Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.     

“THE DAUGHTER OF TIME” by “Josephine Tey” (first published 1951)

Often on this blog I write detailed accounts of a novel and then, at the end and as a footnote, I make some brief comments on film or television versions that have been made from the novel. Book precedes film or TV series. But this time I reverse the process. Film precedes book.

I am writing about Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel The Daughter of Time because some months back I saw, and enjoyed,  the film The Lost King. If you haven’t seen it, the film  concerns the amateur archaeologist Philippa Langley (played by Sally Hawkins) who was convinced that the corpse of King Richard III – who died at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 - lay buried under a car-park in Leicester. After facing much scepticism from professional archaeologists, the research she had done became more and more convincing until, in 2012, the University of Leicester helped to fund the exhumation of the body. They dug up the car-park and soon unearthed the skeleton of a medieval man who had one very slightly deformed shoulder (not exactly a hideous hunchback, as Richard III has often been depicted). After two years of testing the DNA of the bones, their antiquity and the bloodlines to which they belonged, it was determined that this really was the skeleton of Richard III. In 2014 Richard was interred, with great ceremony, in Leicester cathedral.

This is an outline of Philippa Langley’s story. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of every detail of the film. (Did Philippa Langley literally have visions of, and talk with, Richard III? I doubt it.) What is clear, however, is that Philippa Langley was a member of the Richard III Society, which was founded in 1924 with the purpose of rehabilitating Richard III and proving that he was a wise and capable king, and not the bloodthirsty monster and murderer of two young princes, as depicted in Shakespeare’s barn-storming play. The Richard III Society publishes a journal, The Ricardian, to advance their cause. They were far from the first to question the received image of Richard III. Back in 1906, the historian Clement Markham wrote a sympathetic biography of Richard III in which he point by point refuted the charges that had been made against the king.

But (drumroll here, please) we at last get to the core of this review. It was Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel The Daughter of Time  - partly inspired by Clement - that really popularised pro-Richard sentiment. It was a huge bestseller and it has been reprinted many times in the last 70 years. In 1955, only four years after the novel was published, Laurence Olivier produced and starred in his film version of Shakespeare’s Richard III, but he felt bound to include an opening statement saying that Shakespeare’s version of Richard was probably fiction, but it would be “dry matter indeed” if the film (and play) had stuck to the historical facts. I speculate that Olivier added this statement in awareness of what was already Tey’s widely-read book. 

A few words about “Josephine Tey” (1896-1952). She was a Scotswoman, her real name being Elizabeth Macintosh. She used two separate pseudonyms when she wrote plays and novels. As a playwright, she called herself “Gordon Daviot” and she scored a big hit in the early 1930s with her historical play Richard of Bordeaux, but it seems that most of her many other plays were flops. As a writer of detective stories, she called herself “Josephine Tey”. She was notoriously a very private person, never married and is not known to have had any intimate partner. She died of cancer when she was 55 and The Daughter of Time was her last detective story. Josephine Tey was one those women who dominated the writing of detective stories in Britain between the 1920s and the 1950s (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham etc.). Like the other “crime queens” of the time, she built her detective stories around an idealised version of a male police inspector or private sleuth. Only Agatha Christie sometimes had a female detective (in Miss Marple). Josephine Tey’s hero figure was Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, about whom she wrote six novels.

So at last to The Daughter of Time. (Don’t be impatient please. I felt bound to give you all this necessary back-story.) It is quite a short novel even as detective stories go. I first read it years ago when I was a teenager, and recently re-read it in the wake of seeing The Lost King. The title refers to the old idea, often articulated over the centuries, that in the end the truth will come out because truth is “the daughter of time”.

