The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, with Helen Castor

BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

[Music plays]

Today on the podcast, the topic is a leader who believes himself infallible, who bestows cushy titles on his favorites, who serves up retribution based on old grudges, whose trademark move is to accuse those he disagrees with of treason.

And just to clarify, we’re talking here about Richard II, the 14^th-century English king. Richard II isn’t Shakespeare’s most well-known history play. It doesn’t get performed all that often. But the events that brought down the real-life Richard II and brought his cousin, Henry IV, to the throne tell a fascinating story of the abuse of power.

It’s a story that my guest Helen Caster brings vividly to life in her latest book, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV. Caster’s previous books include She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth and Joan of Arc: A History, both of which became documentaries on the BBC.

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BOGAEV: Helen Caster, welcome to Shakespeare Unlimited.​

HELEN CASTOR: Thank you so much for having me.

BOGAEV: Well, Helen, why this story about these two kings now?

CASTOR: It’s a story I’ve been fascinated by for, I was going to say years, but actually decades, going all the way back to my time as a student. But it’s a story that has come more and more to the surface for me in the last few years.

If you made this up in fiction, people would tell you you’d overdone it. Two cousins almost exactly the same age. They’re 10 years old when Richard II becomes King of England in 1377, and they’re 32 when Henry deposes him to take the throne in his place. It’s so neat and they are such contrasting characters. The fact that Richard has the right to be king but none of the qualities that you would look for in a leader, whereas Henry has all the qualities but he doesn’t have the key thing which is birthright.

So, it’s been rattling around in my brain for a long time. But the thing that’s really come to the surface in the last, well, five years as I’ve been writing the book, is this question of legitimacy and tyranny and sovereignty, and what the distinctions are between those qualities of government? How we decide what makes a legitimate government and at what stage we have to decide we need to resist? How far the rules can be pushed before they break? All of those kinds of questions.

So, it’s a coming together of an intensely personal story about these two men with very big questions, I think, about how power works, whether it’s in the 14th century or the 21st.

BOGAEV: Right, the gray areas and the moving of that line in the sand, how it moves and why for a nation or a kingdom. I noticed you’re not saying anything about Shakespeare here.

CASTOR: Well, Shakespeare, of course, is there because, as so often, he is the one who tells these stories the best and gets right to the heart of both the human condition and the political challenges that we face. And of course, I mean, Richard II is, I’ve been trying to argue, perhaps his greatest play—and then realizing that what I mean by that is probably it’s my favorite of his plays.

BOGAEV: And why?

CASTOR: For me, it’s the fact that it’s such an intensely psychological study of power. One of the remarkable things about Richard II as a history play is that almost all the big events in its narrative happen offstage. The substance of the play is made up of some of the most extraordinary poetry that Shakespeare ever wrote in the service of a psychological study of a man who has lived his entire life as god’s anointed and then has to confront what it means to be a king unmade when he’s forced to give the crown up. What does that do to him And of course, then we have the Henry IV plays, which are a different kettle of fish, I think.

BOGAEV: Right. Henry’s very shadowy, really, in those plays.

CASTOR: He is—

BOGAEV: Yeah, you hear about his son Hal and Hotspur and all that much more than you do Henry.

CASTOR: And that—I’m so glad you brought me to this point—one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is because in Shakespeare, Richard II is front and center in his own play but Bolingbroke, Henry Bolingbroke, is his nemesis, but we don’t see inside Henry’s head. Henry has to be there to bring Richard down, but we don’t see Henry’s decision making. We don’t see any agonizing that he does and then we might think, “Well, we’ll get a psychological study of Henry in the plays that have his name on them,” and we don’t. We get a study of Hal and Falstaff; it’s about fathers and sons, and Henry is a kind of grey man in the background.

So, I wanted to put Henry center stage right next to Richard and see if it was possible to bring him into the spotlight too, if that makes sense, and to make one human being out of him instead of the soldierly Bolingbroke turning into the grey and debilitated king of the Henry IV plays.

