Gone Medieval - Richard II vs. Henry IV

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

For the Plantagenets, family might be a curse as often as a boon. They could provide invaluable support, or dangerous rivalry. At the end of the 14th century, the relationship between two first cousins rocked England, ruptured the line of succession and had a long legacy.Helen Castor joins Matt Lewis to discuss the fascinating true story of cousins who became deadly rivals.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. The editor is Ella Blaxill and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. For the Plantagenets, family might be a curse as often as a boon. They could provide invaluable support or dangerous rivalry. At the end of the 14th century, one of these relationships between two first cousins rocked England, ruptured the line of succession and had a long legacy. I can't tell you how excited I am to introduce today's guest. I've been pestering Helen Castor to come on Gone Medieval to talk about the subject of her new book for so long that, frankly, I'm surprised there isn't a restraining order in place yet, let alone that Helen agreed to do it. Helen Castor is a fellow of Sydney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge and the author of several fantastic books, including ones on Joan of Arc, the Paston family, the Wars of the Roses and Female Power in Medieval England. Now, Helen has turned her attention to the stories of Richard the 2nd and Henry IV, cousins who became deadly rivals in her new book, The Eagle and the Heart, the tragedy of Richard the 2nd and Henry the 4th.

Welcome to God Medieval, Helen. It's fantastic to have you here. It's lovely to be here. Thank you for having me. You've avoided us for far too long. I can't believe this is the first time you've come on. That's because I've been in a bunker writing a very big book. It's a very big book and a very good book, so I'm really looking forward to. this to getting into the details of Richard the 2nd, Henry the 4th and how we end up at that big crisis in 1399 and what the fallout of it is. I wonder if you could start off by giving us a little idea of how Richard the 2nd's kind of childhood and upbringing him leave him really poorly equipped

to be a king? It's a very interesting question because of course what we don't have is enormous amounts of domestic detail. We don't have unfortunately the secret diary of Richard the second age 13 and 3 quarters, I would absolutely love it if we did. But what we do have is the combination of a big picture and then some dots we can join to try and put together a sketch. The big picture is that England is at what is obvious to everybody a big turning point. Edward III, Richard and Henry's grandfather, has been king for 50 years. He's been one of the greatest kings England has ever had. but now he's old and he's ill. And the big drawback is that his eldest son and heir, who we know is the Black Prince,

is also ill before his time. And the war that they have prosecuted so triumphantly for decades is also now not going well. So there's a real sense of the wheels turning. And Richard is growing up in this environment where there isn't a model of kingship or leadership actively for him to watch and learn from. And at the same time, he's part of a slightly unusual family in medieval royal terms, what we would call a blended family. His mother very unusually, Joan of Kent, has been married before she married the heir to the throne.

It's a strange story. Joan's been really quite indulged as royal women go. So Richard has older half-brothers and sisters. but he's the baby of the family and he's also the baby of the family wrapped in cotton wool because he is the heir to the throne. He has brother and sisters, but he's the royal one. And so he is brought up within a household

that's arranged around an invalid, his father, the black prince, who's on his way to dying at the age of not quite 46. And we know that Richard was educated, but if we look at what the result, at this education turns out to be, he's not at all keen on fighting, anything military. And he's also not very used to anything that challenges his sense of self. That sense of a protective cocoon is very, very strong. And then when he finally does emerge from home,

after his father has died in that last year of his grandfather's reign, when the people of England are terribly worried about what's going to happen to the succession. He's brought into Parliament and the Chancellor, who is a bishop, introduces him by saying, the King has sent Richard to us, this boy to us, just as God sent his only beloved son. Now, as political rhetoric goes, that's effective and everyone else there knows it's a metaphor, but the 10-year-old boy listening has just been told that he's the Messiah. I'm not sure that's a very good idea. No, it doesn't seem like it ever particularly wore off either, did it? No.

That's the moment that stuck for him. It's quite frustrating sometimes when you think a minority had happened under Henry III, and he seems to miss out on any kind of a martial education, has no drive for war, sort of almost like he's lacking those male role models. Richard's father, the Black Prince, is bought up kind of next to Edward III. You know, they're not that different in age. They grow up almost together at war as father and son, and Richard just completely lacks that.

but nobody's taken the lesson from Henry III and thought he's going to have to lead us in this war. He's never prepared for that part of what he's supposed to do. That's exactly right. Edward III was only 17 when the Black Prince was born and he and Queen Philippa carried on having lots more children and lots more sons. So as you say, the Black Prince was thrown in the deep end straight away, whereas the Black Prince didn't get married till he was over 30 and then became very ill. So I think there's this palpable sense of everyone knows that really. Richard should be being trained how to fight, but he's so irreplaceable and crucial to that sense of legitimate succession that no one quite dares put him anywhere that he might be in danger. He's in the household run by his mother with some of the black prince's very loyal retainers, men who have fought in wars for a long time, people like Simon Burley, around him.

