Amateur Historian and on-and-off writer. Historical thoughts about my favourite periods. The Middle Ages: The Angevins and Henry V specifically, but anything from 12th century to Henry VII will turn up. Italian Renaissance: Medici friendly blog and Borgia lover, as well as fond of the Burgundian dynasty. The French Revolution: probably a montagnard, but can never make up my mind. The Napoleonic wars: love Napoleon and Wellington equally, as well as Byron.
Curious that there's a new pop history book out about Philip Augustus vs the Plantagenets, which is neat given the usual anglocentricism of most studies, but also I'm dying at the graphic design of this looking like those Disney knockoff YA novels that are like "let's see the VILLAIN'S point of view" XD
From Ancient Greek κεφαλή (kephalḗ, “head”) + -φορος (-phoros, “bearing”). A saint who is generally depicted carrying their severed head.
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Until the very end, therefore, Henry remained acutely aware of how his achievements might eventually unravel, if all due skill and subtlety were not exercised by those who came after him. He admitted, too, on his deathbed that he had occasionally done wrong and sought forgiveness for his treatment of the heirs of Lord Scrope and in particular the injustice done to his stepmother, who was to be restored to her former freedoms and dignities. But at the very point of death, Henry reiterated that he had fought his wars purely to obtain his rights and promote the cause of peace. And he reaffirmed too, we are told, his unfulfilled wish to ’re-edify the walls of Jerusalem by crusade.’ Nor were these hollow words, for only a year earlier an envoy had been despatched to explore the possibilities for war in the eastern Mediterranean. Finally, the king’s will gave clear notice that all outstanding debts, both his own and his father’s, should be duly paid, along with appropriate sums to his faithful servants.
Only at one point during those last hours did Henry display any hint of self-doubt when he let out a cry, as if, says the author of ‘Pseudo-Elmham’, he had been addressed by an evil spirit. ‘Thou liest, thou liest,’ the king affirmed, My portion is with the Lord Jesus Christ!’ Not long afterwards, at between two and three in the morning of 31 August, the thirty-five-year-old monarch breathed his last, clutching a crucifix, so we are told, and uttering a final invocation to God: ‘In thy hands, O Lord, thou hast redeemed my end’ - while those around him, the Brut declared, 'would rather have felt that he fell asleep than died.’
John Matusiak, Henry V (Routledge Historical Biographies, 2013)
The poem titled “Napoléon's Farewell” by Lord Byron published July 30th 1815
On July 30, 1815, a poem titled 'Napoléon's Farewell' appeared in the British Examiner newspaper, though no author was named. The editor, Leigh Hunt, included a disclaimer stating that he didn't necessarily agree with the poem's views. However, given Hunt's well-known liberal and often radical political leanings – he was even imprisoned for libel against the Prince Regent – it's highly likely he actually sympathized with the poem's sentiments about Napoléon.
The poem was penned by Lord Byron, who was famously and passionately sympathetic towards Napoléon.
Byron knew that supporting Napoléon wasn't a popular stance. To further conceal his authorship, he even pretended the poem was a translation from a French original.
NAPOLEON'S FAREWELL.
[FROM THE FRENCH.]
1.
Farewell to the Land, where the gloom of my Glory Arose and d'ershadowed the earth with her name She abandons me now but the page of her story, The brightest or blackest, is filled with my fame. I have warred with a World which vanquished me only When the meteor of conquest allured me too far; I have coped with the nations which dread me thus lonely, The last single Captive to millions in war.
2.
Farewell to thee, France! When thy diadem crowned me,I made thee the gem and the wonder of earth, But thy weakness decrees I should leave as I found thee, Decayed in thy glory, and sunk in thy worth. Oh! for the veteran hearts that were wasted In strife with the storm, when their battles were won Then the Eagle, whose gaze in that moment was blasted Had still soared with eyes fixed on Victory's sun!
3.