BOGAEV: Okay, so, let’s go back and set the record straight anyway about the history, and especially for us here on this continent who don’t know it that well, we have to start at the beginning of the story. What was Richard’s childhood like? It sounds like it was crucial to all that came later.

CASTOR: I believe it was. I mean, I think for most of us, our childhood is crucial for what comes later. But the more I looked at Richard’s childhood, the more I felt this was really where the story needed to start because Richard was born into very difficult political and military circumstances.

England had been at war with France for decades, in what we now know as the Hundred Years’ War. It had been going very well initially for England in the 1340s and 1350s, great victories, but now, by the 1360s—Richard and Henry were born in 1367—a treaty, a truce was beginning to break down. In the 1370s war was resumed but not going so well for England after all. One of the circumstances that was very difficult was that the king, Richard’s grandfather, Edward III, was now in his 60s, no longer able to lead in the way he had. But his eldest son, the heir to the throne, the Black Prince, Richard’s father, was also chronically ill, in his 40s, also not able to lead in the way he had done.

By 1376, when Richard was nine, the Black Prince died. So, it became clear that the crown of England was going to skip a generation from Edward III onto the shoulders of a 10-year-old boy. Richard had been brought up with that likelihood in mind. He was the Black Prince’s only legitimate son, and he had been told he was unique, told that he was going to become king, told in Parliament when he had just turned 10, after his father’s death that, more or less, that he was the Messiah.

BOGAEV: It sounds like the making of a megalomaniac.

CASTOR: It really does, doesn’t it? Particularly if you marry it with an education that stressed all that side of things, that doesn’t seem to have taught him what the job of being king actually entailed in any—

BOGAEV: Right, he never really saw his father do it.

CASTOR: No, he didn’t see his father do it and he didn’t see his grandfather do it. He just saw the image, heard about it, and unlike his father and grandfather, doesn’t seem to have been at all keen on the fighting-a-war bit of it. But that’s very difficult when leading armies in war is one of the main jobs that a king has in this period. And he doesn’t seem to have been equipped to do it, doesn’t seem to have wanted to do it at all.

BOGAEV: Right. So, he’s in his teens, and nobles and the council and parliament have kind of taken over governance. There’s this really weird kind of dance that, you know, pretending that, “Yes, Richard is the sovereign ruler” but really, they’re ruling the kingdom. It sounds like there was a little bit of government theater going on.

CASTOR: Theater is a very good word, yes, theater is a very good word for the whole reign.

BOGAEV: Right, and also, as you say, the royal coffers were getting depleted, rebellions were rife. England is beset by enemies, and France is on the verge of a full-scale invasion in 1386, 1387. So set the scene. France is readying its armada. Richard’s chancellor and treasurer are trying to raise funds for war, and this very un-military like boy-king does, what?

CASTOR: Well, his country is looking to him to step up and lead them against the greatest naval threat to England’s shores since 1066. This is a huge fleet that the French are amassing to sail across the North Sea and invade the east coast of England.

Richard by 1386 is 19 so he’s no longer a little boy. He’s three years older than his father, the Black Prince, was at the Battle of Crécy when he won his spurs for the first time. So, in theory, there is no reason that Richard can’t step up, except for two things. One, he doesn’t want to, and second, he doesn’t even understand the need to.

So, at the Parliament of 1386, lords and commons in the Parliament, are up in arms because they’ve been asked for more money in taxation than any Parliament ever before by Richard’s Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, in order to resist this imminent invasion. And what they are saying, they send a message to Richard saying this: “You know, we’re not happy. We’re not going to just grant you this tax. We want to know how it’s going to be spent. We want reassurances. We want you to dismiss your chancellor because we have no trust in him, your chancellor and your treasurer. We need to see reform. We need to see someone get a grip on government.”

