In Josephine Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time, the term “tonypandy” appears repeatedly to denote historical lies motivated by the desire to whitewash some kings and unjustly attribute their crimes to others.
Richard
III and Historical Tonypandy?
K. Cronick
This short
reflection has to do with historical makeovers in general. Specifically, I have
based my conjectures on a particular historical event: the supposed murder of
the two princes in the Tower of London by English King Richard III in the XV century.
My thoughts
about this are motivated by Josephine Tey’s mystery novel, The Daughter of Time
(2009); in this novel a fictional detective, who is in the hospital recuperating
from an injury, solves his boredom issues by investigating whatever accounts he
can find about Richard III’s guilt in several assassinations, especially
regarding the deaths of his two nephews, Edward V, aged 12, and his younger brother, Richard of
Shrewsbury, Duke of York, aged 9, sons of King Edward IV.
Tey’s book
is fiction in the sense that the main characters, Inspector Alan Grant, his
nurses, his actress friend Marta, an American friend of Martha’s called Brent
Carradine, and a few other personages have been invented in order to solve these
historical crimes. Grant gets everyone else interested in the histories and
myths surrounding King Richard, and the result is a sort of research into the
stories told about him after his death. As readers we can’t judge the veracity
of this research, but there are so many suggestive legends that we readers become
Tey’s accomplices and accessories.
There are
other stories of the same events. The most famous is William Shakespeare’s
play, Richard III. It tells a different tale. Curiously the bard never wrote
about Richard’s successor, Henry VII.
We know
that Richard lived during the time of the wars of the roses (1455-85). This
refers to a series of conflicts between two branches of the Plantagenet family
whose members were rivals for the throne of England. On one side of the
confrontation, the house of Lancaster was led by Henry VI (red rose), and on
the other, the house of York was headed by Edward IV (white rose). Both had descended
from Edward III.
During the
reign of Henry, Edward IV fled to Flanders with his brother Richard, Duke of
Gloucester (future Richard III). Later Henry was defeated at the battle of Tewkesbury, and jailed in the Tower of London
where he died. Rumor had it that Richard was his assassin. Then, with Henry’s
death, Edward IV’s descendent Edward, prince of Wales, was heir to the throne
as Edward V. Many historians attributed Edward’s arrest, incarceration, and
finally his death to Richard’s machinations.
Shakespear
describes Richard as a man who has decided to be evil: he says, “I am determined
to prove a villain” (Act 1, scene 1, line 30, n.d.). He is ugly and deformed,
unable to participate in the court-life parties, and so from the beginning of
the play he decides to foment hate among his brothers and sisters, and finally to
take over the power of the realm.
With an
entirely different point of view, Josephine Tey’s novel does not dispute the
sequence of these kings, but it does offer some doubt about Richard’s
evil-doing. She almost never mentions Shakespeare, but has strong suspicions
about Sir Thomas Moore’s writings that influenced the playwright. She says that
his writings are an attempt to appease the power figures of the time rather
than true historical accounts. Furthermore, they were written long after the
events he describes. Tey claims that there were no contemporary accounts of the
princes’ murders; she declares:
“[…] Thomas More had been only eight when Richard
died at Bosworth [….] Everything in that history had been hearsay [….] More had
never known Richard III at all. He had indeed grown up under a Tudor
administration. That book was the Bible of the whole historical world on the
subject of Richard III—it was from that account that Holinshed had taken his
material, and from that Shakespeare had written his, and except that More
believed what he wrote to be true it was of no more value than […] a 'gospel-true'
event seen by someone other than the teller. That More had a critical mind and
an admirable integrity did not make the story acceptable evidence” (p. 45-6).
Tey
concludes that Richard may have been a rather nice guy after all.
All of
which brings us back to “tonypandy”. It may be that Richard is innocent of all
the murders he has been accused of. It may be that the murder of the princes in
the Tower of London never happened at all. When historians can be punished for
telling the truth, or when all contemporary accounts of certain events disappear,
we can never be sure.
Modern
history is replete with tonypandy. Stalin tried it with partial success. These
days history is recorded on the Internet and witnesses are manufactured as they
are needed.
References
Shakespeare,
William (1595-1596/ n.d.).The Tragedy of Richard III. Mowat, Barbara A. &
Westine, Paul, Editores). Folger Shakespeare Library. https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/PDF/R3.pdf
Tey,
Josephine (1951/April, 2009). The Daughter of Time.
A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumation_and_reburial_of_Richard_III_of_England
