Greg McKeown:
Welcome. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to see if we can’t understand more so that we can contribute more.
Have you ever felt an intuitive insight pull you toward a particular direction? Have you ever had an experience that you knew was right even though you didn’t yet have evidence to support it? Well, today is part one in a two-part series with Philippa Langley. You might not know that name, but perhaps you’ve heard of a movie that came out recently. It’s called The Lost King. It’s a dramatic representation of a true story about how Philippa felt an extraordinary desire to discover where King Richard III was buried. Her journey is fascinating. She is the real thing. Let’s get to it.
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Philippa, welcome to the podcast.
Philippa Langley:
Thank you for having me, Greg. Thank you.
Greg McKeown:
Let’s start from the beginning. What motivated you to embark on this search for King Richard?
Philippa Langley:
It actually began with a book, and it was by the American academic Paul Murray Kendall. And reading this book, it was a real surprise to me because I hadn’t studied Richard III at school, so I presumed that Shakespeare’s Richard III was who this man was. But what Murray Kendall did was he went back to the source material from Richard’s own lifetime and spoke about a very different kind of man, a man who was loyal, brave, devout, and just so it was a, A 180 from Shakespeare. And that fascinated me because I couldn’t understand why we always told Shakespeare’s version of Richard’s story and never his historical story.
Greg McKeown:
It seems to run like a golden thread through both your book about this journey and also the movie The Lost King, while on the surface, it is a journey about searching for his burial spot. And, of course, at some point, it’s about that. It seems to be also about this deeper subject of actually understanding him and helping other people to understand who King Richard really was. Can you speak to that?
Philippa Langley:
Yes. It’s about using research. It’s about using evidence-based information rather than, you know, we have two dramatic narratives. We have Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative and Thomas Moore’s dramatic narrative. But where I felt, and I was by this point, I was a member of the Richard III Society, which is, you know, it’s the leading organization in terms of knowledge about Richard III. We do believe that the basis for any discussion about Richard needs to come from the materials from his own lifetime and what we know from that. So, that was a good basis for me. That was a good start, if you like; in terms of doing any kind of research is go right back to sort of the moment to ground zero if you like.
Greg McKeown:
David McCullough, who recently passed away, is one of the celebrated historians in the United States, even though he wasn’t trained as a historian. And that’s part of the magic, I think, for him because he just didn’t know anything about any of the subjects he wrote about until he got curious, had a question that pulled him, and then went back to original sources to really learn what really happened. Not whatever, you know, people generally believe about the subject, but he had to have some sense of calling or some pull towards the subject, and that, I’m curious about that for you. I’m putting words in your mouth, so correct me, but it seems like you must have felt a particular pull, a particular call to do this. Is that true?
Philippa Langley:
I think that, yeah, there was a number of things; A, he lived in a period of history that I found fascinating. Anyway, it was a really interesting period of history. But also, there’s the getting to know this individual himself because so much happened during his lifetime. It was really fascinating for me to really lift the lid on that and to see what really went on. But I think you’re right. I think because I didn’t go through the official academic channels, I didn’t go through university to study to become a historian. So in a sense, I didn’t bring all of that baggage with me. I didn’t need to repeat what my professors had told me. And one of the things that young historians who get in touch with me, and it’s a very interesting point, is that they’re studying at university and in some of our leading institutions, and they will remain nameless. But for some historians who’ve been in touch with me, young historians say they are told to find new ways to say the same things. So I don’t agree with that. I think that you need to question. I think instead of repeating what went on in the past, you need to question, because by questioning and really doing a deep dive into a subject, this is when you’ll make discoveries.
Greg McKeown:
I want to come back to that point in a moment. For people that aren’t familiar with your story, can you just share what happened to you on this journey?
Philippa Langley:
Yeah, coming back to that last question you gave me, I would also like to add that I think reputation is important. Somebody’s reputation, whether they’re alive or dead, is, and I think it was the patron of the Richard III society, the current Duke of Gloucester. He said that reputation is worth fighting for. It’s esoteric, but it is worth fighting for. So I just wanted to drop that into your last question.
So quick overview is somebody who was researching Richard III interested in his life, then a sequence of events changed that research focus to then looking into his death and burial, which was a very difficult thing because there was a lot of mythology out there about the fact that the church was under buildings and a road so was inaccessible where Richard had been buried in this church, but also that his remains had been thrown into a river. So the grave was not there. But because of an intuitive experience that I had in the northern end of this car park, and then because of the research that I then did into what I could find out about what had happened to the church where Richard had been buried, put that all together. And that led to me wanting to go in search of Richard II’s grave. So it was the first-ever search for the lost grave of an anointed king of England.
