The Daughter of Time

Henry VII

Previous Record:

An adventurer, living at foreign courts. Son of an ambitious mother. Nothing known against his private life. No public office or employment. Salient characteristic as indicated by his actions: subtlety.

In the matter of the presumed crime:

(a) It was of great importance to him that the boys should not continue to live. By repealing the Act acknowledging the children’s illegitimacy, he made the elder boy King of England, and the younger boy the next heir.

(b) In the Act which he brought before Parliament for the attainting of Richard he accused Richard of the conventional tyranny and cruelty but made no mention of the two young Princes. The conclusion is inevitable that at that time the two boys were alive and their whereabouts known.

(c) The boys’ mother was deprived of her living and consigned to a nunnery eighteen months after his succession.

(d) He took immediate steps to secure the persons of all the other heirs to the crown, and kept them in close arrest until he could with the minimum of scandal get rid of them.

(e) He had no right whatever to the throne. Since the death of Richard, young Warwick was de jure King of England.

It occurred to Grant for the first time, as he wrote it out, that it had been within Richard’s power to legitimise his bastard son John, and foist him on the nation. There was no lack of precedent for such a course. After all, the whole Beaufort clan (including Henry’s mother) were the descendants not only of an illegitimate union but of a double adultery. There was nothing to hinder Richard from legitimising that ‘active and well-disposed’ boy who lived in recognised state in his household. It was surely the measure of Richard that no such course had apparently crossed his mind. He had appointed as his heir his brother’s boy. Even in the destitution of his own grief, good sense was his ruling characteristic. Good sense and family feeling. No base-born son, however active and well-disposed, was going to sit in the Plantagenets’ seat while his brother’s son was there to occupy it.

It was remarkable how that atmosphere of family feeling permeated the whole story. All the way from Cicely’s journeyings about in her husband’s company, to her son’s free acknowledgement of his brother George’s boy as his heir.

And it occurred to him too for the first time in full force just how that family atmosphere strengthened the case for Richard’s innocence. The boys whom he was supposed to have put down as he would put down twin foals were Edward’s sons; children he must have known personally and well. To Henry, on the other hand, they were mere symbols. Obstacles on a path. He may never even have set eyes on them. All questions of character apart, the choice between the two men as suspects might almost be decided on that alone.

It was wonderfully clearing to the head to see it neat and tidy as (a), (b), and (c). He had not noticed before how doubly suspect was Henry’s behaviour over Titulus Regius. If, as Henry had insisted, Richard’s claim was absurd, then surely the obvious thing to do was to have the thing re-read in public and demonstrate its falsity. But he did no such thing. He went to endless pains to obliterate even the memory of it. The conclusion was inevitable that Richard’s title to the crown as shown in Titulus Regius was unassailable.

17

On the afternoon when Carradine reappeared in the room at the hospital Grant had walked to the window and back again, and was so cock-a-hoop about it that The Midget was moved to remind him that it was a thing that a child of eighteen months could do. But nothing could subdue Grant today.

‘Thought you’d have me here for months, didn’t you,’ he crowed.

‘We are very glad to see you better so quickly,’ she said primly; and added: ‘We are, of course, very glad, too, to have your bed.’