Shakespeare begins his plays with revolutionary formal casualness. Even his most unforgettably conventional starting soliloquy, by the distinctly Marlovian anti-hero of Richard III (“Now is the winter of our discontent”) is disingenuously puritanical, to explosive, and paradoxical, effect.
But none of his introductions are I think so spectacular, so artful, so insinuatingly mysterious as the curtain-raising ritual for his other poetic Ricardian downfall, Richard II. Here the viewer is plunged into an extreme experience of in medias res disorientation, comparable in its cinematic impact to the dizzying obliquities of Black Hawk Down or The Draughtsman’s Contract.
A duel is about to take place upon which depend the irreconcilable reputations of two proud and assertive dukes, the king’s cousin versus a royal favorite. Beyond them, ever less implicitly, the crown’s honor and credibility—and thus the realm’s security, past, present, and future—is fully engaged. This all-important trial of arms is dangled, both by Shakespeare and by King Richard, with captivating finesse, absorbing the full attention of the play’s world and the audience’s emotions, then suddenly withheld, in an apparent caprice, actually a long-planned literary and political stratagem.
Dueling is generally a response to lying; the insulted challenger may have been “given the lie,” accused of some more or less solemn mendacity, or he may seek to uncover an untruth, perennially an amatory one. The judicial combat between Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, which was to have taken place at Coventry on September 16, 1398, seemingly lacked this ancient traditional element of romantic rivalry. But it surely represented a tug-of-war over the affections of the mercurial King Richard: Bolingbroke’s coolly distant cousin, Mowbray’s on-off close friend and demanding, manipulative master. Certainly it concerned falsehoods, probably multiple ones. At least two stories, neither of which stood up well alone, sat mounted upon warhorses, armed at all points against one another.
As in certain passages and characters of the Morte D’Arthur, the situation at the outset of Shakespeare’s Richard II possesses an unfathomable structural depth, perhaps mundanely textual in origin, yet irresistibly redolent of modern, novelistic, individual writerly genius. Perhaps, in this case, the genius is history’s own; even that of Richard II, that essentially disastrous monarch, who nonetheless believed himself to be possessed of that fickle quality—a belief which sometimes, never more so than as expressed by Shakespeare, seems to reach out and for long, shining moments, seduce posterity.
The audience beholds in turn Richard; Mowbray; Bolingbroke and his father, Richard’s senior living uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; and various heraldic dignitaries speaking and performing in the highest, most formal feudal and poetic style, one which this wholly versified play will perpetuate until its conclusion. Yet they are conveying nothing to any direct purpose, compared with what they warily suggest but struggle to unsay. Some great universally tainting crime is being pushed firmly back into the wings by the characters and perhaps even by the laws of chivalry.
Here is the most necessary yet prosaic explanation, by way of literary and historical context. There was, we are told, and can confirm if our appetite for Elizabethan drama ranges beyond the Shakespearean, an old and popular play, Thomas of Woodstock. Shakespeare and his audience knew it all too well, so he was relaxed about writing a sequel, a divinely touched Gladiator II. If any single groundling was unaware that another of King Richard’s uncles, the abrasive, belligerent patriot Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, had been murdered, by Mowbray, at Richard’s scarcely secret say-so, with spools of further implication reaching out to touch another royal cousin, Aumerle, and even to some extent Bolingbroke himself—well, what were they doing at a play called Richard II in the first place?
The duel, or trial, thus becomes burdened with unbearable tension, freighted with enigma and expectation. The only way is out. The audience knows or cares as yet nothing of the combatants, Bolingbroke and Mowbray, as men, personalities, characters in any simply theatrical sense. They are, so far, only spare parts, actors and cogs, in a nervously overwound clockwork theater, overseen by a king who, at this early point, seems the very ideal, conventional, Platonic image and definition of a king: King Richard in the style of those cardboard Lionhearts who bring justice at the conclusion of hackneyed Robin Hood adaptations.
The story, the society, the play, the poetry, the kingdom, the country demands that one of these gorgeously accoutred and appareled knights must die, be exposed, punished, and thereby draw out the psychological poison that flows like one of London’s lost rivers beneath the stage. It never occurs to us that if Bolingbroke or Mowbray falls, this story ends. Quite contrariwise, the resolution of their impasse seems vital if it is ever to develop at all.
