Richard idolises his brother, Edward. When Edward becomes king, though, he worries that he won’t have any time left to be notice his little brother anymore. However, Richard hasn’t counted on growing up and becoming one of Edward’s most dependable and trustworthy advisors. So much so, that when Edward suddenly dies and leaves behind a trail of deception and falsehoods that threaten to undo all his work, Richard is forced to make some difficult decisions…
I’m not normally a fan of historical fiction. I like period pieces: novels that use a time and a place to explore ideas or provoke situations for conflict, but a pure historical novel is often a difficult beast to tame, leaving the author to make some difficult choices about character and situation, often resorting to amateur psychology or detective work to make a point or explain something. Historical figures are also quite difficult to pin down to a particular place or time and sometimes behave in ways that only they understand. And the further back you go, the more you have to rely on hearsay, rumour, and outright lies, or “making stuff up” as it is more often referred to.
Probably the most famous cases of an historical figure being traduced by posterity is the last Yorkist king, Richard III. Traditionally regarded as the ultimate villainous uncle of British history, every bad thing that happened during the Wars of the Roses appeared to have originated from his cunning and power-hungry mind.
But, The Sunne In Splendour, Dr Sharon K. Penman (1945 – 2021)’s housebrick of a thesis, shows that Richard may have been very harshly judged by history: she relies heavily on contemporary accounts to present a fairly convincing portrait of a king unfairly maligned by an unpopular successor. This faith to recorded history is a virtue of the good novelist, but it also ensures that we get some rather clumsy expository scenes: there are several chapters that exist only as a means to explain why a character is in a particular place at a particular time or to allow a character to receive a piece of news that gives them some motivation for their future actions.
This is a particular problem at the beginning of the novel when there are several years between some events but it becomes less of a hindrance later on when things begin to snowball toward their conclusions. However, viewed as a biography of Richard rather than as a novel of historical events, it does feel more cohesive. The trouble is, though, that Penman’s style often careers between creating a soap opera involving royals and making a genuine effort at deciphering some of the more obscure events in British history. But this also makes for a more enjoyable reading experience and allows the reader to feel far more virtuous for having engaged in a noble exercise rather than a potentially lethal bodice-ripper.
Frankly, for all its faults, I love it: I studied British History at school (well, technically, I turned up, took some notes and was an annoying smartarse – my teacher once described me as “the greatest example of wasted genius since Thomas Wolsey,” which I thought was a compliment for far too long) – and the Wars of the Roses was our entry point into the subject, so I had a little background knowledge to work with when I first read this, which is always helpful.
So it became an important story to me because I came to it with some background knowledge, rather than being reliant on what the author chose to spoonfeed me. Unfortunately, my familiarity came from a recent study of Richard III, which was almost certainly written with an eye on impressing the descendants of Richard’s vanquishers. But I still loved reading scenes that were familiar to me from Shakespeare, but written with the perspective of a more balanced view of history. It also helped when I came to read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter Of Time a couple of years later.
Typically, though, I didn’t worry about the history because Penman’s version is such a great story: we meet Richard as a young boy, idolising his elder brother Edward, and we follow him throughout his life as he becomes a respected general, loving husband and father, then regent and, finally, king. Richard does come over as a little too good to be true in quite a lot of ways: he’s shocked but not scandalised by the excesses in Edward’s court when he returns from a long absence, and his devotion to his wife Anne comes across more like that of a romantic hero rather than the man of action he is. Penman paints him a little too admirably, although she backs her portrayal up with accounts from contemporary historical documents, like the accounts from the city of York where he was held to be a fair and admirable lord by his vassals:
“It was shown by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.”
While Richard himself doesn’t suffer from much variety he does have a terrific depth to him as do the other characters: Edward IV is portrayed here as a gilded youth used to getting his own way, deflecting trouble for later and then as a middle-aged man trying to keep up the triumphs of his youth; his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, is one of the great schemers of the genre, a self-made woman trying to keep her family in prominence as their star rises and wanes. And the Lancasters are presented as a royal family with all the arrogance and assumed privilege that entails. Margaret of Anjou, the wife of Henry VI, is another great creation, a woman who laments being born female, but who doesn’t let that stop her from achieving all she can.
It’s filled with loads of fantastic female characters, rather like Marion Bradley’s The Mists Of Avalon, and while it doesn’t have the creepy sexual undertones of that book, it does use its more vulnerable characters to show the dangers of the age it was writing about. Penman’s skill lies in immersing you in a believable and realistic world which is still alien because of the temporal distance from us: her characters are fully rounded and believable but their motivations and worldviews are not. But the concerns of that worldview – the retention and maintaining of power thorough familial bonds – seem far more corrupt and nepotistic to us in the twenty-first century, but they were held as desirable and honourable, and entirely reasonable as well to the denizens of Richard’s world. Penman mitigates a lot of it by having characters acknowledge the flaws and weaknesses of their peers and discussing just how they are going to put up with these reprobates (mostly from Elizabeth Woodville’s family), but we still get the notion that our heroes would often rather trust competence over familiarity. So it manages to keep itself current by dealing with the issues of honour and decency, letting us know that while societies, times, and manners may have changed, the essence of people and how they interact with one another, has not.
You can find out more about Sharon Penman at https://sharonkaypenman.com/
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