Richard III: English king starts final journey after remains found under car park

Dug out of a municipal car park five centuries after his battlefield death, England's Richard III has begun his final journey before receiving a burial fit for a king this week. Some 530 years after he was killed in 1485, the last English monarch to die in battle will be laid to rest on Thursday in Leicester Cathedral in central England, across the street from where his remains were found in 2012. In an unprecedented event, the medieval king will be reinterred in the presence of royalty in a service broadcast live on national television. Five days of events leading up to the burial began on Sunday (local time) when his coffin was seen in public for the first time before being taken by hearse to a spot near where he was killed during the Battle of Bosworth. Archaeologists who worked on excavating Richard III's remains and his descendants laid white roses - the symbol of his royal house - on the coffin before it set off. [caption id="attachment_72876" align="alignnone" width="440"] King Richard III's coffin is carried into Leicester Cathedral[/caption]   Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, ruled England from 1483 until he was killed near Leicester by soldiers loyal to Henry Tudor, later Henry VII. It was the last major conflict in the Wars of the Roses and Richard's defeat saw the crown pass from his House of York to the House of Tudor. Greyfriars was demolished in the 1530s during Tudor king Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and Richard's remains were thought to be lost. But members of the Richard III Society teamed up with Leicester University archaeologists to excavate the site, rightly predicting where in the old church he would have been buried. They found a skeleton consistent with contemporary descriptions of the king, notably his curved spine, and battle injuries. Radiocarbon dating showed the man died between 1455 and 1540. Their discovery was confirmed by a DNA match with Richard's closest living relative - Canadian carpenter Michael Ibsen, who has fittingly made the monarch's English oak coffin.