Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities

Helen Castor is a British historian and BBC broadcaster who left Cambridge because she wanted to write narrative history focused on individuals rather than the analytical style typical of academia. As someone interested in individual psychology and the functioning of power, Castor finds medieval England offers the perfect setting because its sophisticated power structures exist in "bare bones" without the "great apparatus of state," bringing individual power plays into sharper relief. Her latest book, The Eagle and the Hart https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Eagle-and-the-Hart/Helen-Castor/9781982139209, exemplifies this approach by examining Richard II and Henry IV as individuals whose personal choices became constitutional precedents that echo through English history. Tyler and Helen explore what English government could and couldn't do in the 14th century, why landed nobles obeyed the king, why parliament chose to fund wars with France, whether England could have won the Hundred Years' War, the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV's deposition of Richard II, how Shakespeare's Richard II scandalized Elizabethan audiences, Richard's superb artistic taste versus Henry's lack, why Chaucer suddenly becomes possible in this period, whether Richard II's fatal trip to Ireland was like Captain Kirk beaming down to a hostile planet, how historians continue to discover new evidence about the period, how Shakespeare's Henriad influences our historical understanding, Castor's most successful work habits, what she finds fascinating about Asimov's I, Robot, the subject of her next book, and more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/helen-castor/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/c8oDJyKPjEo on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded April 2nd, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page/podcastgift?utm_source=cwt+podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow Helen https://x.com/hrcastor on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Photo Credit: Stuart Simpson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 0:27Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 0:58Tyler Cowen?

  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 could do and what could it not do? What is a government like then?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  So by the late 14th century, when Richard and Henry, my two kings in this book, appear on the scene, the king...

• 2:08Speaker 01

  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 Orban sceptre as a lawgiver and 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 armour on a warhorse 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 defence.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:25Tyler Cowen?

  And what is it back then that government cannot do?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  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 a, 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

• 4:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:08Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  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're not only risking your place in the mortal world, but you're risking your immortal soul.

• 6:41Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  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 defence 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,

• 7:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  On the other hand, we might sometimes think from our modern perspective that they were already being pretty liberal in their interpretation of the defence 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 a hundred years. They weren't saying, right, lads, it's half time, 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

• 8:47Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 9:20Tyler Cowen?

  And does England feel it can win some of those battles because it has a more centralised 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?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  To start with, we have to remember that England has had territory on the continent in what we now know as France since 1066.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  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

• 10:34Speaker 01

  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 Cressy 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.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:41Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  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 sway 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

• 12:35Speaker 01

  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?

• 12:54Tyler Cowen?

  And where do you stand on those disagreements?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  I think they're enormously interesting questions. I mean, 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 going to do for wine if you lose your, if you lose your link with southwestern France? I think things could have looked very different.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  I think if Henry V hadn't died in fourteen twenty-two, very unexpectedly, he got dysentery on campaign, he died very young, he was only thirty-five. 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

• 14:25Speaker 01

  that Henry V had set up, that he was King of France as well as King of England. And when Henry IV's son grew up, he was only nine months old when he became king, when he grew up, he was a complete nonentity. 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

• 15:11Speaker 01

  the monarchs of England didn't give up till eighteen oh one, but with almost none of the territory and Calais, of course, was then lost in the sixteenth 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 defence, including aggressive defence.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:05Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I think in one sense, yes, you could argue that they are blips on the screen because it all depends on what point you're 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?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  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?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  And that is the key problem of 1399. First of all, even if you have identified that your king is now engaged in tyranny...

• 18:07Speaker 01

  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 destabilising. So, once the precedent of 1399 has been set, you get two different precedents. One, that a tyrannical king can be removed,

• 18:48Speaker 01

  but also that what might need to be done to remove him may well push beyond current consensus about what the constitution actually is.

• 19:02Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  In the 1640s, it's fascinating. There are repeated references to 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 precedents, all the things that Richard had done in his reign

• 19:59Speaker 01

  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 example, that he claimed that the law was in his own mouth or sometimes in his own breast and that the lives 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.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  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

• 21:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:02Tyler Cowen?

  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 scandalised?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:13Tyler Cowen?