But no one seems to be pushing Richard to do anything that might either endanger him or anything he doesn't want to do, crucially. He's being told that he is very special and what he wants should, in theory, happen. It's not a good recipe. No, it's missing the martial element and it's missing that part of a King's training, I think, as well, in which you might not actually have to do things you don't want to do. But you have to find reasonable ways not to have to do this politics. to be learned in avoiding doing the things that other people want you to do in a way that and he's missing all of that as well. He's missing all of that and what it takes to lead men, capable, powerful men. And that's a huge problem of the fact that the crown is skipping a

generation. So his father has died at 45, which is still young. And all the other nobles, including the Black Prince's younger brothers, primarily of course, John of Gaunt, Richard's most powerful uncle are still there. So when Richard starts looking around at the nobles of whom he's supposed to be the head, and as you say, he's had no practice in what it might take to lead, to guide, to persuade these men, he's looking at them thinking, well, they will think they're the boss of me, but I'm supposed to be the boss of everyone. And that's, again, a problem of perception that Richard never really gets over. And neither do his nobles in the sense that they know he needs to take over, but when's he going to be ready? That gap never really gets

bridged. Yeah. And it feels like a problem that medieval England never really solves, because we'll see history repeat itself when Henry V dies and Henry VIII comes to the throne. And he's devoid of any of those kind of capabilities as well. So it seems like something they never worked out how to do. It's the problem of a personal monarchy, isn't it? So much depends on the person of the monarch. And when it works well, it works brilliantly well, as Edward III had shown for 50 years. But if someone's not ideally fitted to step into what often is the royal suit of armour, whether it's in the 12th century finding out, can we have a woman in this role, or whether it's now a 10-year-old boy, that's going to be a problem.

Yeah. And the other main player in the book, the juxtaposition to Richard almost, is his first cousin, Henry, Henry Bolingbrook, oldest son of John of Gorn, Duke of Lancaster. How does Henry's upbringing differ from Richards? It differs quite dramatically. Again, we're piecing together bits of a jigsaw where we don't have all the pieces. So I'm sketching out what I can see through these bits and pieces.

But first of all, we need to say they're almost exactly the same age. Henry is born three months after Richard. Henry too is the product of a blended family because he, at the age of 17 months, his mother dies. And his father, John of Gaunt, marries again a few years later. And then very rapidly, after marrying again, also starts a family with his children's governess, Catherine Swinford. It's a complicated domestic setup.

I have to say, I think it's a testament to Gaunt's second wife. of Constanza of Castile and to Catherine Swinford that they make it work so positively, it seems, for all the children. But Henry therefore finds himself in the middle of this rather sort of hugely magnificent, but also rather pell-mell, full, bustling household where he has two very formidable elder sisters, who, as we know, that's probably quite a good thing for a growing young man in terms of knocking off the pointed corners. But he also has this growing a family of half-siblings, particularly the ones being born to Catherine Swinford, children who get given the name of Beaufort, because among those four children there are three sons,

another Henry, and the only surviving John named after their father out of all of Gaunt's relationships. So Henry is the heir. He's the only legitimate son, as time goes on, it becomes clear that he is and will be the only legitimate son. But he's got to be the only legitimate son. But he's got to find his place. There's negotiation at work from the beginning, and there's also duty. Gaunt is not popular in England more widely, and it soon becomes clear he's not terribly popular with Richard either, but a lot of the criticism he gets is deeply, deeply unfair. He is above all loyal. People accuse him of wanting to take the crown of England for himself, but he's doing everything in his power to try to keep government going and to keep the realm safe until Richard

should be ready to take over. He idolised his older brother, the black prince. He idolised his father and he's trying to protect their legacy. So that's the example Henry, young Henry of Bolingbrook sees. He sees his father almost wearing his fingers to the bone as he's constantly on the move gone between Scotland, between France, between campaigns on the continent. And Henry sees what the work of politics is within the Lancasterian estates and in the wider European context. We get a picture in the book at Richard the 2nd's coronation. We have Henry sort of standing next to him at the feast holding the ceremonial sword, Kirtana, and this idea that Henry is sort of same age, first cousin, really closely related,

Henry could be his right-hand man as they sit there. Do you think that's what people might have hoped to envisaged, maybe what John of Gorns had intended his son to be to the king? Does that then cause trouble? Because you insert this guy who are going to say, he's going to be right beside you, and Richard isn't used to being told. Richard isn't used to being told,

and he also isn't really very used to rough and tumble of being with other children. His siblings are a lot older than him. He did have an older brother, the Black Prince and Joan O'Kent did have a son before him, another Edward, but he died very young. So Richard isn't really used to sharing the limelight. He's not used to cooperating. And the efforts to place Henry next to him are well-intentioned. As you say, the imagery is very powerful. We've just seen a coronation now in the modern world a couple of years ago. So the imagery is very fresh in people's minds, I think. And instead of a king in his

70s, you need to imagine a 10-year-old boy with another 10-year-old boy at the feast, at least, standing beside him. It's a very powerful vision of England's future, but only if these two boys can find a way to work together. And it becomes clear the more time that Henry starts spending in Richard's household, we can't see behind those closed doors. We have no vignettes of them squabbling or Richard throwing a tantrum. But it becomes... clear as time goes on and Henry actually stops spending time in Richard's household that the experiment hasn't been working very well, even at this early stage. Yeah, and I think it's easy to think that maybe those different upbringings mean that Henry

will arrive, used to having siblings, a bit of rough and tumble, a bit of banter, if you like, and Richard is completely not used to that, and this immediately feels like it isn't going to work. That would be my best guess. I can't prove it. I can't prove it. I can't drawback that curtain, but that's what it looks like to me in terms of how this relationship then develops or doesn't. I wonder if you had any thoughts on why, when they're casting around for a way to rule while Richard is a 10-year-old and a young king, why is the decision made not to appoint a regent? So Henry III had William Marshall for a while, the regency worked perfectly then. Why is the

decision made this time to go with councils and to spread the rule a bit wider? I think the political community of England finds itself in a kind of inescapable catch-22 in 1377, because the only feasible candidate to be a regent is John of Gaunt, because of the power he wields. He's Duke of Lancaster. It's the greatest noble estate in the country. He also, through his second marriage to Constanza of Castile, he's claiming the right to be king of Castile and Leon. He is wealthier by far than any other nobleman. He's more experienced by far than any other nobleman. He does have a younger brother, Edmund of Langley.

