Ian Mortimer is a prize-winning historian and historical biographer. He is writing a series of biographies retelling the story of late medieval England, the most recent of which is Henry IV. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is married with three children and lives in Devon.

Mark Thwaite: Why did you want to write about Henry IV Ian?

Ian Mortimer: The idea comes from my ambition to write a ‘biographical history’ of medieval England. My plan is to retell the history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries through an integrated series of medieval biographies, one life for each generation. Thus it was inevitable that I would need to focus on an individual through whom to write about the late fourteenth century. I was reluctant to concentrate on Richard II for two reasons. First, he has been the subject of many books already, including an excellent academic study by Nigel Saul. More important, however, was his suitability as a subject. My approach is to try to understand the individual, rather than to judge him. By treating a man sympathetically – through looking at his problems from his point of view – you can work out far more reliably why he did what he did. I would have found it very difficult to sympathise with someone so insecure, spoilt and selfish as Richard II.

My first thought was to write about Henry’s father, John of Gaunt. But then I realised that that would be missing the point. The real ‘story’ of 1377-1400 is this struggle between a tyrannical boy-king and his hated heir-apparent, Henry. The whole relationship raised so many questions, about our cultural appreciation of the past when filtered through Shakespeare, and about political loyalty before and after 1399. As I said in the book, it is perhaps the ultimate political question: ‘to whom does one owe the greater loyalty: those superiors whom one serves or those dependants for whom one is responsible?’ On top of all that, when I realised that there are more studies of John of Gaunt than Henry – the least-biographied crowned king of England – I knew I would be a fool to miss this opportunity to make Henry the subject of my third book.

MT: How long did it take you to write your book?

IM: I began by doing two pieces of research, leading to two academic articles cited in the book. One was to establish when he was born. The other on the Lancastrian claim to the throne. Including these, a total of eighteen months.

MT: Despite being the subject of two Shakespeare plays, Henry IV is something of a forgotten king -- why is this?

IM: Shakespeare himself is the reason! Henry is in the title of two plays, and features as Bolingbroke in a third, but he is never really the ‘subject’. The subject of Richard II is the king. The subject of Henry IV Part One is the Percy rebellion, and Hotspur in particular. In Henry IV Part Two attention is mainly centred on Prince Hal. Henry IV himself is largely ignored.

I find this fascinating. Ask anyone who has a smattering of English history between their ears ‘who is The Usurper King’ and always the answer is Henry IV. Not John (who can be said to have ‘usurped’ the throne of his nephew and arguably his niece). Not Edward IV (who ousted Henry VI). Not Richard III (who ousted his nephews). Not even Henry VII (whose only claim to royal blood was through an illegitimate son barred from passing on a claim to the throne). It is Henry IV who is seen as the usurper. And Shakespeare is largely to blame.

The question of why Shakespeare portrayed him in this way is even more interesting. In Shakespeare’s time you simply could not refer to Henry in a positive way. Politically, his very name was dangerous. Henry was the man who removed an anointed king from the throne and took his place – and survived. In Tudor times he was the proof that, however mighty and divinely appointed the king/queen might feel, a treasonable plot to overthrow him or her would not necessarily incur the wrath of God. Henry IV represented a serious threat to all God-fearing monarchs. A contemporary of Shakespeare’s John Hall was locked up in the Tower on Queen Elizabeth’s orders simply for daring to write a book about Henry! Thus, although the story of Henry as the wronged man would have led to a fantastic Shakespearean plot, and the play Richard II rewritten as Henry IV Part One (of three parts) would no doubt have had some terrifically powerful writing, it was never going to happen. Henry always had to be portrayed as the ‘bad guy’, and Richard as the unfortunate. Sadly for Henry, his place in History was assigned to him by Shakespeare.

That is largely why he is forgotten. Everyone sympathises with poor little Richard II. Who lost his throne to that nasty thug Bolingbroke. And has some great speeches. However, look again at the speech of the duchess of Gloucester – the one which begins ‘Finds brotherhood in you no sharper spur?’ in Richard II. If you read it carefully, you can see that Shakespeare clearly knew what he was doing. He puts the facts of the matter into this speech – by a woman who is near-mad with grief, so her voice is a safe one to express such things – and there he points out that Gaunt stood by Richard II, loyally, even though the young king had just murdered his own uncle (Gaunt’s brother). I suspect that Shakespeare felt such misplaced loyalty in a young king was a bad policy. But he could not actually say so. Interestingly, after the duchess’s speech is over, Shakespeare has Gaunt lay the blame for his failure to act on religion, on God. This religious loyalty to the monarch, expressed by Gaunt, was the reason why Shakespeare did what he did, and made Richard the victim of the events of 1399, rather than showing Henry avenging the wrongs he had suffered at Richard’s hands since 1385.