Plot (such as it is) goes thus : Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant is confined to hospital after sustaining an injury. He is bored. The books well-meaning people give to him to pass the time annoy him (Josephine Tey spends some paragraphs having fun ridiculing the type of genre novels that were popular in her day.) His good friend the actress Marta Hallard decides to cheer him up by bringing him something different. She brings him pictures of people from history and asks him to read the character of each, as Inspector Grant prides himself on being able to read people’s character by studying faces. One image he regards as benign turns out to be a painting of Richard III. Inspector Grant is astounded. Surely somebody with such a pleasing face could not be the evil, tyrannical murderer of the two young princes in the Tower as depicted in Bill Shakespeare’s play! He wants to look more closely into this case, at first reading various history books, noting their inconsistencies. Then he gets the help of a nice young American chap, Brent Carradine, who happens to be researching history in the British Museum. Carradine becomes Inspector Grant’s leg-man, ferreting out ancient documents from the time of the Plantagenets and the Tudors. Thus, bit by bit, they make the case for Richard III.

And that is the whole plot: a chap doing research and building up a theory from a hospital bed.  

The fun, of course, is in seeing how the case is made. At first Inspector Grant recalls Richard III as “Crouchback. The monster of Nursery stories. The destroyer of innocence. A synonym for villainy.” (Chapter 2) Then he begins to see how this image of the man was fabricated by the followers of the usurping Tudor, Henry VII. The supposedly authoritative first book about Richard III was said to be written by the illustrious Thomas More (Grant sometimes refers to him sarcastically as “the sainted More”). But More was only a very young child when Richard was killed, and was not an eyewitness to events. Thinks Grant “That More had a critical mind and an admirable integrity did not make his story acceptable evidence.” (Chapter 7). More was brought up in the house of Bishop John Morton (raised to Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry VII). Morton was an ally of Henry Tudor, helped him plot against Richard III, was a completely unreliable source and had a strong interest in depicting Richard III as a monster. (And it is likely that the book attributed to Thomas More was actually a copy of a book by Morton.)  In effect, the book was Tudor propaganda, designed to justify Henry VII’s taking the throne when, in fact, Henry had virtually no legitimate claim to the throne. (Josephine Tey give us some complex genealogical details to prove that there were many people with more legitimate claims to the throne than Henry.)

What was supposedly the most heinous of Richard III’s crimes, and the one that has been most publicised, was the murder in the Tower of the two young princes, the children of Edward IV. But when Henry VII took the throne, he presented to parliament an indictment of Richard’s crimes. Nowhere did the indictment mention the death of the two young princes which, if it had happened as Tudor propaganda said, would have been the main charge against Richard. The likelihood is that the two young princes died of natural causes. In the first years of his reign, Henry VII set about systematically eliminating (i.e. having executed) people of royal descent who had more claim to the throne than Henry himself had. He, rather than Richard, was the regicidal murderer.

Inspector Grant’s researches also point out the number of contemporary documents in which people lamented the death of Richard as the loss of a gracious and just king.

There is more to it than this, but these are the main points made by Inspector Grant’s researches.

The Daughter of Time is a diverting read, but its attraction is the working out of a puzzle. I am surprised that in 1990 it was voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writer’s Association, as the plot as such is so simple (and with a villain – Henry Tudor – so early identified). There are no real twists. Once Inspector Grant decides that Richard III was a good king, we simply have the evidence to prove it. On the whole I think Josephine Tey was right. Richard was maligned to suit Tudor propaganda purposes. We can’t really blame Bill Shakespeare for writing his lurid (and entertaining) version of Richard III. After all, the Tudors were still on the throne when he wrote his play, the negative view of Richard III was the only one available, and a jobbing playwright could be severely punished if he wrote something denigrating the ruling dynasty.

I have only three small quarrels to make with The Daughter of Time. Being written 70 years ago, it has a few of those outdated condescending assumptions about working people, as in the slightly caricatured staff of the hospital in which Inspector Grant is lying. I do not believe that Inspector Grant could intuit how good or bad somebody was merely by looking at a face. (Indeed I think of Bill Shakespeare’s line in Macbeth : “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”) And of course some of the genealogical explanations will try more people than this reader only.

            Be all that as may be, The Daughter of Time set the pattern for pro-Richard III novels, the most prominent probably being Rosemary Hawley Jarman’s 1971 novel We Speak No Treason.