But Edmund of Langley, bless his heart, he... A bit of a political non-entity. He is. He clearly doesn't want power. He's not equipped for power. He'll stand over there if you tell him to, but he'll sort of hold that place. But he's not a leader by any stretch of the imagination. And the youngest royal uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, really is the youngest. He was the last of Edward III and Queen Philippa's children.

He's only 12 years older than Richard. So he too is a bit stranded between generations. He doesn't have estates to give him landed power in the localities of England. He hasn't got the experience at war or in politics that Gorn has. So Gorn is the William Marshall figure. But the course of politics over the previous years now, since Edward III and the Black Prince started getting ill, have shown that Gaunt is deeply, deeply unpopular.

And he's just been through a big crisis in 1376 at what is known as the good parliament, loss of parliamentary controversy over people in the King Edward III's household, dipping their hands in royal coffers. Gaunt has found a way through all that, but he is profoundly unpopular, particularly in London. People are deeply suspicious of where his ambitions lie. There have been attacks on his home in London, riots in London.

It just isn't feasible to put him at the head of government, but it's not feasible to put anyone else there instead either. So they have to resort to what in the end is a fiction. It's a fudge. They say, well, we won't have a minor. then. Our great king, King Richard will rule us, but King Richard is 10. He can't. So they put out the headline and then they say, right, well, obviously the king needs a council. We will have a formalised council, but even that formalised council isn't really doing the ruling. It's a kind of

a façade and the great men of England are having to carry on doing what they've been doing in the last years of Edward III, but it's a mess. It's not one that you would ever choose. And you mentioned the later minority of Henry the 6th, there's at least a clarity to the minority of Henry the 6th because he's nine months old when his father dies. Ten is definitely not old enough to rule, but as soon as a king nudges into his teens, he's going to get harder to control, and it's going to be harder to say he can't begin to intervene in what happens. So it's a really uncomfortable middle ground in all sorts of ways. Very tricky. And I think with the benefit of hindsight that we are able to enjoy. You tell a small child he's the Messiah. At 10 years old,

you put him in the midst of a coronation and tell him, you know, he's now being raised above everybody else in the kingdom to be special. And then you tell him, you know what, at 10, you're old enough to rule this kingdom. You're so good, Richard. It's just a recipe for disaster. It really, really is. Because, of course, he's a precocious boy in some ways. I'm not sure how intelligent he really, really is, but he's certainly precocious in lots of ways. And as soon as he starts looking around at how his government is functioning, as you say, he's been told this whole script. And he sees that he isn't in charge. No one is listening to him. And in fact, his nobles, particularly his uncle gaunt, seem to be running the whole show without consulting him. And instead

of thinking, oh, well, in a few years, I'll be joining them, he thinks this is going wrong. My nobles, are my enemies. They are trying to keep power out of my hands. That's a wrong thought anyway, but it's a particularly wrong thought in the context of an ongoing war with France, where he looks over to France, the enemy, the historic enemy for decades, and he sees another young king, two years younger than him, in fact, Charles VIII of France, whose government is also dominated by his royal uncles. And the deeply unhelpful conclusion Richard starts coming to is, well, the King of France might understand more of the fix I find myself in than my own nobles who are doing everything they can to keep me away from the power that ought to be mine.

Something's gone very badly wrong at a structural level. And what we see as we begin to get into the 1380s is that fracture beginning to play itself out. And I think it is interesting to think about how clever Richard was because, okay, he's 10, 11, 12 years old when all of this is happening. But it feels like he could have done with someone putting a hand on his shoulder and saying, just watch John, learn how it's done. You might not be in control, but you will be very soon. Watch all of these men, see how they do it, learn. But nobody seems to do that. And instead, they just allow him to throw a paddy on the floor and kick his arms and legs. I want to be in charge. I think so. It's interesting looking, just casting a glance back.

at his parents, the Black Prince and Joan of Kent. They were both a golden couple in their day. And obviously the Black Prince became a war hero and so on. But really, they were quite used to getting their own way. They were the only people with the title of Prince and Princess in the whole of England. The other King's sons and daughters were not typically yet given that extraordinary title. They loved Pomp, they loved magnificence. They'd been quite indulged in their private lives, including being able to get married in the first place, which, as I say, was not a sort of normal alliance for an heir to the throne. So one gets the impression that the tenor of the household was very much about specialness and not about telling Richard he had to shut up and listen

sometimes. Whereas Gaunt's household and the upbringing that Henry was getting was very much about loving household, but you're here to learn. And that's the difference you start seeing as the two boys are getting into their teens. And you and I last spoke when we did brilliant, three-part documentary on the Peasants Revolt, which you can find on history hit if you subscribe, in which you came and spoke about the Peasant's Revolt and Richard, the Second's role in the Peasant's Revolt.