The trouble is, once someone has a historical reputation, they tend to have it forever. Richard III will always be pictured as a hunchback and associated with the murder of the Princes in the Tower. Edward II will forever be associated with a red-hot poker. Harold II will forever have an arrow sticking out of his eye, shot by the man or woman who ‘stitched him up’ in the Bayeux Tapestry. And Henry will always be ‘the Usurper King’.

MT: Your book is titled the The Fears of Henry IV -- what, principally, was he afraid of?

IM: Firstly, from 1377-1399, he was scared of Richard II. Richard killed his uncle, twice or three times attempted to murder Henry’s father (John of Gaunt), and may once have attempted to assassinate Henry. Richard threw Henry into exile without cause. Two days after Gaunt’s funeral, Richard made Henry’s banishment permanent and confiscated all of his titles and lands (although he had previously promised him he could inherit them, when his father died). Thus Henry’s sons were disinherited as well as himself, and his family retainers left without a lord and without protection. Richard declared him a traitor while he was in exile in France, and stopped him marrying the daughter of a French duke. He also ripped up the settlement by which Henry was heir to the throne and probably replaced it with his own, certainly adopting Edward of York as his ‘brother’ and presumed eventual heir.

Secondly, from January 1400, he was scared of people trying to kill him. Because Henry took the throne in a highly dubious manner, he was always prone to accusations of usurpation. It could therefore be said that he had opened the way for others to try and usurp the throne back, on Richard’s behalf. Or on behalf of the Mortimers. There were many attempts to kill or dethrone him – probably about ten – over his reign of just thirteen years. Two assasination attempts in 1400, plus Glendower’s rising in Wales that year, the Friars’ conspiracy in 1402, the Percy rebellion in 1403, the countess of Oxford’s plot in 1404, the seizure of the Mortimer heirs in 1405, Archbishop Scrope’s revolt in 1405, Lord Northumberland’s last stand in 1408, and calls for his abdication towards the end of this life. Plus several other minor and putative ones. Has any other British political leader coped with so many attempts to remove him?

Thirdly, from 1405 (if not before), illness was a ‘fear’. Soon after Henry killed the archbishop of York in that year, he was struck down by an illness – posibly the same illness which had killed the Black Prince. He was often sick over the period 1406-13, and died three weeks short of his forty-sixth birthday.

Fourthly, political opposition. Henry allowed parliament freedom to express itself in a way which Richard never did. He was compromised by his election by parliament. As parliament had confirmed him, some people felt parliament could unelect him. He was also compromised by his political toleration. Whereas Richard had sentenced to death one MP who requested that royal spending be reduced, Henry tolerated such opinions being openly voiced at every parliament. Sometimes the political heat was overwhelming, especially in the Long Parliament of 1406.

MT: What made him a self-made monarch?

IM: In 1376, Edward III had settled the throne on the Lancastrians, in the event of Richard II dying without an heir. Thus Henry grew up believing he was second-in-line to the throne (as Richard never had any children). In the parliament of 1386 Richard II tried to change this, announcing that the Mortimers were next-in-line. Henry forced Richard to change his mind about the Mortimers in 1387. But Richard never acknowledged Henry as his heir. Instead he preferred the house of York and in 1399 he seems to have entailed the throne on his uncle, the duke of York. So when Henry returned at the head of an army in 1399 and decided to claim the throne, he found he was officially no longer the heir. However, the ageing duke had no wish to claim the throne and start a war. Henry thus had to find a way of making himself a legitimate heir when he was not one. He did this through laying aside all the settlements of the throne since 1290, including that of 1376, so he could inherit, and additionally by claiming that he was ‘elected’ in parliament in preference to the house of York.

That was my prime reason for using the term ‘self-made’. I wanted to get away from the ‘usurper’ tag. It’s not as simple as usurpation. ‘Self-made’ was a way of drawing attention to the fact that he was himself the main agent in his becoming king. Really he was king by legal wrangling, parliamentary confirmation, popular acclaim in 1399 and self-promotion since youth.

MT: As you researched your book, did you come to like/admire Henry or to dislike him?

