KING RICHARD III
Before
After
The
latest news in medieval history appears on the front pages of our daily
newspapers so infrequently that I can hardly let pass without comment this
week’s truly sensational bulletin that a team of medieval archaeologists at the
University of Leicester in England have convincingly identified the skeletal
remains of King Richard III buried beneath a municipal parking lot. This is an extraordinary historical
discovery, and a stunning illustration of the powers of modern scholarly
methods to achieve results beyond the reach of earlier generations. So, let’s hear it for the Leicester
medievalists!
From
this medievalist what you will hear is his usual eccentric meditation, which
involves the vagaries of history and literature. In the first place I am deeply gratified, as an historian of
Franciscan culture, that the bones were found in conjunction with the
rediscovery of the actual foundations of the long obliterated Minorite friary
in Leicester. The neighborhood was
called “Gray Friars” from time immemorial, but nobody knew exactly where the buildings had been. Nothing can have been much more politically unpopular
than the mutilated body of a deposed monarch; but ever faithful in their
exercise of the “corporal works of mercy” (the last of which is the burial of
the dead) the friars at Leicester did not shrink from the task. So the Order of Friars Minor, too, deserves its “shout
out,” as the latest vulgarity puts it.
The
literary history of King Richard III
is yet more fascinating. Richard
died in the bloody finale of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Bosworth
Field on August 22, 1485. He was
the last of the Plantagenet monarchs of England. Henry Tudor, who defeated him and who ascended to the throne
as King Henry VII, though he had cobbled together a wobbly dynastic claim, was
actually a usurper. But history is
generally written by the winners, and the winners did a real number on poor old
Richard III. Some of the main
outlines of the Black Legend of King Richard had been sketched by his enemies
even in his lifetime. A physical
abnormality (curvature of the spine, or scoliosis), which left him with the
unflattering nickname “Crookback”, is glaringly evident in the skeletal
remains. But it was his supposed moral degeneracy that William
Shakespeare has made forever vivid.
Since
the Immortal Bard is, well, the Immortal Bard, it may seem churlish of me to
point out that he was also a Tudor propagandist. I say this without suggestion of censure. If you were not a Tudor propagandist in the reign of the Virgin Queen, you
would have been most foolhardy to write a play on an English historical
subject. Still, one of the most
salient features of Shakespeare’s Tragedy
of King Richard III is the gusto with which it incorporates the Tudor
libels about the unfortunate king.
Shakespeare has them all, and then adds a couple of his own
invention. From the popular point
of view Richard’s crowning crime was arranging the murder of his two juvenile
nephews, aged nine and twelve, in the tower of London. Famous actors have loved playing this role.
In addition to getting to utter an immortal line (“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a
horse!”) they have been able to vie one with another in what might be called an
Ugliness Pageant. Ordinarily
making fun of cripples has been regarded as poor form, but Shakespeare’s
treatment of the infanticide Crookback has given a plenary license to the
make-up artists to do their direst thing.
An authorized anthology of grotesques
Thing
is, Richard didn’t do it. That is the argument of a still
insufficiently known masterpiece of modern fiction, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951). This wonderful book has been called
“the greatest mystery story of all time”, and not by me but by the Crime Writers’ Association gathered
in solemn conclave in 1990.
Josephine Tey was the pseudonym of a very proper and unassuming Scottish
lady named Elizabeth Mackintosh.
She took her title from one of the pithier sayings of old Francis Bacon:
“Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.” I would say that you can take my word for it, but it seems
inappropriate to do so.
Like
many great detective writers Josephine Tey has a master detective who moves
from book to book: one Inspector Grant.
But true artistic genius usually combines honored tradition with
striking invention. Part of the
brilliance of The Daughter of Time is
its bold upending of the conventions of the detective novel. The classic detective novel ingeniously
reveals the guilt of a perpetrator who began the book enjoying the reader’s
natural assumption of innocence.
The Daughter of Time
ingeniously reveals the innocence of a man universally loathed as one of
history’s moral monsters. The
great detective must be a man of daring, whose bold initiatives in pursuing his
investigation land him in life-threatening scrapes—a minimum of three scrapes
per caper--in abandoned tunnels, spooky warehouses, and elevator shafts. Inspector Grant cracks the case of
Richard III while laid up in a hospital with a broken leg. The greatest physical danger faced by
his right hand man (an American graduate student!) is the risk of dropping a
heavy folio volume on his foot.
Ms. Tey’s book carries no such dangers, and if you haven’t read it, you
should read it soon.
