An Interview with Helen Castor
The tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV lies in the profound clash between two kings whose lives were marked by ambition, betrayal, and the relentless struggle for power. Richard II, a monarch obsessed with divine authority, saw his reign unravel due to political missteps and his alienation of key nobles. In contrast, Henry IV, the man who overthrew Richard, grappled with the burden of legitimacy and rebellion as he ascended to the throne.
Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart vividly explores this dramatic saga, revealing how their intertwined fates reshaped England’s monarchy and left a lasting legacy of turmoil and transformation.
Rough Transcript of Episode 268: Interview with Helen Castor: Exploring the Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV
Heather: Today, this is a very special video. This is an interview with Helen Castor.
Helen Castor is an acclaimed medieval and Tudor historian. Her first book, Blood & Roses: The Paston Family and the Wars of the Roses, was long-listed for what is now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and won the English Association’s Beatrice White Prize. Her next two books, She-Wolves, The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, and Joan of Arc: A History, were both on numerous Best Books of the Year lists and made into documentaries for BBC television. And Joan of Arc was long listed for the Pen America Jacqueline Bogard Weld Award for Biography. She has one son and lives in London.
On a personal level, I was delighted to interview Helen Castor. I’ve been watching her documentaries and reading her books for 15 years and what a thrill it was to get to speak with her about her new book which is about the relationship between Henry IV and Richard II. It’s a psychological profile of these two men.
So in this interview we talk about how these events from the late 14th century impact the Tudors. We’re going to look at it from a Tudor perspective, and we’re also going to talk about why people who are 16th century enthusiasts I would also enjoy learning more about this period.
If this is new to you, she’ll introduce the topic. Her new book is called The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV. And I’ve read it. It’s so good. Highly recommend it. So let’s get right into it with Helen Castor.
Heather: This new book, so we are talking on a Tudor history podcast and YouTube channel. This new book is, a good hundred, 120 some years before that period. So for a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, watching this interview, they might not be as familiar with the story of Henry IV and Richard II, they might’ve come across it through Shakespeare but not know the details.
So before we get, I think there’s a wonderful discussion to be had around the intersection of. Tudor memory and the way they saw history and propaganda. But before we get in, that’s what my questions center around, but before we get into that, I would love if you could just give us a background for people who are coming to this story fresh.
Helen: Of course, and I have to say I have a very dear friend here. With whom I’ve talked virtually every week while I was writing the book, and I found that virtually every week I’ve had to say, this Richard II, is not Richard the Lionheart, and he’s not the king in the car park, he’s the one in between, and precisely as you say, the one that you might know best from Shakespeare, not Richard III, the king in the car park with the very dramatic villainous portrayal by Shakespeare, but instead the subject of that immensely lyrical and poetic play, the one where we might know that Richard says, for God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings and so on. And he was king from 1377 to 1399. And in 1399, as we see in Shakespeare’s play, he was overthrown.
And deposed by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, who took the throne to become Henry IV. And of course, he has his own two plays that Shakespeare wrote later on. But what we need to know about these two men is that they were first cousins, almost exactly the same age. Henry was just three months younger than Richard.
And that when Richard came to the throne in 1377. They were both just 10 years old. What had happened was that the throne of England had skipped a generation after the reign of Edward III, who was one of the greatest kings ever to rule England and who had been on the throne. He’d worn the crown for 50 years, during which England had been at war with France, the early stages of what we know as the hundred years war, of course, They didn’t know that.
They weren’t saying, lads, it’s halftime, let’s let’s have a break. But this was an ongoing war with France and by the 1360s and 1370s, it was not going well for England after all the triumphs of the 1340s and 1350s, the Battle of Précy, the Battle of Poitiers and so on. It was a very difficult time for England.
Having a 10 year old boy as your king is not ideal, but the central problem that emerged as Richard got older was that it became clear that while he was fixated on the rights of his crown, what he ought to be able to do and command, he had no real understanding of what his responsibilities towards his people were.
And so that’s the story that plays out in. Shakespeare’s tells the very end of it. Shakespeare’s play begins in 1398. So it’s the last two years, if that, of the reign. And what I wanted to do was to tell the whole story and also to tell the story of both men, because Shakespeare’s portrait of Richard II is fascinating and compelling, but Bolingbroke really appears only as his nemesis.
And then in the Henry IV plays, Henry IV seems like a different person from Bolingbroke. And he’s in the background with Hal and Falstaff and Hotspur in the front. So I wanted to do two things, tell the whole story and put Henry beside Richard and let them both be there in the spotlight.
