Helen Castor on Richard II

0:00We have a different kind of programme today, one about an English king whose reputation has in part been shaped by William Shakespeare. Not Richard III, as you might expect, but Richard II, born in 1367, crowned as a boy king ten years later and deposed in 1399. I feel the man who replaced him, Henry IV, may also have a part to play in today's discussion. So, two lives for the price of one. But first, to my guest, eminent historian and broadcaster Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves, Joan of Arc and most recently The Eagle and the Heart. Helen, tell us about Richard and why we're discussing him today.

0:43Well, Richard's life was not great in the sense of admirable or successful, but he is a fascinating character and his life was certainly consequential. He was the second king after the conquest to be deposed. So he's a deposed king succeeded by a usurper. Do you like him? I'm fond of him, which is a different thing. I don't think I like him. I don't think I would have liked him had I had to spend any time in his company. But I feel for him in the sense that I think he had no understanding whatsoever quite how he found himself in the terrible situation that came to pass in 1399. You've written about both these kings, Richard and Henry, and as our nominator, obviously, you have the advantage over us, certainly over me, but I'm anxious to learn.

1:37I've taken what I think I know almost entirely from Shakespeare's Richard and Shakespeare's Henry. So, quick question, what do you think of the plays? Are they history? I absolutely love the plays. And in fact, Richard II is my favourite of Shakespeare's plays. It contains some of the most extraordinary poetry ever written. Shakespeare compresses an awful lot. He has to. The theatre is small. He can't get the whole of the rain onto the stage. But in terms of politically, constitutionally and psychologically what happened to Richard, the plays have an awful lot to teach us. And so from Shakespeare to you, Helen, you of all people know how good dramatic writing can help shape history's estimation of great men and women.

2:30Do you ever feel nervous lest you get the slant wrong and do somebody some permanent damage? Always, always. I mean, it's a little easier for me than it is for more modern historians because my protagonists are long dead. But I feel an absolute responsibility to them. And of course, in the Middle Ages, we're dealing with fragments of evidence. We don't have diaries. We don't have private letters. We don't have memoirs. But I see my job as joining the dots to make as coherent a picture of a three-dimensional human being as I possibly can, because the one thing we know for certain is that these were living, breathing, three-dimensional human beings, and if we end up with a cardboard cutout, we know we've gone wrong somewhere.

3:17From the moment of Richard's earliest memories, his life was set apart, you write, his presence in the world shaped by his God-given destiny. What kind of a thing to be mulling over in your head as a boy while the other boys play marbles? Tell us about this young man, about his parents. How was he brought up? Richard was the grandson of Edward III, one of the greatest kings England ever had. Edward III's eldest son was the Black Prince, the hero of Crecy and Poitiers. And it was the Black Prince who was Richard's father. But the Black Prince never became Edward IV. And from the age of three, Richard was brought up knowing that he was his grandfather's only legitimate heir.

4:07All the hopes of England rested on his shoulders. And sure enough, he was only 10 when his grandfather finally died. From that point on, he was God's anointed. So he had, from the point of his earliest memories, been wrapped in a very expensive, gilded form of cotton wool and told that he was the shining centre of the English political universe. And that was a message he deeply internalised. Wondering how this young boy did as king, I decided to have a look at 1066 and all that. Let me read this. Richard II tried first being a good king and then a bad king without enjoying either very much. Then, being told he was unbalanced, he got off the throne whereupon his cousin Lancaster, spelt Bolingbroke, quickly mounted the throne and said he was Henry IV Part I.

5:06Future generations, Richard said, must learn what it is to offend the royal majesty, for he is a child of death who offends the king. Is that Shakespeare's Richard? That quotation that you just read, for he is a child of death that offends the king, is Richard himself writing towards the very end of his reign, not that he knew it was the very end of his reign. We know that he wrote that. He wrote that to the Duke of Bavaria in a letter explaining how he had struck down several of his most powerful nobles who had dared, he believed, to usurp his power. His fundamental misunderstanding was to see the great men of the realm, the great nobles of the realm, not as his greatest supporters, but instead as a threat, as a challenge, as men who were out to usurp his position.

