HELEN CASTOR ON RICHARD II, HENRY IV AND MORE…

An exclusive conversation for History, Etc subscribers

Exactly a quarter of a century ago, in October 1999, I was an 18-year old undergraduate, newly arrived at Cambridge, having more-or-less accidentally decided that I wanted to study medieval history.

My supervisor and mentor was Helen Castor, a brilliant medievalist and a terrific teacher - who was also patient enough to put up with my nonsense, of which in those days there was plenty.

Helen taught me from scratch the English late medieval history that is still the foundation of all my work on the Plantagenet dynasty. Today we are friends (she remains patient) and we still often find ourselves talking about the antics of the Plantagenets.

Our conversation below is on the topic of Helen’s new book, The Eagle and The Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, which has just been published in the UK (click here to buy) and USA (click here to buy).

The book is astonishingly good. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is both a gripping, moving, deeply humane study of two contrasting cousins, and a clear-eyed dissection of late medieval England’s polity. Helen has kindly agreed to introduce its themes for us below. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Dan

PS: UK people - Helen and I will be live in conversation for an evening at the British Museum on October 28th. Do come if you can. More information here.

---

DJ: The Eagle and the Hart is a brilliant case study - or pair of case studies - in medieval power. On the one hand we have Richard II, king by right, but a political basket case; on the other, Henry IV, a shrewd, capable politician well suited to high office but tainted by the stain of usurpation. What do you think their contrasting experiences of kingship tell us about the office itself?

HC: They might be a perfect demonstration of the pros and cons of hereditary monarchy as a system of government, at least as it was established in medieval England. Richard has the birthright, the claim by blood, which makes his God-given power as king, in theory, unarguable. That means that – in theory – there should be no wrangling or conflict about how government is constituted or where the buck stops, and the king and his nobles should be able to get on with the job of protecting the kingdom against internal disorder and external attack.

Trouble is, Richard doesn’t realise that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Instead, he sees his nobles as a threat, and sets about trying to undermine, sidestep or destroy them. In his case, the royal bloodline has put the crown on entirely the wrong head, and the kingdom needs to be saved from the danger he poses – but how can a king whose power comes from God be removed? Needs must, by 1399. But Henry – who understands the job and has all the qualities required to do it well – has taken the crown by force, so his possession of it will never be unarguable, his rule never completely secure.

It's something like the old rhyme: when kingship was good it was very very good, but when it was bad it was horrid.

DJ: Your portrait of Richard is the best I’ve ever read - he’s vain, petty, flouncy, silly, vicious, pitiable and terrifying, often all in the course of one afternoon. Is this simply a case of ‘here’s why first cousins shouldn’t marry’? [Richard’s parents, the Black Prince and Joan, the ‘Fair Maid’ of Kent, were first cousins once removed.] How do you account for him getting things so wrong?

HC: Certainly why first cousins shouldn’t marry – but also why emotionally indulged heirs to the throne shouldn’t be allowed to wait until their thirties to marry their equally emotionally indulged first cousins. Where’s the sense of royal duty, dammit!

When it turns out that the Black Prince is dying in his mid-forties, at the same time as Edward III is dying in his mid-sixties, Richard is only nine, the spoiled baby of a cossetted family wrapped in particularly expensive cotton wool. As his father’s only surviving legitimate child he is literally unique; after the Prince’s death he hears himself described in parliament as England’s Messiah; and at ten he’s anointed and crowned in Westminster Abbey. He’s learned everything about how special he is, and nothing about the substance of the job that being special requires him to do. Once he’s king, it only gets harder to push him to do anything he doesn’t want to – and (because silly and vain) he can’t or won’t see that there are fundamental things about ruling he just doesn’t understand.

DJ: Your depiction of a handsome, charming young Henry Bolingbroke, swanking around Europe with an ostrich in his hand luggage and the world at his feet, is no less memorable. Yet when Bolingbroke becomes Henry IV, the strain of carrying the crown he has taken seems physically to break him. Alongside your excellent political analysis of Henry’s usurpation of the crown, I wonder how much sympathy, even sadness, you feel towards him? Or is that kind of thing crossing a historical line?

HC: I’m always aiming for empathy, in the sense of seeing through the eyes of the people I’m writing about. You used the word ‘pitiable’ about Richard, and that kind of empathy is where pity for him might come from, I think: the idea that he had no clue about the effects of his own actions, no capacity to comprehend reality as experienced by other people.

