I finished reading The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey about a month ago. In the novel, the author makes the case that it was not Richard III who murdered the two princes in the tower, but his successor, Henry VI. First of all, does the evidence “Tey” presents in the novel actually exist? Secondly, did The Daughter of Time make any headway into determining Richard III was innocent? Thirdly, is the conclusion reached by the novel now widely accepted? In the British lit class I just finished, we were taught that it was Richard III.
I am so hopelessly muddled on the subject. That, and I think it would be fun to watch people debate on the true murderer of the two princes.
I’m no expert in the subject, but my understanding is that Richard is generally accepted to be the culprit. I’d be suspicious of historical arguments laid out in a work of fiction, because if the author is any good, she’ll know to sacrifice historical accuracy for the sake of a stronger narrative.
Not my area of expertise, however, I think the average person believes that Richard III did have the princes murdered. This opinion is strengthened by Shakespeare’s play. You must remember that Shakespeare wrote in the 16th and 17th centuries and his information was taken from pro-Tudor sources, whilst the “murders” occured in the 15th century.
The ruling family at the time of the murders were the Yorks, who were overthrown during the War of the Roses by the Lancastrians/Tudors, who then went on to produce Elizabeth I. So of course any playright worth his salt and in an effort to keep his head attached to his shoulders would not condemn the current family in power.
There are many, many people who could be considered as suspects, among them, Margaret, mother the Henry VII. She would have had a very vested interest in seeing the princes killed. See here.
Had Richard or Henry had the princes murdered, what good would it serve to never publicly show their bodies? Richard had already declared the princes as bastards, children of an illegal marriage. What would be the point. The Duke of Buckingham and Margaret Beaufort (mother of Henry VII), however, would have much to gain.
There’s contemporary evidence that Richard III was a beloved king. He almost certainly was not the creature described by Shakespeare (Henry’s daughter was on the throne and the Tudors had a vested interest in vilifying Richard).
Most of the history written after Bosworth Field was written by the victors. The real threat to the Tudor king was Edward’s sons. The nephew of Richard he did keep alive was intellectually handicapped and he eventually was executed even so. IMO Henry had more motive to kill those boys than Richard did. No Yorkist was going to rally to the cause of the Woodvilles while Richard was alive and governing well. Kill Richard and those boys became the rallying point for the Yorkists. As part of the Tudor spin campaign, claim Richard did it.
We’ll never know the truth probably but Tey was not the first person to dispute Richard’s guilt. http://www.richardiii.net/
Briefly, the evidence clearly points to Richard as ordering the murder of the princes. He had everything to gain by their death – removing the Woodville faction from the equation. (Henry Tudor was irrelevant – an obscure prince living in France who wasn’t even the legitimate Lancastrian claimant.)
And Primaflora – Henry IV was not part of the Woodville faction, though they almost certainly supported him once Richard killed the princes. The cause of the Woodvilles was to keep Edward V on the throne; since he was the Yorkist heir, the two groups were in agreement. Richard was separate from the Yorkists, a faction unto himself.
Also, your argument makes no sense: Henry would have already been king in order to be in a position to murder the princes. Why would he need the support of the Woodville faction then? How would killing their beloved princes bring him their support? Why would he want the Yorkists ralling to the Woodvilles, anyway? He was a Lancastrian (sort of) and brought the Yorkists to his side by promising to marry Elizabeth of York (something that Richard tried to do, but was thwarted by the “ick” factor of an uncle marrying a neice).
The best evidence is Thomas More’s account. Richard apologists point out – rightly – that More was a Tudor apologist. What they ignore was that the account predicted the location of the princes’ bodies.
Under Charles II, renovations of the tower turned up two children’s skeletons in the precise location that More said the princes’ bodies were dumped. The skeletons were prepubescent – too young to determine whether they were male or female (the last exhumation was conducted in the 1930s, before DNA testing). They were also dressed in velvet.