And then, suddenly, King Richard, courtly politics, and history itself—quite deliberately, egregiously, dramatically—refuse to permit that satisfaction to us, and to the equally exasperated adversaries. The joust is canceled. Mowbray and Bolingbroke are banished, under the force of a sentence that is odd, jagged, confusing, ill proportioned. Mowbray must endure the permanent, quasi-deathly command “never to return.” Bolingbroke’s spell abroad is time-limited, and then further watered down, though he and his father, Gaunt, keep grousing about it with passive-aggressive defiant stoicism (“That sun that warms you here shall shine on me”) and emotional blackmail (“Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow”).
The rules have all been broken. And somehow, the trial not proven, the course unrun, and the duel once disallowed turns out to be more enthralling, more memorably haunting, than any of its many initially similar but conclusive parallel clashes of sharp and structural Shakespearean foils (Hamlet and Laertes, Macbeth and Malcolm, Richard III and Richmond, Hal and Hotspur). Perhaps only Mercutio’s death at Tybalt’s hands in Romeo and Juliet (of a roughly similar Shakespearean vintage) matches Richard II’s opening non-combat for sheer theatrical impact, and this is in some ways Mowbray’s and Bolingbroke’s inverse and equivalent: a killing that is not supposed to happen, an excrescence in formal, choreographical terms, and so also a baroque twist of highly expressive art.
Helen Castor, who has long proven herself in the roles, seldom combined with such panache and integrity, of academic historian, writer, and documentary narrator, evidently shares my own obsessive relationship with Richard II (quoted with exceptional stylishness in her chapter titles), which she has gone so far as to call her favorite of Shakepeare’s plays. In 2024, we both saw a production of Richard II at London’s gleamingly contemporary, penetratingly chic Bridge Theatre. It was especially well attended, a little eavesdropping could confirm, on account of its star, Jonathan Bailey, a goodly youth conferring the radiance of Bridgerton to illumine a cynical, insubstantial, chemically stimulated king, who at the very least overlapped with Shakespeare’s, and, in the view of an approving Castor, with her own and with history’s.
Given the substance, dimensions, and ambition of Castor’s latest work, The Eagle and the Hart, she has surely lived alongside the febrile king and his unstable world for far longer than a theatrical production’s gestation, or indeed an electoral cycle. The utilitarian school of history, seeing in the discipline a tyrant’s handy soothsayer, a mere superforecaster, has always seemed to me to represent a depressing, and almost certainly a deceptive, estimate of the subject’s purpose and value. But I should admit, as it were in passing, as the least of the many dazzling excellences of Castor’s book—least in profound worth, maybe, but still the most immediately remarkable—that her material, and her meditation upon it, does seem to have lent to her a quite extraordinary degree of vatic power over the present era. She wrote this book; events she could not then have guaranteed took place; she published it; we, with increasingly eeriness, lived through it. Perhaps after all it is a virtue worth embracing about history that the more truthfully and specifically it cleaves to its vision of the past, the more strangely and perceptively it will accompany us, like Shakespeare in his affectionate rival’s words, “for all time.”
Castor possesses the crucial attribute shared by narrative historians, historical novelists, and political journalists—a nose for a tale. Her first book for a general audience, Blood and Roses, published two decades ago, made use of the all-but-unique fifteenth-century Norfolk Paston family correspondence (comparable for their period to the Lisle Letters, perhaps, or those of the later Civil War–sundered Verneys). In her previous work (including a series of television documentaries) she has engaged with English queens prior to and including Elizabeth I, with Joan of Arc, and, in her doctoral work, with the feminine-formed Lancastrian household. Castor alludes to the shape of her career to date in her introduction to The Eagle and the Hart, telling us that she recognized from the first not only that her “protagonists would be male” this time but that she was writing about “a moment of political masculinity in crisis.” Her professional origins still shape her latest book, and Castor’s acknowledgment of the masculinity of her major players certainly does not occlude her consistent ability to understand elite late medieval life in England by way of its strategically positioned high-born ladies. Mothers, wives, stepmothers, friendly cousinages, a not-quite-requited love affair, and several extremely consequential yet little-known adulteries all receive proper and rewarding treatment. But it is not sex that is most decisive here; it is, as with history it innately should be, time. Castor, whatever justifiable fascination Richard II holds for her, has been guided by chronology and biography away from the play and the king pure and simple. She has identified an irresistible parallel structure, stemming from a basic fact: that Richard II and Henry of Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, the first cousin but never quite heir presumptive who eventually supplanted him through an uneasily defined mixture of political force and popular consent, were almost exactly the same age.
