The Daughter of Time characters

Appears from the start

A Scotland Yard inspector confined to a hospital bed with a broken leg. Bored by novels and celebrated criminal cases, he turns to a historical mystery after a portrait makes him question the received account of Richard III. His professional interest in faces, testimony, motive, and the way stories harden into accepted fact guides the inquiry.

Appears from the start

A successful actress and Grant's longtime friend. Seeing that ordinary reading cannot relieve his boredom, she brings him portraits of disputed historical figures and encourages him to investigate whichever face catches his attention.

Appears from the start

The fifteenth-century English king whose portrait captures Grant's attention. Commonly remembered as a calculating usurper who murdered his young nephews, he becomes the subject of Grant's attempt to separate contemporary evidence from the version promoted after his defeat.

First appears in chapter 2

Grant's dependable colleague at Scotland Yard, who visits him in hospital and helps connect the bedridden inspector's habits of police work with an inquiry conducted through books and records.

Also known as Edward V

First appears in chapter 4

The elder son of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. He succeeds his father as a boy but is never crowned, and he and his younger brother become known to later history as the Princes in the Tower.

Also known as Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York

First appears in chapter 4

Edward IV's younger son and the brother of Edward V. He joins Edward in the royal apartments at the Tower of London, and the later disappearance of both boys forms the central accusation against their uncle Richard III.

First appears in chapter 4

The widow of Edward IV and mother of the two princes. Her actions during Richard III's reign are important to Grant because they offer a way to compare what someone close to the boys did at the time with what later histories say she must have believed.

First appears in chapter 5

A young American acquaintance of Marta's with the time and enthusiasm to search libraries and historical collections. He becomes Grant's mobile research partner, bringing primary-source findings to the hospital and sharing the excitement of testing a famous accusation as if it were an unsolved case.

First appears in chapter 8

The Tudor king who defeats Richard III at Bosworth and establishes a new dynasty. Grant and Carradine examine his position, conduct, and control of the official record when considering who benefited from the princes' removal and from Richard's ruined reputation.

First appears in chapter 8

A Lancastrian churchman and political opponent of Richard III who later becomes a leading servant of Henry VII. His connection to the tradition used by Thomas More makes him important when Grant asks where the familiar story originated.

First appears in chapter 8

The statesman and author whose unfinished history supplied one of the most influential accounts of Richard III. Because More was a child during Richard's reign and wrote years later from partisan testimony, Grant treats his vivid narrative as a claim requiring corroboration rather than as eyewitness evidence.

First appears in chapter 12

The bishop whose disclosure of Edward IV's earlier marriage contract was used to argue that Edward's children by Elizabeth Woodville were illegitimate. His evidence becomes central to the disputed legal basis for Richard III's accession.

Also known as Sir James Tyrell

First appears in chapter 15

A royal servant whom a later Tudor account identifies as arranging the princes' deaths on Richard III's orders. Grant and Carradine scrutinize the alleged confession and the absence of a surviving official record for it.

Also known as Sir Clements Markham

First appears in chapter 17

A historian whose earlier defense of Richard III confronts Carradine at the end of the inquiry with the deflating news that their supposedly new case has been made before, though it has scarcely altered the popular story.