Farewell to thee, France!-but when Liberty rallies. Once more in thy regions, remember me then,-The Violet still grows in the depth of thy valleys; Though withered, thy tear will unfold it again-Yet, yet, I may baffle the hosts that surround us, And yet may thy heart leap awake to my voice-There are links which must break in the chain that has bound us, Then turn thee and call on the Chief of thy choice! ~July 25, 1815. London. First published, Examiner, July 30, 1815.
What is the relationship between Richard II and Henry V?
We don't really know. It's extremely common to see the narrative that in 1398, Richard II took Henry of Monmouth into his household as a hostage during his father's exile but real affection grew up between them and Henry found in Richard a surrogate father who showed him more affection than his real father.
Unfortunately, there are a several issues with this narrative that make it uncertain. To start, we know virtually nothing about Henry's relationship with his father during his childhood so the idea that Richard was a more affectionate parental figure than his real father is simply supposition. This is only the beginning of the problems of whether the narrative has any basis in historical reality.
More significantly , Anne Curry has argued convincingly that Henry was not part of Richard's household during his father's exile, stating that "to date, no mention of him in Richard’s court or presence has been found" and that the grant of a ₤500 annuity (the first payment was made on 21 February 1399) "suggests that he was not at court before this point, and it is unclear why he would have needed an explicit personal grant of funds if he was resident at court." In other words, this suggests that Henry was not part of Richard's household, nor were there plans to move him into Richard's household in late February 1399. We don't know where Henry was during his father's exile - he was likely with his grandfather John of Gaunt but after Gaunt's death and before the Irish campaign, his location is much less clear* - but it seems almost certain he wasn't living in Richard's household.
Now, we can say a few things about Richard's relationship with Henry at this point. His annuity, and other funds, were paid to a Lancastrian retainer, Peter Melbourne, which suggests that wherever he was, Henry was still attended by people associated with his family (his siblings were also in the care of Lancastrian retainers). This all strongly suggests that Henry was not being held as a hostage, even in a benevolent captivity,** nor had his father or grandfather's arrangements for his care been dramatically interfered with by Richard.
The grant and regular payment of Henry's annuity, plus an additional grant of £148 15s. 9d. to equip Henry for the forthcoming Irish expedition, are clear signs that Richard wasn't interested in disparaging Henry or the Lancastrian line. Claims of an intention to "wipe out" the entire Lancaster family and line, usually levelled by pop historians like Helen Castor and Nathan Amin, are unfounded and unsupported by the evidence.
This doesn't, however, indicate any sort of close or special relationship between Richard and Henry. With his grandfather dead, his father in exile, and the Lancastrian estates about to seized, Henry had no obvious source of support and the grant of an annuity, "reasonably generous and appropriate" to his rank, provided him with an income to live on and suggests that whatever Richard felt about Henry's father, it did not extend to his young son. It may also indicate that Richard felt a special concern for Henry's maintenance or that he liked Henry - but these are less supported by evidence and more speculative. The payment for Henry's equipment for the forthcoming military campaign also suggests that he was to be outfitted as appropriate to his rank. Again, it's clear evidence that Richard was not interested in disparaging the Lancastrian line or alienating Henry.
The Irish campaign is the first time Henry and Richard can be said to have spent any great length of time close together, though it is difficult to say what level of contact they would have had. Henry did not serve in Richard's own retinue, or in the retinue of anyone else - likely because of his young age. The belief that Henry was a hostage during this campaign is derived from Thomas Walsingham's chronicle, which records that for this campaign:
[Richard] also took with him boys of noble birth, the sons of the dukes of Gloucester and Hereford, whose relatives he especially feared.
Anne Curry has raised significant doubts over this claim, claiming that the chronicle was written with a "pro-Lancastrian hindsight" and that "it was very common for noble boys to be taken on campaign, even if they were not old enough to indent in person or to bring their own retinue." It might be relevant, in this case, that Walsingham does not overtly claim that Henry and Humphrey of Gloucester were hostages - and notable that he made no claim of mistreatment. Another factor is that while Richard may have disliked and feared the families of the Lords Appellant, he obviously did not consider them a serious threat in 1399, or else he would not have left England to campaign in Ireland.