Heather: Yeah, it’s really a psychological portrayal.
You go back and forth in the story between opening with Richard and how he was raised and then looking at Henry and how he was raised. And Richard and Henry were raised quite differently. And when you look at Richard’s story, it’s hard to not feel sorry for him. And I know he’s portrayed almost like a tragic character in that way.
He was raised thinking he was so special and, but never given any of the, schooling around responsibility. Can you explain just a little bit about the way that he, the way he was raised?
Helen: Yes, it’s a fascinating subject and I’m having to read a lot into silences as often happens in the medieval records, because we can’t get behind those closed doors of the households that they grew up in very easily at all, but as you say, I’m trying to put together a psychological picture and so I’m trying to use the scraps of information we have.
to help us explain and understand the men they became. And in, in both cases, they were brought up within what we would call complex blended families. In Richard’s case, his parents had married relatively late in life, in their thirties, which for an heir to the throne, his father was the black prince, the eldest son of Edward the third.
For an heir to the throne to not marry until he was 31 was a An extraordinary thing, but it was Richard’s mother who’d been married before. She was an English noblewoman, the Black Prince’s first cousin once removed. Legendarily beautiful. and had been rather indulged by her cousin King Edward in terms of being able to pick and choose her previous husbands.
So she already had four children by her second or first marriage, depending on how we want to view her cot checkered marital history before then. She had two sons and two daughters. She then had two sons with the Black Prince, the older of whom, little Edward, died when he was just five, leaving littlest Richard.
The baby of the family to be babied many times over, if that makes sense, because by the time he was four, it was clear that he was the unique heir to the throne. He was the black prince’s only legitimate child and the black prince himself was already ill by this stage in his late thirties. King Edward III in his fifties going into his sixties, also ill.
So England’s future depended on the shoulders of this little boy who was therefore cocooned within this magnificent household, protected, as you say, told he was special because he was special. He was going to be God’s anointed. But if you then think about pushing the little boy in that situation into, for instance, learning to fight.
Which is one of the key responsibilities of a medieval king, to defend your realm in battle. First of all, you’re worried about his safety, and it was dangerous. A couple of heirs to noble houses during this story get killed in training for the joust. But also, and especially once he becomes king at ten, The sense we get is that fighting was not something that Richard wanted to do.
And if you think about trying to make a ten year old king do his homework that he doesn’t want to do, how far are you going to be able to push that? He is the king. He can’t rule, but you don’t want him 10 years further down the line to have a extraordinary hatred for you because you were the one that shoved him onto a horse and made him wear armor.
Whereas Henry, who was the son of John of Gaunt, Richard’s oldest and most powerful surviving uncle, once his father and grandfather had died. Henry was the heir to John of Gaunt’s Duchy of Lancaster. And he was right in the middle of a very complex, formidable, bustling family. He had two extremely formidable older sisters.
I think Philippa and Elizabeth would have knocked some rough edges of any little brother they might have had. You
Heather: say that they kept his ego in check, I think was the line you used.
Helen: That, that is my, now I can’t prove that with a vignette because obviously I would have put it into the book if I could.
Thank you very much. But looking at who they grew up to be. Philippa ended up as Queen of Portugal, the mother of the golden generation of Portuguese, NOx, and Elizabeth was a fiery character in her own right, took after Richard’s mother. In picking and choosing her own husbands I cannot see how their little brother could have got away with much.
But John of Gaunt also then went on to marry again, have another daughter, but also develop a relationship with Catherine Swinford, who was governess to his children, who also had two children of her own before she’d been widowed, but had four more with Gaunt. So this is a packed nursery and Henry is the only legitimate son and the heir to the dynasty, but he’s also having to earn his place.
And all of the Lancastrian children were able, intelligent, Yeah. Impressive people when they grew up. So I think we have to see this as a very constructive and positively challenging environment.
Heather: And it’s, I, when I was reading about how Richard was raised, it made me think a little bit and pulling the Tudor side into how Henry VIII was raised.
After the death of Arthur in this cocoon of safety. And I wonder then when you see each of them, how they grew up and their views on legitimacy and people rebelling against them and all that, do you think there are similarities?
Helen: I do. I think there are very instructive comparisons to be made. I think they turned out slightly differently.
Their characters were different, of course, but. In Richard, you see a profound narcissism developing, I think, and I’m trying to show in the book, in which he is really the center of his own reality. And I’m not sure Richard, and of course that’s difficult because a king, in a sense, should be the center of the reality that, he’s in charge and God has put him there to be in charge.
