IAN MORTIMER

The Fears of Henry IV

About writing the book

I began work on The Fears of Henry IV in the late spring of 2005. I had just revised my PhD for publication by the Royal Historical Society and had delivered a talk on seventeenth-century provincial medicine at Oxford, and so felt I had said all I needed to say about early modern social history for the time being. I was thoroughly looking forward to a return both to writing biography and discussing the late middle ages.

Only slowly did it dawn on me what I had let myself in for. We hardly know anything about Henry IV. He is the least biographied post-Conquest crowned king. He is also arguably the most maligned, for dozens of writers have taken the traditional view of Henry and painted him as the dastard who usurped the throne from dear old misunderstood Richard. Even his date of birth remained unknown, as did that of his eldest son. I decided that that would be my first challenge: to ascertain when Henry and his sons were born.

On the face of it, it was a small matter. But three weeks later I was still fighting with the layers of doubt. I had established Henry V’s birth (16 September 1386) relatively easily as Professor Christopher Allmand had narrowed it down to two dates in his book Henry V, and one of those dates is impossible due to payments to the nurse of Henry’s second son, Thomas, at Christmas 1387. But Henry’s own date of birth was proving difficult. And then there was the problem of the supposed first child, mentioned by Wylie and McFarlane, who turned out to be wholly spurious. I ended up spending about a month on a scholarly redaction of the date of birth (to be published in the journal Historical Research). By the time it was done I was feeling daunted. It seemed there was as much to read about Richard II and Henry IV’s politics (although not the man himself) as there had been for the rest of the fourteenth century put together.

It is worth commenting on the changing ways in which one gathers the resources for a book like this. When I researched The Greatest Traitor I spent hours in Exeter University Library transcribing as much material as I could by hand or photocopying it, and borrowing books (on Inter Library Loan where these were impossible to view locally). Occasionally I would buy a book but for financial reasons my preference was to borrow volumes wherever possible. When I researched The Perfect King I paid a highly competent researcher, Dr Paul Dryburgh (who had recently done his PhD at Bristol University on Roger Mortimer), to gather as much data as he could from Edward III’s household accounts. I supplemented his work by taking digital photographs of any and all other documents I might require on a piecemeal basis. Gradually, the whole process was becoming more technological.

By the time I started research on Henry IV, the technological revolution had shifted up a gear. For a start, there were many more academic articles available to download at home, saving a drive into town. In addition, the online marketplace in second hand books had massively increased. Whereas I used to have as many as fifty books on loan at any one time, now it was rare to have more than five or six. Driving into town cost money in petrol and parking and – worst of all – at least two hours’ work time. Then the book had to be returned, entailing another two hours and more expense. If it had to be obtained through Inter-Library Loan, that added a further charge. These days it is cheaper and quicker simply to buy a book through the Internet than to drive into town to borrow a copy: a complete reversal of the situation when I was writing The Greatest Traitor.

Methods of accessing unique and rare material had changed even more radically. Developments had taken place at The National Archives – due, in part at least (I like to think) to an article which I wrote for the Journal of the Society of Archivists in 2002. Now I could take a large series of documents and systematically film them all without charge, and store each image under its archival reference number on a laptop. Nothing piecemeal about this approach. I copied all of Henry’s accounts and the Charter Rolls witness lists, etc. It amounted to as much text as it would have taken me two years to transcribe. True, I would have learnt a lot more if I had written it all out by hand, but the book would have taken much longer to research and the advance for writing the book would have run out long before I started writing the narrative. Besides, my photographs could all be relied upon as exact whereas notes are sometimes unreliable. For this reason, the use of digital cameras in The National Archives has to be the greatest single boost to British historical scholarship since the opening of the Public Record Office in the early nineteenth century.

There was a price, however. All my files connected with The Perfect King fitted easily on to a single back-up CD. My filmed resources for The Fears of Henry IV extended to twelve full CDs (about 8Gb), and I had not even started work yet. By the time I finished, I had added a further four CDs of resource material. I had also purchased about fifty volumes and downloaded or photocopied about sixty relevant academic articles. My office was awash with paper and data. It was not just that my intended learning curve was steep, it was also seemingly endless.