Otherwise he’s a pretty rebarbative character, whereas Henry is both liked and loved by people around him; strikingly so. And I could see why. That’s not to say he didn’t do some dark things: his complicity in Richard’s destruction of his former allies in 1397 doesn’t sit well with the principles of law and justice he was supposedly championing when he deposed Richard two years later. But during his years as king, when illness made him old before his time, it’s possible to see self-doubt in him, and a sometimes desperate struggle with his conscience, and that’s where empathy does tip into sympathy, for me, because it feels so deeply human.

But I’ve tried (I hope!) to show not tell, and to leave room for other responses. Someone told me the other day that they’d finished the book liking Richard more than they’d expected, and Henry less. That felt like a win.

DJ: Can you ‘zoom out’ a bit from Henry IV’s reign and give us a sense for how the dynamics of the wars of the roses were shaped by the fact that rival noble houses, cadet branches of the Plantagenet line, successively laid claim to the crown. Was it ever really feasible for a king to be both a ‘Lancastrian’ or ‘Yorkist’ AND an effective monarch?

HC: The fact that Henry took a throne to which he had only a claim, rather than the claim, set a precedent that couldn’t be undone. On the other hand, you’ve (brilliantly) shown how formidably Henry’s son, Henry V, rebuilt the power of the crown. We call him a Lancastrian, but one of the points of what he did was to show that he wasn’t, in any partisan sense: he was king of England, and the duchy of Lancaster just one string to his bow.

If Henry V’s son Henry VI had taken after his father, I suspect the words ‘Lancastrian’ and ‘Yorkist’ wouldn’t feature in our historical vocabulary. But once he’d shown himself to be a disastrous no-hoper, it was inevitable that the precedent of 1399 would resurface. Perhaps, if Edward IV hadn’t eaten and drunk himself into an early grave, the idea of being a ‘Yorkist’ might have evaporated, as ‘Lancastrian’ had done under Henry V. We’re back to questions of royal duty…

DJ: Let’s be real now, did Richard II actually invent the handkerchief?

HC: For real. Or, well: perhaps it was his tailor, Walter Rauf, responding creatively to the king complaining about a head cold, given that I can’t imagine Richard coping with snot or blocked sinuses without throwing a tantrum. What we know for sure is that, from the mid-1380s, payments appear in Richard’s household accounts for ‘small pieces of linen made to be given to the lord king to carry in his hand for blowing and wiping his nose’.

By then the words ‘headkerchief’ and ‘neckerchief’ already existed in English, meaning cloths to be worn around the head and neck, but there’s no record of a French word for ‘handkerchief’ till the fifteenth century, or of ’handkerchief’ itself in English till the sixteenth. So the long-winded description in the royal accounts seems to indicate a brand new brainwave.

One historian – though I can’t see it myself (‘the Order of the Hanky’?) – suggests this was ‘Richard’s earliest attempt to design an emblem of distinction similar to the later badge of the white hart’. Another points out that, if the king’s rarefied invention ‘had been called simply a richard’, his place in history would have been much more assured.

DJ: Your last three books, She Wolves, Joan of Arc and the Penguin Monarchs volume on Elizabeth I, have all been (brilliant) studies in female power. Can you offer any thoughts about the differences between writing about men and women in the medieval/early modern period; feel free to fold in any thoughts you have about being a woman writing about the Middle Ages!

HC: Writing about female rule in this period (in any period??) always means writing about the double binds, the 57 varieties of catch-22, in which women find themselves when they try to exercise power of a kind that’s assumed to be male. So I had to beware of subconsciously assuming that, for a man, ruling should be simple – because of course it’s not, especially for a man like Richard who can’t or won’t fit the model of king-as-warrior (quite apart from all the other things he can’t or won’t do). I’m going back to Elizabeth I next, and the compare-and-contrast between Richard and Elizabeth – who once famously said ‘I am Richard II, know you not that?’ – gets more and more interesting, for all that Elizabeth was one of England’s most politically and intellectually gifted monarchs and Richard, er, wasn’t.

In this book all the main protagonists are men, but I wanted to make sure I noticed the women. I wanted to notice the distinctive difficulties women faced – the risk of death that came with every single pregnancy, or the heart-stopping challenges faced by very young royal brides sent to marry men they’d never met in countries they didn’t know or understand. And I was surprised (and fascinated – I’m working on a way to do more with this) by the number of royal and noble women in this story who refused to play by the rules, women who insisted on choosing their own husbands, or who had affairs and illegitimate children. Even more than with the men who stand centre-stage, it’s a question of reading the evidence of fragments, gaps and silences. Watch this space…