Truth is the daughter of time not of authority…(Francis Bacon)

When I was eight, the picture rail in my school classroom was decorated with the names of the kings and queens of England from William I to Elizabeth II. Perhaps the smallest entry on the picture rail was Richard III 1483-1485. I was immediately curious. Why only two years? My interest in the last Plantagenet king was kindled.

When I was about twelve, upon discovering this fascination, my English teacher told me that I should read Josephine Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time (1951). It was a revelation. It confirmed what I had always imagined: that Richard was not a murderous monster who killed his innocent nephews in cold blood, but actually a decent chap who was much more interested in improving the lives of ordinary folk. He was the victim of Tudor propaganda, set up to deflect attention away from their own insubstantial claim to the throne.

The Daughter of Time is a great book, partly because of the way it so successfully blends genres. It is first and foremost a crime novel. It contains all the major tropes of crime fiction and has repeatedly been voted the best crime novel of all time. This is the penultimate outing for Tey’s detective, Alan Grant, and certainly the most famous. Hospitalised after an injury sustained in the line of duty, Grant is a guest of the fledgling NHS for the whole book. This alone is illuminating. Bored, he becomes fascinated by a picture of Richard III. He sees ‘A judge? A soldier? A prince?... A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist.’ Not a murderer. Once he realises who the portrait represents, he sets about doing his job, solving the big historical crime of which Richard is accused, killing his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, determined to find him innocent.

Tey cheats at historical fiction. She never needs to build the medieval world of Richard’s Court, but we feel it nonetheless. Instead, Grant enlists the help of a young American researcher, Brent Carradine, to discover primary and secondary evidence, some real, like Thomas More’s vindictive history, some imagined, such as created works of fiction and conventional histories. The experienced scholar of the Ricardian era can identify the bias here. It is much more subtle than can be found in Shakespeare, but it is there, nonetheless. However, the case for the defence that Grant and Carradine construct is extremely persuasive and a real testament to the power of words, given that one protagonist never leaves his bed and the other has been dead for more than 450 years.

The Daughter of Time was a primary inspiration for The Solace of the Common People, decades after I first read it. It provides my epigraph:

Odd to think that if Richard had seen to it that Stanley went to the block like his much-loved Hastings he would have won the battle of Bosworth, there would never have been any Tudors, and the hunchbacked monster that appears in Tudor tradition would never have been invented. On his previous showing he would probably have had the best and most enlightened reign in history.

Just imagine…