Sunne in Splendour

The Sunne in Splendour is a historical novel by the American writer Sharon Kay Penman, published in 1982. It is about the Wars of the Roses and chronicles the life of Richard III.

Penman became interested in Richard III while she was a student, and she researched and wrote the novel then. The four-hundred-page manuscript was stolen from her car, and afterwards she found herself unable to write anything for five years. She eventually rewrote the whole book, and by the time the nine-hundred-and-thirty-six-page novel was published she had spent twelve years on it while practising law at the same time.

Penman characterises Richard as a good but misunderstood ruler, having studied his life in both the United States and Britain and concluded that his was a classic case of history being rewritten by the victor. She rejects the common belief that Richard had the Princes in the Tower, the sons of his brother Edward IV, killed, and attributes their deaths instead to the Duke of Buckingham.

The narrative begins in 1459 and runs to 1485, following both the political history of the period and Richard's own life up to the end of it.