Acclaimed historian Helen Castor is author of a number of bestselling books on medieval and Tudor history. Her latest offering, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, which tells the story of the lives and reigns of the two royal cousins, has been described as 'A dazzling tour de force of epic royal history', so we couldn't wait to sit down with her to talk about the fascination and draw of the two kings.
You're at Chalke History Festival talking about your new book, The Eagle and the Hart. What can you tell me about it?
The Eagle and the Hart is the story of Richard II and Henry IV, two cousins who were almost exactly the same age: Richard, was three months older than Henry. They were ten years old when Richard became king of England. They were 32 when Henry deposed him and took the throne in his place. I wanted to tell their joint stories, to look at how Richard became king so young, what happened as he grew up, why his reign went so badly wrong, and why it was that Henry took over, and then what the implications of that were for Henry and for England.
Quite a few people are reasonably sympathetic to Richard II, but you hold no truck with that.
I try to understand him. What I'm trying to do throughout the book is to see the world through the eyes of these two men, to try to get a sense of their psychology, how they understood their place in the world, and why not only their relationship, but the entire political structure, went so badly wrong. In doing that, it's possible to feel in some sense a sympathy for Richard, because he had so little clue as to what he was doing wrong, how badly he was misunderstanding the constitution within which he was supposed to be working, how little he understood his responsibilities rather than his rights as king. But the net effect of all of that is he got it really, really badly wrong in a way that, to me, looks like a profound kind of narcissism. I'm not sure that Richard ever fully understood that other people were three-dimensional human beings with needs and rights and interests, just like he was. Of course, his point would be no one was just like him because he was God's anointed - he was the king. But nevertheless, the point of being a king is not only the rights you have: those rights exist because you have very profound duties to the kingdom you rule. That's the bit that Richard never understood.
Yet some people, and not just the ones close to him, rose in support of him after he had been deposed. There was obviously something there.
There were a number of risings after his deposition and death. The first one happened only three months after his deposition. That is an interesting one as a litmus test for what support there was for him. The really striking thing about his deposition is that it's completely bloodless. Henry Bolingbroke doesn't have to strike a blow in anger to take the country. People rally to his banner. The last two years of Richard's reign had been such thoroughgoing tyranny that no one really had an interest or a realistic prospect of fighting off Bolingbroke, to keep the throne for Richard. But by three months after his deposition, the few nobles who'd been closest to Richard and had been very lavishly rewarded by him - the ones set up as an alternative, new great nobility to the nobles that Richard had destroyed two years earlier, in 1397 - lost their nerve, and they made the calculation that even if Henry was tolerating them so far, their prospects were very bleak, so they would try the resistance that they hadn't tried earlier. But again, the striking thing about that is they get nowhere. The plot is betrayed before it's even started, by one of the people who was supposed to be involved in it. And before Henry can get to the leaders, they are hacked to death by angry mobs. It's a horribly violent story, but at that point, just three months in, there really isn't support for Richard. Of course, the net effect of that rising is that Richard cannot be kept alive any longer because Henry Bolingbroke, like several later kings, discovers that having a live ex-king hanging around the place, even out of the way at Pontefract, is not a very secure option.
So, Richard conveniently dies behind the walls of Pontefract in February 1400. After that, he is a very, very unquiet ghost. But this is happening not so much because people are remembering the good old days as they are dissatisfied with Henry's regime. We have to remember that the bar for doing something about dissatisfaction is a lot lower when you're confronted with a usurper, because instead of there being that absolutely secure, God given authority, people are thinking, 'Well, he shouldn't really be king anyway. Let's see if we can gather some opposition to him.' And if you are trying to gather opposition, then the name of the legitimate, deposed king is going to be the banner you raise. So, an impostor at the Scottish court, whom historians rather endearingly call the 'pseudo-Richard', is someone with whom potential rebels can make great play. And the name of Richard is bandied around quite freely by those trying to raise opposition to Henry at various stages, right up to the point where Henry hands over the throne to Henry V. On the very eve of Agincourt, the last rebellion against this new Lancastrian dynasty - before Henry V's great triumphs - is still conjuring the name of Richard. But it's very much a situation where most people know he's not really coming back. He's a stick to beat Henry with rather than someone people want to welcome back in all his tyrannical glory.
It did set a hell of a precedent, though, didn't it? Without that, you'd never have had the execution of Charles I.