We know that during this campaign, Henry was knighted by Richard - out of a "true and entire affection" according to the chronicler Jean Creton. Again, this may not be evident of a special relationship. Curry points out that it can be interpreted as "an act of honour towards the Lancastrian line, the invocation of the military reputation of his forebears", regardless of the problems posed by Henry's father. It also occurred in an environment typical for knighthood - before an anticipated engagement with Irish forces, with other young men also be dubbed into knighthood. The emphasis placed on Henry's knighting by chronicles, such as Creton (who claims not to remember the others knighted), may well reflect that these chronicles were written when Henry's position had become much more important - i.e. when after his father's invasion and usurpation. Nor can all these accounts be dismissed as "Lancastrian propaganda", either - Creton, for example, was a French chronicler writing in 1401/02, well before Henry V became king. This does not necessarily mean Creton's account is a true and accurate depiction of Richard's motivations and feelings, either. After all, Richard's "true and entire affection" for Henry shows Richard in a good light.
It was only after news of Henry's father's unauthorised return from exile that Richard restricted Henry's movements, leaving him at Trim Castle in Dublin, along with his cousin, Humphrey of Pleshley (son of the murdered Thomas of Woodstock). This may mean they were imprisoned - as Adam Usk and Walsingham's accounts certainly suggest, though they display a pro-Lancaster, anti-Richard bias - which might also suggest there were plans to use the boys as hostages. If that was intention, events moved too quickly for these plans to come to fruition. Alternatively, the intention may have been to keep the boys out of the way until circumstances were better known. It need not be one or the other - Richard may have intended to keep them out of the way until he could use them most effectively as hostages.
There are various reports of Richard and Henry conversing when the news of Bolingbroke's invasion arrived. Walsingham reports Richard confronting Henry with the news of his father's invasion and Henry responding with surprising maturity before Richard assured him that he knew Henry was blameless. In some texts more obviously propagandistic in intent, Richard is made to foretell Henry's future greatness - these are shouldn't be taken too seriously. The anonymous Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, for instance, quotes Richard as saying:
we have heard that our own England is destined to give birth to a certain Prince Henry who will be … of exceptional grandeur in his deeds, of rare and immense military prowess, with outstanding titles of fame, and who will shine with prosperity throughout the whole world … we are of the infallible opinion that this very same Henry is that man.
It is doubtful Richard actually said anything like that. The Vita et Gesta was written in the mid-to-late 1430s to lionise Henry V and drum up public feeling for the ongoing war with France. Thus, Richard's prophecy not only foreshadows Henry's achievements as king but also depicts him as an individual whose greatness was obvious even when he was a child.
There is no evidence that Henry and Richard ever met again after Richard sailed from Ireland, leaving Henry in Trim Castle. This does not mean it is impossible, only that such a meeting went unrecorded.
In an open letter addressed to his father during their quarrels in last years of Henry IV's life and reign, Henry referenced rumours that he harboured intentions to seize the throne on the basis that his father was "living a life to which he had no proper title". Per Katherine J. Lewis, these words "had resonances with those used to depose Richard II, but with the implication here that Richard had been the rightful king, whose power Henry IV had usurped." Whoever was spreading these rumours possibly imagined or perceived - and, at the very least, depicted - Henry as still loyal to Richard and feeling both guilt and anger over his father's usurpation. It is doubtful that Henry would have publicly expressed these sentiments as attacking his father's claim to the throne meant attacking his own. Regardless, we can see that the idea that Henry possessed a lingering loyalty to Richard was one not limited to Henry's own image-making.
If Henry in 1412 was imagined to have been possibly still loyal to Richard, his actions following his accession to the throne only confirmed it. The most obvious example is the fact that Henry had Richard's body exhumed and reburied in the tomb Richard had commissioned for himself and his first queen, Anne of Bohemia. Walsingham records that Henry "confessed that he owed as much veneration to Richard as to his own father in the flesh". This can be read as a gesture of personal atonement for his complicity in his father's usurpation and/or a personal fondness for Richard.
