Digging for Richard III

I am a Yorkist. In my garden, I prefer red roses to white ones, but when it comes to the War of the Roses, I wear a white rose. When I was in York in 2017, after finishing my Hadrian's Wall trek, I got a pair of white rose earrings in the York Minster gift shop and I wear them a couple of times a week.

So, when my sister gave me her copy of Digging for Richard III: The Search for the Lost King, by Mike Pitts, I dropped everything and read it. Of course, I already knew the story of how the Richard III Society, with Philippa Langley leading the charge, commissioned the University of Leicester to help them search for the grave of Richard. What I didn't know was that the archeologists at UofL were focused on excavating the Greyfriars friary church, which was demolished during the reign of Henry VIII, and that finding Richard's grave was considered the longest of long shots.

In addition to reading about RIII and the War of the Roses and the Tudor propaganda machine, I absolutely loved reading about how the archeologists approached their task, the techniques and methodology, the scholarship involved, and the practical, financial realities of a project like this. This book very much tells the story of the discovery of RIII's remains from the point of view of the archeology team rather than the RIII Society, which is fine because Philippa Langley's movie about the project does the opposite. It's good to hear both sides of a story like this.

Next trip to the UK will definitely include a stop in Leicester so that I can visit the King Richard III Visitor Centre and the Leicester Cathedral, where RIII was reburied in March, 2015. In the meantime, I will content myself with rereading Sharon Kay Penman's fabulous Sunne in Splendour and Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time. I may even rewatch The White Queen, but you won't catch me sitting through another production of Shakespeare's The Life and Death of Richard III.

FutureLearn: Shakespeare and His World

A few days before my May road trip I finished a 10-week FutureLearn online course, "Shakespeare and His World," taught by Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick) and featuring objects owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

I absolutely loved it! The idea was to study one play each week and Professor Bateman delivers mini-lectures (between 3 and 12 minutes) on different facets of the play that illuminated life in Shakespeare's time and world.  The plays we studied were:

• The Merry Wives of Windsor  - focus was on Shakespeare's Stratford (Falstaff's Windsor was remarkably similar)
• A Midsummer's Night Dream - focus was on the birth of theatre, the origins of popular theatre and the rise of professional theatre
• Henry V - focus was on Shakespeare's understanding of a world at war--fighting with the French in the 15th century had some parallels to fighting with Spain and the campaigns in Ireland in the late 16th century.
• The Merchant of Venice - Venice in the play mirrors London during Shakespeare's day from a monetary and commerical point of view
• Macbeth - An introduction to old and new strands of thought; witchcraft debates, herbal medicines and new ideas about psychology.
• Othello - Focus was on the links Shakespeare makes between Christendom and the Islamic world. 
• Anthony and Cleopatra - In-depth discussion of how the classical world and culture permeated thought and ideals of the Elizabethan world.
• The Tempest -Focus was on travel exploration, other cultures and origins of empire. 

At the conclusion of every week, there was an online test, which I found a bit tricky at times.  You really did have to pay attention to the lectures.  The good news is that you got three tries at each answer, with 3 points for getting it correct on the first try, 2 points on the second try, and 1 point on the third try.  I only got 100% one week, but passed all the tests.  I didn't opt for the certificate of completion--having it shipped to the U.S. would have made the already-pricey piece of paper ridiculously expensive, but I wouldn't mind have an badge to add to my website (hint, hint).

While I had read all of the plays before the course and studied some of them in high school and college and seen all but Anthony and Cleopatra on the stage at least once, I learned such an incredible amount about each one and have much greater appreciation for the depth of the individual plays and renewed amazement at the gift we have in the collected works.  Professor Bate is an excellent instructor--his knowledge and demeanor (i.e., scholarly enthusiasm) was perfect for me.

The next course I'm taking--it starts June 30--is "England in the Time of Richard the Third."  Here's the blurb:

Explore 15th century England through archaeology, history and literature against the backdrop of the excavation of Richard III.

Sounds fantastic, right?

Sunne in Splendour

Way back in the Dark Ages when I was in college, I took an English history class in which we read and discussed To Prove a Villain: The Case of King Richard the Third.  Sadly, I lost this book in the great basement flood that stole most of my college textbooks, so I haven't reread it in years but I remember the revelation that propaganda wasn't a modern invention and victors rewrite history.

In 2010 I finally got around to reading Josephine Tey's marvelous detective story, The Daughter of Time, and at the end of 2012 slowly read Sharon Kay Penman's outstanding novel, The Sunne in Splendour. I read it slowly partly because I initially was following a read-a-long schedule from another blogger, and partly because I loved it so much that I wanted to stay in the fictional world Penman created and hang out with Dickon, Anne, Ned, and the rest of the characters for as long as possible.

