Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm very happy to be chatting with Helen Castor. She is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and also a BBC broadcaster. She's taught history at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of numerous books and most recently, one of the best books of last year, she published The Eagle and the Heart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV. Helen, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

So Richard II and Henry IV, they're both born in the same year, namely 1367. Just to frame it for our listeners, could you give us a sense back then, what was it that English government sort of could do and what could it not do? What is a government like then?

I think people might be surprised at quite how much government could do in England at this point in history, because England at this point was the most centralized state in Europe. And that has two reasons. One is the conquest of 1066, that the Normans have come in and taken the whole place over. And then the other key formative period is the late 12th century when Henry II is ruling an empire that stretches from the Scottish border border all the way down to southwestern France, so he has to have a system of government and of law that can function when he's not there. So by the late 14th century, when Richard and Henry, my two kings in this book, appear on the scene, the king has two key functions which appear on his seal, the two sides of his seal. On one side, he sits in state wearing a crown, carrying an orb and scepter as a law a judge, and that is a key function of what he does for his people. He imposes law, he gives justice, he maintains order. And on the other side of the seal, he's wearing armor on a war horse with a sword unsheathed in his hand, and that's his function as a defender of the realm in an intensely practical way. He has to be a soldier, a warrior, to repel attacks or indeed to launch attacks if that's the best form of defense. And to do that, he needs money. And for that, the institution of Parliament has developed, which both offers consent to taxation that he can demonstrate is in the national interest, and it has also come to be a lawmaking forum. So wherever he needs to make new laws, he can make statute law in Parliament that therefore in its very nature has the consent of the representatives of the realm.

And what is it back then that government cannot do?

What a government doesn't have in the medieval period is it doesn't have a monopoly of force. In other words, it doesn't have a police force. It doesn't have a professional police force, and it doesn't have a standing army. Or at least by the late Middle Ages, England does have a permanent garrison in Calais, which is its outpost on the northern coast of France, but that's not a garrison that can be recalled to England with any ease. So enforcement is the government's key problem. And to enforce the king's edicts, it therefore relies on a hierarchy of private power. On the landed, the great landowners of the kingdom who are wealthy because of their possession of land, but crucially also have control over people, the men who live and work on their land. So if you need to get an enforcement posse, I mean, this is medieval English language that we use when we talk of sheriffs and posses, the county posse, the power of the county. If you need to get men out quickly, You need to tap into those local power structures. You don't have modern communications, you don't have modern transport. The whole hierarchy of the king's theoretical authority has to tap into and work through the private hierarchy of landed power.

And why do those landed nobles obey the king? They're afraid of the future raising of an army, or they're handed out some other benefit. What keeps the incentives all working together to the extent they stay working together?

They have a very important pragmatic interest in obeying the king because the king is the keystone of the hierarchy within which they are powerful and wealthy. Of course, they want more power and more wealth for themselves and for their dynasty. But importantly, they don't want to risk everything to acquire more if it means a serious danger that they might lose what they already have. So they have every interest in maintaining the hierarchy as it already is, within which they can then— it's like having a referee. You can compete safely within the rules of the game if you know the referee is there to step in if it gets really dangerous. And on top of that, We have to imagine that the referee is appointed and anointed by God, and we must take that seriously if we're looking at the Middle Ages. This is a worldview in which God has set up the order of creation, and if you were to resist the king, you are not only risking your place in the mortal world, but you are risking your immortal soul.

And what's the incentive for parliaments to vote a king more funds at the margin? So say the funds will be spent fighting with France. Why doesn't parliament just say, get the money from someone else? There's no benefit to us in doing this.

Quite often it does. And that is one of the things that late medieval kings have to grapple with, that once it has been set up, and it's a great strength to medieval kings that if they can demonstrate that it is in the interests of the realm, that they need this money in order to defend the realm, and defense of the realm can be defined pretty broadly depending on circumstances, they can then take taxation. That's a great strength. But if the representatives of the realm say, hang on, we don't agree, this doesn't sound as though it's in our interests, and a whole number of times in the period I've looked at in the book, Parliaments, both the Commons and the Lords, do do that, and the King is therefore caught within the system that benefits him at other times. So that question of what is the defence of the realm, what is in the interests of the realm, becomes a key point of discussion, argument, and sometimes dissent. On the other hand, we might sometimes think from our modern perspective that they were already being pretty liberal in their interpretation of the defense of the realm, given that this is a period where England and France are fighting what we know as the Hundred Years' War. Of course, they didn't know it was going to go on for more than 100 years. They weren't saying, "Right, lads, it's halftime. We'll have a break now." But this was a war that was almost entirely being fought in France. So, We might not see that as a defensive war, but in terms of England's interests, when it was going well, it was claiming territory that the King of England claimed was rightfully his. It was producing lots of benefit in terms of booty and reward for the men who fought in it, and it did have a defensive element in the sense that if the war's being fought over there, it's not being fought over here. Here. So we have to adjust our mindset slightly in terms of what war is for and what it looks like. But this is where crucial discussions were happening between the king and various of his subjects quite regularly.