Richard sends a message back saying he would not at their request dismiss a scullion from his kitchen. Not tactful, not helpful. They press the point because they can’t quite believe what they’ve heard, at which point he then says, “If you continue with this resistance, with this insolence, then I will have no option but to ask my cousin, the king of France, to for help against you.”

BOGAEV: This is the enemy.

CASTOR: This is the enemy who is about to invade, and Richard is saying, “I would rather submit to him, another king who will surely understand, than submit to my own subjects.” In other words, he does not understand the first thing about the situation in which he and England find themselves.

BOGAEV: Right, he sounds like he’s running away around the countryside from house to house with his—

CASTOR: Entourage.

BOGAEV: His entourage and Robert de Vere—his perhaps lover, who knows?

CASTOR: That’s right. He is very, very preoccupied with this young man, five years older than him—Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford—almost to the exclusion of everything else. It’s almost as though no one else is real to Richard, with the possible exception of de Vere.

But the reality of the invasion, the reality of his subject’s political needs, it all seems to be cardboard cutouts to him and all he can see is that he is being attacked.

BOGAEV: Okay, so what happens now?

CASTOR: Strangely, this does not go well. The most powerful of England’s nobles is Richard’s oldest uncle, John of Gaunt, Henry’s father. But John of Gaunt has by this stage left the country to go and fight in Spain. So Gaunt is not there. He’s gone away as the least popular nobleman in England, hated by almost everyone because the poor man has been trying to hold everything together for years and years and years and getting all the blame as a result. He’s finally gone away, and as soon as he’s gone away, everything has fallen apart even worse than it was before.

So, Richard’s youngest uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, is the one who steps forward and tries to more or less slap some sense into Richard, saying, “This is no way to carry on. Remember what happened to your great grandfather, Edward II, the previous king who’d been deposed in the 14th century.” In other words, this is escalating horribly. Gloucester, with the help of some of the other nobles, takes over government. A council is instituted to control everything that’s going on in the royal administration, and Richard realizes that he has no choice but to cooperate for the moment. In other words, he just sort of lets them take over government and he more or less withdraws with his household, leaving them to it.

But over the next year, as it turns out, the French invasion doesn’t actually turn up, so the crisis gradually dissipates. But Richard has taken himself off, as you were indicating a minute ago, to travel around the country with his inner core of favorites. Instead of pondering what’s happened and learning his lessons, he decides he’s going to redefine the law of treason in order to say that everyone involved with the council and with the parliament that just happened should be declared to be a traitor.

When he comes back to London, clearly seeking to put that into effect, that’s the point when the Duke of Gloucester, the other two noblemen who stepped up with him to run the council—the Earl of Arundel and the Earl of Warwick—have to decide whether they’re going to take up arms to try and protect themselves against Richard or whether they’re going to just hope it’ll all come out all right.

They decide they’re going to raise a force of men to defend themselves and that’s the point at which Richard’s cousin, Henry, has to decide which way to jump. He and another young nobleman called Thomas Mowbray, the Earl of Nottingham, they decide to throw in their lot with the rebels.

So, you get these five rebel lords known as the Lord’s Appellant: Gloucester, Arundel, Warwick, Henry, and Mowbray. They stand up to Richard. They end up defeating Robert de Vere at the Battle of Radcot Bridge. De Vere has to flee into exile. They impose themselves on Richard’s government much more forcibly than ever before in 1388. They end up accusing a lot of the men around Richard of being traitors and executing them as a way of trying to protect themselves from the accusations of treason that Richard had been threatening them with. The whole thing is an absolute mess.

BOGAEV: It’s a mess. I was going to say we haven’t even gotten to the beginning of Shakespeare’s play.

