The Eagle And The Hart

   For god’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.  Thus begins a famous soliloquy from William Shakespeare’s Richard the second, my personal favorite of all his plays.  It tells the story of the overthrow and murder of king Richard the second, and the rise of his cousin to become the new Henry the fourth. Helen castor’s book the eagle and the Hart is a double biography of both these figures.

    While Shakespeare’s play follows the final falling out between the two, this book details the eventful lives they lived leading up to that moment.  Richard, the grandchild of the aged Edward the third, became king while still a child as his father Edward, the black prince, had died soon after his birth. Child kings are always dangerous for a realm. Factions at court tears themselves apart trying to control a figurehead who can never really develop their own leadership style, instead being fed flattery and insincere servility. It isn’t a surprise that Richard came to believe in his own semi divine superiority, especially after the dramatic events of 1381 in which he had, at the age of 14 personally had to confront the leaders of the peasant’s revolt which had nearly overrun London.  Perhaps learning the wrong lesson from that episode, once the immediate crisis was over, he and his advisors broke all the promises they made to the peasant’s representatives, and arrested and executed their leaders. Doing that to the rabble was one thing, doing it to the leading nobles in the country decades later cost him both his throne and his life.   

   In contrast to Richard’s cloistered life, henry’s  was a model of late  medieval chivalry.  He won praise as a tournament champion and participant in the Baltic crusades, and established himself as one of the most respected nobles in the country, even apart from his father.

     For much of the book, both Richard and Henry live under the Shadow of henry’s  father, Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt. As a son of Edward the third, Gaunt was both the richest man in the kingdom, as well as the least popular.  Unlike his older brother Edward the black prince, gaunt was too young to participate in the great victories of Crecy and Poitiers that his father won over the French. Instead, after the death of his father and brother, as the leading man in the kingdom he took the blame from the public as the French gradually won back almost all the territories they had lost in the previous decades. He made things worse for himself by spending English money and lives vainly attempting to win himself a crown in Spain. It was during one of these fruitless campaigns that his son henry joined a revolt against Richard, marching on the capital as a junior member of a group of Noblemen who succeeded in arresting and executing several of Richard’s closest friends and advisors.   

When Gaunt returned to England, he attempted to heal the breech between the two, and he succeeded, for a time. Richard however never really forgave any of the rebellious nobles, and gradually targeted each one in turn for retribution. It is at this point that castor’s portrait of Richard shifts from being an  incompetent and arrogant king, to a truly murderous and  terrifying tyrant.  Henry for a time is protected by the influence of his father, and the fact of his own close relation to the childless king, but when he is exiled and then disinherited by Richard after the death of gaunt, it’s hard not to side with him when he decides to return leading an army, eventually crowning himself henry the fourth.

   While Shakespeare often takes liberties with historical reality, one of his most famous creations, the drunken, irresponsible prince Hal from Henry the fourth part one is the complete opposite of the true life of the future Henry the fifth.  In the play, Hal spends his days drinking and whoring with the lowlifes in the taverns of East cheap, most famously with the notorious Falstaff. In fact, henry was an incredibly impressive and diligent warrior from a young age, leading his father’s armies Against the Welsh while still in his mid teens.

     One of the most fascinating sections of this book details the aftermath of an injury  the prince sustained while besieging an enemy castle.  A stray crossbow bolt hit him square in the face, embedding in his cheekbone.  Months of agony followed, requiring his doctors to develop a new surgical tool, which instead of pulling out the arrow head, which could cause further trauma,  would expand inside the bolt head to be drawn out gradually. Henry would make sure to only ever be depicted showing the unscarred side of his face going forward.

     Richard the second begins an 8 play cycle that examines the breakdown in authority which leads to the wars of the roses, a theme which castor essentially agrees with.  Despite his many faults, Richard was the legitimate, anointed king. Henry’s Lancastrian descendants and their Yorkist rivals were constantly shadowed by a sense of illegitimacy, and she asserts that henry himself was deeply troubled by this. One area in which she improves upon Shakespeare is in her depiction of henry the fourth, who in the plays fades somewhat into the background of two more charismatic figures- his cousin Richard and his son henry. In fact henry the fourth is an incredibly interesting figure in his own right. If you love Shakespeare’s plays as i do, or even if you don’t and just want to understand a fascinating moment in English history,  i highly recommend this book.