Famously, he will ride out to meet the rebels and offer himself as their captain. He will offer them freedom and everything else. I just wondered what you feel the impact of the events of 1381 were on Richard and then perhaps on Henry too. That's very interesting to think about, I think. And what I'd want to do, I suppose, is add the Peasants' Revolt as a third moment after the two you've mentioned, being told he's the Messiah in Parliament

and then being crowned and anointed, being set apart by that anointing. The confirmation of that specialness really comes in 1381 when, of course, it's terrifying. This great rabble of rebels take over the capital. they invade the tower. It's horrifying and frightening. And undoubtedly, Richard at 14 has to be very brave in confronting this. But actually, the closer you look, you realize that his bravery is of a slightly different kind from everyone else's because the rebels, when they take over the city, they are explicitly saying, we want to destroy and punish the traitors around the king. But we are looking to our king for leadership. They say on the road to London, they have a password,

they stop people and they say, with whom hold you? And the right answer is with King Richard and the true commons. So Richard is getting from the common people who are coming to him with their grievances, he's getting a reinforcement of that sense that, yes, you are special. Yes, your nobles who are running your government are doing a terrible job and they're standing in the way of your rightful authority. It's you, my lord. You will save us to the people of England. And I think we have to be pretty clear that Richard is not listening with open ears to find out what ails his people. He's not particularly interested in their grievances. A feature of his education that's coming through is actually he is the centre of his own world and other people are not actually

terribly real to him in all sorts of ways. So he rides out and his intervention saves the day in a sense at Smithfield. And when what Tyler is killed in a scuffle before him, he is the one who says, I am your captain, I am your leader, follow me, and they do. So it is for Richard, I think, a golden moment when everything he believes about his own authority is demonstrated to his satisfaction to be true. Henry, on the other hand, has a very, very different experience. Henry is with Richard in the Tower of London before it gets overrun. And When Richard rides out first to mile end for his first meeting with the rebels, Henry is left behind in the tower at 14 and his father isn't there. Gawnt is up on the northern border. He's ridden up there on diplomatic and military duty. But the rebels hate Gant with a passion. They burn down his gorgeous house, the palace of the Savoy. All his beautiful contents of his home, his riches, all his documents get destroyed very deliberately by the rebels. and in the tower, the tiny number of people who get killed in the tower

include a priest, a cleric and physician who has served him. Henry is in real danger when the rebels take the tower and we know that he comes very close to death because we know that he's saved by one of the rebels who recognises him and takes pity on him. It's a really shocking moment for Henry. It's an adrenaline-fueled brush with mortal danger and we know that it stuck with him

because the only way that we know that this particular rebel took pity on him is that Henry remembered it and nearly 20 years later when an awful loss has changed and Henry is in a position both to be rebelled against but also to meet out punishment

he pardoned this man and it said in the pardon 19 years later that John Ferrer his name was was pardoned because he had saved Henry's life in a wonderful and kind manner So again, if you put this in a novel, I think you probably would be raising your eyebrows at me, the parallel, the extraordinary difference that these two 14-year-old boys experienced in those dramatic days in June 1381.

Yeah, and it just drives their experiences even further to polar opposites, really. I wonder if we could skip ahead a little bit in Richard's reign, so he will fall out with uncles' advisors. We've kind of painted that picture where that was being lined up. They will try to control him in Parliament. He will buck against that. We arrive at this group called the Lord's Appellant, so including his uncle Thomas and some senior nobles. And Henry will join the Lord's Appellant partway through. He's not one of the original band members, if you like, but he joins to add a bit of base to it. He seems to me a little bit like perhaps a reluctant Lord Appellant, particularly when we get to the trial of Simon Burley. He's desperately trying not to have Simon Burley executed, which is what the rest of the Lord. Lord's appellant once. It's almost like he doesn't want to do that, but feels compelled. I think that's right. I mean, I think we briefly need to sketch out what this controversy is about, because it starts with a massive crisis in the war that in 1386, England is threatened with the greatest invasion scare, really, certainly since the early 13th century, possibly since the conquest.

And really, we can talk about it as an armada, a French armada, threatening to, to invade England. And this is where the roots of this crisis come from. Because Richard refuses to take his responsibilities seriously. His parliament is in uproar. London is stockpiling food in case there's a siege. Troops are being mustered. Ships are being mustered. Parliament meets in absolute panic and says, right, we need to make changes at the head of government. And instead of Richard seeing that that's what's happening, he says, I will not dismiss anyone from my government. not even a scullion from my kitchen at my parliament's request. In other words, he's seeing this as a confrontation about his authority. Henry doesn't join that initial opposition. Henry's

been left by this stage by Gaunt, who's gone off to Castile to try to make his paper crown into a real one there. And Gaunt has left these huge responsibilities in Henry's hands. And Henry takes that responsibility very, very seriously. He's at this stage 1386, 1387. like Richard just turning from 19 to 20 in the early months of 1387. He's also become a father for the first time. His second child is on the way. These are heavy responsibilities both for his family and for the kingdom. But the point at which he decides he has to do something is 1387

when Richard's rejection of the criticism that's coming his way and the attempt to force him to do something about the military crisis. lead to him going off around the country, not cooperating at all, and getting his judges to come to him and secretly, initially, giving him a definition of the law of treason that would essentially allow him to say anyone he wanted is a traitor. Anyone who incites or persuades him to do something against his will is a traitor. Now, if you think about that, if I give you my best advice, you're the king, you do it, and then you turn around and say, well, you persuaded me to do that. I didn't want to. You're a traitor. This is the whole protection of law. The whole security in front of the law is gone. By this stage,

late 1887, the invasion scare has finally reduced. The French have discovered that actually they've got far too much going on at home and the fleet they'd mustered was too big and there are all sorts of reasons why neither the original invasion nor the second wave had happened. But by now, Richard has turned this into an internal crisis even worse. And it's at that point that Henry and another young nobleman called Thomas Mowbray step in to defend what in a way we could call the Constitution. That is the established relationship between the king, his people and the law. But that inevitably tips into trials of the people around the king and executions, led by the three senior noblemen, including his uncle Thomas of Woodstock, and focused on, yes, Simon Burley, who Henry has known as a young man. He's got a distinguished war record.

