Anyone who knows me would not accuse me of doting on a king.
‘Royalist’ is not the term that comes to mine when people think of me. It may
therefore come as a surprise that I found this book by Josephine Tey so
compelling a read. I think it must be the historian in me. I just like a good ‘review
of the evidence’ and evaluation.
The Daughter of Time looks at the way history has remembered
King Richard III, and investigates the justification for this. This task is
performed by a policeman who is whiling away his time recovering in hospital.
Inspector Alan Grant
of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary
portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of
history. Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world’s
most heinous villains – a venomous hunchback to may have killed his brother’s
children to make his crown secure? Or could Richard have been the victim,
turned into a monster by the usurpers of England’s throne? Grant determines to
find out once and for all, with the help of the British Museum and an American scholar,
what kind of man Richard Plantagenet really
was and who killed the Princes in the Tower.
