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or what killed them.
Tey assumes that Richard had no motive for murdering the princes
because they were legally illegitimate. Yet one of the princes had been
proclaimed king at age twelve, in the year that his father died, and
Richard himself had presented the boy-king to enthusiastic crowds in
London. Claims of illegitimacy were usually politically contestable and
revisable. In a turbulent time there might be uprisings in favor of the
Queen's children. "He may well have believed," as the historian
Rosemary Horrox has suggested about Richard's usurpation, "that the
fictionalization inherent in Woodville's control of the heir posed such a
threat to political stability that his own rule was preferable - he may have
persuaded himself, in fact, that he was acting for the good of the realm. "
Tey's argument from silence cuts both ways. If Richard were inno–
cent, why didn't he parade the children before the public to still the ru–
mors that they were dead? Nor is Henry's silence about the nephews in–
explicable. Elizabeth Jenkins points out that Henry, as king, framed and
executed the Earl of Warwick, who was the son of Richard's brother
George. The Earl, a boy of retarded intelligence was "the weakest menace
of a disputed succession." Henry Tudor could not afford in 1502 to pub–
lish Tyrrel's confession, because making the accusation against Richard
about an event nineteen years past might stir up public discussion of
Henry's own quite recent political murder of a potential young rival for
the throne.
Cyril Hare's
An English
Mllrder
manages remarkably well to join fic–
tion and history without sacrificing one to the other. The story is entirely
fictional in a classical way, taking place in an English country house at
Christmas time. The historian who plays detective in a Holmesian manner
finds it "impossible to avoid ratiocination." He solves the crime by his
knowledge of English constitutional history, enabling him to perceive a
crucial motive for a murder. He knows of a case in 1806 that is a clue,
just as the dog that did nothing in the night was a clue for Holmes in
"Silver Blaze." Because Lord Chatham did not die from his illness, his
heir William Pitt, who was both Prime Minister and Chancellor of the
Exchequer, was not kicked upstairs into the House of Lords. If he had
been, by the "grim humour" of the constitution, he could not legally
have retained his post at the Exchequer, and the government would have
fallen into a major crisis.
This same possibility threatens to repeat itself in the novel when Lord
Warbeck dies and his son is poisoned, thus presumably elevating the
Lord's first cousin, Sir Julius, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, into the
peerage. The result by the same "grim humour" would pave the way to
the Treasury for a political successor, who therefore had a strong motive