Of course, when you are in this position, you attract other responsibilities. As my wife often remarks, ‘if you want something done, ask a busy person’. I had led a bid on behalf of the Friends of Devon Archives to the Heritage Lottery Fund for money for a project called ‘Eighteenth Century Devon: People and Communities’. Blow me down, they gave us fifty thousand pounds. So I had to recruit a researcher and manage his work. I found myself being asked to chair some committee meetings at Dartmoor National Park Authority, which took up more time in preparation as well as attendance. Add the chairmanship of an active local history society, the secretaryship of a local tennis club and my ongoing responsibilities as a parish councillor, and you can see why I was feeling pulled apart.

Conflicting responsibilities and a colossal workload were not the most significant problems I faced, however. More difficult were the historical issues, which only emerged as the book progressed.

The first problem was the question of the succession. Was Henry IV really Richard’s heir in 1399? And what about before that? Had he not been second-in-line (after his father) since Edward III’s settlement of 1376? These were key issues, affecting the way Henry would have regarded Richard and how he would have been seen by contemporaries. Reading through the Charter Rolls witness lists I became aware of several troubling inconsistencies. I turned to the chronicle which mentions Richard declaring the Mortimer brothers the heirs to the throne in 1385 and noticed that the relevant entry had been dislocated from its original position in the chronicle (under 1386) by an interpolation and a rewriting of the chronicle in the early fifteenth century. As I looked further ahead I could see questions over the succession looming in 1394 and 1397 as well as 1399. Experience now told me that if I wrote my book without first placing the most contentious parts in an academic journal, I would not be taken seriously by my academic peers. So, work on the book stopped for another month while I wrote an article entitled ‘Richard II and the Succession to the Crown’. It was accepted by the journal, History in November 2005 and appeared in the summer of 2006. Unfortunately, only much later did I realise it was incomplete. Richard II must have entailed the throne on the duke of York at the time of writing his will in April 1399. Appendix Two in the book, which summarises this article, carries an addendum on this point. But at least I could be confident that the essence of my work would withstand academic scrutiny. Anyone seriously interested in Yorkist vs Lancastrian legitimacy dispute will thus be interested to read the article and its postscript in Appendix Two.

The second significant problem was Richard II’s death. I was lying in bed one night, thinking about something I had often said with regard to Roger Mortimer and Edward II’s death. If you are writing the biography of a potential murderer, you have to say whether you think he did the deed or not. To shy away from judgement in such matters is intellectually weak and historically pointless. You cannot claim that it is ‘erring on the side of caution’ to say you do not know the truth; it is merely erring on the side of ignorance. Besides, as I stated in the Introduction to The Perfect King, to fail to pursue such a question with utmost rigour is potentially to disregard the most important aspect of a man’s career: regicide not being a minor misdemeanor. That night I realised that the mountain I had shifted in determining the weaknesses in the evidence for the death of Edward II was not a one-off. What was good for Roger Mortimer was good for Henry IV too. It was important to pay as much attention to Richard’s potential murder as I had done to Edward II’s. I didn’t get much sleep that night, nor for the rest of the week. Or the week after that. I proceeded on the basis that the council minutes in the British Library could be read as evidence that the fate of Richard II was out of the hands of the royal council in London and that the ex-king may indeed have starved himself to death. But the French information simply could not be reconciled with this. It was quite a shock to realise, halfway through the book, that I was dealing with a man who was not just possibly a murderer but definitely was one.

A third significant problem was, ironically, an academic symposium on Henry IV. Dr Gwilym Dodd kindly allowed me to attend the event at Nottingham University in July 2006. Every paper was fascinating, and I was very grateful to so many historians for sharing their findings and thoughts so readily with me. But when I got home, something went wrong. I did not realise anything was amiss until the first draft of the book was finished. When I read back over it – reading aloud, to maximise the fluency of the text – Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, and parts of Fourteen were unreadable. They were lists of facts presented in a scholarly fashion. They had no shape. I realised that I had returned from Nottingham subconsciously determined to cover my back against all academic criticism. Placing this defensiveness at the top of my agenda had killed the humanitarian aspects – reduced them to a bare relic, a withered hand. It is fine to prioritise being academically watertight when you have a particular question to answer – such as whether Henry murdered his cousin – but to do it when describing the course of a man’s life to non-specialists is mistake. It is like explaining to a novice driver how to drive a car by numbering the ratchets on each cog in the gearbox. The whole section had to be rewritten.