Accompanying such an elegant temporal structure is an equally alluring emotional one. The royal cousins were, in every identifiable aspect, very different as boys and young men. Their relationship was one of courtly decorousness at its outward best, beneath which mutual distaste and suspicion was scarcely concealed. After passing the Christologically significant age of thirty-three, Henry of Bolingbroke, transformed by his circumstances, was rapidly forced to assume a very different character. Richard II, who exulted in a brilliant selfhood and devised stratagems that compelled recognition of its supremacy, was denied the chance to mature into middle life—denied that chance, however reluctantly, at his cousin Henry's command.
Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke is a photographic portrait of his Richard in negative. While not entirely or necessarily bereft of human responses to the psychologically testing situations he endures, he never reveals to the audience whether, or when, he is for real—though of course an actor may choose to imply such missing answers. Bolingbroke’s early dialogue with his sovereign, contemporary, cousin, foil, and archenemy (one thinks momentarily of the present Duke of Sussex’s description of his elder brother as his “arch-nemesis”) can be interpreted as sycophantic, boldly defiant, or the one laid over the other. Thus Castor, not wholly unlike Dame Hilary Mantel in her final and definitive role as Thomas Cromwell’s ghostwriter, has a profoundly suggestive void upon which to work. It’s hardly a surprise that she disinters a Bolingbroke (simply Henry to her, whereas his heir, the future Prince Hal and Henry V, becomes less intimately “the prince”) whom she transparently admires, likes, and understands. Just as with Shakespeare’s flawed but magnificent Richard requiring a dark gray Bolingbroke across the chessboard, this tends to mean that Castor has little sympathy for Richard II—a position that becomes very convincing as her double saga unfolds.
This richly simple structure—coeval royal cousin antitypes just waiting to burst their golden fetters and engage in a definitively leopardine struggle—is entirely successful. On our way to this fatal showdown, moments in time punctuate the “Tragedy” of Castor’s Shakespearean subtitle to show Richard and Henry in bright, precise, sharply contrasted colors. Unlike Shakespeare, Castor commences not in medias res but in two royal nurseries. Here a compelling fact catches her attention at once. Though born a second son, Richard of Bordeaux was still the child of the most extraordinary couple in the English royal lineage since Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, the warrior hero later known as the Black Prince, and his endlessly controversial cousin and childhood playmate, Joan, or Jeanette, of Kent, beautiful, sophisticated, much-married, dubbed that county’s “Fair Maid.” Destiny at once attended Richard’s birth date, Epiphany 1367, in the person of three distinctly mysterious kings—“at any rate, as the story was told later back in England.” A Canterburian monk suggested the monarchs of Castile, Portugal, and Navarre, but according to Castor the only certain crowned head present (as a recorded godfather) was Jaume, exiled king of Mallorca. The little prince, thus associated with the Magi and named for the Lionheart, was also promptly visited by his paternal uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster in jure uxoris, who was absent fighting in Spain when his own first son, Henry, was born on an unknown day that April.
Richard’s slightly older brother, his legendary but broken-down father, and his anticlimactically senile grandfather within a decade all died. Three deaths of three Edwards made the Magian aureole surrounding his birth all the more significant. Here was no adventurous cadet, intended perhaps to govern in a brother’s name his native Aquitanian territories, but a boy-king needed for England herself, whose childhood would be spent in a cocoon of swaddling, stifling spun gold. Richard was glaringly fatherless in a way perhaps only another cousin of his, the young king of France Charles VI, was situated to understand.
Meanwhile the lower-profile Henry was instead motherless, a more usual situation for the times. Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, died in childbirth before her son was two years old. (The only remarkable thing about her death was its commemoration by Geoffrey Chaucer in his first great poem, The Book of the Duchess.) John of Gaunt responded to this great and genuine loss as most great medieval noblemen would have done, by marrying again, in his case with an extraordinary combination of guile, personal discrimination, and good luck. His Spanish princess would bring to him a fortune and to his daughters thrones, but it was his mistress Katherine Swynford—the beloved governess of his children, Chaucer’s sister-in-law, and ancestress of the present British royal family—who would serve faultlessly as a kind of stepmother to Henry.