He was the king's tutor. Yes, he probably is one of the powers behind Richard's throne. But Henry and Mowbris say, no, we shouldn't be doing this. And so the cracks are appearing in the appellant resistance. And that really is a line in the sand because Burley does get executed. Richard is horrified. It comes in hindsight to be seen as a real turning point. It's a very complicated crisis, but has Henry pulled back from the brinket?

in time, or has he not? I mean, not long after it, we will see Henry leave England and go off on a sort of expedition around Europe, more than once, you know, you go crusading with the Teutonic Knights, he'll end up touring Europe, heading to the Holy Land, all of those kinds of things. And I wondered whether you felt that was Henry wanting to stretch his wings, because he's a young man and he can afford to do all of those lovely things, or has he realised how close they had come to that brink and thought, I need to get out from under Richard's feet, much like his dad has. Exactly. I think it's both and. Gaunt was away for three years in Castile, during which this appalling crisis erupts. And when he comes back, he's the only one who hasn't been involved. So he goes away, hated, loathed, criticised, comes back as an elder statesman, the only one who can patch this whole mess back together. So I think you're absolutely right. Henry is a very young man with great ambitions. He's a chivalric knight. He wants to joust. He wants to crusade. He wants to meet. Chevalric Society, Royal Society, across Europe, he wants to go to Jerusalem as a pilgrim.

All of that would have been true anyway. And he's by now got two sons, another one on the way, and then another one eventually. So he already has heirs. If something bad happens to him, he is replaceable. He knows he can go off and meet danger, see what happens. But he also knows that maybe a break from staring his cousin in the eye is the best thing for both of them. Maybe things will be a little bit calmer by the time he comes back. It's a sensible plan, sadly, doesn't quite work. Yeah. If anything, for me, it seemed to even further increase that polar difference between the two men.

There is a couple of times you speak in the book about it. People say that Richard's going to come and lead an army, he's going to fight in person. And it's almost like, yeah, he's coming. He's coming. He's coming. But Richard is never going to do it. Whereas Henry is off crusading all over the place, meeting the great and good, doing all of those things. It really highlights the differences between them that Richard is isolating himself.

in this ivory tower away from everyone while Henry is becoming the attractive figure who is achieving all of the things that Richard isn't? That's right. Richard is magnificent but brittle. It's all about surfaces with Richard and appearance and he clearly, clearly doesn't ever want to fight. He would much rather be seen as Solomon the great judge, but as we've already seen,

he doesn't really have any respect for the law if it says anything different from what he wants. So it's about the image of kingship fueled by this very brittle will, this rather narcissistic, solipsistic sense of self. Whereas Henry, absolutely, he's in the model of both his grandfathers. On his father's side, his grandfather is Edward III. On his mother's side, his father, his grandfather, the Duke of Lancaster, who was one of Edward III's best friends, is also a sort of chivalric hero famed across Europe. And Henry has a sort of easy charm. It sounds very bland when you say it, but everyone liked Henry.

Everywhere he goes, even in France, the historic enemy later on, a chronicler Jean Foucassar at the French court, will say the Earl of Derby, as he was then, was loved by all. The only person who doesn't like him is Richard. And Henry, too, is magnificent. He wears these extraordinary outfits. His motto is, we might translate as remember me, souvenir vu de moi, but that's the French for Forget Me Not. So he has trailing, forget me nots, embroidered all over his clothes, and he's great at jousting, and he's great at fighting,

and he's great at friendship, but at managing to lead as well, all the qualities that you would look for in a nobleman or, in fact, in a king, none of which Richard has. It's more and more fragile dynamic, I think. Yeah, and it feels increasingly dangerous as Richard's reign goes on, and Henry keeps being a really cool bloke. It's really hard when you've got this cool cousin who's doing all of the things that you can't do. If we could just skip ahead and get close to 1399 and where the crisis is really going to hit,

if Henry has decided to go away for a while to get out of Henry's feet and come back and clear the air, it seems to me that Richard was never going to allow that to happen. Richard spends a lot of his reign going on vengeance after the Lord's appellant. And it seems like maybe only a matter of time before he got to the junior members of the Lord's Appellant in Mowbray and Henry. What do you think is going on? So famously they'll accuse each other of treason kind of thing, really, won't they, and give Richard the excuse that he wants to go after them. And he will set up this duel between them to decide who's right and who's wrong. And we get this huge chivalric moment that looks like it's going to be incredible. and splendid, and then just as they're about to start, Richard sort of stands up and says, change my mind. Let's do something else. What do you think is going on? Why does Richard arrange a jewel, and then why does he stop it? It's a very good question. And it's such a dramatic moment, isn't it? It's not accidental that this is where Shakespeare begins. Richard I, the second, that great play. So much has happened already, but he leaves that out and starts with the duel and the stop. What is Richard doing? One answer is that I'm not sure Richard actually knows