IM: Guess... How could I not grow to like a man who was trilingual, literate, who read history, was the greatest jousting champion the royal family ever produced, travelled further than any other English monarch before the twentieth century, who was politically tolerant (for the middle ages) and who was faithful and dutiful to both his wives. Who used cotton for toilet paper, who had the first known chamber stool and perhaps the first portable clock, who was a ‘sparkling’ musician, and designed his own cannon. As for his personal charm, one young Italian princess, when asked for her views on her intended marriage, declared that if she could be sure of marrying Henry, she should wait for him for as long as necessary, even if she should die three days after the wedding. However, she added in the same letter, as she could not be sure, she would say yes to her other, inferior suitor. I bet he was chuffed.

But most of all I admire him for his courage, in returning to England in 1399 to get rid of Richard. Many more people would have suffered and died if Henry had not put a stop to Richard’s tyranny.

MT: In what ways did you find him different from Edward III, who you called the perfect king?

IM: Quite a lot of people have assumed that because I called my book The Perfect King, that that was my verdict on the man himself. But, as I point out in the introduction to that book, ‘the perfect king’ is not what Edward was, it was what he aspired to be. He wanted to be the king who made good laws, who fought his enemy on their soil (keeping his kingdom safe), and won all his battles. He aimed to be ‘like a lion to his enemies, like a sheep to his people’. Actually he did not always meet his own high standards, having to withdraw from campaigns on a few occasions, and ending up a reclusive figure, old and unloved. He managed to get himself in very deep debts, failed to go on crusade, he had to connive at his father’s fake death and continued survival, he did not prevent his uncle’s execution for trying to rescue the secretly imprisoned Edward II – so there are many reasons why he was not a ‘perfect king’. But he managed to create a legend of himself; for three hundred years he was considered among the greatest kings the world had ever known. It was largely Victorian conceit, religion and pomposity which knocked him off that pedestal.

Henry IV (Edward III’s grandson) was altogether more serious, more intellectual, and more beset by political problems. Edward gathered men together for the purpose of creating ‘nationalism’ through war. Henry was less easy-going, less gregarious, and unable to inspire his men with that same sense of dashing nationalist vigour (you have to lay aside the modern moral aspects of military nationalism to understand these men). Henry was not a bad battlefield fighter, and as a solo tournament jouster he would probably have sent Edward III flying, but he lacked Edward’s broader strategic vision. And culturally he was too purist. Where Edward III created a court of heroes enjoying themselves with wine, women (married to other men, usually), jousting and song, Henry IV preferred the company of well-educated clerics and fastidiously serious political men.

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing? Which do you prefer, the research or the actual writing itself?

IM: Goodness gracious! Does anyone still write non-fiction in longhand? I have a friend who is a dramatist, who tells me that writing with a keyboard forces people to think with another, less poetic and more mechanical part of the brain, so that one simply must write in hand if one is an artist. I’m not sure if I agree. (I reckon it’s really so he can sell his manuscripts to an American institution for a fortune…)

How long has longhand got? Ten years? Twenty? I’m sure than within thirty years the debate will be whether it is still necessary to teach children how to write by hand. And I’m equally sure that, in a hundred years, very few children will be able to write their names fluently with a pen. Then historians in two thousand years’ time will find a higher rate of ‘signature literacy’ (the ability to sign your name) in the 16th century than in the 22nd century!

MT: What do you do when you are not writing or researching?

IM: There’s quite a lot more to the process of creating a biographical portrait which is not really covered by those two activities. And I do a fair bit of that. Thinking, or imagining, or understanding. Attempting to understand, I should say. People tend to think of ‘research’ as sitting down and noting from a book or document, or visiting a particular location. However, for a medieval biography, the ‘research process’ involves quite a lot of plain creative thinking. I’m not really functioning at my most efficient unless it is going on twenty-four hours a day. Literally. When writing The Perfect King often I would realise something in my sleep, in the middle of the night, and wake myself up to write it down. I’m not alone in this; I’ve met other historians and novelists who do it too, completely consumed by the thinking process. Is that writing or reading? Both? Neither? Or something different?

Taking the biographical approach to medieval history means there are many such questions which need to be resolved. Consider the death of Richard II in 1400: was he murdered by his cousin, Henry? That’s a big question in a biography of Henry, and so the traditional answer that we cannot be certain, that he could have died of natural causes (as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states) just has to be put to the test. It so happens that we can be certain in this case. Contemporary minutes (in the British Library) of the royal council meeting which took place between 3rd and 8th February 1400 reveal that the council did not know whether Richard II was alive or dead. But the French knew, as revealed by three royal letters dated 29 January. Unless it is a complete coincidence that the French invented the story at exactly the same time as Richard II, held secretly, was starving himself to death, then this amounts to the French having prior knowledge of Richard’s death. In which case it is hardly reasonable to suggest it could have been natural, or suicide. No doubt about it: Richard was murdered. But sometimes you need to do a lot of thinking before you realise a solution to a problem like this is near at hand.