We next glimpse both boys at a ceremony in which Castor locates their kingdom’s slide from Arthurian high noon to late Morte decline, the Order of the Garter’s ritual knighting of the brace of princes in 1377 (just before the death of the old king Edward III, when Richard was his grandfather’s heir apparent): “The fact that ten-year-olds were being invested with the Garter,” she writes, “showed how wide the gulf now yawned between the trappings of chivalry and the reality of war.” She shows how, in the years after the young Richard II’s accession, his unique position of regal dignity and wholly nominal agency held him back from the kind of development, precocious to us but more or less necessary for a successful medieval magnate, that his cousin was experiencing: “While Richard waited for public recognition that he was no longer a child, Henry was getting married.”
The upheaval in the summer of 1381 of the Peasants’ Rebellion gave Richard the unknowing pinnacle of his reign and Henry, in a headspinning “What if?,” very nearly the premature conclusion of his life. Such was John of Gaunt’s unpopularity with the Kentish rebels that fourteen-year-old Henry, as his heir, was only saved from mob justice by the merciful intervention of one of their number, John Ferrour, whose life Henry, as king, would in turn preserve decades later. Richard’s attitude to both his loyal but widely loathed uncle and his unruly populace was already dangerously unknowable. Outwardly reliant on his uncle’s counsel, the king nurtured envy and fear of Gaunt’s power and possible ambition; announcing himself as a champion of the people, he both toyed with accepting their terms in good faith, and, when it came to it, unhesitatingly and skillfully betrayed their leadership. The tantalizing idea of Richard as a potentially pioneering social reformer, unparalleled for someone of his era, rank, and tender age, has met with a startling amount of support, for example in Juliet Barker’s counterintuitive study England Arise. Castor, while not dismissing Richard’s wholehearted and early interest in conscripting the commons as a countervailing force against his nobles, sees such a policy as both cynical and unworkable. Her sympathies are largely and rather boldly with the unromantic Gaunt, a conscientious and talented statesman obliged to plough his way through apparently impossible serial crises—a burden and a knack that would pass in due time to his son Henry.
The Shakespearean dichotomy of Richard versus Bolingbroke, as well as a certain amount of conspicuous evidence, has tended to credit Richard with, at the very least, style, charisma, and cultural capital. As a (re)builder and patron of the arts, his achievements are unquestionable while also, Castor demonstrates, illustrative of the ever-young king’s distinct personality, for good and ill: the tasteful and the solipsistic (not for the last time, a parallel with Charles I insinuates itself between the lines). The flowering of English as a literary language associated with Chaucer and many a less celebrated but almost as sophisticated poet is often dubbed “Ricardian” and associated with Richard’s court, even though Chaucer was, as we have seen, an intimate client of the Lancastrian milieu who prospered, naturally, in Henry’s reign as a result. A stereotype has thus quietly and unthinkingly emerged of Richard as a glamorous, effete “arty” monarch, reasonably assisted by his distaste for risking his life in battle or even tournaments, his breathtakingly beautiful royal portraits, his lack of progeny, his favoritism of dashing young noblemen, and even his apparent invention of the handkerchief.
This does not amount to nothing, but its corollary is seriously misleading: the conception of Henry of Bolingbroke as a dour, efficient, militaristic “hearty” with little of Richard’s supposed artistic and cultural flair. Castor dismantles both of these broad assumptions about her protagonists with aplomb. Like Shakespeare she is an immensely skillful wielder of dichotomy, but to delightfully revisionist purpose. The doubtfully maturing Richard owned some fine-looking books, but by 1382, when the king married the imperial princess Anne of Bohemia, “it was obvious . . . that he was neither a fighter nor a scholar.” Cousin Henry, on the other hand, was both, and a considerable musician to boot. Castor understands the truth that pertained for centuries after Richard and Henry’s days: that the chivalric and the cultural aspects of a lay nobleman’s reputation were all but inextricable. She thus unveils not arty versus hearty, not style versus substance, but a nullity shown up by a paragon.