This brings me to the nasty memory of a sudden shock. I write about battles well, or so I am told, and I wanted to make a special thing of Shrewsbury, which was by far Henry’s most significant battle. So, the day came. I had been preparing for the moment for at least a week. I had all my sources on hand, pages marked. I had read them all, and decided what I wanted to draw out of each one. In my narrative, Henry took his draught of wine, and I took a swig of whisky. As Henry faced his enemy on that terrifying battlefield, I listened to the ‘Dies Irae’ from Verdi’s Requiem again – as I had done for Crécy and Poitiers – and started to imagine what it must have been like to be there. The images came, the vision, my knowledge of Henry’s life to date and the evidence for the battle itself provided me with the impetus to write. I started typing, excitedly. I wrote three or four thousand words on the progress of the battle. And at the end I read over what I had done with deep satisfaction. It was the best description of a battle I had yet achieved. I was elated. And in my elation I did not realise that, when prompted to save my work, I was actually being asked to save my notes with the same name as the section on the battle. In saying ‘yes’ I lost, irretrievably, all my work, with no prospect of recovery.

I knew instantly what I had done. I was so angry. I stomped downstairs and flung the backdoor open, kicking at things, hitting walls with my fist. You cannot just go back and do the same thing again. It takes time, preparation and most of all the spark of excitement which lies at the heart of originality. You cannot recapture your first moment of seeing the battle and describe it again in the same way. It will have no force, no sense of discovery. Had this been Edward III’s life, it would not have been that bad, for another battle would have been along in five minutes. But this was Henry IV, and Shrewsbury was the big one. I had blown it. It was more than a week before I could begin to prepare to go through the whole build-up to write about that battle again.

In the end, The Fears of Henry IV took more than seventeen months to write (not including revising, editing, indexing and picture research). There were many reasons for the delay, and my loss of the battle of Shrewsbury was not the main one. Political, social and other historical responsibilities bore heavily on me. I decided to spend more time with my family at weekends. The necessity of taking several historical questions to levels of research and analysis well beyond that currently available in print were the most significant delaying factors. And ultimately that mountain of research and reading just never went away. I was juggling electronic images of accounts and chronicles and photocopied articles to the last.

So what do I like to remember now about this book? I remember the night I decided to write it. My wife had received a phone call from my agent and passed the message on about the possibility of Cape contracting both The Perfect King and The Fears of Henry IV. I had walked along a lane over the moor near where I live and looked up at the stars. The choice between a university lectureship or writing these books looked back down on me. The former appealed, but like the stars appealed. They were mere pinpricks of certainty in a great sea of mystery and possibility. Writing these books was attractive in a different way, more like the darkness. They were far more challenging, and I had no idea what I would find.

Therein lies the reason why this book is special. It is not a work of scholarship: it is much more than that. It is underpinned by many scholarly techniques, of course, and says much which has never been said before, with evidence to back it up. But it is not scholarly for scholarship’s sake. Where it is rigorous, rigour is not employed for any academic points-scoring but for the sake of my own understanding of the man. Where it is creative and insightful, it seeks to reintroduce those human elements which historians as educationalists feel obliged to leave out. Indeed, this book taught me more than either of my earlier books about the value of approaching the past directly, and using the evidence judiciously, as opposed to concentrating on the evidence itself. Indeed, far from being a window into the past, the evidence can act as a distorting lens, greatly narrowing our vision, or even as a total barrier. That revelation – that history as an art is not so much the analysis of evidence as striving for something beyond the evidence – is perhaps the most important thing I have yet learnt. By comparison, what I was taught at my schools and universities was essentially a process – the analysis of evidence and the development of an argument – it was not understanding human behaviour in different times. It was not reaching for eternal truths or common elements of humanity across the years. Nor was it in any way concerned with our relationship with the dead and what they might mean to us, and by implication what we might mean to future generations. These are important themes, and ones with which historians should concern themselves. Having realised that, I now see that it is possible to say much more through the medium of history than before.

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