And does England feel it can win some of those battles because it has a more centralized state, or is there some other reason? Because of course they're across the Channel, You would think they would expect to lose. French territories have more people, right? France is not poorer than England back then. Why do they think they can hold that ground?

To start with, we have to remember that England has had territory on the continent in what we now know as France since 1066. The Dukes of Normandy became Kings of England. Normandy was then lost under King John in 1204, but by then, thanks to King John's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the English crown had acquired a vast territory in southwestern France, the Duchy of Aquitaine, sometimes known as Gascony, and that was still in English hands in the late Middle Ages. It was being fought over and its extent grew and shrank depending on how the course of the war was going. But the idea that England should hold territory in France, or indeed should claim the whole Kingdom of France, was not itself a bizarre or, to contemporaries, implausible one. And the way this war was being fought, there were set-piece battles which in the mid-14th century, under Richard and Henry's grandfather Edward III, had gone England's way. They'd won great victories at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, at Poitiers in 1356, Edward had captured Calais after a siege, and in between those victories, warfare was being conducted by great raiding, great cavalry raids across France. So vast swathes of territory were being burned, plundered, and ravaged. So England had every reason to think after the 1340s and 1350s that this was a war that they could win or certainly derive great benefit from.

So when other historians debate this period that you've covered, what's the main thing they disagree about? Like, what's at stake here?

You know historians, they disagree about almost everything one way or another. One thing they disagree about is precisely the question you've just asked: was this realistic? Could we imagine a counterfactual in which England not only damages but takes another large swathe of France, as Henry V did end up doing in the early 15th century, and then hold on to it? They also disagree about the effect of war within England, whether the English state was shaped helpfully or unhelpfully or shaped in a way it wouldn't otherwise have been by war. Did it become a war state? And if it did, what implications did that have for the formation of English society.

And where do you stand on those disagreements?

I think they're enormously interesting questions. I mean, the, the first one, could England have held on to much more of France than in the end it did? Because by 1453, all England had left was Calais. England lost first the reconquest that Henry V had achieved And then it also lost Aquitaine that had been English for 300 years. Devastating loss in all sorts of ways that was, not least because England got its wine from Bordeaux. What are you gonna do for wine if you lose your, if you lose your link with southwestern France? I think things could have looked very different. I think if Henry V hadn't died, in 1422, very unexpectedly. He got dysentery on campaign. He died very young. He was only 35. The course of the war thereafter could have been very different. Essentially, the problem was that the people who took over from him, his brothers, who particularly his brother John, Duke of Bedford, who was an extraordinarily able man, did not have the authority to vary the terms that Henry V had agreed. They didn't have the authority to retreat from the maximalist position that Henry V had set up, that he was King of France as well as King of England. And when Henry V's son grew up— he was only 9 months old when he became king— when he grew up, he, he was a complete non-entity, so he too couldn't vary those terms. But if there had been a competent king, competent in an ideal world militarily and diplomatically, he could, like Edward III before him, perhaps have negotiated a treaty whereby England held on to a lot of what they had in return for giving up the claim to the crown of France. As it was, England was left with the claim to the crown of France that The monarchs of England didn't give up till 1801, but with almost none of the territory, and Calais, of course, was then lost in the 16th century. I do think that could have been different. In terms of the development of the English state, I don't see a huge gulf between what is described as a war state and a law state. I think they went hand in hand. I think kings who had to deal with their subjects in terms of the needs of defense, including aggressive defense, also understood that they needed to deal with their subjects in terms of effective government at home, the imposition of law and the provision of justice. Edward III and Henry V both showed how that could be done, and in fact that the two went hand in hand.

So in the broader arc of English state building and its history, which of course stretches over centuries, do Richard II and Henry IV even matter? So both reigns are truncated. Are they just blips on the screen, or how should we think about how they might have mattered?

I think in one sense, yes, you could argue that they are blips on the screen because it all depends on what point you are taking as your point of reference. Almost anything is a blip on the screen when you're looking at 1,000 years of history. On the other hand, I think they are very significant because they make us confront, or they made the people over whom they each claim to rule confront the question of What was kingship and where and when might it shade into tyranny? And if a king became a tyrant, what could be done about it? The classic definition that contemporaries used as a working definition was that kingship was rule according to the law. In the interests of the people. Authority might come from God, but those were the responsibilities of a king. And therefore a tyrant was someone who ruled not according to the law, but by his own arbitrary will and not in the interests of the people. In a sense, that's quite a clear definition. The real problem is, what do you do about it? And that is the key problem of 1399. First of all, even if you have identified that your king is now engaged in tyranny, do you have to wait for God to remove him, or is there something you can do about it yourself? And if there is something you can do about it yourself, how far can you go if you are trying to defend the law, to defend the constitution as it stands, you may well have to go beyond the law and beyond the constitution in the effort to defend them. And if you do that, then you set a precedent for the future that that is possible, and that too is destabilizing. So once the precedent of 1399 has been set, you get two different precedents. One, that a tyrannical king can be removed, but also that what might need to be done to remove him may well push beyond current consensus about what the Constitution actually is.