But it’s the responsibilities thing that. I don’t, I’m not sure Richard ever saw anybody else, with the possible exception of his favorite Robert De Vere, as fully three dimensional, fully real, with the same needs as he had. Now, in Henry’s case, in Richard’s case, one of the ways that played out is that I don’t think Richard ever liked to think about a future without himself at the center of it.
And one of the ways, that’s it, that’s what I was just going to go to. He married first time Anne of Bohemia, one of the same ages himself, but they didn’t have children. And when she died, he married a six year old girl who was the King of France. His daughter reinforced his sense of his own majesty and his own glory, but was very much putting off any sense of a future without him.
Whereas Henry VIII, of course, obsessively focused on his legacy and how his legacy was going to play out. And, of course, also obsessively focused on the woman he was spending his life with. I’m not sure Richard was interested in women in that way, but nevertheless that sense that the world must reflect back to Richard and Henry, the way they see themselves and must fulfill their wishes.
I think what you’re referring to, that sense of being brought up. In a cocoon where your own central importance to the world is reflected back to you all the time, and you’re not exposed to challenge and difficulty. I was just then thinking about Elizabeth I, whose life was nothing but challenge and difficulty until she became queen and then continued to be and the difference in psychology that produces is really striking.
Heather: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then. That, that also then makes me think about the way then pulling Henry the fourth into it, the way Henry the fourth came to the throne through conquest deposing, and then through how Henry the seventh came to the throne through conquest.
And I wonder because Henry the fourth, Shakespeare shows him kind of having these doubts and wonders or just demons that he has to wrestle with quite a bit. And Henry VII and Henry VIII were very concerned about their legitimacy and what kind of similar lessons do you think there, there are to pull from that?
Helen: I think there are very important similarities and also key differences which you’re making me think about as you ask that question. If we look at Henry IV first, one contrast I would want to make with Henry VII is that The manner in which Richard II was deposed is very significantly different from 1485.
That is, no one had ever questioned Richard II’s right to rule. He was the grandson of Edward III. He was the son of the Black Prince. The reason why Richard II is brought to the point of being deposed is that he has ruled so badly. His kingship has become a kind of tyranny in the last two years of his reign.
And what I mean by that is that where kings ought to be ruling according to the law and in the interests of their people, they ought to be defending their realm against external attack and against internal anarchy by providing justice and peace in their country. Richard’s paranoia about Other people trying to get his power away from him had meant that he had started to act like a tyrant, that is, he was ruling by arbitrary will rather than law, and he was attacking his own people.
And that means that Henry of Bolingbroke comes back to England because by this stage he’s been exiled and disinherited. These are one of the ways in which, in fact, the sort of trigger that brings everything crashing down for Richard is that by exiling and disinheriting Bolingbroke, he demonstrates that even the greatest nobleman in the country has no security under the law.
Richard thinks he can snap his fingers and take his property and future away from him. So Henry comes back to save England and Henry does not have to strike a blow in order to depose Richard. He comes back, raises his banner, England rallies to him and Richard’s throne is gone before Richard knows what’s happening.
So it’s not a crown won on a battlefield, but the comparison you’re pointing to is still apt in the sense that Henry has a claim to the throne because he’s Richard’s first cousin. But he doesn’t have the claim to the throne. There are other possible claimants. It’s not at all clear that he’s the rightful successor.
So he is a usurper. Even though everyone wants Richard gone, there are always going to be question marks about what Henry has done and whether he can simply command the realm. And I do think Henry had. deep troubles with his conscience, particularly later in his reign when he’d been struck down by chronic illness, which of course contemporaries were always prone to see as a punishment from God.
And reading Henry IV’s Will, for example, which he wrote at a moment of a very deep illness, very threatening illness, is a really moving thing because you can see these struggles with his conscience. But he survives and passes the throne on to his son, Henry V, so the dynasty becomes established. Your comparison with 1485 is so interesting because by then, of course, England has lived through 30 years off and on, devastating civil war, and there have been multiple depositions.
And so any question of where an unquestioned right to rule might lie by 1485 can only really be tested on the battlefield. And because Richard III is defeated and killed on the battlefield, Henry VII can claim God’s will has been done in battle. His claim has been tried in battle, and it has been found good, if you like.
And with Henry VII, whatever might have been happening in private. One sees many fewer signs of a struggle with his conscience and many more signs of an overwhelming concern that he is going to reinforce the security of his usurping dynasty by any means necessary. And that is going to include making sure that he’s seeing off pretenders, claimants, and making sure his control is exerted.