CASTOR: Exactly, we’re still 10 years away from the beginning of Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: But let’s go back now because Henry of Bolingbroke has entered the field. Let’s get a fix on him. He’s the son of John of Gaunt, as you said, who was a towering figure at this time and quite unpopular, had taken the fall for trying to hold the kingdom together. It sounds like Henry had a very different childhood than his cousin Richard, just so full of siblings and love and vivid experiences.

CASTOR: He did. Henry is really everything that Richard is not. Henry was thrown into the middle of a really rumbustious, interesting household full of formidable characters. So unlike Richard, he was being pushed in a good way on every front, intellectually, academically, militarily. He was jousting at court from the age of 13, learning what it meant to lead men in peace and in war. Learning that at his father’s knee.

The really striking thing about Henry, as you watch him grow up—by comparison with this very isolated, remote, self-obsessed figure that you see in Richard—Henry makes friends. People really like him, and that’s an unusual thing to be able to say. So, he’s a very interesting point of comparison with Richard. He becomes one of the great chivalric figures in Europe as he grows into his twenties. So, it’s clear that there is no love lost between Richard and Henry. They are temperamentally so different and that’s even before Henry steps up to help lead the resistance against Richard in the late 1380s. After that point, it’s very clear not only do they have nothing in common, but a healthy distance between them is probably the best they can hope for.

BOGAEV: Well, here’s the big question, why didn’t Henry and his collaborators, the rebels, depose Richard at the point when they defeated de Vere’s army and, you know, when they resolved the crisis of leadership?

CASTOR: It’s a very, very good question to ask. The indications are from little fragments of evidence, that they did think about it, because what Richard had done—war.

Deposing a king is a terrifying and risky thing in medieval England because the king is anointed by God. He’s the keystone of the whole political hierarchy. He’s the one who’s supposed to keep order within the kingdom. He’s also the one who’s supposed to protect the kingdom from external attack. Except Richard is clearly not doing that. Not only is he not doing that, he’s also now actively attacking his own subjects by saying that anyone who opposes his will, whatever form that takes, is a traitor.

So, in principle, you could see that there would be an argument for deposing him. But the problem is he’s only 19, 20, in 1387 and he has no brothers and he has no children. So, if you depose him you have to put another king in place as soon as you can, and a king around whom the whole country can rally. But who are you going to put in Richard’s place? So, the reason that in December 1387 they don’t depose Richard is that the risk is everything will fall apart even worse than it is already

BOGAEV: Okay, so there’s a truce with France and Richard is now a king in peacetime. What kind of king is he? I mean, Richard does sail off to Ireland. He seems to broker a treaty with warring Irish lords there, and he gets himself a French wife, and gets a lot of French gold, and here’s this truce after 50 years of war. I mean, at this point, Richard looks pretty good, like a pretty good monarch, doesn’t he?

CASTOR: Well, yes, if you don’t look too closely because Richard is very, very good at surfaces. Richard is very good at the look of things and that goes all the way through to his qualities as a commissioner of art. Of all English monarchs—certainly English medieval monarchs—he commissions the greatest art that medieval England had ever seen. So he’s very good at the image of kingship.

BOGAEV: Good at PR.

CASTOR: Very good at PR. But actually, one of the things that Richard is doing during these years, the early 1390s, is he’s beginning to build up his own private retinue.

Richard has seen his beloved de Vere defeated and driven into exile and what Richard then sets about doing—you know, undercover, kind of, “Nothing to see here. It’s all still very peaceful,” kind of way, in the 1390s—is he begins to recruit his own retinue of knights and esquires answerable directly to him as king. He gives them his badge, his new badge, which is the white hart, the hart of my title. But the question that you have to ask is, why does a king think he needs his own private, in effect, army within his own kingdom when the whole kingdom is supposed to be as one under his leadership? So, there are these signs that things are not quite as they seem.

You referred to the French marriage. So, he’s made peace with France. He’s married the six-year-old daughter of the king of France so he’s clearly in no hurry to have an heir or to sort of normalize, stabilize, the succession. But he’s also got a huge amount of French gold with his bride. So, what is he planning? “What is he planning?” is the big question of the first half of the 1390s.

