Who Josephine Tey Really Was (and Richard III)

The Wall Street Journal published a review by Carl Rollyson of a new biography of Josephine Tey by Jennifer Morag Henderson. "Josephine Tey" was one of two pseudonyms of Elizabeth MacKintosh. She also used the nom-de-plume "Gordon Daviot" when writing for the stage. Her most famous book, The Daughter of Time, about King Richard III and the murder of the Princes in the Tower is featured prominently in the review:

Mention the name Josephine Tey to a reader of detective novels, and you may be told she is in the same class as Agatha Christie—although the novels of Tey (1896–1952) are nothing like her contemporary’s plot-driven whodunits. Mention her name to a historian, though, and you may get a discussion of one particular novel, “The Daughter of Time,” Tey’s exhilarating critique of the historical profession, which too often has relied on the words of the victorious, like those of Henry VII and his Tudor dynasty, which vilified Richard III. Never mind that Tey’s defense of the Yorkist ruler was almost certainly wrong; her brilliant dramatization of historical method led the British Crime Writers Association, in 1990, to select the 1951 book as the greatest mystery novel of all time.

Tey cared less about clues and puzzles than about characters and the parameters of human nature. The core of her achievement consists of six mysteries she wrote about detective Alan Grant—“The Man in the Queue” (1929), “A Shilling for Candles” (1936), “The Franchise Affair” (1948), “To Love and Be Wise” (1950), “The Daughter of Time” and “The Singing Sands" (1952). Grant is nothing like the hardboiled heroes of Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s novels, or like the gentleman sleuths that people theDorothy Sayers school. He is not an intellectual, but he is a profound skeptic. In “The Daughter of Time,” he takes one look at a portrait of Richard III and sees a complex human being who has been traduced by Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare. More, on whom Shakespeare relied, was simply passing on Tudor propaganda, as Grant learns after he employs an aggressive American researcher, Brent Carradine, who discovers a lively set of revisionist biographies rehabilitating the crookback king. What you get in Tey is a moving and profound exploration of human psychology, of what it means to be human, attuned to mankind’s troubles yet making the world a better place at great personal cost.

Rollyson goes on to summarize some of Henderson's achievements in this biography, which many thought couldn't be written because MacKintosh was so reclusive and private: she lived in Scotland, taking care of her father, while writing plays and novels.

In The New Yorker last year, during the Richard III reburial excitement, Sara Polsky interviewed Henderson for her article about how Tey's The Daughter of Time "sparked mass interest in Richard [III]’s redemption." Polsky notes that MacKintosh had researched the history of Richard III after her success with a play about Richard II (Richard of  Bordeaux) starring John Gielgud, and had written a play titled Dickon:

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.”

Alan Grant is pretty hard on Thomas More, even though he "was a martyr and a Great Mind" and rejects his The History of Richard III absolutely. Somehow, Grant and Tey both missed that More did not finish this book, nor publish it in his lifetime.

Monarchs as Monsters: Richard III and Henry VIII

From The Catholic Herald, comparing and contrasting Richard III and Henry VIII:

A car park in Leicester may be home to the last king of England to die in battle: Richard III. Last weekend archaeologists from the University of Leicester brought in heavy diggers to the city’s Greyfriars car park, which historians believe to be the site of the old Franciscan friary where the last Plantagenet was buried.

It’s an exciting time for fans of Richard III, of whom there are many, this king having societies all over the English-speaking world dedicated to softening his image. This is a little strange, considering that Gloucester was a usurper and probably had his young nephews, Edward V and his brother Richard, murdered in the Tower. . . .

Best of all for Ricardians, there came proof in 1973 that a “hunchback” had been drawn on to the famous painting in the National Portrait Gallery, no doubt part of the Tudor black propaganda. Certainly no contemporary account ever mentions any deformity, at a time when a disability would be the central feature of someone’s public persona. . . .

If Richard is rescued from a car park (a fate that has also befallen John Knox), the only questions are where he should be re-buried – would it be Westminster Abbey, where the majority of late medieval kings rest? – and whether this pious man would have a Catholic ceremony.

Even if Richard were responsible for the princes’ deaths he would be nothing like as big a villain as his great-nephew Henry VIII, who destroyed Greyfriars Abbey in Leicester in the worst episode of cultural vandalism in English history. Among the many jewels ruined was Battle Abbey, built by William the Conqueror during one of his brief spasms of guilt over the deaths of 7,000 men here in 1066.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries="the worst episode of cultural vandalism in English history": well put. The University of Leicester has a website with resources on "The Greyfriars Project". I've read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time at least twice; the book has a neat premise of Inspector Alan Grant in hospital with a broken leg investigating the crime of the murder of the Princes in the Tower. She almost persuaded me, but I didn't like her dissing of Thomas More. Here's a re-evaluation of her historical mystery, from washingtonpost.com.

The Battle of Bosworth Field Fought Again

It's the Plantagenets against the Tudors again: Richard III vs. Henry VII. This blog post from History Today sums up the debate pretty well.

The discovery of the remains of Richard III is an archaeological find of the highest importance and the University of Leicester richly deserves its moment of glory. Much less deserving is the Richard III Society, who, predictably, are proclaiming the find as vindication of their long campaign to rehabilitate their hero. It is nothing of the sort.

For years the Society has protested that the idea of Richard as a hunchback with one shoulder higher than the other was pure propaganda by the Tudors. We now see that the Tudor propagandists (and indeed Sir Laurence Olivier) were entirely right: Richard had severe distortion of the spine and a shoulder markedly higher than the other. Tudors 1; Ricardians nil.

The Society has long claimed that the famous portrait of Richard III in the National Portrait Gallery is a piece of wicked Tudor propaganda designed to make him look evil. The reconstruction of Richard's face from his skull shows that the portrait is in fact a remarkably good likeness. Tudors 2; Ricardians nil.