And of course, Henry VIII does this in much bloodier fashion over anyone whose bloodline might. one day allow them to put themselves forward as a claimant.
Heather: And it’s interesting just now when you said Henry IV wasn’t the claimant, and similarly Henry VII, there were other people that had claims too, so some other interesting parallels
Helen: as well.
Exactly. But the whole thing had been blown wide open by then because there were these two lines of claimants. And of course, that is where, Henry 1413, His father had been a usurper, but he can now claim to be the rightful heir of the previous king. In Henry VIII’s case, his strength lies both in being the rightful heir of the previous king, and the fact that of course his mother represents the other line so that he can claim to be the product of the red rose and the white.
And as I say, he backed that up over the years in spectacularly bloody fashion by killing virtually anyone else who had a a small bit of royal blood in their veins, Plantagenet blood in their veins, but whole family, the Courtney’s, yeah exactly, but it’s, I do think those comparisons are fascinating and sorry, I know I’m talking a lot about this, but I think one of the very interesting things about the whole story of Richard II’s deposition is precisely, as you’re saying, the.
The story that this is where the water, the roses come from because that original sin, if you like, of deposing the king then gets played out when Henry the VI is challenged by the line of York. Now, I would want to say as a historian, there is nothing inevitable about that because Henry the V, one of them greatest, one of the other greatest Kings England’s ever had was totally secure on his throne.
died and left a nine month old baby as his heir, and no one blinked. Everyone rallied around to keep the realm and the war going until Henry VI should be of age. But once it had become clear that Henry VI was absolutely hopeless king in ways that made everything in the end impossible, then 1399 was there as a precedent to go back to.
So it wasn’t inevitable, but it was a very significant factor. in what playing out in the Wars of the Roses and then the advent of the Tudors.
Heather: Yeah, and I wonder also just you talked about that original sin and the Tudor propaganda machine did frame their rule in a way that said like we are the result or we are the people come to make that right.
We are the dynasty that’s going to make that original sin right and we’re the fulfillment of All of this horrible stuff that happened, and here we are, come to save everything. And I wonder, how did chroniclers, other than Shakespeare, but the people who were writing the chroniclers at the time, refer to Richard and Henry, Richard II and Henry IV, and was it in a way that reinforced some of this propaganda with the Tudor narratives of their rightful rule?
And what can you tell me about the way the Tudors saw this?
Helen: It’s very interesting and I can’t claim to be an expert in Tudor historiography, but I have just been reading, through as much as I can, Edward Hall’s Chronicle, first published in 1548, of the noble union of the two the union of the two noble and illustrious.
Families of Lancaster and York, and then Raphael Hollinshead’s Chronicle, the two main Chronicle sources that we know that Shakespeare was working from, for example and the two things that struck me very forcibly about reading those texts is, first of all, Edward Hall begins exactly where Shakespeare does.
In other words I’m, and I’ve recently been trying to read a bit more about this. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar in any sense. But it seems to me very likely that framing that Shakespeare starts his play. Richard II Thro, the dual between Moy and Bolingbrook in 1398, that precipitates the final crisis.
He’s not gonna explain the backstory of what Richard has done beyond that final trigger. I think that framing then is obviously what Hall is doing. He’s framing that as the origin, and then he goes through Henry ViiV, Henry V and into. the development of the story of Lancaster and York and so on.
Hollinshead is really even more fascinating, I think he’s a wonderful writer. And the fascinating thing for me as a medievalist reading Hollinshead is that I can see all the medieval sources he’s using and he’s actually a phenomenal historian. But when he gets to Richard II, you can see him being pulled in two directions because he’s saying two things at once.
He’s saying that Richard has gone badly wrong here. Richard is acting as an arbitrary ruler. He’s not obeying the law. He’s taken away Bolingbroke’s property without any legal justification. He’s done something that really does fundamentally undermine his authority as king. And in the story, as there are in the medieval sources, there’s an understanding and a support for what Henry is doing and an understanding of the support he gets.
So you see all the justification for Richard’s fall, as you do in Shakespeare’s play, but at the same time, you also have a sympathy for Richard and an explicit suggestion That deposing an anointed king is wrong. And both of those things are in play because they were both in play. So in a way that points back to what I was previously saying, which is that nothing is inevitable, but once things have gone that way, then you can reach back to that moment and use the fact that deposing an anointed king was a challenge to the order of God’s universe.
