The rollcall of unlucky losers is long: Caroline Gill, Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead, John Renwick, Neil McEwan and Godfrey Ackers narrowly missed the cut. Those printed below earn £25, except Alan Millard who takes £30.
An ‘R’, upon a Council car-park writ,
Condemns my broken bones to Leicester’s light
Where Fox’s Glacier Mints aromas mask
The bloody stench of Bosworth’s battleground;
I am not in a living frame today
Yet framed I am, in dust disturbed by trowels,
The last Plantagenet, once planted deep
In flower-filled gardens, purchased from the friars,
Where warring roses fought the march of time
Till tarmac sealed them in the grave we share.
Now weary, wronged by wrongs I never did
And longing to be laid in holier ground,
I fain would travel to my final rest
But, having neither horse nor strength to walk,
My cry resounds throughout the universe:
A hearse! a hearse! my kingdom for a hearse.
Alan Millard
On Bosworth Field was I, though worthy, felled,
My kingdom gone, and I to Kingdom-Come
Despatched. That day I lacked not just a horse —
They would not coffin me, the less to bear,
But bore me bare to Leicester, there to lie
All twisted in the Grey Friars’ narrow grave,
While Shakespeare’s wider lies soon twisted me
Into a crookbacked killer. I was not.
Years passed. I watched the Welsh and then the
Scots,
And even Germans sit upon my throne,
Until the magic cypher D-N-A —
Domine Nos Adiuve! — proved: I am.
Doomed Richard shall now have a richer tomb,
Yet what dark counsels lay behind the plot,
When all men had this poor king’s lot forgot,
That his plot be a council parking lot?
Brian Murdoch
Was ever rightful king so foully used?
Here harried to my death and more beyond,
My body laid below but not to rest,
My name not royally graved in stone but hacked
By every bidden blade in Clio’s ranks.
The hellhound knew he had a double prize,
To stop my breath and with it stop my tongue.
In death I was reborn a slave and mute,
To writhe in thrall and cry the truth unheard.
And now these schoolmen dabble with my bones
And make a Yorick of the head of York.
The prying world may see how I was formed
And in their thoughts may ossify the lie
That as my back was bent my soul was warped.
Bared here or buried in some holy place,
I cannot falsify my false disgrace.
W.J. Webster
Five hundred years and more our bones have lain
In Leicester Town, and many changes seen.
Of late, our resting place has been reserved
For mobile frames, of glass and metal made,
Whose riders hie to shoppes of wondrous size,
And there buy ‘meat of cattle’ — though oft’times
Of that which I sore lacked on Bosworth field.
But now, our bones revealed, we are resolved
To play the martyr, slain by Tudor knaves,
Then libelled by a slavish Stratford scribe,
Apologist for Henry and his line,
Who wrote but one true verse: how our good
deeds
Lie hidden in our bones. But now to work!
Campaigns for a state funeral must start,
Using the foremost forum of these times,
In tweets with letters up to seven score.
Roger Theobald
Five centuries of wintry discontent,
Interr’d scant leagues from fatal Bosworth field,
Was all the peace Plantagenet could find.
My bones, at first by Nature’s whim deform’d
To shape fit lodging for a villain’s heart,
Were then, at the usurper Richmond’s hand,
Profanely desecrated, hack’d and haul’d
To an unroyal Greyfriars burial.
The dust reclaim’d my flesh. New dynasties,
And new technologies by petrol fuel’d,
Roll’d over my forgotten resting place.
Now come grim-visag’d archaeologists
To make a trophy of my cold remains.
‘Despair and die’, I heard my victims say,
But fate contrives a crueller curse for me:
This freakish sideshow immortality.
Chris O’Carroll
Now that my flesh is rotted from my bones
To be devour’d by th’all-consuming worm,
And the mechanical with pick and spade
Hath rudely disinterr’d my royal corse,
So that the meanest subject in my realm
Can read my reliques as it pleaseth him;
And that cruel bow, my spine, is set on show
To be the butt and scoff of rancourous men,
I learn that mongst the rabble who disturb
My royal sleep are some who seek to harm
My reputation. I was fierce and proud;
I gain’d my ends with much dissentuous scheming,
By murthers and by subtle villainies,
Which I rejoicèd in. Yet now my own
Society would have me lily-liver’d,
Genial, benign. My curse upon you all.
Gerard Benson
You are invited to take inspiration from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language of 1755 (e.g., Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words) and come up with some suitable Johnsonian definitions for modern times (150 words maximum). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 20 March.
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