6:02Take a listen to this. Here's Richard, Shakespeare's Richard, played here by John Hurt, at a point, I think, when he's returning from Ireland to discover that his position is under threat.

6:17We are amazed, and thus long have we stood to watch the fearful bending of thy knee, because we thought ourself thy lawful king. And if we be, how dare thy joints forget to pay their awful duty to our presence. If we be not, show us the hand of God that hath dismissed us from our stewardship. For well we know no hand of blood and bone can gripe the sacred handle of our sceptre, unless he do profane, steal, or usurp. And though you think that all, as you have done, have torn their souls by turning them from us, and we are barren and bereft of friends, yet know my master, God Omnipotent, is mustering in his clouds on our behalf armies of pestilence.

7:10and they shall strike your children, yet unborn and unbegot, that lift your vassal hands against my head and threat the glory of my precious crown. Tell Bolingbroke, for yon methinks he stands, that every stride he makes upon my land is dangerous treason. That part, I should add, has been played by pretty much everyone, from Sir Ian McKellen to Fiona Shaw, previous guests on this show, And joining us now is Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies from Oxford University, and last heard here, talking about Marlowe. Welcome back, Emma. As I understand it, Richard and his cousin Henry, or Bolingbroke, generated not one but three of Shakespeare's plays.

7:57That's extraordinary, isn't it? Yes, Shakespeare's absolutely in serial mode, which is one of the commercial opportunities, I suppose. and history is a good way into that because it's an ongoing narrative. Shakespeare is interested firstly in the story of Richard which ends with Richard's death and then moving to the reign of Henry IV saying how peace has not come to the kingdom. The play starts late in Richard's reign and much of the early part involves a row between Henry and Mowbray and Richard says they should resolve their differences with a duel and then the king suddenly changes his mind.

8:37Is that right? That's absolutely right. And it's a very, for modern audiences, often a very confused start. And we don't completely know whether early audiences would have understood the point of contention, which is actually about the death of Richard's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. Henry has accused Mowbray of being responsible. It turns out Mowbray has actually been responsible for it, but at the king's command. Richard doesn't want this story to come out, so he first of all says, you've got to fight each other, but then realising he might well end up with one winner and one loser, he'll have got rid of one of them, but the other will be more powerful.

9:13He decides to banish them both. Double U-tone, really. Really, they show Richard, I think, to be quite a weak ruler. So Richard is playing a difficult game, I think, choreographing this struggle between his nobles. He puts off the duel, we come back to have the duel again, but then he puts it off finally and banishes the two participants. Here from your book, Helen, is an account of the end of that planned duel between Mowbray and Henry, which I'm going to read. After a second, silence became noise. All was confusion. Bewildered faces in the stands. The baffled crowd straining for a view. The constable and marshal, every certainty gone.

9:56Turning to the king for new instruction. Why does this moment matter so much as you seem to think here, Helen? So the king simply declaring that two of his most powerful nobles should be exiled from the realm with no legal process is itself an extraordinary piece of overreach. He promises them both that they will be allowed to inherit any lands that might fall to them when they are in exile and we know that Henry Bolingbroke's father is not well at this point, the most powerful nobleman in the country. Sure enough, a few months later, Gaunt dies and Richard simply goes back on his word and takes the Duchy of Lancaster into his own hand.

10:37And that is what precipitates Henry Bolingbroke coming back from exile to claim his rightful inheritance. And there's much talk of this in the play, isn't there, Emma? York has an amazing speech saying to Richard, you are only king by succession. What are you doing interfering with rights of inheritance? That is the spark that sets the plot of the play off. You're listening to The Great Life of Richard II, with occasional appearances by his successor and usurper, Henry IV, proposed by Helen Castor. And also here we have Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Emma Smith. And in one interview, Helen, I read this from last year, you said you thought the story of these men, Richard and Henry, had lessons that still apply today.