The Sunne in Splendour tells the story of the War of the Roses, wherein the House of York and the House of Lancaster slaughter each other for thirty years, fighting for control of England (1455 to 1485, or Richard II to Richard III with Henrys IV, V, and VI and Edward IV and V in between).  There's no question that the world depicted in Sunne in Splendour is brutal, but the story told in the novel is warm and bright.

I consider The Sunne in Splendour to be one of the high water marks in historical fiction. Although the story flies in the face of the myth-made-fact "truths" about Richard III, as perpetuated by Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare in particular, I never found myself questioning the historical basis of the novel as I do with other lesser forms of the genre (e.g., sub in "Phillipa Gregory" here).  From the speech patterns to the clothes, food, armour, lodgings, daily rituals, and kingly accoutrements, the world and characters of Sunne in Splendour always feel right and whole and consistent. I'm no expert on Renaissance England, but I don't doubt that Penman gets it right, and as a lover of history as well as novels, this is important to me.

With regards to the story, there's so much to love--Richard as a young boy, idolizing his older brothers, championing his younger cousins, including Anne Neville, the girl who turns out to be his soulmate and helpmate, friend and lover.  I loved seeing him amongst his family, many of whom turned out to be difficult to love, but who earned his loyalty.

I can't really do justice to this wonderful novel--it's well-written, engaging, touching, and authentic.  A hearty thumbs up with a plan to reread before too long.  But first, I have to check some of Penman's other novels--she's too good not to become one of my favorites!

The Daughter of Time

For years people have been recommending Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, and this summer I finally made it a priority to read it. What took me so long? It clocks in at just 205 pages, and is easy to read and utterly fascinating. Published in 1951, the premise would even be novel today.

Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is recuperating in the hospital following a nasty mishap on a case and is bored out of his skull. A friend, who knows that Alan prides himself on being an excellent judge of faces, brings him a collection of famous portraits to while away the hours. One of the portraits, unbeknownst to Alan, is of Richard III, one of history’s most infamous villains. Alan sees suffering, nobility and compassion in the face and is astounded to discover that the picture is of Crookedbacked Richard, the murderer of his nephews, the “Princes in the Tower,” and usurper of their throne.



Alan then starts reading up on RIII, beginning with children’s history books, advancing to other fictional and non-fictional accounts, and finally enlisting the aid of a student who follows up leads and tracks down original source material. What Alan and his accomplice, Brent Carradine, uncover is that Henry Tudor, aka Henry VII, is the real villain of the story, basically doing all the dastardly deeds and then creating the propaganda machine to blame them on RIII.

Back in the dark ages of my college years, I did a paper on RIII in which I explored the evidence against him, and came to pretty much the same conclusion that Alan Grant did. Josephine Tey, however, picked an absolutely perfect way to present her exoneration of RIII. I loved the murder mystery aspect of The Daughter of Time, with Grant applying 1950’s Scotland Yard detective techniques to a 500 year old mystery.

While the key element of danger to the detective was missing from this murder mystery, I found the book absolutely satisfying. I liked Alan Grant’s character as it unfolded; I loved reading about how HVII hoodwinked historians in both his own time and for centuries later; and I liked the theme of how resistant society is to rejecting age old “facts” even when they are thoroughly refuted. I also really enjoyed the novel within a novel angle (i.e., Brent Carradine, Grant’s researcher at the British Museum, decided to write a novel about what he and Grant discovered about RIII and HVII).

Here’s what Carradine says about the book he wants to write:

“I want to write it the way it happened. You know; about my coming to see you, and our starting the Richard thing quite casually and not knowing what we were getting into, and how we stuck to things that actually happened and not what someone reported afterwards about it, and how we looked for the break in the normal pattern that would indicate where the mischief was, like bubbles coming up from a diver way below, and that sort of thing.”

Tey’s dialogue between the two men was a terrific way to present the evidence in the case because it required that the evidence be delivered in understandable, persuasive language rather than academic jargon. I think this would be an excellent book to introduce middle school and high school kids to the War of the Roses in general, and RIII and the Tudors in particular.

Now I have to Google and see whether Rose of Raby, the novel Grant reads about RIII’s mother, Cecily Nevill, is a real book…may have to read it if it is. I have also been wanting to read The Sunne in Splendour (a sympathetic look at RIII in novel form by Sharon Kay Penman) for years now, and I consider The Daughter of Time to be a warm up exercise for it.