So when Charles I is executed in 1649, or there's the Glorious Revolution a bit later, are people citing Henry IV as an example of how this can succeed, is the right thing to do? So that stays a precedent.

In the 1640s, it's fascinating. There are repeated references to the— what are called by historians the Deposition Articles of 1399. Henry didn't simply march in with a big sword and say, right, I'm in charge now. Or in one sense, that is what he did. But in order then to be acknowledged as king and to be crowned in Richard's place, he went to enormous lengths to make sure that this change was justified. He convened a committee who went through every record they could find, historical precedence, all the things that Richard had done in his reign, to draw up 33 articles of deposition to show exactly what Richard had done and why he should be removed. And these articles come back repeatedly to Richard's perjury in breaking the oath he'd made at his coronation to uphold the law and do justice to his people. So they say, for for example, that he claimed that the law was in his own mouth or sometimes in his own breast, and that the lives or, and property of his subjects were his and at his own will. They also made Richard abdicate. This was very much a both-and situation. Let's try and cover all possible bases. And then Henry stands up in Parliament, or is it even a Parliament now? Richard's been deposed because it was a Parliament called by Richard, but he stands up in the assembly of the representatives of the realm and claims the throne through a complicated and slightly fudged series of assertions because he isn't straightforwardly the legitimate male heir. Richard doesn't have a straightforward heir, so he's trying to cover every possible base. But because he succeeds, he does take the throne, he is crowned, He does manage to hold on to it despite repeated rebellion, repeated challenge. He passes the throne on to his eldest son, who becomes Henry V. Those justifications in 1399 become a precedent in the sedimentary process of evolution of the English constitution. And so by the 1640s, those articles of deposition are under active discussion by the men who are standing up against Charles I as a precedent on which they can draw. This is really how the English Constitution works. You try something, and if it takes, then it gets built in.

So when Shakespeare presents the play Richard II in what, 1598? That's a pretty stable time, right, under Elizabeth I? How was that received? Are people shocked or scandalized?

Yes.

Did they just ignore it?

No, we can tell it's very popular because it seems to have been written in 1595 and then published in 1597 and then 1598. In other words, it goes into more than one published edition. People want to read it, but what is not included in the printed edition is what's called the deposition scene, and that's because it's so controversial. You're right that Elizabeth is in many senses one of the greatest monarchs England ever had, a very shrewd political operator. But the 1590s were not a straightforward time, and the parallels with Richard II's reign almost exactly 200 years before were becoming uncomfortably close. Richard had been a childless ruler, in his case by choice, in the sense that he never seemed to prioritize actually having any children, to the extent that in 1396, when he married for the second time, he chose to marry a 6-year-old when he was 29. So clearly having children was not first on his list of priorities. Elizabeth, in the 1590s, was aging. She was heading into her 60s. It was very clear she did not have a child. She had no named heir, and she was refusing to name an heir. So the question of the succession— she was refusing for very different reasons from Richard, but all the, all the same, the uncertainty over the succession, problems in Ireland in both cases, and rumblings of unhappiness that came to a head in 1601 with the rebellion of the Earl of Essex. Her former favorite who'd just been over failing to sort things out in Ireland. And his supporters, the night before he launched his, in the end, abortive revolt, paid for a play about Richard II to be put on at the Globe. We're not entirely sure whether it was Shakespeare's Richard II or another play. In other words, Richard II felt like holding a mirror to current events in the 1590s. And in April 1601, after Essex's Rebellion had been put down, Elizabeth was in the Tower looking through some archives with the Keeper of the Records in the Tower, and he later made a note that she turned to him and said, "I am Richard II, know ye not that." Now, in all sorts of ways, she wasn't at all. She was far shrewder, far more farsighted, far more self-aware than Richard ever was. But she could see the parallels, and so could everyone else.

Now, Richard II was pretty successful as a patron of the arts. The Wilton Diptych is commissioned. He supports Chaucer. Did he have good taste? Did he just get lucky? Did he do this all for cynical reasons? How do you understand the record?