11:26What do you mean? Who are you talking about? Where's the resonance? Well, I think the deep political narratives of this play are set in motion by individuals. And that interplay between constitutional structure and individuals, if we look around the world today, we see those issues in play. We're looking at Washington. We're looking at Washington and other places, but particularly at Washington at the moment. But all regimes claim sovereignty from somewhere. And the question of what do you do when a ruler starts breaking the rules? What do you do? Can the Constitution hold firm and provide some sort of mechanism for reining them in?

12:14Or are other people themselves, like Bolingbroke, going to have to go outside constitutional structures in the attempt to save the Constitution? These are really significant, frightening questions, I think, because constitutions are not self-evidently set in stone forever. They develop, they evolve and sometimes they break. Were there any resonances, do you think, from that time through to the Elizabethan age, which Shakespeare would have been aware of? Most definitely. I think the whole popularity of plays on English historical themes is really highly political. Elizabeth has no heir, and so the 1590s are a period where all political debate about the future succession has to be done in fictionalised or otherwise sort of cryptic ways, and the theatre is a good place to do that.

13:07Elizabeth is said to have said, I am Richard II. What did she mean? Yes, the story goes, and it does seem to be a reliable report that she was in the Tower looking through the archives in the Tower with the archivist there and they came upon some documents from Richard's reign and she said, I am Richard II, no you're not that. And I think Elizabeth could see all these parallels. Of course she could. Richard had chosen at the age of 29 in 1396 to marry a six-year-old and a man who's very concerned with begetting an heir and becoming the father of sons. That's not really what you do. Who was the six-year-old?

13:48Isabella of France, the eldest daughter of the King of France as part of the eventual long-term truce that he signed in 1396 he wanted to marry the King of France's daughter and the oldest available one was six so that's who he went with It was sort of, I want to marry a very important French woman well, she's only six, sire, never mind Never mind, but I think actually it was both and for Richard Everyone else thought we need an heir, but Richard was using the lands and estates and the finances of the Principality of Wales and the Earldom of Chester and the Duchy of Cornwall, the estates that were usually given to the heir to the throne.

14:31He was using them all very actively to use against his nobles and not terribly interested in women. We have to say Richard II probably. So I think for all sorts of reasons, having a very royal six-year-old suited him very well. Two aspects of the historical Richard or the Richard who had come through the Chronicles were relevant. One was that he had no children like Elizabeth. And the other, that part of his political position and the threats to that position seemed to have been created by what were called flatterers. You know, courtiers, people giving bad advice to the monarch. There was a feeling that maybe Elizabeth was over-influenced by particular charismatic people.

15:15the Earl of Essex is an obvious case. And so I think Richard's story comes to be politicised in lots of ways in Elizabethan England. Can I ask about Richard's trip to Ireland? Is this part of his list of kingly failings, Helen? Ireland has been, in theory, part of the dominions of the English crown since the 12th and early 13th century when Anglo-Norman lords went in to conquer, to colonise and so on. But a king of England hadn't been there for nearly two centuries since King John. And the main focus for English kings had been France. And that, of course, is where Richard's father and grandfather had won great victories.

15:55Richard isn't very keen on trying to live up to that, to compete with that. And he sees Ireland as an opportunity to perform his majesty in this disordered land and get all his subjects of Ireland, both the English of Ireland and what he calls the Wild Irish, the Gaelic Irish, to kneel before him. He's been there once before in the early 1390s, 1394 to 95, and it's gone rather well, largely because the Irish saw him coming and realised that if they prostrated themselves at his feet, he'd enjoy it and then go away again and they could get on with what they wanted to do. So in 1399, I think it's a sign of Richard's misjudgment.