BOGAEV: Well, it sounds like he’s planning a decade of revenge on everyone who defied him in the past—and now we are almost at Shakespeare’s play.

CASTOR: We are almost there. That’s it, he’s going to take down Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, his uncle, and the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, who had supported him 10 years earlier and this happens out of the blue in such a way that it takes the political community by surprise and they sort of go along with it because they’re not quite sure what’s happening until it’s too late. But those three nobles are destroyed. They are all declared to be traitors. Warwick escapes with his life because he begs and pleads and weeps on his knees in Parliament and Richard rather likes that. Arundel is very brave and attempts to defend himself, and he is beheaded.

But the real shocker above everything—this is all shocking—but above everything is that Richard’s own uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, who’s been sent off as a prisoner to Calais, when he’s summoned back from Calais to be tried in Parliament, the word comes back from Thomas Mowbray—this might all now start to feel a bit more familiar from the beginning of Shakespeare’s Richard II—Mowbray comes into Parliament and says, “I can’t produce Gloucester because he’s dead.” And the rumor mill, you can imagine, is going to work because what has actually happened is that Gloucester has been murdered at Calais on the king’s orders. That’s not being said in public, but his death is not being explained and Gloucester is Gaunt’s brother, he’s the son of Edward III, he’s a royal duke. This is—

BOGAEV: Unprecedented.

CASTOR: —terrifying and unprecedented, exactly.

BOGAEV: So, Act 1, Scene 1, Richard II, the duel. We have a trial by combat between Henry of Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray. So, remind us, why are those two dueling?

CASTOR: Well, if we cast our minds back to what we were saying a moment ago about the late 1380s, there were five rebel lords. There was Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick, all now destroyed in 1397 by Richard’s revenge.

There were two younger rebel lords. There was Henry and there was Thomas Mowbray. Ostensibly everyone’s been forgiven for everything in the intervening years, but Richard has just demonstrated with extreme prejudice that nothing has been forgotten and nothing has been forgiven.

Henry and Mowbray have been drawn into what Richard did to destroy Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick. Henry gave evidence against Arundel in Parliament. Mowbray was in charge of Calais where Gloucester died. So, both of them are implicated now in what Richard has done. Both of them know that they are in danger because they know what they did 10 years earlier and they’ve just seen what Richard is clearly now planning to do against the former rebels.

So, they are both terrified, and in their terror and their panic, they more or less turn on each other because they are terrified that the other one is going to shop them to Richard. They accuse each other of treason and there are no witnesses, there is no proof that can decide for one side or the other who’s telling the truth. So, Richard says, “Fine, this will be decided by combat. You can fight a duel and whoever wins, they will be the ones God has said is telling the truth and the other one will be the traitor.”

So, this duel is set up for Coventry, September 1398, a massive occasion. People come from all over Europe to see it, and that, of course, is what Shakespeare pitches us into, right at the beginning of the play.

BOGAEV: Right, and most of us are then—because Richard stops the fighting before it starts—we’re all, most of us, very confused already.

CASTOR: Yes, well, and rightly so, because everyone at Coventry in September 1398 was also confused, including Henry and Mowbray. No one knew what was going on.

BOGAEV: So why does Richard stop it?

CASTOR: Well, good question. Richard, I think, was, as he was all the way through, improvising in the name of his own royal control. It must have seemed a wonderful idea to get these two to fight each other. But of course, if one did win, and the other conclusively lost, then you’d got rid of one of them, but the other one was rendered kind of untouchable—

BOGAEV: Yeah, it looks really good.

CASTOR: Exactly, and that was the last thing that Richard wanted, particularly if it turned out to be his cousin Henry. So, on the day—and it does seem to have been a shock to absolutely everybody present there—Richard says, “Stop,” and says, “Rather than have you both fight, you’ve both been very honorable, turning up, prepared to fight. But instead, I am going to banish you both. Thomas Mowbray, you’re banished from England for life. Henry Bolingbroke, you’re banished from England for 10 years.”