But of course Richard by definition was not nobody, and he did not need accomplishments of any kind to be innately much more than a great lay nobleman. That was his heritage, his identity, his joy, and his curse. His earliest memories were of being a beloved heir of uncontested legitimacy, gaining not just from primogeniture’s normal conventions but from the mythical stature of his grandfather and father. At ten he was a sacralized monarch, a holy cynosure, a biblical and national judge and lawgiver. It is in the arena of the law that Castor gives us Richard at his most talented and unbearable. Had he been born into a lesser station he might have made a skilled and hated advocate and authority, a late medieval Judge Jeffreys, except perhaps for the fact that he had particular interest and aptitude in the law precisely because it related to himself and his rights as king.
The exercise and innovation of justice gave Richard a traditional, prestigious, yet non-martial royal role. Here he could be nimble, opportunistic, subtle, ambitious, and bold, and he selected willing servants with similar qualities. Furthermore, he was no Bourbon, forgetting nothing but learning nothing; after every reversal, he contained his inward fury and found himself able to improve legal, diplomatic, and political finagles and to bounce back when opportunity presented itself. His cousin Henry, as ever, was strikingly unlike him in this: born to careless wealth, always rather befuddled by law and finance, correspondingly willing, after usurping his throne, to listen with whatever reluctance to better-versed experts citing established precedent.
The cousins, alike only in their ages, were set apart by geographical space and sphere of operations as much as by character. Richard’s position, his real as well as self-importance, constricted his freedom and intensified his paranoia, exacerbating a tendency to tower over a refined but tiny courtly world. Henry, although his own father’s precious only surviving son of legitimate birth, was given considerable leeway to explore the real thing, partly because his cousin’s emerging character and the pace of political instability led the always shrewd Gaunt to calculate that his heir might well be safer abroad at tourneys or even on crusade than amidst the snakepits of the English court. Gaunt had continued to fill the role of rich and gifted English royal cadets as a continental figure (Richard of Cornwall, brother of Henry III and king of Germany, was notable in an earlier generation). While either Gaunt or Henry adventured in foreign parts, the other could be deputed to watch over Lancastrian interests in England, increasingly the more challenging task.
Castor notes that the boys’ first campaign coincided in the summer of 1385, when they were age eighteen: an expensive washout in Scotland from which they appear to have derived very different lessons. Richard was simply outraged at the unnecessary, unconscionable risk to his person, raging at the long-suffering Gaunt in an almost engagingly teenage tone:
You are always concerned for your own purse and totally unconcerned for me. And now, typically, you want to force me to cross the Scottish sea so that I may die with my men from hunger and destitution, and become prey for my enemies.
This is a reaction from which Castor extrapolates cousin Henry’s growing consciousness of his sovereign and shadow-twin’s “peevish superficiality,” a judgement based not upon any direct testimony from the Lancastrian heir at the time but from his political decisions not long thereafter. In 1387, while his father pursued the elusive crown of Spain, Henry apparently risked his immediate family’s English fortunes by betting on the less secure option, the Lords Appellant, a group of high nobles who had run out of patience with Richard. Though generally a voice for relative moderation among the rebels, Henry was also personally responsible for routing (with contemptuous ease) forces raised by the king’s glamorously lackadaisical favorite, Robert de Vere, consecutively Earl of Oxford, Marquess of Dublin, and Duke of Ireland.
Small wonder that when Richard’s crown survived this first aristocratic challenge (largely for the negative reason that he had no viable successor) Henry became “a knight . . . who had good reason to go wandering.” Castor shows that both his knighthood and his wanderings, both now largely forgotten, eclipsed among historical enthusiasts by the later fact of his usurpation, were impressive even by the occasionally Arthurian standards of English princes. While she does so, she keeps the fascinatingly other existence of Henry’s less martial kinsman and monarch Richard constantly in mind. As Richard’s minority formally ended in 1389, Henry took up a challenge issued by France’s foremost champions at Saint-Inglevert in the marches of French Boulogne and English Calais, none of these chivalric adversaries more renowned than Jean Le Meingre, alias Boucicaut, a warrior at twelve and a hero at sixteen, now about Henry’s own age. At his father’s competitive suggestion, Henry ran double the number of courses against Boucicaut of any of the other English knights (who included another formidable contemporary of Richard and Henry’s, later to become an opponent of both by turns, Sir Harry Percy, alias Hotspur).
