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Wrestling with a Fine Woman

Josephine Tey was a writer of detective stories during the classic era from the 1930s to the 1950s, when Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes and Dorothy Sayers were to the fore, when sleuths were gents, often displaying strong literary bents. Yet her most famous book, The Daughter of Time, published in 1951, is something of a sport, as much fact as fiction, as much to do with the fifteenth century as the 1950s. The Daughter of Time is Truth, according to the proverb on the title page, and the book is about who actually murdered the Princes in the Tower, the two male children of Edward IV. Josephine Tey had the brilliant idea of setting one of history’s great mysteries as a problem to be solved by her regular detective-hero, Alan Grant.

It could have been the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, what killed Napoleon on St Helena or whether the Tichborne Claimant was genuine, but her first great success, the play Richard of Bordeaux (1932, written under the name of Gordon Daviot, though Tey’s real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh and she hailed from Inverness), had already made her familiar with the medieval kings of England. It was a natural progression, therefore, from the reign of Richard II to that of Richard III, and she had in fact written an unperformed play about the latter in the mid-1940s. She had also prepared for her imaginative leap when she published The Franchise Affair in 1948, a modern detective story centred on a case of kidnapping and imprisonment, but in fact a retelling of a notorious real-life mid-eighteenth-century murder case. This had been a great success and was made into a film in 1950, so why not go the whole hog and not even bother to transpose events to the present?

Alan Grant lies, bored and frustrated, in his hospital bed, waiting for his brok

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Josephine Tey was a writer of detective stories during the classic era from the 1930s to the 1950s, when Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes and Dorothy Sayers were to the fore, when sleuths were gents, often displaying strong literary bents. Yet her most famous book, The Daughter of Time, published in 1951, is something of a sport, as much fact as fiction, as much to do with the fifteenth century as the 1950s. The Daughter of Time is Truth, according to the proverb on the title page, and the book is about who actually murdered the Princes in the Tower, the two male children of Edward IV. Josephine Tey had the brilliant idea of setting one of history’s great mysteries as a problem to be solved by her regular detective-hero, Alan Grant.

