Shakespearean Tale, Helen Castor Interview.
How much can we divorce the two kings you have written about, from the characters of the Shakespeare plays?
It is some of the most exquisite writing by one of the greatest writers there’s ever been. So in that sense, it’s extremely intimidating. How very dare I try to tread in these footsteps. But actually I think one of the extraordinary things about the play, Richard II, (which I would want to make a case for being not only the greatest of Shakespeare’s history plays, but I would want to argue perhaps the greatest play he ever wrote) is how well he knows his history. There are so many places in that play where you can recognise where he is taking inspiration from.
Although he is taking liberties, he is compressing time, conflating characters, changing ages if it suits his dramatic purposes better. Actually at the heart of the play, the problem with Richard’s rule; the dilemma Henry faces in attempting to challenge him; and then the tragedy of Richard’s unravelling once the crown’s been taken from him; all of that hits various human and historical nails on the head. I think in a way, Henry IV plays are a little bit different because of poor old Henry. This is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book. Richard is such a charismatic character for all the wrong reasons possibly because he’s very bad at being king.
But Henry, Henry Bolingbroke in Richard II and Henry IV in the plays that have his name on them, is much more of a shadowy figure. Bolingbroke serves as Richard’s nemesis. And then when we move to the Henry IV plays, he’s a grey man in the background behind Prince Hal and Falstaff and their rambunctious goings on. In the Henry IV plays seems an awful lot older.
There is a scene very early on where he is talking to the Earl of Northumberland about their sons, Hal and Hotspur. It sounds as though that is how the generations work. In fact, Hotspur was three years older than Henry IV. Shakespeare has messed around with things for reasons that are completely comprehensible.
One of the things I wanted to do was to bring Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV, out of the shadows and set him alongside his cousin Richard and see exactly how their relationship and the deposition of one man by the other actually played out.
Do you think that Richard has an idea of kingship from people who are telling him what it’s like to be a king, but he doesn’t really have an actual monarch, his father or his grandfather, to act as a guiding hand. So it’s more of an idea to him?
That’s crucial because if you look at the upbringing of the Black Prince, his father, Edward III, had been only 17 when the Black Prince was born. And Edward went on to have 11 other children with his wife, Philippa of Hainault. So the Black Prince had been thrown in the deep end.
He was only 16 when he won his spurs at Crécy so that sense of what the job was, was very real to the Black Prince. Yes, it was about being royal, magnificent, revered and obeyed, but the other side of that coin was that you did the job. You ruled, you fought, you took account of the needs and interests of your kingdom.
The Black Prince was very keen on ceremonial and magnificence. In a sense, I think what Richard ends up seeing as he’s growing up is that formal structure of ceremony and pomp in a household in which his father’s an invalid and he himself is wrapped in cotton wool because he is his father’s only surviving legitimate child. The whole future of the bloodline of this eldest son of Edward III rests on his shoulders.
The sense I got of his education, and we do not have many details, you have to kind of join dots in terms of what the outcome was. I don’t think anyone was pushing him to think, to learn, to fight. We know he liked hunting, but the military side of things, the governmental side of things, he is not being encouraged or forced to step up to what the content of the job is. He is just being told he is very special.
There’s a wonderful moment, horrifying in retrospect when you see the kind of effect it had, in January 1377, days really after Richard’s 10th birthday, his father had died six months earlier. His grandfather is ill and not expected to live much longer, does not live much longer. The men who are running government bring him into parliament to reassure the community of the realm, that the future is still bright because they have this young boy who is going to be the next heir.
The chancellor, who happens at that point to be a bishop, makes a lengthy speech which is recorded in detail in the rolls of parliament saying the king has sent the prince, Richard, to his people just as in the scripture it says, “I have sent my son. I have sent he who is wished for by all men and you must do reverence to him.” Just as the pagans did to Christ. So everyone sitting there knows this is rhetoric. They are trying to hold the country together. They are trying to say, “Okay, look, don’t worry. Just as God looked after his people, so the king is looking after you.”
The one person who doesn’t know it’s rhetoric is the 10-year-old boy who’s just heard himself described literally as the Messiah. You see that kind of understanding that it is all about who Richard is and the proper reverence that should be done to him that is at the heart of what he thinks being a king is all about.
I suppose there is a similar effect on the young Richard when he’s coronated, with his cousin Henry right next to him – as we’ve seen recently there is a huge religious significance that could be overpowering to a ten-year-old boy?