what he's doing from moment to moment. He has, in 1397, as you say, taken the first wave of revenge on the three older appellants, Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, the earls of Arundel and Warwick. And that revenge has been swift and total. Arndall is tried in Parliament and executed. Warwick pleads for his life, which pleases Richard no end. He loves the idea of the Earl of Warwick crying at his feet and begging for his life, saves him. Richard. Richard mercifully agrees to exile him to the Isle of Man for the rest of his life. Woodstock is murdered in an inn in Calais to prevent him having the stage in Parliament. So this has been really frightening as an exercise of power.

But it also seems to have been, I think we can say Richard clearly always wanted revenge, but in the summer of 1397, it seems to have been a fairly hair trigger moment that it's not that he had painstakingly laid a cold-blooded plan. It's that he believes they're plossing against him again and decides to move and finds out they don't actually seem to be plotting against him again, but he's going to kill them anyway. So clearly, you're absolutely right, Henry and Mowbray, who participate in those trials and go along with it all, but have to have been absolutely terrified for their own safety. So when they do start accusing each other of treason, because Mowbray is panicking, he goes to Henry saying, we're going to be destroyed. Henry thinks, is this a trap,

says, oh, well, how can that be? Because the king has said we'll be safe. And so they get into this quarrel, this in a sense presents Richard with a gift. They're turning on each other. Okay, then fight each other. But then he realizes, I think my best guess, we don't know, but in that moment, as he stands there, he loves theatre. This is high theatre. Richard presiding in the stands, these two great men of England, people have come from all over Europe to see this duel. But if he lets it go ahead, one of them might well kill the other, at which point he's got one dead and one triumphant. What does he do with the triumphant one? So at the last minute, no, actually, I'm going to stop you both. You've both come to fight, that's fine, but I'm going to

exile you both. So I have you both where I want you, which is not here. I think Richard is improvising from moment to moment, and his paranoia and his megalomania, if you like, are ramping up month by month, week by week, and then in this moment, almost second by second. It's interesting to think of him not with a plan and just dealing with the crisis as it comes, because the duel would seem like a great idea, except that, as you say, one of them will be dead, one of them will be triumphant. And you can add to that maybe even that trial by combat is decided by God. God has approved this man.

And you can almost imagine Richard thinking, hang on, I'm the only one God approves of. I'm not having him approving of somebody else. I think that's exactly right. it's yeah, the idea that God has chosen Richard to rule and therefore what Richard says goes, even if what he's saying this minute is entirely different from what he said last minute. Everyone just has to shift themselves and get with the new programme. By 1399 then, we will have huge crisis. Richard will be deposed.

Henry will take the throne. By that point, does Richard understand how unpopular he is? and is Henry just such an appealing alternative that he's almost too good to turn down for the nobility by that point? The answer to your first question is no, I don't think Richard does understand at all. By the spring of 1399,

he feels he has the whole country where he wants it because he's exiled Henry and Mowbray and then in February 1399, John of Gaunt dies. So the uncle who has been this overbearing presence all his life. He's been a much weakened presence in the last couple of years, but he's finally gone. And Richard has before that point promised Henry, when Henry went into exile, that he would be allowed to inherit the Duchy of Lancaster. Instead, with Gaunt gone,

Richard says, another of these head-spinning moments. Nope, change his mind. Actually, what I said then, I should never have said because there's a flim-flam reason that he gets his counsel to come up with. No, actually, I am going to take the Duchy of Lancaster into my own hands. Maybe one day I'll give it back to you, but for the moment you stay in exile, I've got your inheritance, that's just how things have to be. And with that, he goes off for a second time in his reign to Ireland, which is a place he's been to before where he's enjoyed making all the lords there kneel before him. Hasn't really sorted anything out, but he likes the theatre again. So to go to Ireland with all his military forces, just at the point when he's taken Henry's inheritance away, is a pretty clear indication that he believes he's destroyed Henry.

Finally, all the power that Richard has always believed should be his is in his hands. But that just shows us how little Richard understands where his power really ought to lie. because what he has just demonstrated to every single person in England is that none of them are safe. If he can take the Duchy of Lancaster the greatest inheritance in England away from its rightful air with no proper legal justification other than the king says so, then what else can he do to anybody else who doesn't have Henry's resources and Henry's rights? And it strikes me that it's interesting that it's tinkering with the laws of inheritance that is the straw that breaks the camel's back because, I mean, we see it a lot with King John. The problem with King John is his unpredictability. You're not certain what's going to happen, what mood is going to wake up in. And there are big echoes of that with Richard. And it's that moment when you destroy certainty, the certainty that a father can pass property to his son, you start messing with that. And suddenly, everyone with anything to lose is against you. And unfortunately for Richard, anyone with anything to lose is all of the powerful nobles in England.