I suppose what I am saying here is that, when not writing or researching, I think through methodologically complex historical problems. On walks over Dartmoor, where I live. Or when driving. Or even when sleeping. I get away from history when playing tennis, playing music (guitar) or cooking.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

IM: No, except in one respect. My ‘ideal’ reader is not yet born, or at least under ten years of age at the moment. I try to think of how my books are going to be thought of in forty or fifty years’ time. It strikes me that, if a book has fifteen thousand readers in its first year, thirty thousand in its second year (after the paperback comes out), twenty thousand in its third, and averages just five thousand per year after that, the sixty-five thousand readers in the first three years are going to be outnumbered (and overshadowed knowledge-wise) by the 185,000 coming to the book in years 4-40. Hence the key is to keep the book in print and the sales at a steady rate in the long-term (i.e. decades).

How do I try to do that? I don’t think anyone can stop non-fiction being outdated. Rapidly. But I do think you can make sure the books continue to have relevance. DON’T put in lines like ‘Edward III, great-great (etcetra) grandfather of our curent queen’, or ‘six shillings (about three hundred pounds in today’s currency)’. Those date a book so very quickly. More importantly, on a deeper level, you can make sure a book continues to have currency by tackling the fundamental issues of a man’s life in a sophisticated way. I don’t believe anyone will be able seriously to address the question of whether Roger Mortimer and Henry IV were murderers or not without using my books. Had I said ‘we don’t really know’ well, no one need cite that in forty years’ time. Similarly, although the leading expert on Edward III, Professor Mark Ormrod, is writing a Yale University Press study of the king – which will be a must-have book – I very much doubt that it will supplant my The Perfect King. In my book I describe Edward’s battles in detail, and with drama; it goes far further than any academic could be seen to dare in reading the king’s personality in the accounts. Thus by concentrating on the spirited writing, invigorating readings of the character and his age, and literary values (as well as original research), you can create a book which inspires people and has lasting value, even if a worthy professor will later produce a tome which supersedes your own work in terms of research and analysis.

For this reason, I suspect that writing only for today’s audience, is the surest way to kill a literary career. Writers are like politicians in that they have the ability to bang the final nail in their own coffin. It’s amazing how often they do so, by thinking only of the short-term.

MT: What are you working on now?

IM: Ah! I’m glad you asked me that question. I’m just finishing off the eleventh and final chapter of a book called The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century. To say this is a radically different approach to the past is an understatement and a half! As I put it on my website: ‘Imagine you could get into a time machine and travel back to the fourteenth century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? Should you go to a castle or a monastic guesthouse? And what are you going to eat? What sort of food are you going to be offered by a peasant or a monk or a lord?

The advantages are many and varied. For a start, it’s challenging and exciting. Secondly, you start to ask questions which normal history books don’t mention. How do you greet someone in the street in medieval England? Textbooks won’t mention that. They’ll tell you more than you’d like to know about indices of per capita income in relation to population fluctuations over the fourteenth century, but nothing about what people wiped their bottoms with. Or how people coped with lice. So, thirdly, why are some historical facts worth discussing at seemingly endless length, and others dismissed without mention? The questions this approach raises for the ‘what is history?’ debate are too many to be listed here. Are history and education synonymous? Can we really imagine past centuries in a meaningful way?

I’ll be handing over the finished text to my editor by the end of November 2007. After that the emphasis of my thinking will shift to creating the fourth volume in my biographical sequence, entitled 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory, a month-by-month account of the king’s ups and downs in that extraordinary year. I see some late nights ahead…

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

IM: I don’t have one. My desert-island book would probably be Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. But desert-island circumstances are hardly representative of normality.

With regard to contemporary history, again, I don’t have a favourite. The historical writing I most admired as a seventeen-year-old was Steven Runciman’s three-volume History of the Crusades. The novel that most inspired me (at fifteen) was James Clavell’s Shogun. I recall thinking at university that if one could take the best of both – the scholarship and effortless style of Runciman, the dramatic skills of Clavell, combined with his uncanny trick of teaching foreign words as part of the story-telling – one could develop a perfect form of writing history. Enjoyable, accurate, informative, and inspirational. Interesting social details and intriguing politics. Drama and accuracy. I never found such a form of literature, however. I have never read a historical book about a character (or series of characters) which I personally find satisfying. I pick up ideas from all sorts of places – especially social history books like Peter Laslett’s The World we Have Lost, and 20th century poetry, including the translated prose works of Jean Genet (whose books I find so inspiring I have to put them down after reading about two pages and go and write something myself). And I have often praised good history books in reviews. But I have never found a single history book which to my mind deserves to be taken to my desert island. I find original documents and my own imagination more revealing.

