Two contrasting occupants of this royal throne of kings
In my lusty prime I used to write 1,000-page books on big subjects. No more. In old age my books are shorter. All the same, I love leisurely, multi-volume histories, and possess many sets. I relish, for instance, the big Cambridge histories, Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern; the grand OUP series on Oxford University — many fat volumes — and the slender ones the CUP has done for Cambridge: only four, but tasty. For England, I was brought up on and went through college and beyond on the old OUP 15 volumes, one or two of them real masterpieces. I still have a complete set and use them a lot. But a new series is slowly adding to or replacing them, and I intend to get all those too. Indeed I not only possess but have read K.T. Hoppen’s The Mid-Victorian Generation, full of useful facts and statistics. Did you know, for instance, that the second Earl of Ripon (his father, formerly ‘Prosperity’ Robinson, was the only prime minister never to meet parliament, and was distrusted by Disraeli as ‘a transient and embarrassed phantom’ and by George IV, who disliked his habit of bursting into tears, as ‘a blubbing idiot’) in the period 1867–1900, covering by no means all his sporting life, killed 142,343 pheasants, 97,759 partridges, 56,460 grouse, 6,738 assorted other fowl, 29,858 rabbits, 27,686 hares, 9,175 ‘various’ (including keepers?), 568 deer, 2 rhinos, 11 tigers, 12 buffalo, 19 sambucks and 97 wild boar? He ‘accounted for’ over 10,000 animals a year.
Paul Langford’s volume on Georgian England, 1727–83, A Polite and Commercial People, I own but have not yet read, and look forward to doing so, to see how far he undoes the mischief caused by the Namierites. (‘Deep waters here, eh Watson?’) But I have just emerged from a deep perusal of Gerald Harriss’s 700-page account of the century 1360–1461, Shaping the Nation. This is a grand read: comprehensive, authoritative and elegant, backed by immense learning and thorough familiarity with all the sources, but with a lot of deep thought about how states were governed and how people lived in those tantalisingly distant times. Harriss really lives in mediaeval England, just as old Leslie Rowse lived in Elizabethan times (‘I know most of the court personally, ha ha’) and Frank Stenton lived in Wessex and Mercia (‘I must be off to the Moot!’). I am particularly interested in Harriss’s book because he was by far the ablest historian of my year at Oxford, and this is his magnum opus, the mellow fruit of a lifetime.
Writing a general account of a century mainly for the use of students but with the hope of capturing a wider public is dauntingly difficult. Harriss has rightly anchored his book in the institution of monarchy, which was still all-important then, and the skills and personalities of the kings on which depended to a great extent the success of the nation and the wellbeing of its people. Though Harriss never makes the mistake of submerging the institutional picture in the biographical (or vice versa), what does emerge from his volume is the sharp contrast between a king who lacked the necessary qualities, Richard II, and one who had them in abundance, Henry V. Richard emerges as spoilt, vain, assertive, a pseudo-intellectual with a flashy interest in ideas not grounded in any real learning indeed an ideologist, as Harriss says, who tried to impose a theory of kingship without first acquiring the martial reputation and abilities which might have made it possible. He did not lead from the front in battle, preferring to preside over tournaments, and there were indeed doubts over his masculinity. He failed to produce an heir, for reasons Harriss says we can only speculate about, and seems to have been not much interested in the business since, after his first wife died, he espoused a second who was only six. Richard was show, not reality, and he had no judgment; given his lack of experience in campaigning, it was insane to throw all his credit, cash and power into an Irish campaign which did for him, and made him easy meat for Bolingbroke.
Shakespeare, it seems to me, got Richard absolutely right, and Richard II is a splendid series of shows and tableaux, much talk (often magnificent) and little action. By contrast, Henry V is a superb action play. It is true that in his two Henry IVs Shakespeare greatly exaggerates Prince Hal’s misspent youth. Harriss shows that he had a thorough training as a teenager in the arts of warfare and administration, being virtually put in charge of Wales, and that he was already taking over rule of the entire kingdom in a business-like and decisive way long before his guilt-racked and inhibited father died. But then Shakespeare was writing plays, not, like Harriss, sober and penetrating history. His Henry was much more a continuum, the Prince growing naturally into the magisterial King.
The Henry V Harriss presents is in many ways the model mediaeval King of England, a man who took all the strong cards his greatgrandfather Edward III had held in his sinewy hands, and added to them. He managed church and nobility, gentry, court, council and parliament with masterly skill, holding all in balance, and making himself simultaneously loved, admired and greatly feared. His handling of finance was as successful as his military campaigns. Harriss shows how strategic mistakes almost brought him to disaster in France, but how his tactics at Agincourt, resting on a cool head and a valiant heart — he knew just how to talk to soldiers, especially in a tight spot — turned near-failure into brilliant success. And, unlike his great-grandfather, he knew how to turn victory in battle into a genuine conquest. All he lacked was longevity and, lacking that, all was lost in the end.
Yet, as Harriss shows, Henry V left a personal legacy in the English language. Right from the start of his reign Henry pushed the use of English in court and administration. In letter-writing, his influence was formative. His personal instructions to subordinates were direct, terse, concrete and unambiguous. His public letters to the citizens of London, telling how his campaigns were going, are brilliant exercises in propaganda. Henry showed publicly and privately how marvellously English was suited to this new art form. It is Harriss’s argument that ‘English letter-writing thus acquired form, precision and directness ... and became the accustomed form of communication among the political class for personal, business and political matters.’ The practice spread among the gentry and into the middle class, and thus the Pastons, Armburghs, Stonors and Plumptons give us a lively picture of their age, producing a new form of literature which lasted well into the 20th century, when it was killed by the telephone. Fascinating to think that Henry V, our most admired sovereign, our greatest royal general, who rivalled even Nelson as national hero-in-chief, was also a master of letters.
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