Greg McKeown:
Hmm. Amazing.
Philippa Langley:
And it took eight years from beginning to end. It took me eight years.
Greg McKeown:
And when you say it took you eight years, that means for those, again, not familiar with the story that you did, in fact, find the grave of King Richard. There is, from my point of view, a most remarkable moment before, you know, tangibly his burial spot, you are standing over his burial spot, but it’s in a car park, and there’s no proof that’s where he is. But intuitively, you know, that’s the spot. Can you talk about that moment?
Philippa Langley:
Yeah. This was in 2004, and this is when I was researching Richard’s life, and I was walking around the large Greyfriars precinct area, which is where the former sort of Greyfriars used to be in medieval Leicester. And, of course, it’s all, but it is all now gone because of the disillusion of the monasteries. So this was a really large area, you know, probably five international football fields in the center of Leicester. And I walked into, well, I walked a lot of places, but I ended up walking into the northern end of this particular car park and by a Victorian red-bricked wall. I had this intuitive experience, and the only way I can describe it was it was a warm spring day, and I was freezing cold. I was covered in goosebumps. I was rolling with goosebumps, and it felt that I was walking on King Richard’s grave.
And I do know how unusual that sounds. So it was a wholly unexpected experience. I went home, told my friends and family about it, and remarkably they weren’t dismissive, and they said, look, maybe it means something. So the following year, I went back to the northern end of this car park because I wanted to check if it had been real, if that experience had been real. And I had the exact same experience in the exact same place. But this time, I saw a letter R on the tarmac, clearly for reserved parking. But that was the catalyst that, that was it. Then that’s what changed my research focus at that moment.
And the strange thing was, throughout this eight-year journey, every time, every single time I was in the northern end of that car park and near the letter R, I had that same intuitive experience. It never went away. And I think that was one of the reasons that compelled me to make the dig happen. That I just couldn’t let it go. And I think that together with the research, then I then did it. It gives you a laser focus on a very particular subject. And I think that laser focus was really interesting for me because I could see a lot of interesting research which suggested that the location of the church could be in the northern end of this car park. But I think what was equally important was I couldn’t find anything in all of the research I was looking into that challenged that view. So I couldn’t find a stopper, if you like, which said, you’re not in the right course; give it up.
Greg McKeown:
What do you think that intuition was?
Philippa Langley:
Good question. I don’t know. And I’ve had scientists who’ve been, you know, and I give talks, I’ve had scientists in the audience, and they have come up to me and said, you know, look, Philippa, we can see that you did your research. It was very logical, it was reasoned, but it all began with this intuition. And they said that you know, as scientists, we go down the logic, the reason route, and we follow the evidence. But sometimes, when you’re coming against a brick wall, sometimes we take a left turn, we take a new turn, and we do it purely on intuition. We think, okay, this isn’t leading anywhere. What if we try this, and it doesn’t make any logical sense, but we still do it. And they said, in many cases, once you take that step, that intuitive step, that’s when the discoveries come.
And I’ve asked a number of scientists, and a number of scientists are actually looking into what intuition is because it’s certainly something, I mean, we are sentient beings, and I think it’s important that A, we don’t ignore that fact, but B, that we use all the arsenal that you’ve got available to you. And if intuition is one of part of that arsenal with logic and reason, then I think my story is a powerful story for bringing all of those aspects together in one and not being frightened of or wary of the intuition side of things, but as to what it really is.
Well, we know with the discovery of Tutankhamun that was in that involved intuition, the discovery of Sutton Hoo by Edith Pretty, that involved intuition. Is it a thing? Maybe one day, our scientists will know more and can tell us more.
Greg McKeown:
What you are saying is, one, this is my story; this is what happened. So it is manifestly evidence in your own journey of discovery of King Richard’s grave. Number two, it’s given that it is a thing, and it did help it’s permission for other people to utilize it along with other capacities we would use for problem-finding and problem-solving. And I think if I’m hearing you right, there’s something under the surface like, this is underutilized, it’s underappreciated, it’s underemphasized, and yet it was absolutely critical for you in this journey because it was that that gave you, as you called it, the laser focus. It was that that gave you the courage, I suppose, to just keep pursuing that direction when other people wouldn’t have done it. Am I hearing you right?