Boucicaut swiftly turned from a notional foe to a genuine friend and role model. He was already a famous crusader upon the freezing fields of Lithuania, and Henry of Bolingbroke became determined to follow in his wake as soon as he could. By October 1390, while Richard presided over a glorious tournament at Smithfield, one bedizened with his new badge, the White Hart, but one in which he had “no intention of taking up arms himself,” Henry was returning with his seasoned battle companions into Konigsberg after a two-month reyse, or campaign, against the pagan warriors of Samogitia and Vilnius. His feats, not wholly negligible, grew exponentially in the telling, and after a surprisingly comfortable winter spent arranging for the ransoms of captured friends while dressed in squirrel, marten, and beaver and quaffing excellent local wine and provender, Henry returned to England in the spring of 1391 with his reputation “elevated . . . into another league.”
The cousins’ private lives no less than their public careers were eloquently estranged in kind. Henry was by the time of his homecoming the father of four sons. His relations with his father, his common-law stepmother, his half-siblings, and his household and vassals were all what was expected at best of a great noble heir. Richard presented quite another personality to his most necessarily intimate friends and relations. He favored his own uterine half-siblings, the handsome and gifted Holands, but these were a brood of uncertain steadiness, responsible between them for an endlessly gripping cascade of manslaughters and love affairs (several with politically relevant unofficial issue). He loved his sophisticated and popular Central European queen Anne deeply, almost over-emphatically. Castor quotes a letter that implies the marriage was almost certainly consummated and that their lack of children was a great grief to the queen. But she is equally sure sonlessness rather suited the insecure, unconventional Richard, who in this respect famously resembled his successor Elizabeth I in an instinct perhaps best articulated by Philip Larkin: “Why did he think adding meant increase? / To me it was dilution.”
In any case, even Good Queen Anne, with a characteristic lack of resentment, took second place to the gloriously awful Robert de Vere, a fleetingly charming, bottomlessly avaricious, entirely incompetent schemer who ditched his wife, another royal cousin, for one of the queen’s Bohemian ladies, lost his only battle against Henry, bored the French court in exile and then was finished off by a boar, possibly inspiring the end of Robert Baratheon in Game of Thrones, before the still-enamored Richard could arrange for his recall. Like Piers Gaveston, ill-fated favorite of an earlier doomed, cowardly, acquisitive, and tyrannical king of England, Edward II, whom Richard II with astonishing gall openly revered as an ancestral saint, de Vere after his death was replaced by further loathed objects of royal affection, both of them profoundly ambiguous and, in both senses, intriguing figures with whom Shakespeare did not quite know what to do. These were Edward of Norwich (“Aumerle” to Shakespeare)—yet another of Richard and Henry’s cousins, referred to by Castor over the course of a bewilderingly long, eventful, and mutable career under his most consistent title of Rutland—and Thomas Mowbray, the flighty opportunist who would find himself, half by accident, Richard’s scapegoat and Henry’s mortal rival combatant.
I have always viewed Henry and Mowbray’s entanglement with puzzled, unslakeable interest through the rich, dusty, shadowed occlusion of Shakespeare’s quite deliberate murk. Castor renders their insoluble dilemma as if through a crystal glass—or a perfectly eavesdropped confidence. Both Mowbray and Henry played critical roles as the pillars of Richard’s new world, in which all of the other previous rebel Lords Appellant were carefully and utterly destroyed. Both, accordingly, were left—in common with the rest of the realm—in a position never to appease Richard’s restless, circular, and thus justified suspicions. Mowbray panicked first, and by trying to confide in Henry gave the king’s cousin little choice but to denounce him; the cycle of accusations led to their abortive duel and Mowbray’s permanent exile in 1398 and then to Henry’s coup in the succeeding year.
Castor’s combination of engagement with, and rebellion against, Shakespeare’s characterization and structure continues after the downfall of Richard, her titular Hart; she makes the bold decision to give us in addition the whole regnal flight of her Eagle, Henry, and even a little of the reign of his successor, Shakespeare’s Hal and Henry V. The shape of her work perforce changes, no longer possessing the taut solidity of a doubled life. Henry IV’s foils and threats were miscellaneous, very nearly overpoweringly so. His soon and conveniently deceased predecessor’s memory was not the least among them. He had to consider also his erstwhile allies the Percy family, most conspicuously the great paladin Hotspur, most continuously Hotspur’s father, Northumberland, and most intimately Hotspur’s uncle Worcester (who at one point led a flank at the battle of Shrewsbury against Henry’s heir, to whom he had been tutor the preceding day, resulting in the near-death of the young Prince of Wales from an arrow to the face). There occurred also the most serious quasi-national rebellion the English ever faced in Wales, led by Owain Glyn Dŵr, the charismatic Celtic sorcerer who appears in Shakespeare as Glendower. All in all, I emerged thinking that if we could arrange for the awakening of a long-dead king to save us from our present and depressingly serial political difficulties, Henry IV would be far from the worst candidate.