Alison Weir has pointed out that velvet was unknown in England prior to Edward IV’s reign. So the bodies had to be dumped there after that time. There were only two pre-pubescents during that period who were in the Tower but never were found – the princes. In addition, More’s account mentioned that the two princes wrapped themselves in velvet blankets just before they were murdered.
Henry VII also had no motive to kill the princes. He reigned by right of conquest, not of blood. If the princes lived, it would not have invalidated his rule. In addition, Henry came to power two years after the princes were last seen alive. In that time, Edward would have aged from 12 to 14 – in other words, he would have reached puberty and at least one of the two corpses could have been identified as male. So they couldn’t have been killed under Henry’s reign.
In addition, Richard stopped paying the princes’ jailer in July of 1483, a good sign that there was no one alive to jail. And the princes were sighted during the early months of their captivity, but never after August of 1483.
Of course, Shakespeare overstated Richard’s villainy – he was impulsive and harsh, but didn’t seem to sceme his way to the throne (When he seized Edward V, it was clearly on the spur of the moment). The result is that people started saying, “He can’t really be that bad” and began to prove he was really a good guy. You see similar things in some quarters with Hitler; when you spend a lot of time vilifying a man, some people will inevitably begin to sympathize with him.
That’s not exactly true. Henry claimed the throne through his Beaufort mother. The Beauforts, as you know, were the descendents of John of Gaunt, through his mistress Katherine Swynford, and had been legitimized by Richard II, although barred from the secession. However, the Lancastarians were willing at that point, with the direct Lancastarian line dead, to accept Henry as heir.
Henry also, as you mentioned, sought to strengthen his claim by marriage to Elizabeth of York, (I thought the claims that Richard wanted to marry Elizabeth had been disproven, btw) and one of his first acts as king was to name her legitimate (more proof that the princes were dead by that point, because the act legitimizing her would have legitimized them as well).
Not that I think Henry killed the princes…he didn’t have much of an opportunity, but he did benefit from having them out of the way, from a dynastic sense. The current Ricardian villian is the Duke of Buckingham, I believe. (And they do make an interesting case for him) The thing that makes me wonder about Richard doing it is that the way he did it doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to kill them then announce “Woe is me! The poor princes choked on a chicken bone! Here are their dead bodies!” It doesn’t make sense to kill them quietly, bury them secretly and never talk about it. That way just leads to pretenders (and there were Yorkist pretenders claiming to be the princes during Henry VII’s reign, most notably Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simmel)
Of course Richard III is generally accepted to be the killer–that’s why I was surprised when I read the novel. Tey actually lays out a pretty convincing argument. In short, Richard III had no motive to kill the boys. When he died, they were still reported to be alive. When Henry’s regime wrote a list of grievances against Richard, double-regicide/infantcide was not one of them, although it would have been the essential bargaining chip. For another thing, why would Richard need to kill the boys? He had already ascended to the throne, and the boys were no threat, having been declared illegitimate. Henry VII had to reverse the act declaring the two princes illegitimate in order to marry their older sister, Elizabeth. As Captain Amazing said, this would cause Edward to be the new king, so Henry ordered that all copies of the act be destroyed.
Throughout The Daughter of Time, Tey uses the metaphor of the Tonypandy Massacre (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A701858) as an example of a historical event that has been vastly misconstued (the “massacre” consisted of one dead miner). Her point is that just because it is widely accepted, the historical evidence proves to the contrary. Most people base their views on Richard III through Shakespeare’s play, which, as ** Lyllyan** said, was written over a century after the fact using biased sources including St Thomas More’s history, which was actually not written by More.
Miller, I find it hard to believe (but not impossible) that Tey “sacrificed historical accuracy.” She simply chose to lay out the facts in the form of a mystery, rather than writing a non-fiction work that she would not be qualified to write. I have googled reviews, and although I have read some that disagree with casting Richard as an innocent, no one has disputed the historical facts.
This is rather interesting. I suppose I now need to read an anti-Richard account of the murders to balance things out a bit.
