15: The Daughter of Time

A book by Josephine Tey

Who was Edward V? Pose this question to anyone with only a patchy knowledge of English history (so most people) and the answer would likely be: “No idea.” A query about Edward IV would probably get a more positive response: “Wars of the Roses, right?” And Edward VI? Well, he was Henry VIII’s son, so obviously everyone knows who he was. But Edward V? Nothing.

Well, Edward V was Edward IV’s son and was King of England for 78 days in 1483. He and his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, are the Princes in the Tower, of being-killed-by-Richard-the-Third fame. Or so most school history books would have you believe. And Shakespeare for that matter. The Bard’s characterisation of Richard III as a deformed schemer who would stop at nothing to achieve his aims is largely responsible for his reputation as possibly England’s most evil monarch.

Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (first published in 1951 and voted in 1990 as the Crime Writers' Association’s No. 1 crime novel of all time) was the first time I’d ever been alerted to the idea Richard III might actually be history’s most misrepresented king.

The novel opens with Scotland Yard’s Inspector Alan Grant (a recurring Tey character) laid up in hospital with a broken leg and out of his mind with boredom. A friend, Marta Hallard, aware of Grant’s fascination with human faces, brings him a stack of portraits which have historical mysteries attached. He is most taken by a portrait of “a man dressed in the velvet cap and slashed doublet of the late fifteenth century” who he initially guesses may have been a judge. He is shocked when he turns the picture over to discover it is Richard III. “Crouch-back. The monster of nursery stories. The destroyer of innocence. A synonym for villainy…to have transferred a subject from the dock to the bench was a shocking piece of ineptitude.” But Grant believes that the man in the portrait (this portrait, if you’d like to make your own assessment) simply does not look like “one of the most notorious murderers of all time”. His inquiring mind leads him to investigate further, and with the help of American “woolly lamb” Brent Carradine, he attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery of who killed the Princes in the Tower.

Simply as a detective story, The Daughter of Time is great. It has many of the usual beats that would be expected of a murder mystery, but the suspects are all historical characters (and thus dead and uncross-examinable), the clues are all buried in history books, and the lead investigator is in a hospital bed. The conclusion Grant and Carradine come to is no less satisfying as a result, though, and the route they take in getting there is hugely entertaining.

And even once the final page is turned, the mystery persists. Because this is not alternative history. It is not a speculative what-if-Richard-the-Third-hadn’t-killed-the-Princes-in-the-Tower novel in the way Robert Harris’s Fatherland is a what-if-the-Nazis-had-won-the-war novel. The rehabilitation of Richard III has been going on for centuries (and continues apace with the work of The Richard III Society), and yet ninety-nine people out of a hundred likely still think of him as a murderous villain. Poor bloke. He almost certainly had his foibles, he was a Plantagenet after all. But he wasn’t the “poisonous bunchback'd toad” of Shakespeare. Or, indeed, an “abortive rooting hog”. That’s just plain mean. And just because Shakespeare wrote it, doesn't make it true, not least as he would have been eager to remain on the right side of Elizabeth I. To put it another way, in the words of French philosopher Pierre Bayle: "The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth." Richard III deserves a fair trial, Tey and Grant give it to him.