Exactly. And you're absolutely right in calling it the last draw, because he's done all sorts of other things in the last two years that have been frightening. He has forced people to give him loans and then not paid them back. He has given a general pardon to everybody in the country except 50 people, but I'm not going to tell you who they are. So that could be anybody. So then do you have to come and sue for a pardon? But are you admitting? And he's also recruited his own private army in the northwest based in his earldom of Chester. And why does a king need a private army on English? soil. What's he going to use that for? But the final straw, as you say, is if a father cannot pass an inheritance to his son without the risk that the king will grab it, what safety do we have? The king should be the keystone that locks the safety of all of England's people in place, and instead Richard's just taken a wrecking ball to it, but he has no clue what he's just done. So Henry of Bollingbrook is able to come back from exile strictly against Richard's orders to say, I am coming to claim my rightful inheritance. And what happens at that point, is, as you say, he doesn't even have to lift his sword,

partly because Richard's taken his army off to Ireland, so they're not there to defend him. But what forces there are in England under the command of poor old Edmund of Langley, the very ineffective remaining uncle, the last one standing? Basically, people are sort of coming to get wages from the king and then defecting to Henry straight away.

Henry is like a conquering hero, except he doesn't actually have to fight. He just has to come back in to say, I'm here to defend England and the rule of law, and people flock to him. And by the time Richard manages to get back from Ireland, never the greatest would-be military leader at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. England's already gone. De facto, Henry is now the ruler of England. He's just now got to work out how to justify that, and that is an ongoing problem.

Yeah, yeah. It's almost like Richard ends up driving the rest of the country into the arms of the Lord's appellant that he's done so much to try and destroy that. And I wondered, there is so much in the book, I could keep you here for days talking about all of of this. So Henry will become king, King Henry IV, the first of the House of Lancaster. He would disrupt that line of succession in a way that will cause him infinite problems throughout his own reign. But I just wondered how much of Henry's reign you feel is about him battling the ghost of Richard. How much is Richard still lingering there? Certainly the early years are all about the ghost of Richard in the sense that, well, first of all, he realizes very soon that he's going to have to make Richard a ghost. He doesn't initially want to kill Richard. Richard is deposed. He's sent up to Pontefract, explicit orders given that no one should ever see him again, more or less. And Henry hopes that will be enough. But within three months, there is a rebellion of the Lord's closest to Richard who are beginning to worry that they may be in danger from this new

regime. It's a pretty standard pattern that if there is a rebellion and there's an ex-king hanging around in whose name the rebellion is being launched, that ex-king is not going to live very much longer. We certainly see it with Henry the 6th in 1471, obviously later than this. So first of all, Henry has to kill Richard, and that is a worse act even than usurpation. He's now a usurper and a regicide. And those early years, yes, there are rumours constantly that Richard is still alive. The Scots find a kitchen boy who looks a bit like him and say, we've got Richard up here and the Percy Rebellion in 1403, Hotspurs Rebellion leading to this great pitched battle at Shrewsbury in 1403, is launched in the name of Dead King Walking, Richard

the second in Cheshire. So that is a very real threat. But beyond that, even when everyone knows Richard is dead really, the shockwaves linger and the instant. because it's not clear that Henry is the legitimate king, anyone who is dissatisfied with any aspect of his rule has an immediate go-to, in a sense. The issue of the succession is not simple. Richard had no children. He had no urgency about having children his second marriage. He married a six-year-old girl in 1396 at the age of 29 and seemed to have been completely fine with that. He didn't seem to really like the idea of having a clear air to the throne because he didn't want there to be any lessening of the spotlight on him. And he wanted all the resources of the kingdom in his hands.

So there's always been a question mark throughout Richard's reign about who the real air should be. The Mortimer line, the great 1066 exam paper question, are you Edmund Mortimer or have you got him? This sort of complicated line of Mortimer airs. should they have been the heir to the throne or not, but what is certain is there a question marks over Henry's claim to the crown, and that means that he's vulnerable and he's vulnerable to military challenge, but he's also vulnerable in his sense of himself as king. And after 1406, when his health collapses more or less a year after the last really major rebellion of the reign in which he's had to execute an archbishop, you can see signs that he himself is

haunted by what he's done. He's not going to compromise his commitment to the public legitimacy of his crown. In public, the Lancasterian line absolutely is the right line to the throne. But in private, there are signs, particularly when he writes his will in 1409 at a particularly grim point of illness, that he is haunted by what he has done and by what it might mean for his soul ultimately. Yeah. We've bigged him up all the way through this as having all of the potential to be a great king in the model of his grandfather, Edward III, that man's man, a soldier's man, who understands the world and can deal with people. But he just never manages to deliver on any of that potential. And it's almost like Richard is just over his shoulder,

because anytime anyone has a problem with him, they can go, are you the right for king, though? That's right. And he's firefighting the whole time. If he had been clearly the heir to the throne, I do think he could have been another Edward III, or something close to that. But as a it was, there is this irreparable flaw somewhere at the heart of his kingship, and it's a constant, constant struggle. And the great achievement he has, of course, is that he has this great brood of sons, four very, very able at their head, the Prince of Wales, the next Henry, who'll be Henry V, who unlike our Henry that we're talking about now, who had in some ways a sort of golden youth, able to go off on these grand tours, crusading and pilgrimages and so on, never had to

worry about money, famous across Europe, great in the joust. His son, the Prince of Wales, is fighting real battles from very, very early, always short of money, always firefighting on his father's behalf, horribly injured at the age of 16 in his first battle at the Battle of Shrewsbury. It's a grim apprenticeship, but it's an apprenticeship that means that Henry IV's great achievement is handing over the crown to one of the greatest and best prepared leaders that England has ever had. A couple of questions to finish off on. How close do you think between them, Richard II, with all of his God-appointed haughtiness, and Henry IV by smashing that line of succession and creating all of this doubt around his right to rule and all of that kind of thing.