This doesn't necessarily preclude the extreme likelihood that it was a shrewd political moved that helped quash rumours of Richard's survival, heal ruptures caused by Richard's deposition and promote Henry as the spiritual "son" and "heir" of the childless Richard. In other words, the narrative of Henry as especially fond of Richard may well be propaganda.
Paul Strohm has argued that Henry deliberately promulgated the narrative of his "special relationship" with Richard as a way of neutralising or appropriating Richard's spectre in his own legitimisation efforts. This involved Henry "assert[ing] Richard's benign sponsorship of his own career" and presenting himself as "regarding Richard with the affection one owes to a true father", ending up with a situation in which Henry appears to have promoted Richard as his chosen and "dynastically legitimate" father, secondary to his actual father. This leads to the question of just how much of the evidence attesting to Henry's fondness of Richard and the idea he was a fatherly figure to Henry is, in actuality, the truth.
As I've said, the fact that Henry used these stories to legitimise his own reign doesn't preclude the possibility that they were true, or based around a truth. But it makes it murkier to navigate the reality of their relationship. Most of what we "know" about their relationship is derived from Henry's display of fondness of Richard at the start of his reign. If we read that as as a legitimisation narrative, than very little - possibly nothing at all - is certain about about their relationship and all possible interpretations are valid, even the possibility that there was no positive relationship to speak of.
Now, in the latter scenario, we can say that if Henry had any negative experiences with or negative feelings towards Richard, they were mild enough that idea of presenting Richard as his "spiritual father" and himself as Richard's fond, would-be son was something Henry could personally tolerate. Additionally, as Richard had been dead for 13 years when Henry ascended the throne, Henry's presentation of their relationship had to be plausible enough to people who had known Richard. In other words, he couldn't completely invent a relationship between himself and Richard and expect the people he was hoping to win over to be convinced it was true. Things are a bit different when we get to the mid-to-late 1430s when the VIta et Gesta Henrici Quinti was written, since it was composed three, nearly four, decades on from Richard's death and in the reign of the third Lancastrian king.
This is the extent of what we can historically "know" about Richard and Henry's relationship. Although this reading is focused on what the evidence tells us and in providing a less emotive reading of both Richard and Henry's gestures, it does not tell us the whole story. It is, for example, almost certain that Richard met Henry sometime before the Irish campaign. We know Henry was present at Richard's 1396 marriage to Isabelle of Valois and that he attended Richard's 1397 parliament where his father was promoted to the dukedom of Hereford. Richard may have visited John of Gaunt on his deathbed and, if Henry was then residing in Gaunt's household, Richard and Henry may well have met at this time. There were doubtless other meetings that don't appear in the historical record. What relationship formed from these meetings can only be speculated upon.
Nigel Saul, Anne Curry and T. C. Kniphfer all have considered Henry as "the object of [Richard's] hopes" for Lancaster. Curry and Knipher do not see any conflict between this and Curry's contention that Henry did not reside in Richard's household (Saul's assessment was made before Curry's reassessment of the story of Henry's time in Richard's household). Kniphfer suggests Henry was perhaps the intended to become part of the next generation of Richard's duketti - the new nobility compromised of Richard's favourites. In this scenario, Henry would be a loyal and trustworthy supporter of the king and in exchange be allowed to hold the great Lancastrian estates. It is a speculative, "what if" argument but we must remember that neither Richard nor Henry knew how how 1399 would end and must have imagined different futures for themselves.
I want to turn now to the narrative of Richard as the father Henry wished he had that was outlined in my first paragraph, and how that is handled in historical writing and historical fiction.