  Did they just ignore it?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  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

• 22:55Speaker 01

  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 have prioritised actually having any children, to the extent that in 1396, when he married for the second time, he chose to marry a six-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.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So the question of the succession, she was refusing for very different reasons from Richard, but 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 favourite, 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.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  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. No, ye not that." Now, in all sorts of ways, she wasn't at all. She was far shrewder, far more far sighted, far more self-aware than Richard ever was. But she could see the parallels, and so could everyone else.

• 25:02Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  He had superb taste 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.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  The tomb he commissioned for himself and his first wife, Anna 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 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.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  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

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Stunning portraits of himself at the centre.

• 27:23Tyler Cowen?

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

• 27:29Speaker 01

  He also has a remarkable tomb, but it's not his own work. When he died, 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. Richards, of course, goes into enormous detail about what outfit he wants to be buried in, et cetera, et cetera. Henry's is in English and it is written in the first person singular and it begins,

• 28:12Speaker 01

  "I, Henry, sinful wretch, King of England, France, Lord of Ireland, et cetera, who has never been worthy to be man, but by God's grace, which my life I have misspent." He, I think he was racked 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.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  He's wearing a crown, but his face, given that he died at not quite forty-six, and he had been one of the most celebrated Chevalier 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.

• 29:27Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  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 in to an English speaking country. And French and Latin, the langue franca of medieval Europe, remain the languages of government until, if you like, the elite has bedded in sufficiently.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  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

• 31:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:37Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I have no idea, I have to say.

• 31:49Tyler Cowen?

  But it would have been quite expensive, right?

• 31:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:26Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think of the notion that there were these late medieval technologies of water power or 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?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  The fourteenth 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 thirteen forty-eight, which, as far as we can tell, killed between a third and a half of the population.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  So one of the things that's happening in the later fourteenth 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 fourteenth century in England is that

• 33:51Speaker 01

  the political classes are desperately trying to keep a lid on this new.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  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're 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

• 34:42Speaker 01

  trauma that was immediate and intense.

• 34:46Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  That's not a bad analogy, actually, and 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 Bollingbrook, 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,

• 35:53Speaker 01

  the Duke of Norfolk, and his cousin Henry. He'd exiled them both.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  And then in thirteen ninety nine, 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 thirteen ninety four to five.

• 36:30Tyler Cowen?

  In Ireland.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  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 five minutes, leaving them actually emboldened and empowered in pursuing their own interests.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:52Tyler Cowen?

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

• 37:58Speaker 01

  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

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Al-Ghaib, 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.

• 39:25Tyler Cowen?

  You must like Connie Willis novels, then?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Whose novels?

• 39:29Tyler Cowen?

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

• 39:35Speaker 01

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

• 39:39Tyler Cowen?

  We will email you some titles.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Please do.

• 39:42Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Both and, I would say.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  I wish we had diaries for this period. I would dearly love to have the diary of Richard the Second at any point in his life, or of Henry 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 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

• 40:50Speaker 01

  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 were so many. There were four legal terms a year, two or three different courts that I was trying to work with. And

• 41:31Speaker 01

  just physically, I would, you know, order up a terms worth of documents, and it would be more than I could almost manhandle onto the, 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 a, 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.

• 42:17Tyler Cowen?

  So just your personal sense of what Richard the Second was like, Henry the Fourth was like, where does that mainly come from? What document or evidence or thing gives you that feeling?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  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, 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're trying to see long-term development,

• 43:15Speaker 01

  structural change and so on. And 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 colours what I've already said. So for instance, we don't really know that much about Richard and Henry's education.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  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 thirteen, what they did when they were fifteen, what they did when they were twenty and so on. So it's, it's a cumulative thing and every scrap of evidence I can possibly find, I will be adding into the pile.

• 44:40Tyler Cowen?

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

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Not completely made up at all.

• 44:49Tyler Cowen?

  I know that historical details are not made up, but his sense of them is people.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  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 Hollenshed'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 Hollenshed's Chronicle.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  And Hollenshed'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 centre. 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.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  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, it's a one man band, really, in terms of the parts in the play. And then when we shift to Henry IV, part one, suddenly Bolingbroke has been let, active, commanding figure of Bolingbroke has been left behind. And for the purposes of Shakespeare's drama.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Henry has become a sort of grey, 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 three years older than Henry IV. So I think it's Henry IV, Bollingbrook and 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.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  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 three 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

• 48:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:52Tyler Cowen?

