If you had told me a week ago that my blog post today would be about King Richard III of England, I would have given you a look of disbelief. I probably had never given two minutes of thought to Richard III and if you asked me to tell you what I knew about him it would be limited to (1) Shakespeare wrote a play about him, (2) he was bad, bad, bad, and (3) they recently found his bones buried Jimmy Hoffa style under a parking lot or in a construction site or something. That’s it.

Today, I am still far from expert, but I know more than I did then (and probably more than I ever will again) because of my odd reading habit. I have such a strange way of deciding what book to read next. I pick a book at random, say to myself “this is the next one”, and start reading – unless the first few pages convince me otherwise, I will read to the end. I do not have what is typically called a plan.

A few days ago, I picked up a short book (I admit that short books do often win out over long books when I pull one off a shelf or from a pile) titled The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. I had no idea what it was about. I hadn’t heard of it. I didn’t know that Josephine Tey was a pseudonym for Elizabeth MacKintosh, who wrote plays and books under various names. I didn’t know it was about Richard III. And I didn’t know that the British Crime Writers’ Association in 1990 voted it the best crime novel of all time, or that the Mystery Writers of America had voted it the fourth best mystery novel of all times. I bet you didn’t know that, either.

The format is odd and original. Scotland Yard detective Alan Grant (presumably not related to my late friend Alan Grant) is laid up in bed following an embarrassing on the job injury, and is looking for something to wile away the hours. As a detective (by the way, he is the protagonist in several other Tey mysteries), he is an expert in face recognition. He discovers a portrait of Richard III and decides he does not look villainous, and with the help of some friends, including a young American who enjoys researching and has time to spare, he looks into the history of Richard III, one book at a time. Was he really as bad as they say?

Not that I remember ever seeing Shakespeare’s Richard III, but the King in the Bard’s play is demonic – he is hunchbacked, has a withered right arm, kills his two nephews to gain the throne after his brother, King Edward IV, unexpectedly dies, and is defeated by Henry VII in a battle in which he is willing to give away his kingdom for a horse, but is in fact killed. He died in his early 30s and reigned only about two years. He was the last of the Plantagenets, and Henry the first of the Tudors. It was the late 15th century.

But how much of that is accurate? What if the real Richard was not hunchbacked, and did not have a withered right arm? What if he was not at all demonic. What if he did not kill his two nephews (known as the “Boys in the Tower”, although they were not toddlers, but rather in their late teens)? What if he accepted the crown reluctantly? What if he was an all around good guy, and in fact that his largesse was one of the causes of his quick downfall? What if in fact it was the Tudors who were the bad guys? What if the history books got it all wrong, because it was the Tudors who wrote the history books?

Each character in the book has studied something about Richard III during their schooling, and the Richard III they have studied is much closer to Shakespeare’s Richard than to any alternative version of Richard. How did this come to be, if the real Richard was in fact so different from the Richard that is taught throughout the United Kingdom?

Today (2024), there is a lot of intellectual activity concentrated on discovering who Richard III really was. Spurred on by the discovery of his burial (proven apparently by DNA), the Richard III Society is trying hard to restore, if that’s the right word, his reputation. Reading The Daughter of Time would, one would think, make that a relatively easy task. The book is filled with citations to reference works that Grant and his American friend look at. Whether anyone has done a specific analysis of Tey’s book, I don’t know.

I guess what surprised me was that Tey’s book was published in 1951. That’s over 70 years ago, and well before most of what I have discovered to be the research conducted to find the real Richard. And the book intimates that these questions have been asked for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, the curricula in the British schools stuck to the picture of the bad, bad Richard, citing as a regular matters, books that were either written by Richard’s enemies, or written later, but based on those earlier writings. During the two years Richard was king, there appear to have been no contemporary writings on the subject, and – again according to Tey – it would not have been wise to write anything favorable about Richard III during the early Tudor days.

The “history” unraveled in The Daughter of Time is complex, some of it confusing to a novice like I am, and I am not laying it out here. You can look into it if you want. Let me give you just a hint – Alan Grant, in his bedside research, discovers that the early books were written by Richard’s enemies, that Richard really had no reason to kill his two nephews (one of whom was to have been the next King of England), but the Tudors did. And he carefully goes through the time lines, the fate of various historic characters, some of whom were clearly “survivors” and others “innocent victims”.

One last thing: fake news. Once again, fake news comes to the fore. The winner gets the spoils, yes, but also creates the history. Refuting that history is very, very difficult. Once the fake news spreads, it can affect generations. It ignores factual history and creates its own history, and its own made up history that sets the stage for the future.

Was Richard III a good guy or a bad guy? Obviously, I don’t really know, but – having read the book – for now, I will stand with him against those god-awful Tudors. You have to take a stand, you know. “Which side are you on?”

Digression: why did she call the book The Daughter of Time? That’s the real mystery.