A Certain Slant of Light

Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time is a history treatise thinly disguised as a detective novel, wherein it is argued that a) Richard III did not in fact kill his nephews (the Princes in the Tower), b) was more generally not such a bad guy, and c) was in fact a far better fellow than that blackguard Henry Tudor, (later Henry VII), the Tudors being a rather rotten crowd altogether - and not just because they stained poor Richard's memory with one of the most effective smear campaigns in history. They got Shakespeare on board! Who can argue with Shakespeare?

I won't be able to read his plays the same way ever again.

Tey piles up quite a bit of evidence, but these seem to me to be the most important pieces:

1. There's no contemporary accusation of murder. No one seems to have noticed that the princes were missing until after Henry VII took over the Tower, where they were kept.

2. Moreover, Richard had nothing to gain from killing the princes. Not only were they disqualified for illegitimacy (it seems their father was a secret bigamist) - but there were half a dozen other possible heirs to the throne that Richard would have had to kill, too, if he meant to safeguard his claim.

3. Henry, on the other hand, had a lot to gain from killing the princes, just as he did from killing all the other Yorkist heirs - which, in the years after his coronation, he did, because he was a paranoid and ruthless man.

4. Moreover, even if (in a fit of uncharacteristic bloodthirstiness) Richard did have his nephews murdered, it would have done him no favors to keep their deaths secret. He would have done better to shout from the rooftops that it had been fever and plunge the whole family into deepest mourning - such a course being much less suspicious than being unable to produce the princes when they got a bit older and someone thought to ask about them.

5. But Henry had to kill them in secret. No one would believe that they neatly died of a coincidental fever right after they took the throne; no, his only hope was to quietly disappear them. But someone would still ask about them eventually - what would he say in answer to that?

6. And thus, he blamed it on Richard, who was too dead to defend himself - along with the lot of his followers, many of whom Henry executed by enacting, after the fact, a law that made it illegal to fight on Richard's side at Bosworth. He made it treason to have fought for the rightful king! Blackguard, like I said.

Tey tells the tale much better, of course, but I finished the book so burning with zeal on poor slandered Richard's behalf that I just had to proselytize.