Now, neither of them have been found guilty of anything, but they go along with it. They don’t have much choice. What he does promise them, however, is that if they inherit any land while they are banished, they will be allowed to inherit it. In other words, they’re not being said to be traitors. They’re not having all their lands taken away from them. They’ve not been found guilty of anything, but he just is banishing them to stop this quarrel.

BOGAEV: Yeah, he threads a very tiny needle. So, Henry sails off, but then Richard reneges—as we know from Shakespearean history—Richard reneges on his deal. He doesn’t inherit his estate from John of Gaunt when his father dies.

CASTOR: Exactly. His father dies February 1399, only months, four months later. The great speech in the play gives us a sense of how brokenhearted I think Gaunt was that the future of his line had been brought to this.

[Clip from Richard II. Joss Ackland is John of Gaunt]

JOHN OF GAUNT:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

BOGAEV: Father and son are together at his death. Henry sails home from exile and stages a coup here. Why does Henry think he should or he could depose Richard, a king, now when just a decade earlier it seemed impossible?

CASTOR: Another excellent question. But I think the answer is the issues are the same, broadly speaking, in principle, as they were in the late 1380s. In other words, the key functions of kingship are to uphold the law, to provide your subjects with justice, and to protect the realm inside and out. Richard has shown again that not only is he not capable of doing that, he is actively determined to act in the opposite direction. Because from 1397 to 1399, not only has he done what he’s done to Henry and Mowbray, he’s also embarked on a period of rule that is best described as tyranny.

There is no security under the law for any of his subjects. He’s unleashed his private army on his subjects. The Parliament of 1397 meets with his retinue of archers standing round the meeting with their bows in their hands. This is a kind of militarized tyranny that he’s now imposing on his subjects, and when he finally says in 1399, after Gaunt’s death, “No Henry, you may not inherit the greatest noble estate in the kingdom. Despite the fact that I promised you, you could.” He’s going against the law. He’s going against his own word. If the greatest nobleman in the country can’t find any security in the inheritance of his own estate, what hope for anyone else in England?

So, in coming back to claim his inheritance, Henry is standing up for his own legal rights, but he’s also acting as a representative of the whole realm. This is so well described in Shakespeare. If you follow it through in the various speeches when the Duke of York says to Richard, “Don’t do this. Don’t do this to Henry for how art thou a king, but by fair sequence and succession.” In other words, if you deny someone else their right to succeed, what are you doing to your own authority?

BOGAEV: Yeah, it delegitimizes you.

CASTOR: Exactly. And so, that’s the situation that Henry finds himself in. If he comes back to claim his own inheritance, which he does, how is he to make his possession of that inheritance secure?

Richard has shown he cannot be trusted. Richard has shown over and over again that he will break his own word, that he will override the law. He has to go at this point, and if he has to go, then someone has to take his place and the big difference between 1399 and 1387, for example, is that in practical terms, there is only one candidate.

In the moment of 1399, Henry does have a claim to the throne. It’s not the claim to the throne, but it’s a claim to the throne. He’s a proven leader. He’s standing up for the law. He’s standing up for justice. He’s standing up for England. He is the man to whom the people of England now look for salvation.

BOGAEV: They do, and he’s successful. And the way you describe it, it’s so interesting. He almost is backing up into becoming king, backing up into this deposition. It maybe wasn’t his intent even in the beginning, but it turns out, history hands this to him.

CASTOR: Exactly. It’s a very frightening thing to contemplate a deposition, but what becomes clear when he arrives back in England—and he does so not at the head of an army, he’s on one ship with a group of household men. But when he lands and then starts making his way south through the country, people flock to him.