Philippa Langley:
Yeah, absolutely. I think when you go back to, you know, when my journey started with this 2004, 2005, when I eventually got the tarmac cut in 2012, it was very different days then. And I think there was a lot of, you know, denigration for things like intuition. I think we’re changing. I think there’s been a shift, and I think people are now taking it more seriously and not dismissing it. And I think my story has probably helped that to some degree because I think when Richard was found and I told my story, I had huge abuse for it. I was, you know, deemed as a slightly unhinged emotional person who should never have got involved with a scientific project. But it’s very different now, I think. I think we’ve kind of turned a corner. And again, it’s what I said, it’s part of an arsenal. It’s something that is a benefit. I’ve certainly, it’s worked for me, and I continue, would continue to use intuition for sure. Definitely. In all my research.
Greg McKeown:
There’s two points there. The first, you just clarified something that when you first stood in that car park, that’s the very, very beginning of the journey. I didn’t realize that. So it was eight years after that moment that you actually did the dig there. So it wasn’t like halfway through or towards the end. It was close to the impetus of this journey that you were on.
Philippa Langley:
Yeah, it definitely was the impetus to search for Richard. I know in the film, they put it in the center of the movie because it works dramatically that way. But in real life, you know, in my book, that was the catalyst.
Greg McKeown:
The impetus moment. It’s an amazing clarification. And then now this other element that people really ridiculed, it ridiculed you for sharing that insight. Can you tell us more about that opposition that you felt to the feeling, to the intuition?
Philippa Langley:
Yeah. So I wrote a book about my search for Richard III, and when I was writing the book, I remember sitting there and thinking to myself, okay, do I make this public? Do I tell people about how it got underway? Am I going to be honest about the journey? And I thought, I have to be honest. I have to, this is my story, and I have to tell it come what may. But I did know that there was probably gonna be some form of backlash because when I was writing the book and expressed what I was telling the full story to my family, they were a bit wary of that. And my publisher was wary of that, too. But you know, I just had to do it. And I think now, with hindsight, I’m pleased that I did that. Yes, I did go through, you know, some of that abuse. But perhaps it’s helped.
Greg McKeown:
The book you’re referring to has now been republished with the launch of the movie, it’s called The Lost King: The Search for Richard III. Did you get the opposition after the book was published? Was there kickback about it at that time? Or was it just when you were telling people about it as you were trying to actually search for his grave?
Philippa Langley:
It was after the book was published because, in terms of the search for Richard’s grave, I didn’t tell anybody about what had happened to me in terms of the catalyst and the intuition really, really only told very close friends and family. Because I think one of the things you have to remember was I was going to specialists, a number of specialists, because I needed an archeological team. I needed people to do the DNA analysis. If we discovered Richard, and I’m not a doctor, I’m not a professor, I’m not a scientist, I’m not a specialist, I’m an ordinary person. So I think giving them that information would’ve probably have been deeply damaging to the process and to the potential of getting the project off the ground. But I think putting it in the book because, you know, I was working with scientists and a university, and then people sort of judge you on that basis. So I’m not a doctor, I’m not a professor, I’m an ordinary person, and therefore, I’m a bit of an oddity. You know, I’m a strange person who somehow got involved in this scientific project. So that’s how it was initially for me. For sure, it was.
Greg McKeown:
Well, you are describing, I think, a pretty serious cognitive bias and cultural bias because the fact, and I know something of what you speak, but the fact that you felt clearly that if you were to say it to the serious professors, to the serious academics, that they would not take you seriously, shows that you felt that bias just in the air, in the tone of the conversations that you were having. And then I know something of that moment when you are writing a book, and you pause in your telling of the story, and you say, really? Am I going to share this? Am I going to put this personal thing out there? I’ll never be able to take it back. Anyone will be able to read that this part of my private life will be available to anybody. And I suppose you must have had an intuitive moment about that most intuitive moment.
Philippa Langley:
Yes, I think so. I did. Well, I just felt it wouldn’t be right for me to not tell the full story.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. It would be intellectually dishonest to not tell about the intuitive part of your problem-solving journey.
Philippa Langley:
Yes. Yeah. Because then I couldn’t make any sense of why I was laser-focused on the northern end of that car park at the archeological dig. Because that was my hotspot. That’s where, you know, I wanted to know exactly what was going on in the northern end of this car park.