It could have been the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, what killed Napoleon on St Helena or whether the Tichborne Claimant was genuine, but her first great success, the play Richard of Bordeaux (1932, written under the name of Gordon Daviot, though Tey’s real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh and she hailed from Inverness), had already made her familiar with the medieval kings of England. It was a natural progression, therefore, from the reign of Richard II to that of Richard III, and she had in fact written an unperformed play about the latter in the mid-1940s. She had also prepared for her imaginative leap when she published The Franchise Affair in 1948, a modern detective story centred on a case of kidnapping and imprisonment, but in fact a retelling of a notorious real-life mid-eighteenth-century murder case. This had been a great success and was made into a film in 1950, so why not go the whole hog and not even bother to transpose events to the present? Alan Grant lies, bored and frustrated, in his hospital bed, waiting for his broken leg to mend. A friend, knowing his penchant for arriving at people’s characters from their faces, gives him some postcards from the National Portrait Gallery and suggests he might turn to a puzzle from the past to occupy his time. The card that pulls him up short is Richard III’s. This is not the face of Shakespeare’s arch-villain and infanticide, Grant is sure. He is soon asking his nurses and visitors for their reactions to the card and what they know about Richard – a clever device for giving the reader the outline and background of the story. The pile of books on later fifteenth-century England grows on his bedside table. Heaven forbid that we should imagine he comes to the matter with a preconception or prejudice based on his appraisal of that postcard. He is after all a police detective, trained in forensic science and the rules of evidence. However, he quickly accumulates what he sees as telling points in Richard’s favour: his reputation as a trustworthy and efficient deputy to his brother Edward IV; the untrustworthiness of Sir Thomas More’s early sixteenth-century biography of Richard (via Holinshed, Shakespeare’s main source); the fact that there were five sisters of the two Princes plus a boy and a girl cousin still alive; that if Richard had killed the boys, his sensible move would have been to proclaim that they had ‘died of a fever’ and have their bodies publicly displayed to prove their demise. And, above all, when Henry VII came to the throne after Richard’s defeat and death at Bosworth in 1485, why was there no mention of the murder of the Princes in the Bill of Attainder passed against Richard? And why was Richard’s Act proclaiming the offspring of Edward IV bastards repealed without being read and all copies of it destroyed? Grant is not a pioneer in his revisionist view of Richard. Attempts to rehabilitate the king began with Sir George Buck’s five-volume biography written shortly after the death of Elizabeth, the last Tudor monarch with a vested interest in keeping the reputation of the last Plantagenet black. Buck’s great-grandfather had been executed after the Battle of Bosworth for supporting Richard. Interest was kept alive when the bones of two children were uncovered in 1674 during works at the Tower of London. These were assumed to be the Princes’ and so were reinterred in an elegant urn designed by Christopher Wren and placed in a side chapel off Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey. Horace Walpole, as part of his enthusiastic if amateur rediscovery of the Middle Ages and all things gothick, published his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third in 1768. Both Edward Gibbon and the annual volumes of the Society of Antiquaries attacked his arguments in defence of Richard, but this did not deter the 16-year-old Jane Austen from writing her pert History of England under his influence in 1791. Calling herself ‘partial, prejudiced and ignorant’, and making play with the two impersonators of the Princes who came forward in Henry VII’s reign, she writes that,
It has indeed been confidently asserted that [Richard] killed two of his nephews, but it has also been declared that he did not kill his two nephews, which I am inclined to believe true, and if this is the case, it may also be affirmed that he did not kill his wife, for if Perkin Warbeck was really the Duke of York why might not Lambert Simnel be the widow of Richard?
The book used by Josephine Tey as a quarry for much of her argument appeared in 1906. It was a biography of Richard by one of those great panjandrum figures of late Victorian England, Sir Clements Markham, Secretary and then President of the Royal Geographical Society. His book also spawned the Fellowship of the White Boar, founded in 1928 and named after Richard’s personal badge. The Fellowship changed its name to the Richard III Society in the 1950s when it began its great period of growth, stimulated by Tey’s book and maybe in reaction to the film of Shakespeare’s Richard III with its bravura performance by Laurence Olivier (a performance only capped by Anthony Sher’s in 1988, when he turned himself into a monstrous scuttling six-legged spider with the aid of crutches and dangling sleeves). The secret behind the continuing fascination with Richard’s reputation is that there is, and almost certainly always will be, insufficient evidence to convict or acquit him of the Princes’ murder. And that evidence is finite and mostly in print. The story has poignancy and extreme evil, chivalric echoes and calculated brutality, and is positioned on the cusp between late medieval ‘Bastard Feudalism’ and Tudor ‘New Monarchy’. It allows us to savour, even if at one remove, the delights of historical research, likened by the seventeenth-century Lord Halifax to the pleasure of ‘wrestling with a fine woman’. This is also what makes The Daughter of Time compelling, this, and the feeling that we are party to the righting of a great wrong. The theme of false accusation and the fallibility of evidence is strong throughout Tey’s work, nowhere more so than here. There is hardly any action as such, the characterization is thin and, more than fifty years after its first appearance, it now comes across as a touch mannered, with some rather arch dialogue at times. This, though, is part of its charm: the book itself has become something of a period piece and entered the realms of history. If, however, one were a professional historian, one’s feeling towards it might not be entirely amiable. Tey’s tone, when speaking about historians through Alan Grant, is wonderfully supercilious: ‘They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation . . . Perhaps when you are grubbing about with tattered records you haven’t the time to learn about people.’ They might, like her, absolve Richard of any responsibility for the deaths of Henry VI or his son Edward of Lancaster, Richard’s brother the Duke of Clarence or Richard’s wife Ann Nevill. But they would not paint his life up to 1483, when he came to the throne, in the glowing colours used by Tey. Up until then he may have remained faithful to the Crown, but he also showed himself capable of violence, duplicity and self-promotion, while his military reputation is in some part unearned. His record when acquiring a great many of the estates of his late father-in-law, Warwick the Kingmaker, is one of unscrupulous greed, and he also seized land from the Countess of Oxford. Historians might concur over the amount of blood on the hands of both Edward IV and Henry VII, but none of it was that of innocent children. Whatever the apparent strength of the Ricardians’ stance over the murder of the Princes, it is not shared by most academics. For them, the Princes were murdered in 1483 and on Richard’s orders, not in 1485 by Henry VII or in any other year by anyone else. For the reader seduced by the magic of the book, there is much fascinating controversy in store, into which they can plunge. They can, for instance, weigh the merits of the Italian monk Dominic Mancini’s account written in 1483, The Occupation of the Throne of England by Richard III, passed over in silence by Tey, and of the contemporary Croyland Chronicle, dismissed by her as prejudiced. And what of the claim that Edward IV was not the son of the Duke of York? There is new evidence that the duke was not in Rouen with his wife Cicely Nevill at the time he was conceived in 1441, but on campaign at Pontoise. Cicely’s nephew, Warwick the Kingmaker, had claimed that Edward was a bastard in 1469 when he held Edward captive, and the claim was repeated in a sermon delivered at Paul’s Cross in London on 22 June 1483 by the Mayor of London’s brother, shortly before Richard was crowned. So the game goes on and the fascination continues. Only a few months ago the Lottery Fund promised £1 million towards finding the true site of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire. Josephine Tey would probably have approved; after all, she left virtually her whole estate to the National Trust on her death in 1952 and her writings have subsequently earned several hundred thousand pounds in royalties for that worthy heritage body.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Roger Hudson 2005


About the contributor

Roger Hudson has worked in publishing all his life, latterly compiling a number of books for the Folio Society. His modestly titled Hudson’s English History came out from Weidenfeld in 2005.

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