In the 1640s it's very striking that the nobles who are moving into opposition against Charles I are looking at the deposition of Richard II as part of their examination of the constitutional position they and the king find themselves in. You're absolutely right: once a precedent has been set and established, once it's bedded in, it can't be undone, and the constitutional future is going to be built upon it. In the same way, in 1399, when Henry was desperately trying to work out how best to depose Richard, they were looking back particularly to the deposition of Edward II in 1327. But also, Henry establishes a committee of clerics under the leadership, ironically, of Archbishop Scrope - the archbishop of York, who will later rebel against Henry himself - to examine any possible precedents: Frederick Barbarossa; Arthgallus, King of the Britons; any mythical or historical precedent. All the monasteries in the kingdom are asked to send written evidence that might be useful. It's a very interesting demonstration of how constitutional development happens in England: it is thought through; it's not the simple violence of 'might is right'. It is, 'How can we remove a king who needs to be removed because he has become a tyrant, but without undoing the institution of kingship, which is what we're trying to protect?' It's a difficult circle to square.
How many of the problems of that time are related to the massive upheavals of the waves of Black Death and all the social changes that went with it?
That's a very important context, as is the context of the Hundred Years' War - although, of course, contemporaries did not know it was the Hundred Years' War. I always feel I have to run that flag up when I say this, because these are handy labels to use, but no one knew them at the time. No one was saying, 'Right, half time, lads. Let's have a quick break.' But when the war starts going badly for the English, the whole question of the supply of money to the government becomes particularly acute. How to tax for a war that's going badly, where the payback for your money is not clear and it seems to be disappearing into a black hole? That then produces the poll tax in the late 1370s, which produces the Peasants Revolt, which means you can't resort to the poll tax again. The very profound crises in Richard's reign come out of all that. Richard's solution is to stop fighting the war. They can't find a peace - poor John of Gaunt has run himself ragged trying to find a peace by 1394 - so they have a really long truce.
Once Richard has done that, and collected the huge dowry he gets with his six-year-old French bride, he's in a position to start unleashing the tyranny he feels ought to have been his rule all along. So, it's very profoundly bedded into this much wider context, which also then informs Henry's problems. When Henry takes over, he hopes to be able to justify his rule and repair the constitution, smooth over the institution of kingship by ruling well. But the French are not happy with what he's done to Richard; the Scots seize the immediate opportunity to start causing trouble in the North; the Welsh decide this is the moment to rebel; and there are people in England who aren't happy with the rewards they've got for the whole thing. There's no way that Henry can avoid the same financial wrangling and worse financial holes than Richard had faced. That's the constitutional difference relating to your earlier question about the 1640s: the precedent they are looking at by then is not 'How do we get rid of this king, but keep kingship?' They've moved to the next, slightly more radical level, which is 'This king is so bad, we've been here before. How can we do without this altogether?' But they're nowhere near that in 1399 and 1400.
The mindset is fascinating. It's difficult enough, though, to get into the outlook of, say, the 1640s. How do you do that for a time that's 250 years earlier?
We're very lucky that the fourteenth-century chronicles, both English and French, are fantastic. Of course, like any source, they have to be treated with caution. But those narrative sources provide a lot of insight into the mentalities of the age. The parliament rolls are an extraordinary official administrative source to put beside those narrative sources. We also, for Richard's reign because he was so visually oriented, have an extraordinary array of visual material to work with: the coronation portrait in Westminster Abbey, Richard's tomb that he built for himself, the Wilton Diptych. When you put all these together, these key moments become central pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that enable you to get into the mindset not only of the political culture, but of the key players.
To give you one example, there's a particular moment: Richard is just past his tenth birthday in January 1377. His father, the Black Prince, has died six months earlier. His grandfather, Edward III, is not yet dead, but it's clear it won't be very long. And there's been a huge crisis in the Good Parliament the previous year. John of Gaunt has been up to his eyes trying to hold everything together. When Parliament convenes in January 1377, it really is an emergency meeting about how to bring the country back together and unite everyone. So, they bring in young Richard and sit him in front of parliament in his grandfather's place. Parliament is meeting in the Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster, which burnt down in 1834, but a wonderful, historically minded artist did watercolour sketches before that, so we have a sense of what those pictures looked like. And on the end wall in that huge, glorious chamber, was a vast painting of the coronation of Edward the Confessor, surrounded by his bishops and archbishops. Imagine Richard, just ten, sitting there with that massive picture of the Confessor being crowned. Then the chancellor, the bishop of Exeter, gives a speech in which he says the king has sent the prince to us, just as God sent his only beloved son; he who has been longed for by all men, and we must do honour and reverence to him as the pagans did to the son of God. The major idea of the whole speech is that Richard is essentially the Messiah. Everyone in that room knows it is political rhetoric, knows exactly why the bishop is doing this. The one person who doesn't is a ten-year-old boy who's been told he is unique and special since he was three, and who's now hearing that he's the Messiah while looking at this enormous painting of the Confessor being crowned. This is a message he's taking literally. Then you have his coronation in the Confessor's Abbey a few months later, and you start to build a picture. So I don't have Richard's diary to tell me what he was thinking. But in terms of understanding what's going on psychologically, I think it's a question of joining dots and putting together the most coherent picture we can.