The Daughter of Time has a strange history. Ever since it appeared its fans - and even many critics - appear to treat it as if Tey actually did a feat of historical research and deduction to solve an ancient mystery. This is nonsense, of course. What happened was, IIRC, that historians had recently published works that laid out the case in Richard’s favor exactly as Tey recounted it, although these works were barely known by the general public. What Tey did was transform the academic histories into a mystery format, an armchair detective solving a real world case.
This was hardly a first, even then. Poe pioneered the genre with “The Mystery of Marie Roget” which purported to solve the real world case of Mary Cecilia Rogers. John Dickson Carr tried to solve The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey in 1936. And of course everybody and his sister has taken a stab at Jack the Ripper.
Tey was following in well-worn footprints. Personally, I found her book incredibly dry and dull and its continuing popularity incomprehensible.
You have to remember that The Daughter of Time was written as long ago as 1951. Even for historians, that’s forever ago. Historians, like everybody else, make their reputation by disproving the work of their colleagues and coming up with new theories of and conclusions about history. These fits of revisionism shake the field with striking regularity and the late 1940s were a particularly fertile time for it, since all of history appeared to have been turned upside down by the events of the previous half-century. A much needed revisionism took the accounts of the US Civil War away from southern historians about that time as well.
A half-century later, the world has been turned upside down again, and historians dismiss all the theories of their predecessors anew. As far as I know, the weight of opinion has swung back to Richard being the villain (or inspiring someone to do it in his name). I would hope any good teacher would use the latest research, so it’s not surprising that Lisa-go-Blind’s professor said that Richard did it. The professor would be a hopeless incompetent to rely on what Tey wrote.
Ah, thanks Exapno Mapcase! This is exactly what I was looking for. I’m still completely muddled and confused. I suppose the best thing would be to consider it an unsolved mystery and enjoy it on that level.
Well, being declared illegitimate reduced the threat, but it didn’t eliminate it. The whole declaration that they were illegitimate was pretty shady anyhow, based on a secret plight-trough and secret confessions, and probably was just made up. At any rate, a declaration of illegitimacy could be reversed. What made the boys a threat was the presence of the Woodville faction, which wanted to see Edward on the throne. It’s true that threat to Richard was reduced by his executions of Earl Rivers, Thomas Grey, and Lord Hastings, but it wasn’t eliminated. (As a side-note, I personally thing Earl Rivers was the most interesting figure of the Wars.)
I haven’t read this particuar book, mostly because I didn’t know it exists, but it’s not the only one that paints Richard III in a fairer light than Shakespeare. Sharon Kay Penman’s book Sunne in Splendor purports to use source material that points an accusing finger away from him, at least as the actual murderer (whether he knew what was going to happen is another question).
Well, in The Sunne in Splendor, Richard is pure as the driven snow. That’s one of the problems I have with a lot of the Ricardians. They’re not content to argue just that Richard didn’t kill the princes, in support of which they do bring up some good, or at least debatable points, but a lot of them also set Richard up as a paragon of virtue…the only honorable man in the Wars of the Roses.
Isn’t it suspicious that Morton had so much info about the specifics of the crime? Where would he get the information? The fact that he got so much right could be considered evidence that he knew the murders and took part in a conspiracy.
He seemed motivated to kill many of their close relations. Why would he be any less motivated to kill them?
First of all, it’s More, not Morton. Second, More’s account was drawn from an interview with someone who claimed to have been present when the princes were killed. Since the account predicted the location of the bodies and the fact they were dressed in velvet, it indicates that the informant was telling the truth.
It was hardly likely More was part of any great conspiracy; he was seven years old when Henry came to the throne.
However, if – as you admit – he got “so much right” about the location of the bodies, it gets Henry off the hook. Remember, the bodies – which you seem to agree are those of the princes – were prepubescent. Edward was a few months short of his 13th birthday in August of 1483 (about the last time he was seen alive). He was a few months short of 15 in August of 1485, when Henry took over. If Henry had killed him, and if the bodies are those of the princes (which you seem to admit), then one of them would have shown signs of puberty. QED, Henry couldn’t have killed them.