Between the two of them, how close do they come to breaking kingship in England? I don't think they came close to breaking it. I think in a way what 1399 shows us is the strength of the relationship between king and kingdom that had developed in England by this point. If you understand it, if you understand that the king's authority is instituted by God to protect and defend his people, that he needs to work with them in that, that's an incredible strength, as Henry V is about to go on and show. that if you can harness that, you can conquer half of France. And if you had managed not to die of dysentery at the age of just 35, you might have, who knows what might have happened. So in a sense, we have that counterfactual haunting us there that if Henry V had lived,

would what he done in France have been a horrible overreach that would have crumbled anyway, or actually is the model that he put into such effective use? Where could that have taken us if a nine-month baby who turned out to be Henry's? with a six hadn't inherited the throne. So in a way, it shows the strength of that constitutional system, which I'm calling that unspoken precedent-based development of the relationship between the king and his people. On the other hand, what you're pointing out also quite rightly is this is a moment that does in the end, not in the counterfactual, but in the factual, cast a long shadow because this shows that it is possible to depose an anointed king

and it is possible for someone who isn't clearly the rightful heir to the throne to take the crown. The previous example within recent history being the deposition of Edward the second in 1327 but he'd been shuffled off to make way for his own son so at least you could sort of paper over that crack. The rightful line had not been in interrupted. 1399 is different in that sense. And so when huge problems emerge with the reign of Henry the 6th, the political community does everything to try and hold government together. And in the end, just can't. And when it can't any longer, the example of 1399 is there to look back to and the Wars of the Roses is the result. In a precedent-based system, it's created a really

dangerous precedent for every king that follows. Really, really dangerous precedent. It's very interesting to see. how that does and doesn't play out in that when the Duke of York steps forward to claim the empty throne in 1460, he doesn't have enough support behind him. It's a divided realm because Henry the 6th is useless, but he's useless in a hopeless and passive way. He hasn't really done anything wrong because he hasn't done anything at all, whereas Richard had been terrible in a really active way, which had united the kingdom against him. But you're absolutely right. Once the precedent is there. And once the narrative is there to be appealed to, that genie can always

be got out of the box again. It does seem like the Wars of the Roses, particularly the Early Part of the Wars of the Roses, it's the story of people trying, just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. They're resisting doing it. Yes. But everybody is aware that it's there in the locker. It could be wheeled out. And once it has been wheeled out with the Yorkist takeover in 1461, it's that bit nearer again when we see Warwick the Kingmaker going, oh, sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm going to bring the old king back. It just gets closer and closer to the surface and harder and harder to keep in check. Yeah, that's the thing about having a precedent-based constitution developing

is that you can derive enormous strength from that in all the positive ways. But if things have gone wrong in the past and have had to be fixed with a patch that is a little bit of an improvised, that we'll just not look too closely at how we did that, the risk that can break out again is so much nearer. Just to finish off, I wondered whether your opinion of either men, Richard the 2nd or Henry 4th, did it change writing this book? That is a really interesting question. I would say it developed. I mean, I've been thinking about them for a very, very long time all the way back to being a undergraduate student in the late 80s, because writing my very first essay about the reign of Richard the second

was a real eureka moment for me in terms of quite how fascinating this period of history could be. And then I went on to write my PhD really on politics under the Lancastrians and even then felt that Henry IV needed a lot more thinking about and all sorts of brilliant work

on the whole period has been done in the decades since I first started thinking about it. So I wouldn't say there hasn't been a sort of reversal or a big reveal in that sense. But working through the work through this reign chronologically, forcing yourself to account for things almost day by day at times, never letting yourself off the hook about what the motivation is. What was Henry doing in 1887? What was Richard doing in 1397 means you just get to see up close the development of

their psychologies, of their mindsets? And I think that sense, for example, of Richard being precocious but actually not very intelligent because he can't see that other people are three-dimensional beings with thoughts and interests just as real as his own. Seeing where he butts up against the limitations of that and then seeing the real humanity of Henry. I mean, I'm going to sound as though I'm special pleading because he was quite capable of meeting out really savage punishment if he felt it was necessary and required. I don't mean he was a man of our age rather than his, very much the opposite. But seeing the depth of his relationships with other people up close, I think in a way the rigor that his

son was forced to develop, the absolutely implacable, hard-edged kind of leadership that you see with Henry V, in a way, is more effective. But as a human being, I think Henry VIII is fascinating. in all his complexity. Yeah, they come out of the book, I think. They couldn't be more different, but they're equally fascinating for that. That was wonderful. Thank you so much, Helen.

I'm aware I've kept you talking so long about this, and I could gladly keep you here long. I think it's been me talking rather than you're keeping me, but thank you for giving me the chance to talk. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. Helen's newest book, The Eagle and the Heart, the tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV is out now,

and I heartily recommend it. you. If you've enjoyed this episode, you might like more on The Peasants Revolt in an episode with Andrew Prescott, which came out a little while ago to complement the documentary series we made on The Uprising, which also features Helen. There's a great episode in our early back catalogue on John of Gaunt, a key figure in this story with Helen Carr, and a recent one on Henry V with Dan Jones that neatly continues the story of Lancasterian kingship. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join you. join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to

also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts add free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. As a special gift, you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use the code medieval at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.