I recently finished reading “Richard II: A True King’s Fall” by Kathryn Warner, a biography of the boy/man who was king of England from 1377 to 1399.
This is the second book I’ve read by Warner. The other was about Richard II’s great-grandfather, Edward II. It’s interesting that she wrote about these two kings, because they’re both notorious failkings of English history, the first to be deposed from their thrones, and their misfortunes, many of them self-inflicted, seem to rhyme. They were both letdowns after their towering, long-lived predecessors, Edward I and Edward III. They both elevated gay lovers into the nobility and lived to see them executed by the other nobles. They both had a taste for finer things more than they had a taste for ruling. They both did much to cause the situations that led to their downfalls, and they both died as prisoners in obscure circumstances. Richard himself recognized many of these parallels and developed a “near-obsession” with his infamous great-grandfather, making “strenuous” efforts to have him canonized as a saint.
When Warner writes about Richard II and Edward II, she is consciously trying to bring a fresh view to kings traditionally written off as misfit failures. While she can’t totally rehabilitate them, because they were genuinely inept, her approach tends to render them more as hapless and tragic — the true victims, even, having never asked to be kings in the first place — rather than as malevolent mad tyrants.
This book was strongest, and felt the most purposeful and coherent, when it was describing Richard II as an individual. By combining scraps of details pulled from royal expense logs and cross-compared between various chronicles, Warner paints a reasonably clear picture of this young man from 700 years ago. Here are a few of the highlights.
- He was “refined and artistic.” His portrait at Westminster Abbey is the earliest an English king is known to have commissioned for himself.
- He was “personally fastidious and enjoyed being clean and well turned-out.” His tailor is credited with fashioning him the world’s first handkerchief.
- He had little control over his emotions. He blushed easily and was “vindictive, petty, irrational, cruel, prone to overreaction and quick to anger”; time and again he displayed an “inability to discern bad and self-interested advice from wise counsel or to stop himself overreacting.”
Outside the confines of Richard’s cranium, the book was less useful. Analysis of the actual events rarely extends beyond Richard’s personal bubble. To be fair, Warner states on page 1 that the book is “intended to be more a portrait of an individual than a thorough account of all the politics of the reign.” But when the individual is this remote, we need more context to understand him. The narration consistently hovers above ground level, skipping over the sights, sounds and smells of Richard’s England. The “kingdom” always feels like some distant thing, inhabited by an amorphous mass of country folk who exist mainly to harbor vague grievances against him.
As an example, here’s how Warner describes one of the major catastrophes of Richard’s reign: an angry mob ransacking London and executing the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The king and his companions leaving the Tower was the cue for an invasion of the fortress: apparently the guards simply opened the gates and let the mob in. Sudbury and Hales, the rebels’ main targets, were discovered hiding in the chapel of St John in the White Tower, the oldest part of the Tower of London. The two men were beaten, dragged out of the fortress, and beheaded on Tower Hill. Walsingham says that it took eight strokes of the axe to remove the unfortunate Sudbury’s head.
Boring. Dry. Compare that to how the same events are described in “Henry IV: The Righteous King” by Ian Mortimer:
The archbishop could expect no mercy. He had prevented Richard from disembarking at Greenwich to meet the rebels the previous day. On the list of men to die, his name appeared second, just below that of Henry’s father, the duke. He knelt and prayed in the chapel of St John in the White Tower. Those who were with him had already heard one Mass; now they listened to another. They could hear footsteps running through the keep. The archbishop chanted prayer after prayer, the seven psalms and the litany. As he said the words ‘all saints, pray for us’, the rebels burst in. In scenes which must have been truly terrifying for everyone present, the archbishop was seized and dragged out by his arms and hood along the passages of the castle, across the bailey and out to the yelling masses on Tower Hill, where they set up a makeshift block. It was said that they took eight blows to cut off his head.
Even the simple suggestion that it “must have been truly terrifying for everyone present” is enough to place me in their shoes and force me to briefly imagine such a scene unfolding around me. Warner never brings you this close.
Another significant problem is that Warner’s personal fixation on medieval genealogy was allowed to run completely rampant. Sentences like this are constant and quickly turn into mush:
In strong opposition to Lancaster stood Edmund Mortimer, the young earl of March (born in 1352), who was married to Lancaster’s niece Philippa of Clarence, only child of Edward III’s late second son Lionel, and who was the great-grandson of Roger Mortimer, the man Edward III had had executed for treason in 1330.
This book sags with chunky paragraphs detailing the tangled relations of people who barely deserve a Wikipedia entry, let alone mention in these pages. An obscure French nobleman, Duke Antoine of Brabant, is name-dropped precisely once by virtue of having married Joan, the daughter of Richard II’s half-sister Maud, who had married Waleran, a French count captured in battle by the English, who was only tangentially related to the story in the first place.
Warner clearly finds the “fiendishly interrelated” nature of the nobility immensely interesting, and it is. Her passion for this pocket of history jumps off the pages. You only need to visit her 20-years-running blog, edwardthesecond.blogspot.com, to understand her fervor. But it needed to be reined in. For much of this book, especially its first half, Richard’s story is drowned in a wall of noise about branches of the family tree and distant relations in other kingdoms.
This book is also weirdly sloppy on the editing front. It sometimes repeats itself, often has little sense of flow, and has a grating habit of ending long paragraphs with one completely unrelated sentence.
Sometimes Warner just throws you a riddle. Try understanding this sentence on the first read:
His elder daughter Maud made a most unhappy marriage to Queen Philippa’s nephew Willem, count of Hainault and Holland, who became insane and was confined for more than thirty years, and died in her early twenties in 1362.
Overall, I’m not sure I can recommend this book. Coming after the enjoyable “Edward II: The Unconventional King,” this was a disappointing and confusing read. This felt like it went through a different set of hands.
