The Sunne in Splendour

We were reading Romeo and Juliet, not Richard III, but Sr. Maureen Christi told us that we can't trust Shakespeare's depiction of Richard because he wrote to please his politically savvy patron, Elizabeth. Granddaughter of Richard's deposer, she'd want popular culture to enhance, not diminish, her sometimes questioned reign.  Maybe Sr. Christi had read the recently published The Sunne in Splendour when she told us Richard III probably wasn't quite the villain he'd been made out to be although I doubt it (she said she never read anything unless it had been written at least 20 years earlier, to be sure it was enduring and therefore literature). Still, I wonder, because in 1982 Richard had not yet started the rehabilitation project that tells us now he was a skilled commander with moderate scoliosis who ended up buried under a car park.

Sharon Kay Penman's book wasn't the fist to portray Richard III sympathetically, but unlike Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, she covers Richard's life from age 8, not just his reign and the question of nephews' deaths.  We first meet Richard as a boy awed by his charismatic brother Edward (and we first meet Edward seducing Richard's pretty, red-haired nurse). Sons of the Duke of York, they're on one side of the confusing Wars of the Roses, battling the addled Henry VI and his tactical skilled wife, Margarita of Anjou. She's fighting for her son, the Yorks are fighting for a crown they believe should be theirs, and the Duke of Warwick is fighting for himself.

After an exile forced by Lancaster's victories and the deaths of his father and brother Edmund, Richard comes of age in the glare of his brother Edward's reign.  Ned takes the Sunne in Splendour as his badge after an atmospheric refraction makes it appear there are three suns at the climax of his crown-winning battle, in which Richard shows his tactical skills. He also falls in love with Warwick's daughter, a love apparently thwarted when Warwick switches sides, along with Ned's and Dickon's middle brother, George, Duke of Clarence. (If this seems confusing, it is.  I recommend keeping a genealogy chart and chronology open while reading about the Wars of the Roses). Warwick marries Anne to Henry VI's son Edward, then loses to Ned after George switches sides again. Despite attempted interventions from George and from Ned's Queen, Katherine Woodville, Richard and Anne marry.

Their marriage is happy (as with her Welsh trilogy, Penman skillfully welds romance and medieval warfare and politics), but times are not. York and Lancaster both district the Queen's relatives, and the Queen herself. Katherine Woodville comes across as a scheming, calculating, power-hungry social climber - totally unsympathetic and completely compelling. I wonder how much of this portrayal, taken from the historical record, is accurate and how much is public scorn for forceful women. Her political machinations come to the forefront towards the end of the book, after Ned has burned himself out with his excesses.  She, her brothers, and her sons by her marriage to Lord Grey scheme to take the regency of her son Edward V from Richard. She'd already pushed Ned to execute unreliable George of Clarence, so what would she do as Edward V's regent, monarch in all but name?

Richard holds onto his regency, then lets his council convince him to take the crown. This leads to two  years of perpetual tragedy for Richard while rumors swirl about the fate of his nephews (Penman gives a plausible, non-Shakespearean fate for them). Broken and perhaps suicidal, Richard's fate on Bosworth Field is almost a given. The Tudors brought peace, and eventually prosperity to England, and in the final chapters Penman hints at how Richard's reputation will be altered for nearly 500 years by politically motivated authors. Penman's first novel sprawls across over 900 pages and I wanted to read it in a single sitting.