A plastic facial reconstruction model made from the recently discovered skull of King Richard III on display during a news conference in London on February 5, 2013. (AFP)

London, Aug. 17: As if 500 years of ignominy lying in a grave hastily dug after his defeat in battle were not enough, King Richard III now faces a new battle in the English courts over which of two cities, Leicester or York, will be his final resting place.

A high court judge in London, Charles Haddon-Cave, ruled yesterday that a group backing York’s case, called the Plantagenet Alliance and involving several distant relatives of the slain monarch, could take legal action against the government and the University of Leicester.

The university has laid plans for Richard’s reinterment in Leicester based on a government license that authorised the dig that found the remains. The license specified that the university should decide where the dead king’s remains, if found, should be reburied.

The plans, already well developed, call for reinterment next May in an elaborate tomb in Leicester’s Anglican cathedral, and the opening of a $6.2 million visitors’ centre that is expected to be a major tourist draw.

But in the case heard in London, York’s champions argued that Leicester was never more than a waypoint for Richard on his last night before the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485, 20 miles from Leicester.

They contend that the slain king’s ancestral home, and the place he had designated as his preferred burial place, was York. They have described Leicester’s haste to lay permanent claim to Richard as a “hijack”, prompting some in the Leicester camp to retort, tartly, that king or not, it is a case of “finders keepers”.

The link with York was underscored by no less an authority than Shakespeare, who began his play Richard III with a monologue in which the future king, speaking as the Duke of Gloucester before the tortuous events that would make him monarch, speaks of his older brother, Edward IV, in one of the playwright’s most quoted lines, as a Yorkist.

“Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York,” Richard says, before laying out the treacherous schemes that form the webbing of Shakespeare’s work.

In his ruling yesterday, Judge Haddon-Cave urged Leicester and York to settle the case out of court and to not renew the animosities that drove the 15th-century period known as the Wars of the Roses, between two rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, the houses of York and Lancaster.

The hostilities ended with Richard’s defeat at Bosworth Field, which gave rise to the Tudor kings under the Bosworth victor, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII.

“In my view, it would be unseemly, undignified and unedifying to have a legal tussle over these royal remains,” the judge said, appealing to the two sides to avoid engaging in a “Wars of the Roses, Part 2”.

He added that it was inevitable that the question of Richard’s final burial place should arouse “intense, widespread and legitimate public interest” since it involved “the remains of a king of England of considerable historical significance, who died fighting a battle which brought to an end a civil war which divided this country”.

The contest between Leicester and York has taken place against the backdrop of renewed public and scholarly interest in Richard III.

In effect, the man depicted by Shakespeare as the wicked, hunchback murderer of his two nephew princes in the Tower of London, cast throughout succeeding history as England’s most reviled monarch, won the chance of a reappraisal last autumn when the skeletal remains later ruled to be his were unearthed beneath a municipal parking lot in the heart of Leicester.

The archaeological dig that found the remains, confirmed by DNA testing and other evidence, was undertaken after years of petitioning by the King Richard III Society, which is dedicated to a revisionist view of the monarch. After the success of the parking lot dig, the society’s enthusiasts have forecast a new age of scholarship that will reveal him as one of England’s most compassionate and reformist kings — and as a victim of the propaganda of his Tudor successors on the throne, and their in-house spin doctor, Shakespeare.