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by Tamara Baker

Monday, Sept. 13, 1999 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA -- From the pages of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, a book I strongly recommend, come the lines which are soon to follow. They are spoken by two persons, an English policeman and an American scholar, concerning their discovery that virtually everything they thought they knew and had been taught about the famed English King Richard the Third, the "Wickedest Uncle in History" who allegedly murdered his nephews to gain the throne, was totally errant and bogus:

"Look, Mr. Grant, let's you and I start at the very beginning of this thing.  WIthout history books, or modern versions, or anyone's opinion about anything.  Truth isn't in accounts but in account books."

"A neat phrase," Grant said, complimentary.  "Does it mean anything?"

"It means everything. The real history is written in forms not meant as history.  In Wardrobe accouts, in Privy Purse expenses, in personal letters, in estate books.  If someone, say, insists that Lady Whoosit never had a child, and you find in the account book the entry: 'For the son born to my lady on Michaelmas eve: five yards of blue ribbon, fourpence halfpenny' it's a reasonably fair deduction that my lady had son on Michaelmas eve."

Whenever he could, Richard pardoned his foes, and in the rare case where he was compelled to execute any of them - Lord Hastings being the best example - he did not strip their families of their lands and titles. He even allowed Tom Lynom, his Solicitor-General, to marry Jane Shore, the mistress of Lord Dorset, who had conspired with John Morton and Lords Hastings, Rivers and Dorset to depose and murder Richard.

Richard the Third it was who, during his short two-year reign, gave us among other things the right to have bail granted, and who took steps to prevent the intimidation of juries.

On the other hand, the man who took the throne from him in battle with the help of French troops, Henry VII, gave us that horrible excuse for judicial murder known as the Star Chamber, and is in all likelihood the real murderer of Richard's two nephews, the sons of his older brother Edward IV.

Why Henry VII, and not Richard III?

Because it turns out that Edward IV, before he married Elizabeth Woodville, the mother of the two boys in question, had secretly married another lady: one Eleanor Butler.  Therefore, the lads were illegitmate and not in the direct line of succession, which means that the motive attributed to Richard for murdering the two boys goes up in a puff of smoke.

Once both Richard and Parliament got over the shock of finding the late Edward IV to have been a bigamist, Parliament created an Act called Titulus Regius, acknowledging Edward's bigamy, his sons' illegitimacy, and their uncle Richard's right to the throne.

When Henry VII came to power at the head of a French army, having just slaughtered the popular King Richard, he was desperate to prove his right to the throne. Henry's blood-right in the succession was so shaky that in his claim to the English throne he had written that it was his de jure belli et de jure Lancastriae - by right of conquest and only secondly by right of being a Lancaster, Henry's own mother being the heir of an illegitimate son of the third son of Edward III, Richard's legitimate great-grandfather.

In order to buttress his claim, he had to weaken Richard's, the man whom he had murdered. Therefore, his first act was to suppress Titulus Regius: He repealed it without allowing it to be read, and anyone found with a copy of it in his or possession was heaved into prison for as long as Henry wished, which often turned out to be forever.

However, by repealing the Act, he put Richard's nephews back in the line of succession - and made the elder of the two King of England - which he solved by simply having the boys murdered and then having his favorite scribe, the aforementioned John Morton, Bishop of Ely, spread the tale that Richard had done the deed before his death.

In fact, the evidence suggests that Morton, who was himself in danger of  being punished by Richard for gross David-Hale-like corruption, had worked on  this tale on Henry's orders as he fled from England in the autumn of 1483.   Morton first hid out in the fen country of Ely - which is where the rumor  first appears - then traveled to France in the spring of 1484, wherein he  immediately met up with Henry, who at that time was making nice with the  French, trying to get an invasion army together, but without allowing the  French to leverage him into vassalage to the French crown. It was then that  the rumor appeared a second time, during a partisan political speech in the  Estates-General - but then it disappears, not to be mentioned again until  well after Richard's death.

One would think that Henry himself would, if the  rumor was true, use it in his justification for taking the throne by force,  but he does not: and the only logical explanation for this is that the boys  were alive and well when Henry took over - but not for long.   The truth about Richard had to be hidden so long as the Tudors, Henry VII's descendants, had the throne, but researchers like Buck in the seventeenth century, and Walpole in the eighteenth, have laid out the facts for all to see.

Yet, despite all that, one will still open up a typical child's schoolbook - the only history we are likely to remember, or even encounter, save when we seek it out on our own in college courses or elsewhere - and still find the bald, and baldly wrong, pronouncements of Richard Plantagenet's evil.

Now, you all are probably wondering:  What is all this historical hoo-ha doing in a modern political website?

I put it here to show you how good men can, through the efforts of powerful, well-financed enemies and their press agents, be brought low and their names traduced for centuries, even with the evidence of their innocence in plain sight for those who would look for it.

But it is also here to show that, as the saying goes, truth is the daughter of time:  the lies will be uncovered eventually.

Which is why I urge you in the strongest possible terms to go to Amazon.com and place an order for Gene Lyons' and Joe Conason's new book on how Bill Clinton, his friends and his associates were the victims of similar smears over the last seven years--that is, after you preorder a copy of Jeff Koopersmith's Corrobillusion, which demolishes one particular attempt to cast Clinton as a modern-day Richard III, Bill Bennett's The Death of Outrage.