Greg McKeown:
You used an interesting word just then, you used the word hotspot. And why that’s interesting for me is because I’ve spent the last 25 years preparing to write a book that I’m writing right now, finally. And it’s about getting to the heart of the matter, getting to the very core of the right problem. And sometimes I have experienced that when I’m listening to someone, for example, and trying to get to the very, you know, that exact, well, what I call it is a red button that somehow amongst a lot of complexity, a mental diorama, you find that there’s something right down underneath the surface, hidden way down some little thing, a red button. And that’s the key to unlock everything else. And so for you to call that the hotspot, it just sounds exactly analogous to that red button that there’s something right underneath. No one can see it. It’s not obvious. But somehow, part through exploration, part through curiosity, and then part through intuition. You can identify something small, infinitesimally small, but as it turns out, infinitely important. Does this sound right to you?
Philippa Langley:
It does. It absolutely sounds right because by discovering Richard’s grave, we now have moved on exponentially in terms of knowledge about Richard and in terms of the research that’s being done about Richard, and certainly in interest in Richard as well. But also, you know, I think when I was looking at the research as to where the church was, there were 17th and 18th, and 19th-century accounts which confirmed that the priory, the Greyfriars priory was opposite St. Martin’s church in Leicester. And St. Martin’s church today is the cathedral, Leicester Cathedral. And directly opposite Leicester Cathedral was the northern end of this car park. So for me, when I was looking at this research, you know, churches were very, and still are, very important places and landmarks. And so for me, when they’re saying the Greyfriars priory is opposite St. Martin’s church, they’re not saying the kitchens or the orchard or, you know, whatever else there may be. They’re talking about the church. And again, that was that laser focus. Because I think everybody else until that point said, we don’t know where the church is because it just says priory. So it was that small, that very small difference that, for me, changed things.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. I didn’t really anticipate spending so much time asking you about that moment, although it was very much on my mind. But it’s like we can’t get away from it in the story. We can’t understand the journey you had at all without coming back again and again to that. Because even though it was all validated by your other research, you would not have tried to validate it without that first intuitive moment and that repeated intuitive moment, a sort of assurance that this is the place. This is exactly where it is again and again, something not obvious, something unseen that is assuring you, this is the right path, keep going, keep going towards this.
Philippa Langley:
Yeah, and I think at the dig, once the dig started and we cut the ground, it was being filmed; we had a documentary film crew there the whole time. And I had a mantra, which I kept saying all the time on screen and off screen, and it was church, road, church because they kept saying to me, why are you so focused in the northern end of this car park? Why, you know, is this where you need to know about? And that was what I would say all the time. I said, look, it looks like it’s church road church. That’s what I can see from my research.
Greg McKeown:
Were there people real-time pushing back against you doing the dig in that location?
Philippa Langley:
Yes, there were. It wasn’t so much the location. It was pretty much the dig per se because most of our leading historians had written before 2012 that Richard’s grave wasn’t there. Now he’d been thrown into the river Soar. So it was the bones in the river story. And strangely, it was also written on the exhumation license by the archeologist three days before we exhumed the remains in trench one. This story was so powerful and so believed that you know, any search for Richard’s grave just looked like an odd search because surely he was in the river. And I think in terms of the archeologists, when I expressed to them that I wanted to go in search of Richard’s grave, it wasn’t something they said. We don’t go in search of one particular thing. And I had to convince the lead archeologist, Richard Buckley, to come and do the archeology because he has a fascination with churches, medieval churches. So he felt he had comfort academically to go and search as a church rather than one particular thing, such as King Richard’s grave. So Richard went in search of the church. I went in search of Richard’s grave.
Greg McKeown:
You mentioned something a moment ago, and I wanted just to understand that better. Who wrote, what about where Richard’s bones were three days before the dig?
Philippa Langley:
Yeah. In order to be able to exhume human remains, you have to fill in what is called an exhumation license. The archeologists have to fill in an exhumation license. And on the first day of the dig, in the first hours of the dig, the very first find was lower leg bones beside the letter R in our first trench, it was the very first find. And so again, with my laser focus as the client, I wanted these remains to be exhumed. Even though at that point, the remains were not thought to be in the choir of the church where Richard was supposedly buried. They thought that it was a fryer and that he was in the nave of the church. So once I’d paid, asked for, instructed, and paid for exhumation, the archeologists then fill in this form, send it to our government, the Ministry of Justice, to say we want to exhume human remains. And they have to explain why they want to exhume them. And on the exhumation license, they expressed that it’s a dig for the Greyfriars church. But there is the potential to look for the lost grave of Richard III, which is highly unlikely that he will be here because his remains were thrown into the river. But we do want to exhume some remains.
