When Shakespeare wrote Richard II, he billed his play as a tragedy: the downfall of a king riddled with fear, contempt and an obscure sense of majesty. Shakespeare’s portrait was a reasonably accurate one. Some historians have suggested Richard was a narcissist; others that he had borderline personality disorder.
Helen Castor offers a candid and considered view. Though the king ‘always knew he was special… his presence in the world shaped by his God-given destiny’, he simply lacked the conventional qualities of kingship. Richard’s tragedy was that he was doomed to rule under the spectre of his father and grandfather’s martial legacy – the Black Prince, hero of Crécy and the military giant Edward III.
His cousin, however, possessed all the skills that a ruler required. Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, excelled in a tournament. He was a soldier, fighting for a time on crusade in Lithuania with the Teutonic Knights, and had three sons by the time he was in his early twenties. Richard had no interest in war and his marriage to Anne of Bohemia – who was described by a contemporary as ‘a tiny portion of meat’ – provided no children to succeed him.
Both Richard and Henry were born in 1367, three months apart, the year their fathers were at war in Spain. Princess Joan (Jeanette) gave birth to Richard in Bordeaux on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany, a date Richard would exploit for all its symbolic worth. On his return from Spain, the Black Prince developed an illness that would eventually kill him. When Edward III died soon after, the ten-year-old Richard was next in line. Henceforth, kingship was a tantalising and glittering prospect; yet the reality was also mundane. Richard’s constant power-struggles with the nobility are deftly woven into Castor’s portrait.
As for Henry, the antagonist in Shakespeare’s version of events, Castor evidences a wholly different man. The dutiful son of the staggeringly wealthy John of Gaunt, he has the world at his feet, bankrolled by his father to live a life of luxury, learning and adventure. During their youth, Henry and Richard’s lives inevitably intersect – notably in 1381 when a ‘volatile compound of anger and fear fuelled a revolt that spread like wildfire’. As rebels chanted for the head of John of Gaunt, Henry was hiding for his life in the Tower of London. Richard, however, showed remarkable maturity and nous in confronting the rebels. Castor writes:
For the first time Henry was experiencing the shock of uncontrolled violence and mortal danger. For Richard, the flood of adrenaline came instead from the knowledge that, confronted with anarchy and bloodshed, he alone was untouchable.
Loyal to Richard, Henry was, like his father, bound by the traditional code of chivalry. Richard could not have been more different. John of Gaunt was forced to wear a breastplate, fearing assassination at the hands of his nephew, and Richard beat the Earl of Arundel bloody for arriving late to Queen Anne’s funeral. This king was certainly aggressive and impulsive, but Castor challenges the sources. For one chronicler, Richard’s demolition of Sheen Palace – where his wife died – was the result of petulance and grief, but for Castor, he was utilising the building materials to focus on a new project, architecture being one of his passions. In fact he focused his grief on a magnificent shared tomb where, next to Anne’s, his ‘encomium took pride of place… unwilling to wait for the judgment of posterity. He knew how he should be remembered: as faultlessly right’.
Henry watched as Richard dismantled old King Edward’s England, paying thugs to act against his people. After John of Gaunt’s death, Richard proceeded to strip Henry of his inheritance. ‘In his sorrow and his anger’, Henry had to act. In a matter of weeks, he had taken the crown: ‘The people of England had united under his command to reject a tyrant.’ But the word ‘usurper’ was now being whispered. Was Henry divinely punished? His deteriorating health suggested so. ‘The king had leprosy, they said.’ According to Castor, however, Henry had a ‘blood clot in his leg or possibly even a rectal prolapse’. The latter part of his reign was spent in physical disintegration, quelling rebellion and securing the crown until his death.
Castor’s England is a fragile realm, about to implode under the rule of a despot. Yet its liberation by a hopeful new sovereign is tainted by fears about legitimacy, dynasty and righteous succession. Castor untangles a web of fractious politics and questions the meaning of medieval sovereignty. The Eagle and the Hart is a meticulous account of the precariousness of kingship and the psychology of power. It is also a rattlingly good story, told with scholarship and humanity by one of our finest historians.
Comments