Develop this

Has Richard Armitage shelved his Richard III dreams? I vaguely remember he mentioned that he was reading a draft script of The Daughter of Time a few years ago.

I found interesting a report that broke a month ago regarding a chapel in Devon with clearly Yorkist iconography. Philippa Langley is on the case; having found Richard, she now hopes that she can find his son Edward (V) and has headed a project in this direction since 2016.

Here‘s the article I read (via KRA). There were also paywalled articles in the Telegraph and Times on Sunday (London). The author of the one I read points out that it’s all very Dan Brown. Given the number of 15th and 16th century uprisings and wannabe uprisings oriented around various pretenders and distant relatives of York and Lancaster, I tend to agree with Tony Pollard. Had anyone known the location of a living Edward V, given Richard III’s tenuous hold on power, they’d certainly have used the young man to make hay out of the situation.

Langley & Co. did not discover this chapel and there has been speculation about the meaning of the iconography since a local historian published a survey of Devon churches back in the 1920s. I wondered while reading the article if there’s yet another explanation: John Evans noted a coincidence or two between his life and that of the murdered king, concluded that he had some connection to the Yorks, and included all the iconography out of conviction rather than knowledge.

I was a bit surprised at the level of uproar over this on the web (maybe I shouldn’t have been) and while I’ve read around a fair amount it, I’m not linking to anything just because I don’t want to dig into the details again, as I’m not that interested in controversy about it any more. I did find three things interesting, however. One is how much the proponents of the theory are making of what seem in some cases to me to be coincidences, supposedly at the behest of modern investigators. (No wonder we have so many conspiracy theories these days.) All this stuff about the missing “n” in EVAS seems to be anachronistic and the kind of thing that a professional historian already knows. The second was an editorial which argued that if the mystery were solved, we’d have nothing to argue about.

But the third was exactly what a great television script this all might make. Brown’s got a popular tv series on in the US right now (The Lost Symbol). So maybe someone wants to put it together and approach White Boar Films for a read?

~ by Servetus on January 27, 2022.