In the past year the Rev Pete Hobson has grown a beard – snow white, much to the amusement of family and friends of the brown-haired priest – and written a book. Its title, How to Bury a King, is the clue to his other recent preoccupation.
Last March millions around the world watched live television coverage of the reinterment of Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet kings, 530 years after a halberd pierced his skull and brainin the battle of Bosworth, and two and a half years after his remains were rediscovered under a Leicester council car park.
Hobson’s first encounter with the king under the car park came about, appropriately enough, over parking. As director of St Martin’s House, an administrative and conference centre next door to Leicester Cathedral, he took a call from a woman he had never heard of who phoned to ask if she could use some of the cathedral parking spaces while doing a bit of archaeology.
“Parking in the centre of Leicester is at a premium, and she seemed to want to take up a lot of space for a long time, so I said absolutely not – and thought that was that.”
The woman was Philippa Langley, a Scottish screenwriter and historian who was convinced that Richard still lay where he was buried in August 1485, after the victorious Henry Tudor took his crown, and his naked and mutilated corpse was lugged back from the battlefield. Hobson would come to know her name very well.
“I was told: ‘We think we’ve found Richard.’ My instant reaction was I didn’t know we’d lost a Richard. I completely failed to take in its significance.”
In the spring of 2013 the astonished world learned that Richard III had been identified “beyond reasonable doubt”, and Hobson was seconded to the cathedral staff to take up the challenge of creating a 21st-century ceremony for a medieval king. It was a job which suited his unflappable nature, practical mind and organisational ability, but which his work in inner city parishes in London and Manchester since his ordination in 1977 had done little to prepare him for.
“If we were going to do it – and despite all the arguments it was apparent from the start that it would be us doing it – we were going to do it properly,” he said. “The theme ‘with dignity and honour’ emerged quite early in the discussions.”
As the cathedral filled slightly beyond capacity on Thursday 26 March 2015, with royalty and civic dignitaries, including the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and Catholic cardinal Vincent Nichols and academics, few would have noticed Hobson, though he had swapped his usual jeans and fleece for full clerical garb. Also in attendance were descendants of those who fought on both sides at Bosworth, including an Australian nurse still astonished to learn of the connection, two medieval uniformed yeomen warders who arrived unexpectedly along with the governor of the Tower of London, and Benedict Cumberbatch reading a newly composed poem by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.
Few gave credit to the priest, whose official title, somewhat baffling to those outside clerical circles, was acting canon missioner. He described himself, more matter-of-factly, as “project manager for the reburial of a medieval king”.
“It was not a job that came with a how-to book,” Hobson said. “I wouldn’t use the phrase ‘making it up as we went along’, as that might sound disrespectful and we did take expert advice at every turn, but we certainly didn’t start out on this road with a clear map of where we were going.”
After the reburial ceremony the congregation scattered to lunches of varying grandeur, but another long day and night’s work awaited Hobson. For the ceremony, the former king’s coffin had only been lowered into the brick vault, not completely buried: the single gigantic block of Swaledale tombstone, was still to arrive at the cathedral overnight, and lowered into position to seal the grave. The completed tomb would be revealed for the first time to the public and press, at the week’s final ceremony the next day.
Somebody remembered to bring a few sandwiches into the cathedral as Hobson oversaw the complicated dress rehearsal for the final ceremony, which involved scores of actors, dancers and schoolchildren. As darkness fell, the work continued. It was impossible to get heavy lifting gear into the cathedral, so the three-tonne block of stone was brought through the south door by pulleys, rollers and muscle power, much as it would have been in medieval times. The job was finished at dawn, a few hours before the final ceremony.
Every aspect of the saga was attacked by somebody, and usually by many. The reburial itself was delayed for almost a year over a high court claim by very distant relatives of Richard – the king’s only legitimate child died in boyhood, and he left no direct descendants – that they should have been consulted over where he was buried. Rival claims for Westminster Abbey and York Minster were bitterly argued, and some queried whether a king described by one writer as “one of the worst of all English monarchs” should be afforded any honour at all. There was outrage in some quarters over the first tomb proposal for a plain inscribed floor slab and over the final strikingly modern block of sloped stone deeply slashed with a cross, and many queried the money spent on reordering the cathedral and the ceremonies: £2.5m for the cathedral, considerably more spent by the city and county, though it bought publicity beyond price.
Through it all Hobson grinned, shrugged, occasionally muttered a few unpriestly words, and cracked on.
In the end almost every aspect of the week won awards, from the joint media operation by the cathedral and university to the new visitor centre across the road encompassing the car park site and the elegant landscaping of the once scruffy space in front of the cathedral. Visitor numbers have increased tenfold to 210,000, and donations to what Hobson called “the second poorest cathedral in the country” to £70,000. The lead archaeologist, Richard Buckley, was awarded an OBE and Langley and historian John Ashdown-Hill MBEs..
By the Friday evening of that unforgettable week, most of the visitors and almost all the journalists had gone. Hundreds of local people were still queueing patiently to get into the cathedral, by then surrounded by a glittering golden collar of flames from the thousands of firepots which were lit as dusk gathered.
Hobson’s wife, Sue, joined him – he had scarcely seen her, his five children or his many grandchildren in weeks – and they walked through pathways of flames all around the narrow streets of the city centre, through the new gardens, past the white roses heaped on and under the statue of Richard.
“It was a magical moment, celebrating in the present and making a bridge to the the distant past. It was the first time I thought: ‘You know what, we’ve done a good thing here.’ It was a very good feeling. But life goes on – on to the next job.”
St Martin’s was never more than a big parish church, and only became a cathedral in the 1920s. It was seen as a temporary measure until a new cathedral was built in Leicester, but that never happened, so St Martin’s gradually filled with cluttered facilities for its new role. Hobson’s job now is to mastermind giving the remainder of the building a clarity, elegance, and usefulness to match the work preparing for Richard.
And his book, due out in spring, could prove invaluable to someone if the next royal body hunt, in the ruins of Reading Abbey, does turn up the remains of the 12th-century King Henry I.
