The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King | Ian Mortimer

The crisis of the drama (after which the battle of Shewsbury is climax and the rest of Henry’s 13-year reign dénouement) is the deposition of Richard in 1399. Henry’s decision to return from France in rebellion against banishment and disinheritance in order to lead a revolution of the people, or more narrowly the communitas regni, is justly described by Mortimer as an act of great personal courage. His musings on Henry’s imagined analysis of the situation facing him and England are persuasive. But the mix of motives — to restore his good name, to redeem the ancestral honour of the house of Lancaster and to advance Lancastrian political ambitions — may not have played in Henry’s head as they do in Mortimer’s.

There is a deeper consideration. Looking at events through Henry’s eyes leaves Mortimer with little good to say of Richard or his ministers — ‘favourites’ his opponents called them and so does Mortimer. A consequence is that in the great dynastic battle of one of the most significant reigns, constitutionally, in English history, Richard’s ultimate failure to establish a personal monarchy of absolutist stamp is viewed as the outcome of weakness of character. That Richard had a certain logic, a lot of historical tradition and most of the judges on his side is largely overlooked. What undid Richard was not simply his supposed unfitness for office, but a want of suppleness of mind combined with a high degree of amour propre, so that he was unable to weigh properly the mood of the nation as represented by the Houses of Parliament, which in the preceding century had steadily grown in self-confidence and self-assertiveness and which expected to be treated if not as full, at least as essential, partners in the conduct of the nation’s business.

Mortimer writes that Shakespeare, by seeing the monarchical crisis through the eyes of Richard II, the autocratic ‘king unking’d’, rather than those of the banished heir fighting for ‘natural justice’ against a ‘detestable tyrant’, was untrue to history. That may be beyond dispute, though Henry, after all, was fighting for the throne for himself. But what if Mortimer had himself chosen to write a ‘sympathetic’ life of Richard and to write it, as by his lights he would have had to, through Richard’s eyes? Where then would historical truth lie? History requires the weighing of evidence from all sides, looking at things through many eyes.

Mortimer has written a fine biography, but there is stamina yet in McFarlane’s contention that ‘the historian cannot honestly write biographical history’.