It has been ten years since the discovery of the remains of Richard III in September 2012 and, like Stonehenge or Tutankhamun, the discovery of the king in the car park looks set to become one of those archaeological stories that never fades (see CA 272 and 277). Recent media coverage has focused on the controversy around The Lost King, the film about the search for Richard III’s grave that has been accused of demonising the archaeologists and academics involved (see our review in CA 393). The film adopts the fashionable trope of the passionate amateur with a spark of intuition who gets it right (hurrah!), versus the cold and sceptical ‘experts’ (boo, hiss!) who belittle the amateur then try to steal her glory when, after many a battle, she is proven right.
A decade hence there might be yet another feature film involving some of the same cast of characters – notably Philippa Langley, the heroine of The Lost King. She is now ‘seeking the truth’ about the Princes in the Tower – the uncrowned 12-year-old Edward V and his 9-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York, heir presumptive – who were, as tradition holds, both brutally pushed aside by the Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III, as he clawed his way to the throne.
Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896-1952), using the pen name Josephine Tey, wrote a best-selling novel called The Daughter of Time (1951) that was hailed as ‘the greatest crime novel of all time’ by the Crime Writers’ Association in 1990. Tey’s detective, Inspector Alan Grant, decides to keep his brain active while confined to bed with a broken leg by investigating the fate of the brothers and the question of the Duke of Gloucester’s involvement in their disappearance. Tey’s detective concludes that Richard III was innocent of the crime of murdering the Princes in the Tower and that the king had been a victim of Tudor propaganda.
