The Richard III story, when he came to it, was called The Princes In The Tower, and it seemed that young Ella had found the Princes a poor substitute for Coeur-de-Lion, since she had filled every small O throughout the tale with neat pencil shading. The two golden-haired boys who played together in the sunbeam from the barred window in the accompanying picture had each been provided with a pair of anachronistic spectacles, and on the blank back of the picture-page someone had been playing Noughts and Crosses. As far as young Ella was concerned the Princes were a dead loss.
And yet it was a sufficiently arresting little story. Macabre enough to delight any child’s heart. The innocent children; the wicked uncle. The classic ingredients in a tale of classic simplicity.
It had also a moral. It was the perfect cautionary tale.
But the King won no profit from this wicked deed. The people of England were shocked by his cold-blooded cruelty and decided that they would no longer have him for King. They sent for a distant cousin of Richard’s, Henry Tudor, who was living in France, to come and be crowned King in his stead. Richard died bravely in the battle which resulted, but he had made his name hated throughout the country and many deserted him to fight for his rival.
Well, it was neat but not gaudy. Reporting at its simplest.
He turned to the second book.
The second book was the School History proper. The two thousand years of England’s story were neatly parcelled into compartments for ready reference. The compartments, as usual, were reigns. It was no wonder that one pinned a personality to a reign, forgetful that that personality had known and lived under other kings. One put them in pigeon-holes automatically. Pepys: Charles II. Shakespeare: Elizabeth. Marlborough: Queen Anne. It never crossed one’s mind that someone who had seen Queen Elizabeth could also have seen George I. One had been conditioned to the reign idea from childhood.
However it did simplify things when you were just a policeman with a game leg and a concussed spine hunting up some information on dead and gone royalties to keep yourself from going crazy.
He was surprised to find the reign of Richard III so short. To have made oneself one of the best-known rulers in all those two thousand years of England’s history, and to have had only two years to do it in, surely augured a towering personality. If Richard had not made friends he had certainly influenced people.
The history book, too, thought that he had personality.
Richard was a man of great ability, but quite unscrupulous as to his means. He boldly claimed the crown on the absurd ground that his brother’s marriage with Elizabeth Woodville had been illegal and the children of it illegitimate. He was accepted by the people who dreaded a minority, and began his reign by making a progress through the south, where he was well received. During this progress, however, the two young Princes who were living in the Tower, disappeared, and were believed to have been murdered. A serious rebellion followed, which Richard put down with great ferocity. In order to recover some of his lost popularity he held a Parliament, which passed useful statutes against Benevolences, Maintenance, and Livery.
But a second rebellion followed. This took the form of an invasion, with French troops, by the head of the Lancaster branch, Henry Tudor. He encountered Richard at Bosworth, near Leicester, where the treachery of the Stanleys gave the day to Henry. Richard was killed in the battle, fighting courageously, leaving behind him a name hardly less infamous than that of John.
What on earth were Benevolences, Maintenance, and Livery?
And how did the English like having the succession decided for them by French troops?
But, of course, in the days of the Roses, France was still a sort of semi-detached part of England; a country much less foreign to an Englishman than Ireland was. A fifteenth-century Englishman went to France as a matter of course; but to Ireland only under protest.
He lay and thought about that England. The England over which the Wars of the Roses had been fought. A green, green England; with not a chimney-stack from Cumberland to Cornwall. An England still unhedged, with great forests alive with game, and wide marshes thick with wild-fowl. An England with the same small group of dwellings repeated every few miles in endless permutation: castle, church, and cottages; monastery, church, and cottages; manor, church, and cottages. The strips of cultivation round the cluster of dwellings, and beyond that the greenness. The unbroken greenness. The deep-rutted lanes that ran from group to group, mired to bog in the winter and white with dust in the summer; decorated with wild roses or red with hawthorn as the seasons came and went.
For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman. No one pushed in at your door to demand whether you were York or Lancaster and to hale you off to a concentration camp if your answer proved to be the wrong one for the occasion. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party. They fought a battle in your lower meadow, and turned your kitchen into a dressing-station, and then moved off somewhere or other to fight a battle somewhere else, and a few weeks later you would hear what had happened at that battle, and you would have a family row about the result because your wife was probably Lancaster and you were perhaps York, and it was all rather like following rival football teams. No one persecuted you for being a Lancastrian or a Yorkist, any more than you would be persecuted for being an Arsenal fan or a Chelsea follower.
He was still thinking of that green England when he fell asleep.
And he was not a whit wiser about the two young Princes and their fate.
3
‘Can’t you find something more cheerful to look at than that thing?’ The Midget asked next morning, referring to the Richard portrait which Grant had propped up against the pile of books on his bed-side table.
‘You don’t find it an interesting face?’
‘Interesting! It gives me the willies. A proper Dismal Desmond.’
‘According to the history books he was a man of great ability.’
‘So was Bluebeard.’
‘And considerable popularity, it would seem.’
‘So was Bluebeard.’
‘A very fine soldier, too,’ Grant said wickedly, and waited. ‘No Bluebeard offers?’
‘What do you want to look at that face for? Who was he anyway?’
‘Richard the Third.’
‘Oh, well, I ask you!’
‘You mean that’s what you expected him to look like.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Why?’
‘A murdering brute, wasn’t he?’
‘You seem to know your history.’
‘Everyone knows that. Did away with his two little nephews, poor brats. Had them smothered.’
‘Smothered?’ said Grant, interested. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Smothered with pillows.’ She banged his own pillows with a fragile vigorous fist, and replaced them with speed and precision.
‘Why smothering? Why not poison?’ Grant inquired.
‘Don’t ask me. I didn’t arrange it.’
‘Who said they were smothered?’
‘My history book at school said it.’
‘Yes, but whom was the history book quoting?’
‘Quoting? It wasn’t quoting anything. It was just giving facts.’