Josephine Tey. The Daughter of Time. 1951; New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.
Fans of BBC’s Inspector Morse TV show may recall one of the later episodes in which Morse was hospitalized. While abed in the hospital, Morse began reading up about a famous murder than took place in Oxford about a hundred and fifty years earlier. From his sickbed and with the help of a librarian, a police archivist, and his loyal associate Detective Lewis, he was able to solve the mystery.
The Daughter of Time is like that. Inspector Alan Grant, the detective in a number of Tey’s mystery novels, is bored stiff in bed until he begins reading about Richard III, Shakespeare’s notorious villain king.
In all fairness to the Bard, Shakespeare based his play the chronicles by Holinshed, who was not always the most diligent researcher. Without going into great detail, The Daughter of Time gives us the impression that most of the evil deeds attributed to King Richard were made up out of whole cloth.
Like the 2010 popular novel The Harbinger, The Daughter of Time is a research paper presented in novel form. Tey does an effective job of rehabilitating Richard’s reputation from Tudor propaganda. An axiom attributed to many people says that history is written by the victors. This novel illustrates that axiom well. No one apparently would gainsay the accepted history until after the last Tudor monarch.
Here are a few tantalizing pieces of information Tey shares; there are many others. Richard had nothing to do with declaring Edward IV’s children by Elizabeth Woodville illegitimate. John Tyrrel was promoted by Henry VII and was not tried for the death of the princes in the tower until 1502, seventeen years after the supposed date of the crime. Richard III as king was generous to the leaders of both factions of the War of the Roses and was seen by many as bringing the war to an end.
Most of the surviving stories of Richard—stories which Holinshed and Thomas More relied on—came from John Morton, a strong anti-Yorkist who would become the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Daughter of Time calls him “Richard’s bitterest enemy.” (95) Indeed, the single contemporary account of Richard’s death calls it a murder, not a death in battle.
The term Morton’s Fork, the British equivalent of “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” apparently originated with this Rev. Morton. He said that a man who appears poor is really just hoarding money and can be taxed while a man who lives extravagantly is clearly rich, so he can pay taxes, too.
Tey notes that Inspector Grant is not the first person to take a critical look at the received Richard III tradition. The first legally published was after the death of Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch. The most famous was author (and son of the Prime Minister) Horace Walpole.
I note that today there is a Richard III Society, and that those who are trying to rehabilitate his reputation are known as Ricardians. This year was significant for Ricardians because the bones from the king’s unmarked grave were reburied with honor in Leicester Cathedral. One note on the bones: Tey maintained that Richard was no hunchback, but he is portrayed as having one shoulder lower than the other. His bones indicated that he suffered from scoliosis—this can be transformed into a hunchback just as Henry IV’s psoriasis was transformed into leprosy with just a little exaggeration.
The Daughter of Time is a fascinating read. It is a lesson in history, even if it means going against Gandalf and John-Boy Walton as well as Shakespeare. And even if Shakespeare’s Richard III is pure fiction like Cymbeline or Titus Andronicus, it is a jolly good show.