Shadow Pasts by William D. Rubinstein

Author:William D. Rubinstein [Rubinstein, William D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, World
ISBN: 9781317870050
Google: 0HZ_BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-11T16:06:58+00:00

Chapter 5

Richard the Third and the Princes in the Tower

Did King Richard III murder the Princes in the Tower? This enduring puzzle has been termed ‘history’s greatest unsolved mystery’ and ‘the most famous mystery in the annals of England’.1 It is unarguably the most famous mystery involving English royalty, and owes some of its lasting renown to this fact. It is, moreover, still highly controversial and still able, after more than 500 years, to arouse considerable and even heated debate. ‘Richard III is still capable of arousing strong feelings, as anyone rash enough to give public lectures on him soon discovers’, the historian Rosemary Horrox wrote in 1989.2 Societies and periodicals, as well as the inevitable websites, continue to multiply, some to debate the mystery, some explicitly to defend Richard’s character. The mystery of Richard and the Princes does differ, however, from the other subjects considered in this work in a number of ways. Although Richard III’s life and reign are matters of historical record, it is fair to say that continuing popular interest in the fate of the Princes in the Tower derives from two works of fiction, Shakespeare’s celebrated play The Tragedy of Richard III, and, 460 years later, from an enormously popular English detective novel, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, which was published in 1951.3

Tey’s work came towards the end (perhaps after the end) of the golden age of the detective story in the first half of the twentieth century. Characteristically, a golden age mystery, normally a murder, is solved by a talented amateur detective (or, occasionally, a Scotland Yard man) based on clues and evidence fairly presented, eschewing excess violence, sexuality, psychological undertones, or espionage. It is genuinely surprising that The Daughter of Time appears to be the only classical detective novel of that era, and certainly by far the best known, that attempts to solve an actual historical mystery. Tey’s book remains widely and popularly known to this day: again and again, when I have mentioned to academic historians and others that I intend to discus Richard III and the Princes in the Tower in this book, I have been referred to The Daughter of Time, as if I were unaware of it. Many of those who have mentioned Tey’s novel to me have certainly not read it themselves, are often surprisingly rusty about the facts of Richard and the Princes, and know nothing or almost nothing about the non-fiction and academic literature on Richard III. Nor have they read any of Josephine Tey’s six other detective novels: such are the vagaries of fame.

In Tey’s book, her detective, Inspector Grant, recuperating in a hospital, sees a copy of the famous portrait of Richard III in the National Portrait Gallery and, through a mixture of boredom and growing fascination, tries to solve the case by employing researchers and reading many books. He concludes that Henry VII, not Richard, murdered the Princes. Tey’s information is apparently derived chiefly from Sir Clements R. Markham’s Richard III: His

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