Greg McKeown:
So they’re on literal record stating the dominant narrative of where Richard lay.
Philippa Langley:
Yeah. Yes. And understandably so because most of our leading historians had said that. So you could understand that.
Greg McKeown:
It’s an interesting narrative about a narrative that, once the narrative gets established, it can make any other narrative hard to explore or hold onto because everyone just believes the narrative they’ve been told, even without evidence. That’s just the story. Is there a lesson here for other people who are trying to solve problems and try to make their own discovery?
Philippa Langley:
Definitely. Question, question, question, question. And don’t stop questioning and question everything. Do not take anything as being evidence unless you can really support it, cross reference it and support it and say, okay, that does seem to be correct from what we can see from that. But where there is any form of unsurety or any form of, you see, because, with the bones in the river story, there was actually no evidence for it. It’d just been a story that had been repeated. So it needed to be questioned. And it was actually a historian called Dr. John Ashdown Hill who was the first person to really thoroughly question it. And so that’s what I’d say is you’ve got to be, again, it’s layers of focus on what we know and what we don’t know, and be very clear about what we don’t know. Remove assumption.
Greg McKeown:
The problem is, in my mind, with what you just said, is it comes back again to this idea of intuition and questioning because, without the intuition, you probably wouldn’t have questioned anything like as determinately as you did. So it’s interesting to think about, well, the role of that intuition in being able to then confidently question and to say, well, there’s no proof of that. You can’t prove until you could prove this intuition wrong. I’m going to keep going with the intuition, even though you weren’t saying that to people. So it’s interesting like we all have heard this idea, we’re supposed to ask questions in life, we’re supposed to challenge assumptions around us. But for you, it seems like the intuition gave you the permission, the courage, and the clarity of what to question. So before we get into how to ask those questions and how to make sure we’re not absorbing those stories, and it’s like they go together somehow, one begets the other.
Philippa Langley:
Yeah, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I think as an ordinary person who’s not an academic, who’s not a doctor, not a professor, it gave me the permission that I needed to question and question hard and to continue questioning and to ignore or put to one side what could be perceived as my elders and betters telling me that I should believe.
Greg McKeown:
The intuition authorized you.
Philippa Langley:
Yeah. Yes. That’s a good way of putting it. It gave me an inner confidence to continue and to not let because there were a lot of naysayers, there was a lot of difficulties that I had to get past. There were a lot of doors that got shut. So it, it gave me the confidence, but it gave me the ambition to know because I needed to know, I needed to know if, you know, the, the, the king’s grave was there. I think there’s a personal journey here with the intuition and the research and that which we’ve discussed. But I think also he’s one of a very few former kings of England who have or had no final resting place, no two monuments, no marker. And I think a huge part of this journey for me personally was that if we Richard, to rebury him with dignity and honor and to give him two monuments so that he would be recognized again as an individual, as a former head of state, as a king, as a monarch, but also as a, an incredibly brave man who died on the field of battle.
Because in terms of the re-burial document that we produced prior to cutting the tar mark, I’d gone to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is the organization here in the UK. And I think you have something similar there in America, which is responsible for reburying our war dead. Hmm. And they were so gracious and kind with me and said, Philippa, we will share with you under the strictest confidentiality the process that we go through when we find the remains of our fallen in battle and how we rebury them, how we honor them, how we do that. And so I followed that process in the re-burial document, giving Richard the same as that we give a fallen today. And because of that, because I’d given this document to Buckingham Palace, to the Queen’s office because of that, we got prior to cutting the tarmac, we got her blessing for the looking for Richard Project because of the respectful manner in which it was being done. So that was huge. That was another huge moment that, again, kept me going, kept me wanting to do this.
Greg McKeown:
Thank you. Really, thank you for listening to part one of this conversation with Philippa Langley. What has stood out to you? What is one thing that you can do immediately as a result of listening to this conversation? Who is somebody that you can share this with so that you can increase your influence and make it more effortless for you to take action?
If you haven’t already signed up for the 1 Minute Wednesday newsletter, I encourage you to do that. Just go to gregmckeown.com/1mw. If you haven’t subscribed to this podcast yet, subscribe to it. So the episodes will come to you every Tuesday and every Thursday. And for the first five people who write a review of this episode, you’ll receive free access to the Essentialism Academy. Go to gregmckeown.com/podcastpromo, and I’ll see you next time.