Other than Richard, who? And by the time Henry was in any position to kill any hypothetical princes, he was recognized as king and didn’t have to. Even the Woodvilles supported his rule – they weren’t likely to do so if the princes were alive, and they were even less likely had he murdered them.
This is true; Henry had a claim through the Beauforts (and actually a claim to the king of France through his grandmother, Henry V’s widow).
However, he wasn’t actually the true Lancastrian claimant. At the time Henry became king, that was Joao II of Portugal, who could claim direct descent from John of Gaunt through his daughter Philippa. Philippa was the daughter of Gaunt’s first wife, whereas the Beauforts were descendants of Gaunt’s third wife.
John of Gaunt had three children with his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster. One son was Henry IV, but his line was snuffed out when Henry VI’s son, Edward, was killed (incidentally, Richard III visited the Tower the night Henry VI was murdered). The second was through Philippa. There was also a daughter Elizabeth; I don’t know if that line continued. If it had, it would have mean more people ahead of Henry.
John of Gaunt’s second wife gave him a daughter, Catherine, who married the King of Castille; which meant that Queen Isabella (yes, that Isabella) had a stronger claim on the throne than Henry.
In order to avoid a messy situation, Henry VII mentioned his Lancastrian connections and married a member of the House of York, but claimed his right of kingship because he had whipped Richard’s ass.
As Captain Amazing pointed out, that declaration did not have much force, and it was further undermined by the fact that Richard had previous declared that he was legitimate because his brother Edward IV was a bastard. He withdrew that claim (which pissed off Richard’s mother, who didn’t particularly like being called a whore) and then came up with another story.
No one really believed the princes were illegitmate, but as long as Richard brought peace and had an heir (his son Edward), most were willing to let Richard be king. It was when Edward died that Richard began to lose support, since there was fear that without an heir, the country would be plunged back into civil war.
BTW, the claim that Richard was planning to marry his neice may be disputed by historians nowadays, but it was widely believed in Richard’s day – so much so that the issued a proclamation denying it was his intention.
Richard’s major opposition was the Woodville faction (for those without a scorecard, relatives of Edward IV’s wife). They were commoners whose only connection to the throne was the princes. Kill the princes, and the Woodville faction has no claim.
Finally, remember that in 1483, Henry Tudor was just an obscure nobleman living in France. No one at the time would have considered him a threat to the throne.
Actually, it did. Elizabeth was married three times, but only had any children with her second husband, John Holland, Richard II’s half brother and Duke of Exter. Through her daughter Constance, she was the grandmother of Edmund Grey, earl of Kent (and Edward IV’s Chancellor), and through her son, grandmother of Henry Holland, Earl of Exter (who commanded Warwick’s left flank at Barnet)
Also, I wouldn’t go that far. Edward IV had tried to have him killed a few years previous, and Louis XI tried to take him into custody to use him against England. He also became a centerpoint for Lancastarian hopes in exile.
Actually, Sir Prize is correct here. As I already mentioned, it was actually not written by More. It is called the More manuscript because a copy of it was found among his belongings after his death. The actual author was a guy named Morton, who was employed in some form by the royals and had a serious grudge against Richard.
A minor complaint: the fourth quote in your last reply was stated by me, not Sir Prize.
Well, no, even though it wasn’t published until after More’s death, the authorship of “The History of King Richard III” is pretty generally attributed to him. More was in Bishop Morton’s household for a time, and might have used him as a source for the work, but I don’t know anyone who seriously claims that Bishop Morton wrote the History.
It’s debatable as to which gentleman is the actual author. The young More lived in Morton’s household. While More physically wrote the unfinished manuscript, scholars seem to be split as to who created it. There are those who believe that the style of the document indicates that More is the author (basing it on Morton’s story, of course). But there are those who champion Morton, saying that wee Thomas only copied Morton’s writings.