The Society is always claiming that Richard was a popular, much-loved King. The bones cannot be expected to prove this one way or the other, but the evidence of a knife thrust into his corpse's backside does not appear to suggest that Richard's passing was mourned by those on the scene: it contrasts sharply, for example, with the reverence with which Charles I's body was treated after his execution. Not conclusive, I grant you, but judging strictly on the evidence of the bones: Tudors 3; Ricardians nil. [I think this is rather weak: Richard III was killed on the field of battle with emotions running high; Charles I was beheaded in an orderly, public, "legal" execution.]

Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society said on seeing the face, "It doesn't look like the face of a tyrant. I'm sorry but it doesn't." Well, I'm sorry, but my first thought on seeing the face was that I have never seen such ruthlessness in a human face in my life. We'll call that one a draw.
History Today also provides a summary of Richard III's life and reign with this interesting conclusion (different author than above, of course):

Richard might have been an excellent king if he had won the battle of Bosworth. Victory in battle would have vindicated him in the eyes of many and delivered God’s favourable verdict on the usurpation. His intelligence, vigour and vision might well have delivered a period of good rule. Instead, he died ‘fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies’, within yards of his nemesis, Henry Tudor. We can never know whether Edward V might have been a strong ruler, but the likelihood is that a power struggle would have ensued and the spectre of civil war would have been raised again. Richard’s character, and the trajectory of power he had experienced, made subjection and obedience to those he considered his inferiors impossible. The usurpation guaranteed the preservation of strong central authority, but it was the Tudors who benefited from it. The Yorkist achievement, in making royal administration more accountable and effective, did survive Richard’s death, even if the dynasty itself was all but destroyed.

But there are more debates occasioned by the identification of Richard III's body: where should Richard III be buried: York or Leicester? (That seems to be settled.) With what service: Catholic or Anglican? Surely, Catholic, since that is what he was. And can we dig up the bones of the Princes in the Tower buried at Westminster Abbey to figure out who killed them: Richard III or Henry VII? No, says the Abbey. The reputations of Shakespeare and St. Thomas More are also up for debate, ala Josephine Tey.

Out of all this debate, I'd say the most constructive thing is that it proves how important history is, how essential the past is to today as the battle of Bosworth Field rages on. We are still examining the structures of power, of religion, of truth and propaganda in the 15th and 16th centuries in the 21st: we want to know what is good, true and beautiful in the past and in the present. Truth, goodness, and beauty matter. We want to find them and be able to proclaim them. May I suggest that we are currently looking at the wrong grave? We should be looking at the Empty Tomb and the Resurrection of the One, Jesus, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, in Whom Truth, Beauty and Goodness meet! Amen.

Saint Thomas More and the Princes in the Tower

My local PBS station is airing episodes of Lucy Worsley Investigates and I watched the first installment on the Princes in the Tower Sunday night. The Princes in the Tower are of course King Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, the sons of King Edward IV.

Saint Thomas More's History of King Richard III was rather important to her investigation of the mystery: did Richard III order their murder? did Thomas More have good reason to name the murderers? or did Henry VII murder the princes after he defeated Richard III on Bosworth Field? were the two Pretenders (Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck) really the Princes?

Partisans for and against Richard III offer their opinions and Worsley tries to find documentation and evidence about the mystery.

I don't want to give away her conclusions, except to say that she does not agree entirely with Josephine Tey!

But Travis Curtright provides us with free resources, should you want to read a student edition of More's Richard III and a study guide.

One of the vignettes of this episode included her visit to Buckfast Abbey to view the hair shirt of Saint Thomas More, displayed there for public veneration since 2016. She questioned the authenticity of this relic, and Abbot David Charleswell, who had escorted her to the side altar, provided some explanation, but this blog gives much more detail:

In the century after More’s death a few competing stories sprang up about the hair shirt, and these are what I’m trying to unpick at the moment. One tradition has it that More sent the hair shirt to his daughter, the extraordinarily learned Margaret More Roper (1505–1544), who gave it to her equally learned sister by adoption, Margaret Giggs Clement (1508–1570), who later went into exile with her family to practice her faith, reportedly taking the hair shirt and other More relic-objects with her. Other traditions hold that Thomas More sent it to Giggs rather than Roper, who kept it until her death. Still other traditions state that he sent it to Giggs, who gave it to Roper, who returned it to Giggs, while another source claims that he sent it to his wife Alice. In any case, the hair shirt ultimately passed to Giggs Clements’ youngest daughter, Prioress Margaret Clement (1539–1612), a nun of the English convent of St Monica’s, founded in Louvain during the period when it was illegal to practice Catholicism in England. The nuns of St Monica’s claim to be More’s spiritual heirs through Margaret Giggs and her daughter Margaret Clement.

The hair shirt remained in Prioress Clement’s community and the communities descended from St Monica’s up until the 1980s, by which time most of the exiled English convents had returned to England. When I first began my doctoral studies in 2010 the exact whereabouts of the hair shirt were not clear. I recently discovered that when the modern-day St Monica’s convent closed, the hair shirt went to the Diocese of Plymouth for safe keeping. In 2011 it was transferred to Buckfast at the request of Abbot David Charleswell who arranged for it to be put on public permanent display at Buckfast starting in 2016.

So this first episode of Lucy Worsley Investigates provides almost as much information about St. Thomas More as it does about Richard III and the Princes in the Tower! It's interesting, also, that she finds more evidence about St. Thomas More than she does about the mystery she investigates.

Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

Picture credit (Public Domain): The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower, 1483 by Sir John Everett Millais, 1878, part of the Royal Holloway picture collection. Edward V at right wears the garter of the Order of the Garter beneath his left knee.