16:37He thinks he's finally safe. Gaunt is dead. Bolingbroke is exiled. He's taken Bolingbroke's inheritance. He's killed the Earl of Arundel who stood up to him before. He feels he's safe so he can go back to Ireland and enjoy his majesty there again. What he's built is a house of cards and he's left it behind for Bolingbroke to blow down. You mentioned the comparative success of the first visit to Ireland, and here, from Richard's great expeditions to Ireland on Radio 4, is a quick account of what happened on that first trip. Richard ringed the Wicklow and Wexford Mountains with heavily armed positions.

17:15He ravaged the foothills to deny supplies to King Art McMurrow of Leinster, and completed his ring of steel by closely patrolling the coastline with his mighty armoured ships. Then, when the trees shed their leaves and it became difficult for King Art's men to hide themselves in the woods, Richard sent in raiding parties of mounted longbow archers. On this expedition, his tactics appeared to work. Warlords from all over Ireland came to submit in person to Richard. Each man removed his hat, girdle and weapons and, on his knees, put his hands, palms joined, between those of the king. The oath was taken in Irish and then translated for the benefit of the royal entourage into English.

17:58Amongst the 80 chieftains who submitted was the mighty King Niall Moore O 'Neill of Tyrone. But Emma, as Helen says, it didn't work in the end, did it? It doesn't. And listening to that from the Elizabethan point of view, from the point of view of Shakespeare's Richard II in the early 1590s, the O 'Neill we'd be thinking of is Hugh O 'Neill. The Nine Years' War, that is another flashpoint in the long-troubled relationship between England and Ireland, would have made that also a topicality for Shakespeare's first audiences, how the monarch engages with the Irish problem. And messes it up. Inevitably.

18:39Yes. I have a feeling, Helen, that of the two men, you probably prefer Henry. So let's talk a little bit more now about him. How did he take over and was he a better king? He was much, much, much better equipped to be king than Richard. Really you find yourself in a situation, or England found itself in a situation, where Richard had none of the qualities that you would look for but had the right to rule. Henry had all the qualities you would look for in a monarch but didn't have the right to rule and that was his fatal flaw. He became king in 1399 really because Richard had to go by that point.

19:22Richard had become a tyrant. He'd revealed himself as someone with whom none of his subjects could be safe. If he had simply taken for himself with no legal process, no legal right, the greatest noble inheritance in the country, then who else could feel they had any security left? So when Bolingbroke comes back and he comes back with one ship full of his little household with whom he'd gone off to exile in Paris, eventually lands at Ravensburg in Yorkshire. And what happens is that the people of England flock to his banner. First of all, people connected with the Duchy of Lancaster who didn't appreciate the fact that Richard had simply dispossessed their lord, the rightful Lancastrian heir.

20:11But beyond that, more and more and more people before Richard can even get himself home from Ireland. And that really is testament to how badly Richard had mishandled his rule. I'm interested in what you've just said, the suggestion. It wasn't so much Henry's act of usurpation as the fact that Richard had to go. And in 1399, Henry really is the only practical choice. He is a proven leader, a proven soldier. He's been wronged and he has a claim to the throne. The difficulty is that he doesn't have the claim. Let me just rewind a little bit here. The two men meeting at Flint Castle, Henry with an army and Richard unable to resist.

20:58Here from your own book, Helen, is what happened next and perhaps you'd like to read it. The cousins came face to face inside the fortress. Henry, fully armed but for his helmet, bowed low. Fair cousin of Lancaster, you are right welcome. My lord, Henry replied, I have come sooner than you sent for me, and I shall tell you why. It is commonly said among your people that for the last twenty or twenty-two years you have governed them very badly and far too harshly, with the result that they are most discontented. But if it please our Lord, I will help you to govern them better than they have been governed in the past.