And if things have gone wrong later, you can point to that, and you can particularly point to that if you’re a usurping dynasty whose claim to the throne in any wider objective sense is vanishingly slender, really. No one until 1485 would have put money on Henry Tudor becoming King of England and founding a dynasty.
Heather: And I want to be mindful of the time here, but I have two more questions. The first, we talked about the legitimacy and that made me think about the Shakespeare came out right as the ethics rebellion was happening. And I say it came out like it dropped at the store or something, there was a lot of questions around the legit that Elizabeth had to deal with legitimacy.
But also as you’re talking, I thought about her not wanting to name an heir and the idea of not necessarily being forward looking as well. And I just wonder in a minute, if you can share a little bit about how Elizabeth struggled with legitimacy and what kind of lessons there were for the later Tudors, Elizabeth.
Helen: That’s such an interesting question. Elizabeth struggles on two fronts, I think. One is the legitimacy of her self as sovereign, because Henry VIII had made such a mess of his marriages, and of course, then the split from Rome. So in the eyes of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth is a bastard. She’s a heretic.
She should not be on the throne. She’s also a woman, and that has left her with a huge problem about the future. So I don’t think Elizabeth was bad. narcissistically blind to the future in the way that Richard II was. But the problem Elizabeth had been struggling throughout her reign with was, she, unlike a male ruler, could not simply marry and have an heir.
Because if she married a man, would he be the king? Would he rule instead of her? And having an heir would also risk her life every time she attempted it in a way that was never the case for a king. So she had decided that the way to preserve her authority as queen was not to marry, to fend off questions about the future in the hope of controlling the present.
And you’re absolutely right that by the 1590s, this was causing acute problems even among her loyal subjects, because they wanted to know what was going to happen. And so when Richard II was first performed, Shakespeare’s Richard II, which we think was 1595, it was certainly first published 1597, and went into two further editions in 1598.
Clearly striking a chord, crucially when it’s published. The deposition scene is not printed, it’s too much of a political hot potato. People are worried about it. And then in 1601, when Essex does rebel, he has a play about Richard II, or his supporters have a play about Richard II, possibly, probably Shakespeare’s, performed for them the night before the rebellion at the Globe Theatre.
So Richard’s story becomes a way of talking about a monarch who hasn’t named an heir, and for whose critics, Their advisers are favourites who are leading the realm astray. So Essex is saying, you ought to be listening to me, not the people you’re listening to. And the pointing at Richard II’s favourites is a way of doing that.
And of course, Elizabeth herself then says, after Essex Rebellion, she’s in the tower looking at the archives with the archivist. And she says, I am Richard II, know ye not that? Now I don’t think she was anything like Richard II in terms of her understanding of politics. She had a mind like a steel trap, but she was stuck in a parallel situation.
Heather: And so for people who are more 16th century interested, Tudor interested, and maybe medieval curious, what would you say as to why this is important for those people to read your book and to learn more about this period?
Helen: All the reasons we’ve been talking about, which is that, of course, with any period, the roots of this are going to lie earlier.
And I’ve always been fascinated by the Tudors. I started with the Tudors and over the years of my studying and then beginning to write, I worked backwards, so I’m hoping it’s a journey that your listeners and viewers might want to come on to. But also, I think one of the reasons I’ve always loved the Tudors, I imagine might be true for other people, is that they’re such huge and fascinating three dimensional characters.
I’ve always thought one of the reasons we love them is because of Holbein. We can see their face. Now, Richard was terrible at being a king, but he was brilliant at commissioning art. So Richard is the only medieval king whose face we can actually see because he commissioned two glorious portraits and a glorious tomb effigy.
I think that part of him is fascinating. But also in this book, what I’ve tried to do is draw a psychological portrait of both men and explain the political world in which they live. that can live up to what I loved about the Tudor world. So I’m hoping it might be of interest.
Heather: I think it will be for sure.
Congratulations on the success of the book. I know it’s made a lot of best books of the year lists and all of that kind of stuff. So congratulations to you. It was a wonderful, it was a wonderful read.
Helen: Thank you so much, Heather. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
Heather: Who’s been fun. Thank you so much to Helen Caster for taking the time out to speak with me.
I hope you enjoyed that interview. I hope you will check out her book. Read it. It’s so good. Such a good book. I’ll kill. I have both the audiobook and the e book, and I had been going back and forth between the two because I just couldn’t stop. The story had me so pulled in, so I really highly recommend it.
Related links:
History Reading Room: Witches and Richard II
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
