YORK has lost the second great battle of Bosworth: the battle about where King Richard III should be finally laid to rest.

Despite the discovery of a 529-year-old letter revealing the king apparently planned to be buried in York, it will be Leicester where he stays: the city in which he was unceremoniously buried in 1485, and equally unceremoniously dug up from beneath a car park more than 500 years later.

There remains huge interest in the last Plantagenet king.

But what about the man who killed him? No, not Henry Tudor – who became king in his place and founded the Tudor dynasty – but the man who actually dealt the killing blow at the Battle of Bosworth?

That man was a Welshman, according to tradition: one Rhys ap Thomas. We have the Welsh poet Guto’r Glyn to thank for knowing that, according to Susan Fern in her new book The Man Who Killed Richard III.

“Rhys killed the boar, destroyed his head,” goes a line in Glyn’s prose poem.

Destroyed his head seems about right. Richard died fighting manfully, and received many blows to the head, Fern writes: but that final, fatal blow, delivered by ap Thomas’ halberd, seems to have been delivered from above. The king by then had probably lost both his horse and his helmet, Fern writes.

Richard’s body was slung across a horse and taken into Leicester, “stark naked, despoiled and derided, with a felon’s halter about the neck”. As the horse carrying the fallen king’s body was led into Leicester across a bridge over the River Soar, Fern notes,”his head was carelessly battered against the stone parapet. For two days the body was kept on display in the house of the Grey Friars, then he was given a quick burial.”

And what of the man who killed him? Ap Thomas was knighted on the field of battle by a grateful Henry Tudor, now King Henry VII. The Welshman went on to become one of the great men of the land, becoming Lord of South Wales.

But his dynasty was short-lived, Fern notes. “The family fell from grace during the reign of henry’s son, Henry VIII. Like Richard, Rhys also ended his journey with the Grey Friars, but in his home town, Carmarthen. He had taken himself there to die – an act of remorse, perhaps, or an echo of a betrayal long ago on a battlefield in Leicestershire?”