THE government is being asked to help fund tests that could solve a 600-year-old mystery surrounding the disappearance and death of an English king. Remains have been found near the high altar at a former Dominican friary in Stirling that could be those of King Richard II. Yesterday Central Croydon Conservative MP Andrew Pelling appealed for government help to verify the remains.

King Richard, who quelled the Peasants' Revolt as a boy king in 1381, was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. Officially, he starved to death in Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire in 1400 and was eventually laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. But it is also believed that he escaped his captors and fled to Scotland and died in Stirling, where he was buried at Blackfriars.

"He crushed the Peasants' Revolt, built up a group of unpopular favourites, arrested, imprisoned and executed the people he worked with, or banished them and confiscated their estates. It sounds a little like a Conservative Party selection meeting."