Possibly Castor’s greatest insight, though, is to identify Henry’s ill luck in being compared in the eyes of history (largely because of Shakespeare) not only with Richard but with his successor. Henry V would attain the royal and patriotic glory that Henry of Bolingbroke had once seemed to promise as prince but was too hard-pressed and unevenly accepted to capture as king. It is a poignant fact that Henry, a consummate European, who once nearly married a Visconti, crusaded in Lithuania, and traveled to Jerusalem as a pilgrim and aspired to die there, ended up being the first English king since the conquest who never dared to venture outside his own borders during his reign (even the insular Richard campaigned in Scotland and Ireland and undertook diplomatic ceremonial on the border with France).
Castor omits much discussion of the personal relationship between Richard on the one hand and Henry’s heir on the other; the younger Henry was essentially Richard’s hostage following his father's exile in 1398, but he nonetheless seems to have been well treated and to have nurtured affection for his older cousin the king. She does point out that in the early years of his father’s reign the Prince of Wales had none other than Hotspur as his “mentor” in the Welsh Marches, thus growing up in close proximity to Henry’s two preeminent enemies and likely knowing both of them much more intimately than he did his own father.
Henry V is perceived by Castor at an admiring, awed, unemotional, and formal distance. Acknowledging his military and political genius, she evidently regards him to be in no need of the passionate personal advocacy she reserves for his father. The younger Henry’s Machiavellian agility in successfully posing as the rightful heir of both the Eagle and the Hart is thoroughly displayed. Rutland, the cousin whose tergiversations act throughout much of the period as a weather vane of prevailing power, was a Ricardian favorite, deserted (more quickly than Shakespeare says) to Henry IV, was implicated in several conspiracies against him but always denounced them just plausibly enough, and ended up dying in defense of Henry V at Agincourt.
The medieval era is a test, perhaps a matchless one, for the historian as a student of individual human character, its evidence on the surface so liable to appear partial, in the sense both of interested and incomplete, conventional, impersonal, or simply absent. Castor passes this test with such extravagance that it has been necessary even in contemplating her great book at some length to avoid consideration of many personages of both sexes, all of whom she pinions with gossip that feels fresh, specific observation, and ingenious extrapolation of motive. Her analysis of Henry IV’s relationship with his factional enemy turned obligatory ally turned troublesome primate turned spiritual guide, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, feels as if it could alone justify a whole volume. Castor’s bracingly speedy coverage of the illegitimate origins of the House of York (not the old story about Cecily Neville and a longbowman, but a far more germane, consequential, and likely one featuring a bored Spanish princess and Richard’s hottest-blooded half brother) to me, at least, seems to transform the entire background to and basis of the Wars of the Roses.
I was left with ineluctably lingering curiosity about the sexual predispositions of Richard II, his favorites de Vere and, more especially, Rutland, and his wider court. Rutland, like Richard, died without issue (and was thus succeeded as Duke of York by the heirs of his probably illegitimate younger brother). Having garnered credibility at court for years as the betrothed groom of a French princess with the title of “the King’s Brother” (Richard possibly considered him as an eventual heir), Rutland married instead Philippa Mohun, who brought him scant political or pecuniary advantage, so perhaps I am barking up the wrong richly emblazoned tree after all and they were profoundly in love. The story that his obesity contributed to his death at Agincourt appears to be untrue. My only tentative query to Castor is why she, along with almost everybody else, is so hard on Rutland’s father, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, Richard and Henry’s longest-lived uncle, routinely dismissed as “passive,” “ineffectual,” or in Shakespeare’s devastating word, “neuter,” when it has been proven since a Victorian excavation (the sort of enterprise on which Castor is, in relation to Richard and Henry, extremely beady and amusing) that he was by the crisis of 1399 all but crippled, in agonizing pain from fused vertebrae. But part of Castor’s excellence, after all, derives from her origins as a scholar of the House of Lancaster. Perhaps the White Rose of York still awaits an exegete of equivalent caliber.