21:40If it please you, fair cousin, it pleases us well. How much of that speech is true? I can ask you, as we haven't got Shakespeare here, too. How much of that speech is true and how much imagined? Well, it comes from an account written by an eyewitness. It doesn't mean that it wasn't elaborated or embroidered, but Cretan, who wrote this, was with them as they met each other. Emma, how often do they actually meet in the play? It's a good question. So Shakespeare has this Flint Castle scene. very interestingly Richard is above shining like the sun but he willingly steps down into the general stage level with Bolingbroke and symbolically that isn't the moment he loses the throne but symbolically it is and then the scene where Richard hands over in this great de-kinging, de-coronation ceremony interestingly one that was much in Winston Churchill's mind when he wrote the Instrument of Abdication in the 1930s, it was the only thing he could turn to.

22:50That scene that Richard scripts for himself doesn't have any source, I don't think, if that's right. Did they meet at that point? They do meet, but in private in the Tower, not in Parliament, because in Parliament it is declared that Richard has willingly and cheerfully handed over the Crown and abdicated because a deposition was such a frightening and difficult thing, that they followed the example of the deposition of Edward II in 1327, which is a sort of, we are deposing you, but could you abdicate first just to make it a bit easier for us and to make sure? Of course, Richard hadn't abdicated cheerfully or willingly.

23:29What had happened was that in the Tower he had said, no, he would like to know to whom he should resign his crown, given that God had given it to him and that he demanded to see his cousin. so duly the next day Henry and the Archbishop of Canterbury have to go along to the Tower and it is made very clear to Richard that how because he has no alternative and to whom to Bolingbroke then Henry can step into Parliament with the symbolically empty throne and claim it as his own but significantly with a quite a sort of vague and woolly compendium of reasons why it should be him after Richard's abdication and deposition has already been announced.

24:12Here's the Shakespeare, here's Richard, once more, meeting Henry, played here by David Suchet. I thought you had been willing to resign. My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine. You may my glories and my state depose, but not my griefs. Still am I king of those. Part of your cares you give me with your crown. Your cares set up. Do not pluck my cares down. A miserable and broken Richard towards the end of the play. Do you think John Hurt is a good Richard? I think he is a rather distant Richard, and that may be exactly right. It's quite a mannered style, isn't it, for us now? But there is something mannered about Richard as a king, and clearly what Richard is saying in all his speeches is, I am not as you are.

25:07The distance from you is expressed through this extraordinary diction and sense of formality and hauteur. But that's not necessarily the kind of performance that we expect to see now. David Tennant played him too. Did either of you see that? I did see that one and loved it. There was a kind of impish humour performing the part of God's anointed. I loved that performance. I must say, did you see it, Matthew? I didn't, no. Yeah, there's an element of camp in it, I think. I mean, there is often an element of camp about this extraordinary poetry. And I think Tennant really captured that. He had lovely, lovely long auburn hair.

25:50I seem to remember that wig being auctioned or something for some enormous price. Did either of you see Fiona Shaw in the role? I wish I had. I so wish I had. I've only seen there was a television version of it. And the most wonderful thing about Fiona Shaw, who played Richard not at all as if Richard were a woman, but as a very emotional figure, who in the scene I most remember is the scene of the abdication come deposition where both cousins are weeping. It comes back to what Helen was saying, that really Henry's got to do this. He's a little bit, in a way, more like Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, not completely committed to the overthrow of the ruler, but sort of feels it's got to be done and is willing almost to sacrifice themselves to do it.

26:36And certainly that came across, they really were cousins. One review of it calls it a wrecked love affair. And I don't think that's about a kind of sexual charge, but a really strong emotional charge between them. Final question to you, Helen Castor. what would Richard, do you think, have thought of the play? I think he would have loved the fact that he has all the best lines and really when he's off stage you're just looking for him to come back. I was very struck when Emma was talking about the scene in which he appears on high, shining like the sun. It always reminds me of Juliet, but light through yonder window breaks.

27:13He's so charismatic. I think he would have wanted to hire Shakespeare as his own script writer. My thanks. To Helen Castor, author of The Eagle and the Heart, and to you also, Emma Smith, Shakespeare expert and also our expert on The Great Life of Christopher Marlowe, which you can find on BBC Sounds. Thank you for listening.