I can only think of a few child monarchs who did well. Do you think that's just a standard thing, that they are so impressed by their importance at such a young age, that they're always going to turn out mental?
I think it's always very hard. It's not a bad rule of thumb, because you are growing up being told you are God's anointed. Also, it's remarkably hard to educate someone who is already king, because to educate someone properly - when it's a matter of huge responsibilities, difficult tasks, things they might not want to do and might not want to hear - how far can you push it? A very good contrast is Edward III, who became king at fourteen, but who had grown up as the heir to the throne seeing what a disastrous state his father had brought the country to. And then at fourteen, he was not free to rule, but saw his mother and her lover take over and make another disastrous mess of everything. So by the time Edward is seventeen, he's been fully educated as the heir to the throne should be. He's had a very good education in terms of seeing what's happened in front of his own eyes. He's also deeply thwarted because the power that ought to be his is kept out of his hands. That seems to be a perfect storm for a king of Edward's abilities to learn how it should be done. Edward learns from his mistakes. It's an extraordinary quality he has right throughout his reign, until the point at which he stops being fully compos mentis. Whereas those who become king much younger seem not to want to hear that they ever make mistakes, and that's a fatal flaw for Richard II. Those kings who, as children, are given something to think about and something to fight against turn out better. My impression of Richard is that he is wrapped in a peculiarly expensive form of cotton wool, and given a gilded cage that he's quite happy to be in and wants to keep everybody else out of. That's not a good preparation for life with a crown on your head.
What's your next project?
My next project is going to be a full-length biography of Elizabeth I. I did a short Penguin Monarchs volume, A Study in Insecurity, and it feels as though it's time, perhaps, to have a tilt at the whole thing, particularly because she famously said in 1601, 'I am Richard II, know ye not that?' I would be looking at Elizabeth I for quite a long time before I was reminded of Richard II, because she is such an astute figure, someone who precisely understood her responsibilities and the dangers of not doing the job well. But I can also understand what she had in mind. There are a whole number of parallels. From the 1590s on, you have a childless monarch refusing to name an heir, for very different reasons; problems in Ireland; and they're both very visually oriented, very conscious of the aesthetics and the iconography of monarchy. There are all sorts of comparisons, but those key differences make her such an astounding politician, which is something you could say of Richard, but only in a negative way. I think it's going to be a very interesting job.
Last time I interviewed you, I asked if you could witness one event, with all the caveats of not catching plague or what have you, you said you would like to know what happened to the Princes in the Tower. Would that still be the case or would you choose something else?
I would like to know that to settle the dispute, but I suspect it would be a horrible thing to witness. Now, I would say, having been steeped in the late fourteenth century, and bearing in mind your question about understanding the mentality of an age that's very different, this time I might choose September 1398: the duel between Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, with which Shakespeare starts the play Richard II, and the moment at which, after five months of preparation for this duel – people have come from all over Europe, it's a glorious, glittering occasion, but with so much at stake – Richard suddenly says, 'Stop'. If I could witness it all and interview the key participants, then I would take that.
Who would you like to have as dinner guests: people from history, but with no language barriers or need for vaccines?
If I'm only allowed one, I know I want Henry Bolingbroke. I have become so fond of him to the extent that my editor did query occasionally about my being too much on his side. But I would really love to have a chat with him and to find out if my assessment is right: whether he is the complex, interesting, very human, very fallible but very humane in lots of ways, person that I suspect he was. He could be my ally in dealing with Joan of Arc, because I would love the chance to talk to her, although I suspect she'd be a lot more challenging as a dinner guest. Who else do I want? Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk from the fifteenth century, Chaucer's granddaughter. In fact, one of her husbands was the earl of Salisbury, killed by a cannonball at the siege of Orleans just before Joan of Arc got there. So, there'd be lots to talk about! Alice Chaucer was one of the canniest politicians in the whole of the fifteenth century, a really brilliant woman. That means I want Margaret Paston as well. Maybe one more chap. I think Edward III, as well as Henry, would be fun: I would like their perspectives on everything else that's being talked about. That would be a really interesting group. And Edward III, a king who once dressed up as a pheasant for a fancy-dress party, is going to get things going a bit!
You can purchase Helen Castor's fabulous book The Eagle and the Hart here.
