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Tuesday, October 01, 2013

Richard III is 561 today!

It's October 2nd in this part of the world, though northern hemisphere folk won't be able to celebrate till tomorrow. Last year, I posted a Richard III birthday celebration. Here's the link:

http://suebursztynski.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/happy-birthday-richard-iii.html

Since then I have reread Daughter Of Time, The Sunne In Splendour,  and the two Rosemary Hawley Jarman books, We Speak No Treason and The King's Grey Mare. I think the last-mentioned is not as good as Jarman's first book. It could have been a good historical romance except that the heroine stops being the heroine early in the book. She gets Edward as a husband using witchcraft and is horrible to people we care about. It was just too hard to write a novel from her and the Lancastrian viewpoint when cheering for the other side. We Speak No Treason was wonderful except that I kept muttering, "Richard, you idiot! Stop forgiving everyone! Lock up Stanley, execute Morton, do it NOW!" And her saintly Richard III really was an idiot. I think The Sunne In Splendour was more believable in this respect. But still a beautiful book.

I wish I could find my copy of the children's book, A Sprig Of Broom, part of the Mantlemass series. There are a lot of books out there if you can find them, which give Richard fictional descendants. And there's Margaret Campbell Barnes' The King's Bed, which features Dickon, a bastard son of Richard who may have lived a long life as a stonemason. Well, you never know.


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