Robert Stewart

Shakespeare got it wrong

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King<br />by Ian Mortimer

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

Henry IV, in Ian Mortimer’s graceless (and sense-defying) words, is ‘the least biograph-ied English king to have been crowned since the Conquest’. No longer. Here is a full and richly detailed life. Not a deal more would need to be said were it not that Mortimer has invited us to look upon his book as representative of a new species of biographical history.

In his introduction Mortimer argues against the traditional view that a lack of documentary evidence (chiefly letters) places limits on medieval biography. His book is intended to demonstrate that not only is a ‘personality-based’ biography of Henry possible, but that biography is the most important approach to the past. Only biography can uncover ‘why this had happened, or that had not happened’. It can do this, however, only if historians throw academic caution to the winds and eschew ‘judgmental’ biography, Mortimer’s example of which is K. B. McFarlane’s chapters on Henry IV in his Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (1972). McFarlane’s chapters are ‘too objective’ because ‘linked to a philosophy of history as a judgmental process — seeing Henry in the context of his peers’, whereas Mortimer’s biography is ‘a sympathetic one (seeing his peers through Henry’s eyes)’.

Historians’ distrust of biography is rooted in the biographer’s need to place historical events in the background while his subject struts his hour upstage. Mortimer drizzles cool water on ‘life and times’ biographies which spend too much time on the ‘rustling leaves’ of the period, rather than concentrating on the ‘roots, trunk and branches’ of the protagonist’s personality. Mortimer himself gives the political events of the time at least as much space as Henry’s personality. He is not so foolish as to believe that everything can be seen through Henry’s eyes; even so, those events are seen chiefly as they touched Henry’s interest.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in