He had superb tastes artistically, I think, in terms of the visual arts. There again, he makes an interesting comparison with Charles I, who's our other great commissioner of art as king. Two men who understood the power of image, but didn't really understand the structures and the realities behind that. Richard really was a superb commissioner of art. If we put together— there's a life-size coronation portrait in Westminster Abbey which is an extraordinary painting. It's currently at the west door of Westminster Abbey, but it used to, we think, be in the choir near the high altar. The tomb he commissioned for himself and his first wife, Anna of Bohemia, first ever double tomb for a King of England, is a superb piece of metalwork, gilded bronze effigies lying on a gilded tabletop. And then the crowning achievement, the Wilton Diptych, which is one of the most exquisite pieces of art I've ever seen. Interestingly though, Chaucer served Richard II. He, he held office in his government. One of Chaucer's trips to Italy was to attempt to arrange a marriage for the young Richard in the late 1370s. But I'm not sure Richard was a great reader. Another biographer of Richard says that his interest in written literature was polite, and I think that's quite a polite way of putting it. I'm not sure Richard really did take an interest despite having Chaucer at his court. I think Henry, Henry of Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, clearly was a reader, and he was much more interested in the written word and in music, much less interested in the visual arts. And I think Richard was all about his kingship, the image of his kingship, the iconography of his kingship. It's no accident that the three great pieces of visual art he commissioned all have stunning portraits of himself at the center.

And with Henry IV, there were few visual remnants of his rule, right, that we care about? Are there any?

He also has a remarkable tomb, but it's not his own work. When he died, we, we do have his will, which is a really unusual and remarkable document. Royal wills were usually very formal. They were usually in French or Latin. They were written using the royal we. They were very public. They usually left lots of bequests for one's soul and perhaps instructions about a funeral. Richard's, of course, goes into enormous detail about what outfit he wants to be buried in, etc., etc. Henry's is in English, and it is written in the first person singular, and it begins, I, Henry, sinful wretch, King of England, France, and Lord of Ireland, etc., who has never been worthy to be man but by God's grace, which my life I have misspent. He, I think he was wracked by guilt about what he had done, and so he didn't leave instructions for an elaborate funeral or an elaborate monument, but his widow commissioned a beautiful alabaster tomb for the two of them in Canterbury Cathedral, and I find that tomb deeply moving because in the figures, they're very finely carved alabaster, you see the mark of what Henry had done. He's wearing a crown, but his face, given that he died at not quite 46, and he had been one of the most celebrated chivalric knights in Europe, he really had been a golden boy, but the man depicted in that effigy is a man weighed down. By what he's done. Other than that, he didn't really have time for commissioning much art. It was firefighting, his reign. Firefighting from beginning to truncated end.

And how is it that a Chaucer suddenly becomes possible? Because it seems quite hard to imagine there having been a Chaucer 100 years earlier. What is it that has changed that enables a Chaucer? In Florence, of course, there's Dante, What's the delta, as we economists would ask?

I have to say I'm no literary scholar, but the development of English as a language spoken across all classes of society really flexibly, because before the 14th century, I mean, of course, we go back to the conquest and we have a Norman French-speaking elite coming into an English-speaking country. And French and Latin, the lingua franca of medieval Europe, remain the languages of government until, if you like, the elite has bedded in sufficiently. And one of the things that helps the elite to bed in sufficiently is the war with France. It helps to draw literally battle lines between what's happening over there, including culturally, and what's happening over here. And you can see that both in the French that's spoken in England, that by the late 14th and early 15th century, it's not always easy for people who speak French in England to understand Parisians, for example. French has gone native, but at the same time, English has grown and developed into a language that is used throughout society from the bottom right to the top. And that then gives the opportunity for that vernacular to feed into the growth of literature in the vernacular that is happening in various places across Europe. That's my understanding of how— and of course then a genius appears who wants to try his hand at writing poetry in his own language. And he's not the only one. There's John Gower and Langland and all sorts of anonymous poets too.

This is before Gutenberg, of course. Do you have a rough sense of what a copy of Canterbury Tales would have cost if you wanted to get one?

I have no idea, I have to say.

But it would have been quite expensive, right?

Absolutely. It would be expensive. Copies of any text have to be copied by hand. Writing is a professional skill. Lots more people can read than can write because writing is a very difficult professional skill. Writing on parchment using quill pens and so on, it's not something that everybody can do. And certainly copying out a long manuscript like that is, it's an elite form of production for an elite consumer.

What do you think of the notion that there were these late medieval technologies of water power, wind power, they slowly became more productive, and that by this time there's just more social surplus. So for fighting the wars with France, for supporting Chaucer, is that true? Or was— were living standards just flat for centuries?

The 14th century is an interesting century to ask that question because we have the huge traumatic break of the Black Death, which arrived in England in 1348. Which, as far as we can tell, killed between a third and a half of the population. So one of the things that's happening in the later 14th century is that elite incomes and standards of living are being squeezed because the cheap labor on which they've always depended is no longer there in abundance. Meanwhile, the opportunity for social mobility is suddenly vastly expanded because labor is in suddenly short supply. And people in the lower orders of life suddenly have opportunities or should have opportunities they've never seen before. And one of the things you see that is enormously divisive in the late 14th century in England is that the political classes are desperately trying to keep a lid on this new capacity to flex their muscles that they're seeing from their social inferiors. So one question is, whose incomes are we talking about? Whose surplus are we talking about? And one of the remarkable things is if you are only looking at the war in the 1340s and 1350s, you might not even notice there'd been the Black Death because they carry on regardless. The war machine keeps going. It takes some time for these hugely affecting social and economic changes to work their way through at a social, cultural, and political level, as opposed, of course, to the personal trauma that was immediate. And intense.

