Review: The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor

An enthralling study of human frailty and the corrosive effects of power

Even when contemplating their own deaths, the two cousins inhabited different worlds. Richard II’s will, written in the spring of 1399, was largely devoted to lavish plans for his own funeral and to pursuing vengeance beyond the grave. The judgments he had recently made against his enemies, he wrote, must be defended “even to the death if need be”. 

The will of his successor Henry IV, by contrast, written nearly a decade later, was abject in its humility: “I Henry, sinful wretch… bequeath to God my sinful soul, the which had never been worthy to be man.” Where one commanded, oblivious to the constraints of reality, the other shouldered his responsibilities, even as they crushed him.

They were both brought to the throne by catastrophe. Richard was born on January 6 1367 in Bordeaux, at the heart of English Aquitaine. He was the second son of Edward, better known as the Black Prince, then the 36-year-old son and heir of Edward III. But by the time the 64-year-old king died in June 1377, Richard’s father and older brother were both already dead. Richard had grown up in a household of “such sumptuous state that no other prince or lord in Christendom could match [it]”, the chronicler Jean Froissart said. How would such a 10-year-old, adapted for nothing but his own magnificence, respond to the demands of state?

At first, as Helen Castor reveals in The Eagle and the Hart, her grand and enthralling account of the two kings’ reigns, Richard wasn’t required to. Decisions were made in his name by those around him, key among them John of Gaunt – Richard’s uncle and Henry’s father – a man “shaped by duty and ambition so closely intertwined that they were indistinguishable one from the other”, Castor writes. This was not a happy compromise for Richard; it was not a happy compromise for England either. 

The country was hard-pressed to defend itself: within weeks of the old king’s death, the French sacked and burned Rye, Hastings and Lewes. There were four parliaments in the first three years of Richard’s reign. The Lords and Commons agreed: the problem was extravagance, corruption and mismanagement. The Government responded by pointing to their refusal to raise sufficient taxes. As for Richard, he had other priorities. What mattered, he told Parliament in 1386, were “his prerogatives and the liberties of his crown”.

Richard’s reign would be a tense and bloody power struggle that pitted the king against the nobility, Parliament and country. The Merciless Parliament of 1388, led by five noblemen, oversaw the execution of 10 men, including some of Richard’s closest companions. Sir Simon Burley, for example, had been by Richard’s side since he was nine. Richard pardoned the five nobles but spent a decade plotting revenge. In 1397 he acted. Two of the five were condemned as traitors. A third – Richard’s uncle, Thomas of Woodstock – was murdered on his orders. The others, including Henry Bolingbroke, soon to be Henry IV, were exiled. Henry received written guarantees from Richard that when John of Gaunt died, Henry would inherit his estates. Gaunt died in February 1399, and Richard broke his promise. How could Henry not act?

But Richard also fought the deep structures of the state, built around law and precedent and held together by familial, local, regional and national affinities that wedded loyalty and service to security and protection. Castor shows how easily political processes and societal norms warped and buckled under pressure. She describes her book as “a study of the psychology of power”, but it’s more a study of the psychological consequences of power on those who wield it. Richard believed his divinely invested authority gave him the right to redefine truth and reorder reality at will. The kingdom was a mirror for his majesty: he could not countenance anything else being reflected back.

Richard’s chaotic, improvisational tyranny was a catastrophe for England. “It is commonly said among your people that… you have governed them very badly, and far too harshly,” Henry told him shortly before deposing him in the autumn of 1399. Richard died in prison, seemingly of starvation, some months later. But if Richard’s reign was defined by the quest for an unrealisable perfect order, Henry’s was defined by the quest for a moral legitimacy that he could never fully earn. The first years of his reign saw crisis after crisis. 

The French refused to recognise his kingship. The Welsh, under Owain Glyn Dŵr, rebelled. Harry Hotspur, once an ally, rose against him. In the summer of 1405, Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, used his pulpit to denounce “bad governance”, “harsh regulations and unmanageable taxes”, before joining another rebellion. Henry had him summarily executed. Where was his legitimacy then? Henry’s health began to fail the following year. By the time he died in 1413, aged 45, he was a broken man.

The Eagle and the Hart is packed with drama and incident, but it’s also written with an electrifying sense of the tensions between individuals and institutions, innovation and tradition, legitimacy and tyranny. This is a masterpiece of narrative history. The subtitle – The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV – nods to Shakespeare, and it’s true, both reigns were tragedies of a kind. But there are no easy answers to the questions the book raises about human frailties and how they are magnified and corrupted by political power. That is our tragedy too.

This review first appeared in the Daily Telegraph.