This narrative is generally centred on Henry and his feelings towards Richard. Biographers of Richard might note that he treated Henry kindly or well and that he hoped Henry would be a Lancaster loyal to the crown, but rarely do they suggest he felt anything else for Henry, much less that Henry served as a surrogate son for the childless Richard. If Richard is granted a surrogate child, it's in the form of his second wife, Isabelle of Valois, who was younger than Henry and probably spent more time with Richard.
Historical fiction sympathetic to Richard tends to deal with Henry in passing - mentioning he was fond of Richard but giving the reader no reason to suspect the emotion is returned or how Richard inspired this affection. I don't quite understand this tendency, since one would think that Richard's ability to inspire the affection of his enemy's son would only assist in showing the quality of his character. It may be a side effect of the older, now discounted belief that Bolingbroke was a non-entity throughout Richard's reign, appearing as if from nowhere to depose him, meaning his son was also a non-entity. It may also have something to do with the tendency for these stories to depict Richard as an enlightened and cultured pacifist "born in the wrong time", and the authors' inability reconcile their view of Richard with the idea that he could have been fond of the boy who became the "perfect" embodiment of the medieval warrior king and thus the antithesis of their enlightened Richard.
Fiction and non-fiction hostile to Richard usually ignore this narrative and dramatise and exaggerate the risks of Henry's position as a hostage to further vilify Richard or centre Henry's father as a hero or a victim, suggesting that Richard would have killed Henry or dialing up the risks of the "hostage situation". These are not "pro-Henry" narratives by any means, but either pro-Bolingbroke or anti-Richard.
Finally, I want to address the fact that some novels raise the possibility of Richard sexually abusing Henry.
There is no evidence whatsoever for this. Obviously, this isn't the sort of thing we should expect to have evidence of but it needs to be emphasised that this scenario is not derived from anything on the historical record and the responsibility for the promulgation of this narrative lies solely with the author. While some of it may have been inspired by Richard's marriage to Isabelle of Valois, since these novels tend to depict Richard as queer or gay, it seems to be almost entirely derived from the homophobic trope of queer men preying on children. There is nothing in this scenario that reflects the reality of Richard's life (his one suspected lover was older than him) or his relationship with Henry. Instead, it reveals the authors' own homophobia.
* Henry likely wasn't with his younger siblings since the accounts for their expenses make no mention of him. He may have been cared for in the household of Katherine Swynford, dowager Duchess of Lancaster, one of his Beaufort uncles, or his maternal grandmother, Joan de Bohun, Countess of Hereford. Alternatively, he may have been living in his "own" household.
** Even if Henry was in Richard's household, it doesn't necessarily follow that this was because he was a hostage. Boys of his class and age were often fostered in the households of great men and to be fostered in the household of the king would usually be a marker of royal favour. Obviously, his exact circumstances mean that we can't assume this was a "business as usual" arrangement or one that Henry's father and grandparents would have consented to. However, his presence in Richard's household wouldn't automatically mean there was something dastardly going on.
References
The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, trans. David Preest (The Boydell Press 2005)
Helen Castor, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Allen Lane 2024)
Anne Curry, Henry V: From Playboy Prince to Warrior King (Penguin Monarchs 2015)
Anne Curry, "The Making of a Prince: The Finances of ‘the young lord Henry’, 1386–1400", Henry V: New Perspectives ed. Gwilym Dodd (York Medieval Press 2018)
T. C. Kniphfer, "The Last of the Duketti? Richard II, Henry of Monmouth and the House of Lancaster", Fourteenth Century England XII (The Boydell Press 2022)
Katherine J. Lewis, Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England (Routledge 2013)
Ian Mortimer, The Fears of Henry IV : The Life of England's Self-Made King (Vintage 2008)
Nigel Saul, Richard II (The English Monarchs, Yale University Press 1997)
Paul Strohm, "The Trouble with Richard: The Reburial of Richard II and Lancastrian Symbolic Strategy", Speculum, Vol. 71, No. 1 (1996)
Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (Yale University Press 1998)
Kathryn Warner, Richard II: A True King's Fall (Amberley 2017)
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