The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

"Yes. The Eagle and the Hart is in a rather tricky genre, but she pulls it off very well: a double biography. Her subtitle is interesting: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, because she’s obviously referencing Shakespeare here. Shakespeare, of course—and we will see this in another book on the shortlist—has shaped our conception of these monarchs at this time of ruthless transition to the Lancastrian monarchical family via the deposition, essentially, of Richard II. Richard II is made such an interesting, flawed and strange figure by Shakespeare’s great play, which Castor is pushing back against. Helen Castor is a very fine archival historian, and she digs into the reality of the figure, although he still is rather Shakespearean in the flawed, narcissistic boy king who she sets against his ruthless Bolingbroke relation. While they were superficially friends, relatives, and allies at a certain earlier part of their lives, one, of course, supplanted the other. So it has great drama. Psychological astuteness is an essential part of the weaponry of any historical biographer, and I think Castor has it in spades. It’s a vastly ambitious book, very long, stringently researched, but written with grace and pace, which was very characteristic of Elizabeth Longford, and what we look for in this prize. I think there is. And one of the authors on our shortlist, not a book we’ve discussed, says quite frankly that in some ways his book is a work of historical imagination as well as research. There’s got to be an element of that, while keeping away from the ‘must have’ or ‘would have’ or ‘surely she would have thought’—you know, the conditional case that you have to watch for very carefully when you are analysing historical biography. At the same time, the biographer has, I think, a right to exercise their imagination from time to time, and where there are gaps, something has to be supplied. The stringency with which you infer or deduce or assume has to be observed. You can’t embrace the kind of wishful thinking that allows you to assert as a fact what you want to have happened. We have all read historical biographies that do that too much. But none of the books on this shortlist, or any of our shortlists over the last 20-odd years, have, I think, done that. It’s one criterion by which we exclude a book quite early on, if imagination was left too free a rein."

"Yes, it is well trodden. And, in some ways, this is a thoroughly traditional narrative history of kings, of the most important people in society, very unlike the book by Barraclough, which is about the individual details of normal people’s lives. What Castor has done here is take on the big theme of personality and power. Richard II, the legitimate heir, thinks that what is important is having that legitimacy versus his cousin Henry IV, who is the same age as him, but in a different position in the line of succession. Henry is much more about action, and that’s where it becomes fascinating because, once you start to think of Richard as the rightful heir, then it’s all about being the king, but less about doing what kings should do. By contrast, Henry is not the rightful heir, but what he does is absolutely brilliant, even though it includes regicide. That starts to make you think about what power is and how you get it and hold on to it. That big theme, which is highly relevant to modern politics, really holds the book. It’s also excellent on detail. We have fantastically rich source material for this period, including things like the records of the Royal Wardrobe, so we know what colours the king would be wearing, what clothes were bought for particular seasons of the year. Those sorts of details, to me, take it beyond a traditional history into something far more interesting and personal. Masculinity is another huge theme. Castor points out that at the coronation ceremony for Henry in 1399, the Archbishop of Canterbury preached on a passage from the Old Testament, “a man shall rule over the people.” Castor picks that up to think about what masculinity is in this period. So there are some quite modern themes: the nature of power, what it is to be a real man. These are brought out through this historical period, which, as you say, in general we know much better than some of the other periods we’re looking at in these books. Yes, it’s how those two have to somehow be pitted against each other, because that’s the way that kingship works. You can only have one king at a time! If it had been the other way round, if Henry had been the legitimate heir, what might history have looked like? What might the state of the British people have been at the end of this? Because it’s a very tumultuous period with Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt and the Tower of London being taken. It’s not a smooth-running period of history at all. Castor asks what things would have looked like if we hadn’t had this struggle between these two men."