Now, as you well know, toward the end of his reign, Richard II goes off to Ireland. Not long after that, he's deposed. Two-part question. Like, first, was that just a stupid mistake? And second, why does he have to go personally? It reminds me of these old Star Trek episodes where Captain Kirk himself beams down to the planet. Clearly, that's a mistake. Why is he in Ireland?

That's not a bad analogy, actually. And I science fiction is something I think about quite a lot when trying to understand medieval England. It is a stupid mistake, but not one that Richard, I think, could have recognized because his whole approach to governing England was a stupid mistake. He thought he had just pulled off his greatest triumph by cutting his greatest rival, Henry of Bolingbroke, off at the knees. He'd destroyed his three most powerful opponents, the men he saw as his opponents, in 1397, his uncle and two other nobles. And that left two other men who had stood up to him previously, the Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk, and his cousin Henry. He'd exiled them both. And then in 1399, when Henry's father, John of Gaunt, died, he seized Henry's inheritance, and it was clear that Henry wasn't ever going to be allowed back. Richard thinks, "Now I'm safe. I've seen off my greatest opponent, so I can go and do what I want to do, which is go to Ireland." Why does he go himself? Very good question. Because he'd had a good time there before in 1394 to 5, In Ireland. In Ireland. He'd gone there before to sort out long-running conflict between the English settlers in Ireland known as the Anglo-Irish Lords and the Wild Irish, as the English called them, the Gaelic Irish chiefs. And essentially what Richard had done was appear in majesty. The Irish had seen him coming. The Gaelic chiefs realized very quickly that if they prostrated themselves at his feet and swore homage to him, he would be delighted and would go away again in 5 minutes, leaving them actually emboldened and empowered in pursuing their own interests. So his previous visit had not sorted anything out, surprise, surprise, and now was his chance to go back again and have some more of these ceremonies, of these Irish chiefs more or less lying at his feet, which he'd rather enjoyed first time round, not seeing that leaving his kingdom open and undefended gave Henry an opportunity to come back, not with an army because he didn't have one, but to come back from exile to claim his rightful inheritance. And what he discovered when he got there was that the people of England flocked to him.

How else is it that you use science fiction to think about medieval England?

I think it's that sense of putting recognizably human people into another world, into a world where the landscape, the culture, the assumptions are different from ours. And that's what it feels like to me trying to think about being in medieval England. So for example, when I went to see the Dune films, the recent remakes of the Dune films, that sense of Paul Atreides as the Lisan al Gaib, the chosen one, That's how Richard thought of himself, the unique being who should be able to simply to speak with the voice and then everyone should obey him. Trouble is he's not in Dune, he's in England, and it doesn't work. But that sense of destiny, of chosenness, those narratives, because of course history is a process of finding a narrative within the records of the past, but it's also a question of recognizing the narratives that people in the past told themselves or other people about themselves. And I think it can be helpful.

You must like Connie Willis novels then.

Those novels?

Connie Willis. She writes about time travel back to earlier English history, often medieval England.

I don't know her work, but thank you. I will go in search of it.

We will email you some titles.

Please do.

This era, if I'm trying to think about the flow of evidence, is it that we learn new things each year because records get digitized or we discover new diaries, or is it just what we have is what we have? The new evidence coming, is it archaeological or how do we learn things over time other than just historians arguing with each other?

Both and, I would say. I wish we had diaries for this period. I would dearly love to have the diary of Richard II at any point in his life, or of Henry for, for that matter, or anyone around them. We do have some letters, very few of them in any sense what we would call private letters. So in one sense, we have, compared to what modern historians are working with, very little. I, I tend to think of it as joining scattered dots, trying to paint a picture when you're having to join dots that can be very far apart. But because England was such a centralized state, we have vast quantities of documents that are produced by central government or by the law courts, centrally or in their delegated forms, right down to manorial level. And in that sense, new evidence is being discovered by the process of historians digging deeper and deeper. I mean, when I was doing my PhD many decades ago, I was working on the legal records of 15th century England, and I was having to sample them because there was so many. There were 4 legal terms a year, 2 or 3 different courts that I was trying to work with, and just physically, I would, you know, order up a term's worth of documents, and it would be more than I could almost manhandle onto the stand I had to use. So, it's less a question of things being digitized and more a question of the historical process of sifting and finding and what questions are being asked and returning to the material and seeing what those documents can be made to give up. So, and occasionally, of course, there is either a document that hasn't been looked at or hasn't been looked at in the very particular way that a historian is now choosing to do it.

