AddThis SmartLayers

Daily spearheads campaign to have King buried in city

A newspaper’s campaign to have the remains of King Richard III buried in its local cathedral has reached its first milestone – just days after it was launched.

The Leicester Mercury has been backing an online government epetition supporting the city’s claim to be the rightful resting place of the King whose body was discovered under one of the council’s car parks in August last year.

It was orginally launched by Mercury reader Roy Shakespeare in response to a bid by campaigners in York to overturn plans to reinter Richard’s remains in Leicester Cathedral and bury him in the North Yorkshire city instead.

Around 12,000 people signed the petition in its first few weeks but the number of signatures soared past 20,000 in just a few days when the Local World paper threw its weight behind the campaign.Mercury editor Richard Bettsworth said: “We’ve seen how passionately people feel about keeping Richard in the city – he is a king of England and it would give Leicester fantastic kudos to have royalty buried at the cathedral.”

The online document still has some way to go before it equals a petition calling for the last Plantaganet king to be buried in York, which has 29,650 declarations of support.

But there are still three weeks to go before the Leicester petition ends and it only needs around 7,000 more people.

“Reaching 20,000 declarations of support is amazing – but we can do better. If every person who has signed finds one more to add their name, we’d double our total,” added Richard.

The Mercury has been calling for people in Leicester to show their support and a number of celebrities and businesses have also rallied to back the fight.

Editorial staff printed cut-out coupons for readers to sign and return and these were added to the paper version of the online petition.

A number of readers have also hit the streets to collect names for the campaign.