Laura Ashe

Laura Ashe FRHistS is a British historian of English medieval literature, history and culture.

Quotes

Richard II: A Brittle Glory (2016)

All quotes are from the first edition hardcover in the Penguin Monarchs series, ISBN 978-0-141-97989-2

• Richard’s difficulties were many, but the essence of his personal feelings seems to have lain in the confluence of these two great ideas – the divinity of kingship and the perfection of peace – because for Richard, ‘peace’ in the sense that he valued it meant the complete obedience of every subject to the will of the king.
  • Prologue (p. x)

• This is no Henry VIII to command obedience by sheer force of personality; rather, Richard’s image enacts kingship itself, around a curious void. As an individual, he is absent from the portrait; as king, he is presented for our veneration.
  • Prologue (p. xi)

• Once again, the viewer is made to recognize the sheer glory of kingship, its otherworldly status, and Richard’s distance from his subjects. This majesty is revealed by the actual events of Richard’s life and death to have been empty at its heart.
  • Prologue (p. xi)

• The idea of the court sustained Richard, and he sustained it, at vast expense. He surrounded himself with courtiers who stood to gain from his largesse, and who therefore flattered and praised him as he wished. He experienced his court – his day-to-day life of hunting, or feasting, or games – as the place where the king’s will was enacted without question, and he believed that this was as it should be. But beyond his court circle all was very different, in ways which Richard seems not to have understood.
  • Chapter 1, “Parliament” (p. 11)

• Richard understood his own reign through the distorting lens of the court he made for himself; he could not understand why the regality he regarded as his right was denied to him on the broader stage.
  • Chapter 1, “Parliament” (p. 12)

• Richard’s will was sovereign, and yet it could not be trusted not to change. He had demonstrated that he would erase history, change the statutes of the realm, rather than remit his desires.
  • Chapter 1, “Parliament” (p. 27)

• The court was by definition in place of extreme instability, of faction and favourites, in which men could rise and fall as they pleased or displeased of the king. For the nation to function at large, this could not be the case. The noble men of the realm needed the security of their patrimony, their status and their rights; for them to support the king they needed to know that he would support the social structure which maintained them all. Richard had demonstrated, fatally, that everything was personal to him.
  • Chapter 1, “Parliament” (p. 28)

• Here and throughout the reign, the tendency was to focus criticism on particular individuals charged with corruption, rather than to address the structures which made such corruption endemic.
  • Chapter 2, “Battlefield” (p. 36)

• The long story of the medieval cult of chivalry, from its emergence in the twelfth century to its belated glories in the court of the young Henry VIII, is punctuated by the ongoing conflict between knighthood’s idealistic claims to virtue and divine favour, and the Church’s condemnation of all chivalric values as empty and worthless.
  • Chapter 2, “Battlefield” (p. 37)

• This kind of moral analysis is characteristic of medieval thought: the aim is to condemn where condemnation is due, but to salvage from the criticism the ideals which animate and support society.
  • Chapter 2, “Battlefield” (p. 38)

• The government’s reassertion of control over England in the aftermath demonstrated a merciless insistence on the social structure, which tied all into the hierarchy, supporting the king at the top. It was part of Richard’s failure that he did not understand, or would not accept, his throne’s dependence on the stability of that structure.
  • Chapter 2, “Battlefield” (p. 47)

• It took a particular genius and a great deal of luck to make war pay, and Richard had neither.
  • Chapter 2, “Battlefield” (p. 55)

• The Londoners’ faithful love and their money were both important to Richard; unfortunately he sought the latter at the expense of the former, while imagining them to be the same thing.
  • Chapter 3, “City” (p. 69)

• Being thought to be untrustworthy is no better – indeed in political terms much worse – than actually being untrustworthy.
  • Chapter 5, “Epilogue” (p. 103)

• As we approach him through contemporary records and chronicles, any sense of the real man beneath the image recedes, never to be caught. Chroniclers tell us what they think he said or did, or that bias or rumour believed he had done or said – and even then they give us a Richard who baffled those around him. But the idea of Richard II is as real an object of historical study as the man himself. When it comes to trying to understand the fate of a king, the idea of him may be the only real object of study there is.
  • Chapter 5, “Epilogue” (p. 103)