So just your personal sense of what Richard II was like, Henry IV was like, Where does that mainly come from? What document or evidence or thing gives you that feeling?

It's a cumulative process, a bit, I suppose, like what I was saying about the development of the English Constitution over the years. It's a process of building up a sketch and then filling it out. And that's one of the reasons that in the work I do now, I always, always write chronologically because we live chronologically. It may sound obvious, but a lot of academic history, for extremely good reasons, is written with a kind of eagle-eyed view of the past where you are trying to see long-term development, structural change, and so on. That's all vastly important, but because I'm trying to investigate the role of individuals and the psychology of individuals, we all live from day to day and we don't know what's going to happen in the next hour, in the next day, in the next week. So, I'm always trying to build up from the fragments of evidence I have, and sometimes that's difficult, and sometimes I have to go back, and sometimes what I learn later then colors what I've already said. So, for instance, we don't really know that much about Richard and Henry's education. We know what a typical education for aristocratic and royal boys in their period was, but I've given myself the liberty of filling in some of that space by what I know about their families and what I know about the men they became. So I'm trying to see in that moment the steps that will allow me then to explain what they did when they were 13, what they did when they were 15, what they did when they were 20, and so on. So it's a cumulative thing, and every scrap of evidence I can possibly find I will be adding into the pile.

And what evidence is it that Shakespeare had access to? Anything? Or is this some kind of oral tradition, or it's completely made up?

Not completely made up at all.

I know the historical details are not made up, but his sense of them as people?

Well, I think a lot of that does come from the historical sources he was using. I'm ashamed to say I've only very recently gone and read Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle, which is one of the main narrative sources that Shakespeare was using, and I hadn't read it before because it's 16th century and I'm trying to read the contemporary stuff. And actually, it's fantastic. He's such a good writer. And I could trace, in reading his account of Richard's reign and Henry's reign, I could trace, I could see which chronicles, which medieval chronicles he'd been using and where he'd used the records of Parliament and so on. So Shakespeare isn't going back to medieval chronicles and the records of medieval parliaments, but he's using Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle, and Holinshed's Chronicle does use those sources, and then he's using Edmund Hall's Chronicle, and Hall's Chronicle also draws on those sources. And those are narrative sources that do give a sense of the men, the main protagonists at their center. So I think the portrait of Richard in the play Richard II is astonishingly fine, although I think, perhaps for obvious reasons, Shakespeare makes him much more articulate and insightful than I can see the real Richard being in the historical record. I think the one who comes— who gets the short straw is Henry, because in Richard II, he's Richard's nemesis. He's this implacable figure, Bolingbroke, who is there to bring Richard down. And Richard II is really a play about Richard. It's a one-man band, really, in terms of the parts in the play. And then when we shift to Henry IV, Part 1, suddenly Bolingbroke has been— active, commanding figure of Bolingbroke has been left behind. And for the purposes of Shakespeare's drama, Henry has become a sort of gray, careworn, much-aged man. Now, the carewornness is real, the difficulty is real, but Shakespeare's played with the generations. He's made Henry IV the same age as the Earl of Northumberland in order that he can have Prince Hal and Hotspur out front as the young, hot-blooded rivals. And in actual fact, Hotspur was 3 years older than Henry IV. So, I think it's Henry IV Bolingbroke in Henry IV, that in a sense Shakespeare's not that interested in him because he goes from being interested in Richard II to being interested in Hal and how he can tell Hal's story as he goes on to become Henry V. So one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, if it doesn't sound too hubristic, I mean, following in Shakespeare's footsteps is a frightening challenge. I'm not the only person to try it, obviously, but I wanted to put Henry beside Richard because that parallel that they were, as you say, born in the same year— Henry's only 3 months, in fact, younger than Richard, even though Richard is often talked about as a boy and Henry as a man. Henry is the younger of the two. To see how their lives played out in parallel. And then, of course, when I was writing the book, I discovered exactly why Shakespeare had done what he'd done, because it's very difficult to keep the momentum and the arc of the story going once Richard has gone, once this melodramatic figure has gone, and Henry's reign becomes this series of challenges and revolts and difficulties, and his health collapses. It's very hard to avoid the story becoming a sort of dying fall. That took a lot of work in the attempt to, I hope, let the narrative play itself out.

Do you ever find you have to fight off the emotional influence of Shakespeare's Henriade? This is a problem for me when I read the history. The Shakespearean influence is too vivid for me, and it's often stronger even though I know, well, Falstaff and Hal dissolute as a youth, that's probably quite made up. Do you have that issue?

