Benedict Cumberbatch is related to Richard III, scientists say

Benedict Cumberbatch will pay tribute to his late second cousin 16 times removed when he reads a poem at the reburial of Richard III in Leicester Cathedral.

It is estimated that between one and 17 million people in the UK alone are related in some way to the Plantagenet king, but Cumberbatch’s kinship is much closer than most.

Kevin Schurer, a genealogist at the University of Leicester, has established that in the tangle of interrelated bloodlines of the Yorkists, Lancastrians and Tudors, Cumberbatch is linked to Richard several times, most directly through Richard’s mother, Cecily Neville, a daughter of one of the richest and most powerful families of the medieval kingdom.

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“In terms of number of generations, the shortest is via Richard’s mother Cecily Neville’s grandmother Joan Beaufort. He also has more indirect links to both Queen Elizabeth II and Lady Jane Grey through other ancestors in his tree,” Schurer said.

Schurer has also identified Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig as possibly the last direct descendants of Richard’s sister Anne of York, whose shared mitochondrial DNA helped identify Richard’s bones found under a car park in Leicester in August 2012.

At the reinterment on Thursday, to be presided over by the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and attended by Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Cumberbatch will read Richard, a new work by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, commissioned by the cathedral.

Duffy is unable to attend but has visited the cathedral and, 100 yards away, the car park site of the excavated grave, now enshrined in a stone pavilion in the visitor centre.

The 14-line poem, a meditation on the impact of the finding of Richard’s remains, includes the line “grant me the carving of my name” – fulfilled in the inscription on the coffin made by Richard’s 16^th great nephew, Ibsen, and the dark limestone surround of the great block of Swaledale stone that will become his tomb.

Cumberbatch is to play Richard III in the forthcoming BBC series The Hollow Crown, based on Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses plays.