Even though I had read these accounts of medieval coronations and I had written my account of Richard’s coronation, I knew all this stuff. Yet, still I felt as you did that actually seeing King Charles III being anointed and crowned on the same spot that Richard had been crowned in 1377, there is something about the continuity of that very sacred ceremony, however much the tide of faith may have retreated in the modern world.
To imagine a 10-year-old boy at its centre, so small that when he was carried out of the coronation at the end of the ceremony by his tutor, this little boy wrapped in the coronation robes with all the regalia. One of Edward the Confessor’s slippers, which of course was adult sized, actually slipped from Richard’s foot and got lost in the crush, which we know because adult Richard later on gave a new, very splendid pair of slippers to the Abbey to replace the one that had got lost. It is an extraordinary thing to think about the psychological effect that that ritual.
The acclamation of all of his nobles, all of his people, anointing by God would have had on a 10-year-old boy who has been told for as long as he can remember that he is unique, irreplaceable, the chosen one.
Also, from Henry’s perspective, it’s not as if he is going to be sceptical either. He is 10 years old, he will believe all this as well. If we skip forward to 1399, he is overthrowing someone anointed by God. It is a terrifying prospect for him and for the country. This is a sacred bloodline that reaches all the way back to William the Conqueror.
In 1399, when Richard’s rule has gone badly wrong, it is clear that England and his people cannot be protected in the way that the understanding of England’s constitution and the role of the crown means the crown should be protecting them. Something has got to be done. Henry has to believe that it is the will of God that he should take Richard’s place.
On the 13th of October, 1399, the feast day of Edward the Confessor, who is the patron saint of Westminster Abbey and has become the patron saint of Richard himself, Henry is crowned in the exact same spot, in the exact same way as he had witnessed 22 years earlier. It is a terrible responsibility that he is taking on then and he has to believe that God wills it and that God will subsequently vindicate his rule.
Henry, whilst he had a strong claim to the throne, was a usurper. Surely his claim was stronger than King Stephen’s, yet Stephen is not viewed as such despite having taken the crown from Matilda?
Henry I had written in his will that Matilda should take over. He had got his nobles to swear allegiance to her as his heir. But I think there are a lot of differences between that situation, as you say, in the early 12th century and what’s happening by the late 14th. In the early 12th century, we have to remember that it is not long since the conquest, really. And that shift from an Anglo-Saxon set of rules of inheritance that do not necessarily put all the emphasis on male primogeniture.
The Anglo-Saxon system is Æthelings, the people who have a claim to rule, and you choose whichever is the best candidate from among them, which usually means they beat each other up until the strongest is left. It is not at all clear how inheritance is going to work in this new Anglo-Norman world.
William the Conqueror leaves Normandy to his eldest son Robert and England to his second son Rufus. Rufus then fights Robert and sticks him in prison and takes both. Then when Rufus dies slightly mysteriously in the New Forest with Henry right there, Henry goes to get himself crowned. What we have to remember at that point in the Anglo-Norman realm, that is England, getting yourself crowned is how a king is made. It becomes a race for the coronation chair.
And what happens in 1135 when Henry dies are two things: One, is he has only got a woman, his daughter Matilda, left to succeed him. Can a woman rule? Not clear. Henry wants his legitimate daughter to succeed him, and he has made everyone swear that she will. But in practice can women do this? Plus she is pregnant at the key moment, and she is not in England, and she cannot get there quickly enough.
Whereas Stephen, who is Count of Boulogne races for Winchester, gets himself crowned. At that point he has been anointed by God. Fast forward to the 14th century and things have settled down an awful lot. It has become clear by precedent that a king’s eldest son should become the King of England. There has been an unbroken line of kings since then. Richard II is very keen on the idea of that unbroken line of kings. He commissions a set of 13 statues in Westminster Hall, going all the way from the Confessor who he believes has designated the Conqueror to be his successor and then an unbroken line of kings. That inheritance is his and it is much harder to break that precedent. It is clear by now that ‘The king is dead, long live the king’ works even if there’s a little pause before your coronation.
Those gaps, those possibilities of real politic overriding right has been damped down an awful lot. So it is a big thing and it is less that Henry is not the obvious candidate in 1399. He is the obvious candidate in 1399, and he succeeds unopposed, [however] the first rebellion comes three months after his coronation.
Helen Castor is a historian and the author of The Eagle & The Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV.