I do. And I wanted to acknowledge it, to nod to it by using— what I've done in the book is use phrases from the plays Richard II and Henry IV, 1 and 2, as my chapter titles. Not necessarily phrases that are from the right bit of those plays, but I just wanted to acknowledge that, of course, the plays are there and Shakespeare's language is there. We can't pretend it isn't. But all I could do was acknowledge it, bow to it, and then try to steep myself in the 14th and 15th century sources, write my version, and then have the great joy of going back to the plays and seeing seeing what I'd done in the light of revisiting those texts. It's a constant dialogue. Whoever it was, I should know, who said, "You don't finish a book, you stop." That's how I feel. It's a conversation that I'm lucky to be a tiny part of.

Cinematically, do you like The Hollow Crown, or are there other adaptations that make you happy and not too upset?

I love The Hollow Crown, and one of the reasons I love it is the depth and range of the casting, which must, I'm imagining, be a challenge on the stage when you've got to get people to commit to a certain number of months. And what if the part is only tiny? One of the things, of course, that television has the luxury of doing is importing all sorts of brilliant people, even if it is only one scene. So, I love the richness of that production in terms of its range, and then in terms of letting the plays breathe outside that extraordinary scene when Richard comes back from Ireland and you're on a beach. There are other productions I have loved. I loved David Tennant's portrayal of Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company. I've just seen Jonathan Bailey at The Bridge. Completely different, equally fascinating. But I think I've realized in the process of writing this book and then talking about writing it that perhaps I'm not a very good theatergoer because I love reading the plays on the page.

I also prefer that.

Interesting. Why do you prefer it?

I feel I can create my own version in my mind, and I have difficulty keeping track of everything as it's spoken so quickly.

I feel exactly the same. And there's something about the words in the space of the page that allows the imagination to play and allows the resonances to sound. And I think that's one of the reasons I love Richard II among all the plays, because the language is so beautiful, and the resonances within and between the lines is something that I go backwards and forwards with, and it's my own private world. And I realize that makes me a very bad theatergoer, But it's one of the reasons that play means quite so much to me.

Do you know the Orson Welles movie Chimes at Midnight?

Do you know, that's another shameful admission. Of course I know about it, but I have not seen it.

So that is fantastic. It's completely unfaithful both to history and to Shakespeare, but it's the movie that makes Shakespeare work visually far more than any other. I think it's quite brilliant.

I will add that to my list. And I think that's a key point too, isn't it, that the medium is key. So if it's television, do what works on television. If it's film, do what works on film and do what can uniquely be done in that medium. And that's where new insight comes. And don't be afraid to grab a text by the scruff of the neck and make it something new.

When you think of your work and also just your consumption of history and also of Shakespeare, what is it you think you're maximizing? How do you think about your own endeavor?

What an interesting question. I think I'm preoccupied by the human dimension And that's why the focus of my interest goes in two directions. One is psychological, that I am always trying to work out what makes my protagonists tick from moment to moment, even though I'm trying to work across 500 or 600 years. That's what I love is trying to get inside their minds and see through their eyes. But the other thing I'm preoccupied with is the functioning of power. And I think that's why I love the Middle Ages because I've always felt in looking at modern history that I get bamboozled by structures, by the institutions through which power is expressed and mediated. And what I find fascinating about the Middle Ages in England is that you are looking at a very sophisticated structure of power, but the, it's present in bare bones because we don't have the great apparatus of state, and therefore individual individual choices and individual psychology become extremely exposed. And so it's that point where skeletal structures of power are being inhabited by particular individuals and how that plays out. I think that's where my interest lies, and therefore that's where I'm hoping to contribute.

If in some counterfactual universe you're studying some other period of history with that same interest, what and where would it be?

Well, I'm already trying to cover 500 years, so that's fascinating. I think I would have to go back, not forward.

I would probably Rome, ancient Greece, African kingdoms?

Yes, I'm thinking Greece, ancient Greece. But of course, that's really an extension. It's a chronological extension backwards of— I'm not leaping to somewhere completely different because the classical world is at the root of, in many ways, of medieval culture. But I think I would leap back there and I would much more happily leap back there then I would leap forward, if you'll allow me that.

Sure. Why did you leave academia?

The immediate cause was that I was— was geography. That I was having my son and I was teaching in Cambridge and his father, my ex-husband, was teaching in Liverpool and we lived in London. And that was a geographical triangle that was going to be quite difficult to navigate. With a baby. But that's too easy an answer for me to give you.

You haven't gone back, right?