No one is flocking to defend Richard. Everyone is flocking to Henry. Henry doesn’t actually have to strike a blow to take control of England. That is how much Richard’s power has become a house of cards by this point.

BOGAEV: If you could, describe the scene when the two cousins finally come face to face. Shakespeare immortalizes it with some great poetry in Richard in Act 3, Scene 3. But is there a record of what they really said to each other?

CASTOR: There are records. There are two key meetings. One is at a castle in North Wales when Richard has just come back from Ireland and it’s clear that he can’t raise an army to defend himself against Henry. Henry comes to see him and bows before him and says, “You have ruled England very badly for 22 years and your people are not happy. I’ve come back to help you.” And Richard says, “Okay, thank you, fair cousin,” because he knows he has no choice at all at that point, and is then taken to London, housed in the Tower.

As you say, Henry is treading very, very carefully at this point. He sets scholars to work to investigate all possible precedents for deposition. It is also agreed that following the model of their great grandfather Edward II in 1327, Richard is not only going to be deposed, he’s also going to have to abdicate, and of course, Richard is not keen on the idea of abdication. And this is where we get “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed king.”

[Clip from Richard II. Samuel West is Richard II]

RICHARD II:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king.

CASTOR: It can’t, and yet it must now, and Richard must concede the crown to his cousin. He does demand that Henry come to see him in the Tower. The report that’s given into Parliament is that with a smiling countenance, Richard gladly handed over the crown, but it’s not quite that easy behind the scenes. He demands to know by what authority and to whom he can be asked to resign a crown that God has given him. And the answer is, because he has to and to his cousin because that’s what’s happening.

BOGAEV: What happened to Richard in the end?

CASTOR: Henry hoped he would be able to consign Richard to oblivion. After the deposition, he was sent north, under cover of darkness, to Pontefract Castle, one of the great fortresses of the Duchy of Lancaster in Yorkshire.

But only three months after Henry’s accession, there was an attempt at rebellion by four of the nobles who had been closest to Richard and had got most of their rewards from Richard and they were clearly terrified about what might happen to them under the new regime. So, they attempted to rebel. Didn’t go well at all. They ended up getting lynched by angry mobs before Henry could even reach them.

But in the aftermath of that rebellion, it dawned on Henry, as it dawns on every medieval usurper, that having a living ex-king around the place is not actually politically practicable, however little you want to tackle the problem. Only a couple of months later, news arrived in London that Richard had died in captivity. Again, a bit like the Duke of Gloucester in Calais before, it was not announced how he died, but the most plausible of the rumors seems to be that he might have been starved to death.

The story in Shakespeare, of course, is that Henry says, “Will no one rid me of this problematic cousin who’s still alive?” And Sir Pierce Exton, as he’s called in the play, rushes off to Pontefract and kills Richard.

When Richard’s skeleton was taken out of his tomb in the 19th century, not all the bones were there. But his skull was there and it is clear that he had no head injury, so he certainly didn’t die in quite the way that’s described in the play.

BOGAEV: It’s such an amazing story. Henry seemed so fit to be king, but then his reign was just one crisis after the next. What kind of ruler was he?

CASTOR: In lots of ways, he was a very good ruler. He was so fit to be king, as you say. He had all the qualities, all the education, all the experience that you would look for in an ideal medieval king.

But the one thing he didn’t have was unquestioned legitimacy. And that was, if you like, a fatal flaw at the heart of his kingship that meant that anyone who was dissatisfied with his rule in any way, anyone looking to make trouble from outside. So, the Scots immediately start causing trouble in the north. The French are extremely angry that the king, to whom they’d married their princess, has now been deposed. They’re scathing about the English predilection for killing their own kings. And in Wales, Owen Glendower raises the flag of rebellion for an independent Wales. So, Henry is confronting military problems on all borders of his kingdom.

BOGAEV: And his health was just terrible. I mean, do we even know what disease he suffered from?

