Ruining reputations

In the face of an agenda, truth is the victim

This is another post I’ve wanted to write since Christmas but I let “the most wonderful time of the year” be that wonderful and busy time it was with family and friends and celebrations instead.

I happen to love detective stories. I discovered writer Andrew Klavan through his biography, “The Great Good Thing,” and his subsequent book, “The Truth and Beauty.” Being a mystery writer himself, he recommended on his podcast recently “ten great crime novels you must read” (I’ve read them all and now need a list of the next ten). That is how I came to read, over the holidays, “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey, which wasn’t on his list but mentioned in his discussion of the list (see how I need another list?).

I was astounded that “The Daughter of Time” was so incredibly timely to current personal events, namely the disparaging of my own husband’s reputation. The book tells the story of a police detective who is laid up in a hospital bed because of an injury. In her efforts to cure his boredom, his friend brings him copies of portraits of people of history who have unsolved mysteries surrounding them, hoping he’ll be inspired to solve a mystery from his hospital bed in order to pass the time. Being familiar with identifying criminals in line-ups, he becomes intrigued by an unlikely portrait of English King Richard III, who is infamous for killing his nephews, the sons of his older brother King Edward IV, whom he succeeded. The detective then has his visitors, and even his nurse, start bringing him history books and he becomes so intrigued with the story that the friend that inspired his intrigue finally brings him a historical researcher with the British Museum to assist him. The researcher has both interest and access to historical documents, so he joins in with the detective in unearthing facts about these murders that generations have presumed King Richard III to be guilty of, though the boys’ bodies were never proven to be found.

The book has a lot of fascinating history of long generations of English rivalry between Lancasters, Yorks, Woodvilles, and Tudors. It seems the Lancasters usurped the monarchy from the Yorks, but Edward IV reclaimed it. When Edward IV died, his young son was supposed to succeed him. His brother Richard was appointed Protector over the boy before Edward’s death. When Richard, who was on the border of Scotland, received news of his brother’s death, he arranged for a requieum mass at York for his brother, took an oath of loyalty to the young prince, and eventually escorted the prince to London, ordering the soon date for his coronation. Before the coronation, however, Bishop Robert Stillington of Bath told a Council that he had married Edward to a Lady Eleanor Butler before Edward married the presumed Queen Elizabeth Woodville. Evidence and witnesses were presented to Parliament, an act called Titulus Regius proclaimed the young son of Edward was illegitimate heir to the throne, and Richard was given title to the crown. Richard subsequently put the illegitimate sons of his brother under his own protection in the Tower of London, which was a residence of the monarchy at the time.

Richard the Third, however, is historically accused of killing his two nephews in order to attain the throne. What the detective uncovers is that Henry VII, a Tudor, who himself attained the monarchy upon the killing of Richard III a few short years later, ordered the act Titulus Regius “repealed, without being read. He ordered that the Act itself should be destroyed, and forbade any copies to be kept. Anyone who kept a copy was to be fined and imprisoned.” He then brought a Bill of Attainder before Parliament accusing the deceased Richard of cruelty and tyranny, and his followers of treason, resulting in the deaths of those loyal to the house of York. He did not, however, accuse Richard III of the murder of his nephews. In fact, the detective can find no contemporary accusation regarding these murders at all.

At the time of King Edward’s death, his young son, the assumed prince, was under the care of the queen’s brother. Upon her husband’s death, rebellion was initiated by this brother and the queen’s son from her first marriage. Richard was informed of this rebellion, had the queen’s brother arrested, and took guardianship over the young prince. Before the Council declaring the queen’s son illegitimate, a plot was uncovered to murder Richard, led by Lord Hastings, Lord Stanley, and John Morton, Bishop of Ely. Lord Hastings, an old friend of Edward and Richard, was beheaded one week after a proclamation was issued regarding the plot, but Richard showed mercy to his widow, restoring to her the family estate and her children’s right of succession to them. He pardoned Lord Stanley, and put John Morton into gentlemanly detention at Buckingham. His brother’s widow, the illegitimate queen, received a pension from Richard III. She and her family members, including her son guilty of rebellion, participated in royal life during Richard III’s reign. The detective and the research fellow surmised that Richard’s lenience was due to a desire to end the long-standing York-Lancaster feud. Lord Stanley’s wife was a Lancaster, and she was given a place of honor at Richard’s coronation, carrying the Queen’s train.

