On Thursday, March 26th, nearly five hundred and thirty years after his death, King Richard III will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral. The discovery of the monarch’s remains after half a millennium was an improbable archeological feat, sparked in part by a writer named Philippa Langley, who was researching a screenplay about him. Langley, by her own account, was walking through an empty parking lot, when she felt a chill and decided that she was standing on Richard’s grave. She then spent years persuading a University of Leicester team to do the dig and a group of Ricardians—people convinced that Richard’s reputation has been unfairly maligned for centuries—to fund it. In 2012, archaeologists excavated a skeleton with spinal curvature and battle wounds near that spot in the parking lot. They concluded, eventually, that it was indeed Richard III.
But the quest to discover Richard’s skeleton, and perhaps redeem his reputation, has earlier and equally unlikely roots. Though writers and historians have been arguing since the seventeenth century that Richard III wasn’t the villain whom Shakespeare described, it was a 1951 mystery novel that sparked mass interest in Richard’s redemption. The writer went by the name Josephine Tey, and the novel was called “The Daughter of Time.”
Tey, whose real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, is herself something of a mystery. A teacher from Inverness, Scotland, she began publishing novels in 1929 under the name Gordon Daviot, the first of her pseudonyms. Daviot also wrote historical plays—her “Richard of Bordeaux” starred John Gielgud as Richard II—and she seems to have researched Richard III’s life first for a play called “Dickon,” sometime in the nineteen-forties. The subject offered her rich material: the debate about whether Richard had murdered his brother’s two sons, the famous Princes in the Tower (the Tower of London, that is, where the boys were living when they were last seen) had been ongoing for centuries. Tudor-era historians and writers insisted that Richard—named the boys’ regent after the death of their father, King Edward IV—had killed the princes in order to assume the throne. As new documents came to light, writers began to take Richard’s side, arguing that evidence against him was slim and that his motive for murder was unclear. “Dickon” was Tey’s first foray into the debate.
As an attempt to sway the public, though, the play was a failure: it was neither performed nor published during Tey’s lifetime. But even if it had been produced “Dickon” probably would not have drawn audiences to the Ricardian cause—it’s too confusing. Jennifer Morag Henderson, whose biography of Tey will be published this November, says, “If you didn’t know the controversy about the Princes in the Tower, it would be quite difficult to understand.”
But, with “The Daughter of Time,” Tey found an approach to the story that would make more sense to the uninitiated: she gave the mystery of Richard to a detective. The Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant first appeared in her 1929 novel, “The Man in the Queue,” and is the protagonist of five of Tey’s books. When “The Daughter of Time,” the fourth of these, begins, Grant is out of work with a broken leg—the result of “the absolute in humiliation,” a fall through a trap door during a chase. His active mind has exhausted the entertainment value of his hospital room by mapping the cracks on the ceiling and profiling his nurses, whom he dubs the Midget and the Amazon. He has no patience for the formulaic novels that people have sent him. To quiet his “prickles of boredom,” an actress friend brings him a collection of portraits attached to historical controversies: Grant, after years in the police force, has a fascination with faces. His eye catches on a portrait of Richard III, who has the reputation of a monster but the face, Grant thinks, of a judge. “Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist.”
For Grant, the question of whether a man with such a responsible face could be a murderer is irresistible. Without any training as a historian, he begins his investigation with a child’s history book borrowed from a nurse. He takes in the usual story of Richard III as nephew-killing villain. He then advances to denser secondary sources about Richard, his family, and the Princes in the Tower, learning about the secret marriage agreement the princes’ father had made, which, when discovered after the father’s death, rendered the sons illegitimate. (Richard, next in line for the throne after the princes, became king by an act of Parliament.) Finally, Grant works with a young researcher named Brent Carradine to read chronicles from Richard’s time and the Tudor era. He judges the tone of these chronicles, and the attitudes of the chroniclers, in a way—and to a degree—that a historian might not. “An aroma of back-stair gossip and servants’ spying came off the page,” Grant thinks while reading a history written by Sir Thomas More. “So that one’s sympathy tilted before one was aware of it.”
The investigation doubles as a research tutorial. Grant’s reading list, Henderson told me, probably mirrored Tey’s own research for the book, which she would have done at the British Library on trips from her home in Inverness. Tey’s sympathies were clearly with Richard: Grant cannot build a case for Richard’s guilt in the matter of the princes, and he has little patience for historians who have tried to do so. “They have no talent for the likeliness of any situation,” Grant tells his friend Marta Hallard, the actress who brought him Richard III’s portrait. “They see history like a peepshow, with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.” By the end of the novel, Grant and Carradine are convinced that it was Henry VII, Richard’s successor, who was responsible for the deaths of the two boys.
Carradine is dejected when, at the end of “The Daughter of Time,” he discovers that writers have been proclaiming Richard’s innocence for hundreds of years. He fears that there will be no room on the shelves for his addition. “It won’t be a great discovery!” he shouts, and Tey notes that he “said it in capitals. A Great Discovery.” Even so, “The Daughter of Time” accomplished what previous literary efforts on Richard III’s behalf had not: it made research seem romantic, even noble, and made the quest to clear a man’s name seem possible for anyone with a library card or willing friends. Grant, after all, spends the entire book in bed.
The novel was immediately popular when it first appeared, in 1951, and as its reach grew so did the pool of potential Ricardians. Tey’s dissection of received history prompted readers to question, as Grant does, everything they had been taught. This could feel like an awakening, as George Awdry describes in “The Richard III Society: The First Fifty Years,” an insider’s history of Ricardian efforts in the early-to-mid twentieth century. “It begins in the haphazard sort of way each of us can probably recognize as like his own experience,” Awdry writes. “Vague dissatisfaction with the official version, curiosity, kindling of intense interest, realization that one is convinced.” (This was my own experience as a thirteen-year-old—after devouring “The Daughter of Time,” I followed Grant’s route into biographies and chronicles, and then into an ever-broadening swath of history.)
At the end of the novel, Grant assures Carradine that he need not worry about a Great Discovery. “If you can’t be a pioneer what’s wrong with leading a crusade?” he says, adding, “There’s that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone.” Tey’s title, drawn from the saying that “truth is the daughter of time,” is a nod to this same idea—and her book did get the water flowing. It was the first in a wave of novels, plays, and biographies sympathetic to Richard that appeared in the fifties and sixties. (One of these, Paul Murray Kendall’s 1955 biography of the King, was the book through which Philippa Langley first encountered Richard III.) “The Daughter of Time” became a radio broadcast in 1952, and a subsequent series of letters about Richard’s reputation, published in the Radio Times_,_ introduced one “Daughter of Time” reader, Isolde Wigram, to a group of Ricardians who had formed their own organization in 1929. Wigram helped to reëstablish the group, now the Richard III Society, in its mission “to encourage and promote a more balanced view” of the King’s life and reputation. The group sponsored research that could reveal new details of Richard’s life. Half a century later, the members of the society were the Ricardians Langley called on to fund the Leicester excavation.
After archaeologists recovered Richard’s skeleton and extracted evidence for DNA analysis, they sent the skull to an anthropologist and an artist who could use it to reconstruct Richard III’s face. The result looked much like the surviving portraits of Richard III, the same ones that so compelled Grant in “The Daughter of Time.” He spends much of the novel staring at Richard’s portrait from his bed, asking every visitor’s opinion on it, ruminating on his research and what it tells him about that conscientious, worry-heavy face. I imagine he and Carradine doing the same with the 3-D reconstruction we have now, marvelling at the latest Great Discovery.