I haven't gone back. It's too easy an answer for me to give you because there were deeper reasons. I never, I had never intended to be an academic. I always wanted to be a historian and I didn't really know how that was going to be possible. And I loved studying history as an undergraduate. I didn't intend to do a PhD, but at the last minute I thought, I'm not ready to stop. So I did a PhD and then applied for a research fellowship because I hadn't quite finished the PhD, was extraordinarily lucky to get one. And then a teaching job came up in my first year that I was convinced I had no chance of getting, and so merrily applied for it for experience and got it. And then spent an extremely happy 8 years teaching and being a director of studies and a tutor and all sorts of things at Sidney Sussex, my college in Cambridge. And I loved so many things about it, but I wasn't writing in the way that I wanted to write. I'm a very slow writer and an immersive writer, and I was finding it very difficult to spin all the other plates Many people do it brilliantly, but I was finding it difficult to spin all those plates. And also, I wanted to write a different kind of history rather than writing the very analytical academic kind of history that I had been writing. I wanted to write narrative history that was focused on individuals. It's not that that's impossible inside academia, Many people do it brilliantly, but I was finding it difficult with the weight of my history in the institution I was teaching in. I was teaching in the same place that I'd been a student. I was teaching with colleagues, many of whom had taught me, who I admire immensely, but I was feeling that sense of still being inside that structure and it was my own inability to either in practical terms or psychologically break out of it unless I actually broke out of it. And I was very lucky to get a book deal for my first book aimed at a more general audience almost exactly the same time my son was born. So I took a leap and I've been lucky to be able to keep going since.

What's your most unusual successful work habit?

I'm not sure I have any successful work habits.

You've written how many books? 8 books?

But I despair—

This book has great reviews. It's fantastic. It's still selling.

I think I've had to learn to live with myself, if that counts as a work habit. I have always thought that I should grow out of having essay crises. And I never have, even if they're now essay crises that spread over 5 years for any individual book. I've had to accept that that's how I work. And try as I might, I can't find a way round it. I'm not sure that's a successful work habit, but at least it's a form of self-acceptance.

What is it you find so interesting in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot? Because that's also a chronological history, right? Told in sequence. And he, I think himself, did not know what was going to happen.

I think you probably put your finger on exactly why I love it. I read it when I was very young and then reread it a whole number of times as I was growing up. And it's on the shelf by my bed almost as a talisman. And I keep meaning to go back to it and I haven't yet. And I feel very poorly read because I haven't read any other Asimov. You're an Asimov fan, right? Is that right?

I think it's high variance. I like much of Foundation trilogy. Caves of Steel is pretty good. There's about a dozen truly brilliant short stories. A lot of it I find unreadable. I'm not a fan fan, but I appreciate the best of it, I would say.

And would you say I, Robot is among the best of it, given that I haven't read any of the rest?

I think there are 4 or 5 stories in the sequence that are amazing. A number of the others quite seem flat to me. In the aggregate, it's one of the most important books and most influential books of its century. As we're seeing now in 2025.

Aren't we?

With AI. Yeah.

Aren't we? And I think what grabbed me when I was younger was a combination of that conceptual grasp. I mean, the three laws of robotics are so astoundingly thought through and precise. And I think when I was very young, that conceptual framework grabbed me, and then the fact that there's a woman at the heart of it, which isn't always the case in sci-fi. And watching that progression through the stories with that sense that nothing was inevitable, but one thing was leading to the next. I think you might have put your finger on exactly why I love that book and how it links to the work I do now.

And the stories remain unfinished. There's various attempts ex post to add on to the canon, but the story just keeps on going. Like English history, right?

Like all of history. Like all of history. I think these are such interesting times to be thinking about the past in. Not very comfortable times, but if ever we needed a reminder that people in the past had no idea what was coming next, we're getting it now. And it produces interesting perspectives even on much more recent parts of the past. I recently sat down with my son, who's 23 now, to watch Being John Malkovich, which I hadn't seen since it came out. And I realized when I went to look exactly when it came out that it came out in the same year as The Matrix. And I hadn't clocked that at the time. But in retrospect, watching Being John Malkovich again now, it seems to me to be far more prescient about the world we live in now than The Matrix is. That sense of, well, you can be somebody else for 15 minutes through a portal, and it'll be addictive, and you're going to— And then I was very struck that actually the thing that seemed most far-fetched to my 23-year-old son was that there should be a whole company, the company that John Cusack gets a job in, that just does paper filing. He was, "Paper filing? What's that?" And I had to tell him that my first job, the first job I ever had in 1984, my Saturday job was in an office services office. We didn't just do filing, but we did telephones, fax, telex, typing, photocopying for people who didn't have an office themselves. So, you know, the perspective on the past, the present, and the future is a bit mind-boggling.

Very last question. What is it you will do next?

I have already written a short book about Elizabeth I, but I'm going to write a full— I'm going to attempt to write a full-length biography. She's been my historical lodestar since I first picked up a history book when I was about 5. The first book I ever picked up was a children's book about her. She's such an enigma because she wore masks all the time. You could be in the room with her and not know what she was thinking. So she's endlessly fascinating. And she also said, "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" So it seems there's a bridge there waiting to be crossed. I'm very far from the first person, and I won't be the last to try to make sense of her. But I'm really looking forward to it and more than a bit intimidated, but that feels like a good place to start from.

All of Helen's books are great. The very latest, The Eagle and the Heart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV. I recommend it highly. Helen Castor, thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.