Richard the Third’s lenience toward those who had conspired against him, however, cost him his life and his family the monarchy. Lady Stanley’s son by her first marriage was Henry VII, Richard III’s traitorous successor, a Tudor. Even when she was found guilty of treasonous correspondence with her son, Richard put her under the care of her husband. Lord Stanley ultimately betrayed Richard at the battle that ended his life. In his place of detention at Buckingham, John Morton had been able to organize an eventually successful Woodville-Lancaster-Tudor conspiracy against King Richard, later becoming Henry VII’s Archbishop of Canterbury. Needing to legitimize Henry VII’s accession to the throne, he wrote the account, despite all evidence to the contrary, claiming King Richard had murdered his nephews to seize the throne and therefore had himself been an illegitimate king. A handwritten copy of this account was found among the papers of Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, so the believed historical evidence accusing King Richard of murder became attributed to this saint, who was five-years-old when Richard III became king and eight-years-old when he died. As the detective realized, More “had never known Richard III and had grown up under a Tudor administration.” The summation of the history and reputation of King Richard III in most history books, and even in the works of Shakespeare, are based on this fraudulent account. The detective realized, “It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.”

The detective began to doubt the supposed account of Sir Thomas More, actually written by John Morton, enemy of Richard III, when he recognized that it was made up completely of hearsay. He started uncovering evidence to put the pieces of truth together when he found actual letters from the time of the events to read. He found More’s (Morton’s) account of Richard III completely inconsistent with all evidence of his character, demonstrated in his lenient and protective actions, and letters that Richard III had himself written. Henry VII actually married Elizabeth, older sister of the boys Richard supposedly murdered, after Richard III’s death. That is why he needed there to be no record of the act Titulus Regius, in order to legitimize his own wife. But by legitimizing her, Henry VII made her two brothers legal heirs to the throne. Thus, they subsequently disappeared around the time Henry VII had their mother committed to a convent for the rest of her life, and after Henry VII had killed the allies of Richard III.

The detective’s commentary throughout the book on finding evidence for truth is fascinating: “Truth isn’t in accounts [one’s telling of a story] but in account books….The real history is written in forms not meant as history. In Wardrobe accounts, in Privy Purse expenses, in personal letters, in estate books." Truth “lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring.” Historians “tell you what [someone] thought. Research[ers] stick to what they did.”

The reaction of those around the detective to his telling them the story they’d always heard was wrong is also fascinating. One nurse was “not out of any feeling for Richard but…her conscientious soul was distressed at any possibility of mistake.” The detective reasoned about the seemingly uncaring reaction of the nurse matron, “you of all people should be interested in….the frailness of your reputation’s worth. Tomorrow a whisper may destroy you.” As he mused over these reactions, his friend told him:

It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.

The researcher who helped the detective unearth the truth decides to write a book about it, but then finds others began to write about Richard III’s vindication as “soon as the Tudors were gone and it was safe to talk….A man Buck wrote a vindication in the seventeenth century. And Horace Walpole in the eighteenth. And someone called Markham in the nineteenth.” The detective tells him, “If people have been pointing out for three hundred and fifty years that Richard didn’t murder his nephews and a schoolbook can still say, in words of one syllable and without qualification, that he did….It’s time you got busy.” When the fellow asks why he should expect success when others have failed, the detective responds, “There’s that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone.”

Before he leaves the hospital, the detective and the researcher stare at the portrait that inspired their investigation for truth. The detective comments that the nurse matron characterized it “a face full of the most dreadful suffering.” The researcher observes he was, however, spared the “knowledge that his name was to be a hissing and a byword down the centuries.”

I’m tempted, as I was taught in a journalism course, to “tell you, not sell you” on why I wrote this essay. But I live with a man whose reputation, actions, and character are being distorted. There are those with the motive to lie. And there are those without the interest to explore or believe evidence of the truth. You can understand why it was incredible timing to find myself reading this tale. After my husband recently got fired, and unfired, from his role as a pediatric cardiologist, he received a call from a company that had observed his online reputation had been rapidly and recently destroyed and would be willing to rehabilitate it for the cost of around $20,000. He declined the offer.

I’ve encountered my own hopelessness in the face of many lies I’ve observed in the last six years, knowing the evidence is out there and many vindications of the relevant evidence have been written. And then I read this story. Those who seek and share evidence of the truth must continue to stay busy, because, “There’s that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone.”