  Do you ever find you have to fight off the emotional influence of Shakespeare's Henry ad? 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 disallude as a youth. You know, that's probably quite made up. Do you have that issue?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  I do, and I wanted to acknowledge it, to nod to it by use it. What I've done in the book is use phrases from the plays, Richard II and Henry IV, one and two, 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.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Write my version and then have the great joy of going back to the plays and seeing,

• 50:08Speaker 01

  seeing what I'd done in, 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, I feel. It's a conversation that I'm lucky to be a tiny part of.

• 50:29Tyler Cowen?

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

• 50:36Speaker 01

  I love The Hollow Crown. And one of the reasons I love it is the depth and range of the casting.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  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

• 51:24Speaker 01

  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 the Second for the Royal Shakespeare Company. I've just seen Jonathan Bailey at the Bridge, completely different, equally fascinating. But I think I've realised in the process of writing this book

• 52:00Speaker 01

  and then talking about writing it, that perhaps I'm not a very good theatre goer because I love reading the plays on the page.

• 52:11Tyler Cowen?

  I also prefer that.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Interesting. Why do you prefer it?

• 52:15Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  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 the Second 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 realise that makes me a very bad theatre goer, but it's one of the reasons that play means quite so much to me.

• 53:01Tyler Cowen?

  Do you know the Orson Welles movie Chimes at Midnight?

• 53:04Speaker 01

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

• 53:09Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:52Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 54:01Tyler Cowen?

  How do you think about your own endeavor?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  What an interesting question. I think I'm preoccupied

• 54:13Speaker 01

  by the human dimension. And that's why the focus of my interest goes in two directions. One is psychological, that I'm always trying to work out what makes my protagonists tick from moment to moment, even though I'm trying to work across five 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

• 54:56Speaker 01

  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're looking at a very sophisticated structure of power, but it's present in bare bones because we don't have the great apparatus of state. And therefore, individual choices and individual psychology

• 55:39Speaker 01

  become extremely exposed. And so it's that point where

• 55:47Speaker 01

  skeletal structures of power

• 55:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:06Tyler Cowen?

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

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Well, I'm already trying to cover 500 years, so

• 56:21Speaker 01

  that's fascinating. I think I would have to go back, not forward. I would probably.

• 56:31Tyler Cowen?

  Rome, ancient Greece, African Kingdom?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  I'm thinking Greece, ancient Greece.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  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 than I would leap forward, if you'll allow me that.

• 57:01Tyler Cowen?

  Sure. Why did you leave academia?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  But that's too easy an answer. 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.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  And

• 57:56Speaker 01

  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 eight years teaching and being a director of studies and a tutor and all sorts of things at Sydney Sussex, my college in Cambridge. And I loved so many things about it, but

• 58:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  The weight of my history in the institution I was teaching in, I was teaching, 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.

• 1:00:06Tyler Cowen?

  What's your most unusual successful work habit?

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:14Tyler Cowen?

  You've written how many books, eight books?

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  But I despair of myself.

• 1:00:17Tyler Cowen?

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

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  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 five 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 around it. I'm not sure that's a successful work habit, but at least it's a form of self-acceptance.

• 1:01:06Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  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

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  very poorly read because I haven't read any other Asimov. You're you're an Asimov fan, right? Is that right?

• 1:01:50Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:12Tyler Cowen?

  I think there were four or five 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.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Aren't we?

• 1:02:27Tyler Cowen?

  With AI, yeah.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  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

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  astoundingly thought through and precise. And I think when I was very young, that conceptual framework grabbed me. And then a fact, 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

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  with that sense

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  that nothing was inevitable, but one thing was leading to the next.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:23Tyler Cowen?

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

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Like all of history, like all of history, I think.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:36Tyler Cowen?

  That's right.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  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 good to work. 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. Because 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.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  So, you know, the perspective on the past, the present and the future is a bit mind boggling.

• 1:05:26Tyler Cowen?

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

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  I have already written a short book about Elizabeth the First, 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 five. The first book I ever picked up was a children's book about her.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  So she's endlessly fascinating. And she also said, I am Richard II, no, 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.

• 1:06:33Tyler Cowen?

  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 Kester, thank you very much.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:06:49Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite 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 at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.