The Daughter of Time - A Review

Tey, Josephine [Elizabeth Mackintosh]. The Daughter of Time. With a New Introduction by Robert Barnard. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 1995 [1951]. Scribner Paperback Fiction. 206 pages + “About the Author.”

The Daughter of Time was first published in 1951, a year before Elizabeth Mackintosh, who had written the book under the pseudonym “Josephine Tey,” died. As far as I know, Mackintosh published nothing under her own name, but she produced a number of books under the “Josephine Tey” name, and both books and plays under the name of “Gordon Daviot.” In the Introduction to this edition of The Daughter of Time, Robert Barnard points up Tey’s impatience with the usual mystery formulas, a characteristic which makes it difficult to estimate what she might have written had she not died at the age of 54 or 55. This book certainly has very little in common, except good writing, with the other three Tey mysteries I’ve read.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first read The Daughter of Time, but it made quite an impression on me. I never forgot the book, its basic theme, or how much I enjoyed it. But, until now, I never got around to re-reading it. My sister recently sent me this attractive paperback edition, as much to clear her crowded bookshelves as for any other reason, I think. I took the opportunity to find out if it was still as enjoyable as I remembered it. I was not disappointed.

This is not to say that I was as impressed by the book as I was as a youth. I like to think I know a little more about reading, and about writing, than I did years ago. Some of Tey’s devices are pretty transparent. Some are, in fact, inevitable in constructing a mystery story. Our hero, Alan Grant, a Scotland Yard detective temporarily confined to a hospital, needs interlocutors to act as sounding boards for his suspicions, and the nurses, along with the occasional visitor, serve that purpose nicely. Grant needs a legman, and up pops a young American historical researcher, Brent Carradine, who is already familiar with the British Museum. But the key literary trick here is the order in which Ms. Tey reveals the evidence.

As to the mystery itself, that is quickly told. Knowing of Grant’s fascination with faces, an actress friend gives him a number of photographs of persons, all with some mystery about them. Grant finds interesting, and dignified enough to be that of a judge, a picture of a medieval figure who turns out to be the infamous Richard III. Grant, chagrined by his placement of this character on the bench, rather than in the dock, starts investigating the story of Richard III, the murders of his nephews, the battle of Bosworth Field, and all the story most familiar to us from Shakespeare’s play.

Here is what I mean about the order in which Grant uncovers the evidence. First he gets a couple of simple school histories from one of the nurses, and finds in them the familiar story, but with enough apparent inconsistencies to lead him to enquire further. He obtains more serious histories, and eventually gets to Sir Thomas More’s book, which is the primary source on the subject. Holinshed got his version of the story from More, and Shakespeare got the story from Holinshed. And, as everyone knows, Sir Thomas More, later executed by Henry VIII for refusing to approve Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, was an unimpeachable source.

Or was he? I would say that the crux of this story comes when, in the midst of reading More’s book on Richard III (and somewhat put off by the gossipy tone), Grant realizes that More is precisely a man of the reign of Henry VIII, while Richard’s death began the reign of Henry VII. Thus he is led to discover that More was only five when Richard was crowned king, and is, therefore, not the eyewitness, the impartial observer, he has been thought to be. No, More has taken an account written by Bishop Morton, an interested party, and produced it, years after the events concerned, as a favor to his master. After all, if Richard II had not been killed, if Henry VII had not become king, Henry VIII would have been just another descendant of Edward III by an illegitimate granddaughter.

And so Grant, with the help of the more mobile (in a couple of senses) Carradine, works out what really happened at the end of the War of the Roses, and how the Tudor propaganda machine had successfully slandered the last Yorkist king. Once they figure out that More is not a trustworthy source, they look to other, contemporary sources, and they find any number of anomalies. Why wasn’t Richard accused of murdering his nephews as soon as Henry became king and brought charges against him? Because they weren’t dead yet! Why were his subjects so sad at Richard’s death? Because he wasn’t the tyrant More claimed!

In the end, looking at the old principle of “who benefits,” and with a devotion to the predictive efficacy of character, Grant and Carradine conclude that Henry Tudor himself murdered the young princes, who were in fact illegitimate. They note that Henry, with dreary efficiency, disposed of all the possible Yorkist claimants to his throne. And, besides that, Henry was a penny-pinching, unlovable monarch, who could be expected to do any evil thing you might conjure up. Their only disappointment is that the story turns out to be a twice-told tale; there have been other “vindications” of Richard, other “exposes” of Henry VII, in the past.

Aside from its entertainment value, and it is a good read, The Daughter of Time carries some nice lessons about watching out for history, which is, after all, written by the winners. It also makes a nice point about the difficulty of changing popular perceptions, no matter how poorly founded they might be. The thing Miss Tey doesn’t want you to notice is that she may be doing the same thing to poor Henry Tudor that she says More did to poor Richard III: using selective sourcing and careful insinuation to paint a man a villain.