CASTOR: His health collapsed in 1406. There are various descriptions, but he does seem to have had circulatory problems, he seems to have had skin problems. This golden boy that he’d been, this golden young knight, turns into a suffering, debilitated, agonized king who’s agonized not only by his physical suffering, but also, it seems—I’m convinced—by guilt and fear about the consequences of what he’s done.

BOGAEV: Well, in the end, what does this tale of warring cousins say about the workings of power?

CASTOR: I think it tells us a great deal about the complexity of power, about how individual qualities can shape and turn political conflicts and political systems. But it also shows us how important legitimacy is in allowing political structures to work, allowing nations to be brought together under a functional government, and how careful we have to be about rules and structures that may seem eternal in more peaceable moments, but can prove to be frighteningly vulnerable or even ephemeral if legitimacy is lost.

BOGAEV: Well, these are all the things that Shakespeare does grapple with in the play and just bringing the conversation full circle back to the beginning. Richard II is, as you said, one of your favorite Shakespeare plays, but it is relatively unpopular on the stage. Why do you think that is when it gets to the heart of things that we’re grappling with now that have such resonance?

CASTOR: I think one of the difficulties can be is that it is such a talky play and perhaps therefore not action packed and no moments of light relief. But if you tune in, I think, and in the hands of a great actor and a great director, I think it is one of the most powerful pieces of political theatrical writing we could possibly have.

BOGAEV: Well, Queen Elizabeth certainly thought It was powerful. She said, “I am Richard II, know ye not that.” And in fact, the deposition scene was cut from the Richard II quartos because it was considered so topical and dangerous.

CASTOR: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because to have a play reprinted as many times as Richard II is, once in 1597, twice in 1598, and yet with that key scene taken out, you can just see how relevant it is that it’s being put out there but censored at the same time.

There are a lot of parallels. Despite the fact that Elizabeth was one of the most gifted politically and intellectually gifted sovereigns England ever had, nevertheless, she was a childless ruler. That was a real parallel to the 1390s with Richard, even though he was many decades younger than Elizabeth was in the 1590s. He too had no children, he had no direct heir, and therefore the question of what might happen in a future after him was beginning to loom, not least because he was so bad at ruling that that future might need to come a lot quicker. But it was looming in the same way that it was for at least some of Elizabeth’s subjects.

BOGAEV: So, really touchy subject, and now I understand your next book is about Elizabeth. Why are you turning to her now?

CASTOR: It’s going to be wonderful turning back to Elizabeth. I’ve already written a very short book about Elizabeth, but that was before I wrote about Richard and Henry. I do feel I’ve learned an enormous amount about the 16^th-century perspective and Elizabeth’s view of her own authority having had a chance to delve into the late 14th and early 15th century.

Richard II really is about the nature of kingly power, and what Shakespeare does so brilliantly, is show that these two things are true at the same time: that sovereign power is bestowed by God and you mess with that at your peril because you are messing with the entire political structure.

We could parlay that into our own times by replacing God with wherever we see legitimacy coming from, in terms of validating sovereignty. But wherever the legitimacy of sovereignty comes from, you mess with that at your peril. And at the same time, those who wield sovereign power can sometimes go too far. They threaten to break the system that they’re at the head of. Shakespeare very clearly shows that something does have to be done about Richard.

So it’s that those two things can both be true and then wanting to see how Elizabeth, trying to wield sovereignty as a woman in a system that doesn’t think sovereignty is designed for women, and after a century and a half of some of the most bloody political conflict that England ever saw plus a religious revolution—it’s going to be fantastic. I’m so looking forward to it.

BOGAEV: I’m so looking forward to reading it. Thank you so much for the book and for this.

CASTOR: Barbara, thank you so much for having me.

——————

BOGAEV: Helen Caster. Her latest book is The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, and it’s out now from Avid Reader Press, part of Simon & Schuster.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Encounter Studios in Toronto and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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