Away from history, at school my hero was Lord Byron, but to be honest, I have never read all of Childe Harold or Don Juan. Chaucer and Shakespeare go without saying, but I could not sit down now and read an entire work for pleasure. In fact that goes for pretty much all literature at the moment. The only books I’ve read from cover to cover in the last ten years are those I’ve had to review. Plus three or four novels and the books I read to my children at bedtime.

That might make me sound somewhat unbookish. But it’s the truth. When you spend twelve or thirteen hours a day in a room surrounded by three or four thousand books, and almost no conversation, the last thing you want to do when you leave that room is… pick up a book!

Having said all that, I was once the archivist at Exeter University Library. I have some treasured memories of putting together their literary collections. One day I opened a bundle, recently received, and started to read ‘They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the Old Days.’ So the first lines of Du Maurier’s original MS of My Cousin Rachel became the first words of hers I ever read. To ‘discover’ them like that was special. I could say the same for the poetry of a little-known young poet, James Farrar, who was killed in the last World War. His fair-copy notebook is exquisite and touching. My most cherished literary archive memory was spending a month or two reconstructing the MS which had defeated so many people before me. It was Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter. He claimed in a letter to the Librarian in the 1960s to have rewritten it eighteen times, so the MS was ‘three million words’ long. That was a bit of an exaggeration – he reused and rejigged so much of it – but it took an age to sort out all the extant pages. And I grew to love it in the course of sorting those pages, whether the bit I was reading was entitled ‘Tarque the Otter’, ‘Lutra that Otter’, ‘Tarka’ or just ‘The Otter Saga’.

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

IM: We are all aspiring writers! If you stop ‘aspiring’ after you’ve had a few books published, then you’ve set yourself up for long-term failure. Not to mention a tedious career. On that basis, my advice would be the same to anyone who wants to put something across to the public, whether they’re published or not. Just get on and do it! As Ron Tamplin, a poet and lecturer in English literature, told me in 1987: ‘being a writer is easy. You just keep doing it until something forces you to stop’. What keeps me going? Wanting to say so many things. About time itself, and about our relationship with the yet-to-be-born, which itself implies a relationship with the long-since-dead. About how we can recover some knowledge about the past from old manuscripts, or from old bones, or old castles. About how even ghost stories can have meaning. So, yes, if you’ve got something to say, say it, and keep saying it until something forces you to stop. But then all true writers know that without having to be told.

MT: Anything else you would like to say?

IM: Each book of mine tends to yield a particular question at literature festivals and similar events. For The Greatest Traitor, people asked me: ‘are you descended from Sir Roger Mortimer?’ The answer is ‘no more than you are’. The male line of Mortimers died out in the fifteenth century. My Mortimer ancestry lies in South Devon, back to the seventeenth century at least. But we are probably all are descended from Roger Mortimer as he had eight daughters, one of whom had seventeen children. He is, like Edward III, very probably a common ancestor of the English people by now. For The Perfect King, people went on about the death of Edward II. Some people simply cannot accept that you can use information-based methodologies to show that something which is supposed to happen six hundred years ago never took place. This is quite strange: people pay millions of pounds in tax to fund academic history departments up and down the country, and think that those departments cannot work out what happened in the past! I set out my argument in 2005 in the leading peer-reviewed journal, The English Historical Review, published by Oxford University Press; there is a synopsis in the back of The Perfect King. But the main thing is to understand the difference between ‘evidence’ and ‘information’. Once you can do that, then you can start to work out what did and what did not happen in the past.

The most interesting question I have been asked is in conection with The Fears of Henry IV. ‘Given what you say about Shakespeare, Dr Mortimer, do you think that Shakespeare was a good or a bad historian?’ I love that one. If you are trying to establish the facts of a narrative, Shakespeare is rubbish. It goes without saying. He was not an antiquary, far less a historian. However, facts are only the bones of the matter. If you are considering the past in order to understand the human character, you will have a far better idea of Richard II and Henry IV by reading Shakespeare than you will from reading JL Kirby’s Henry IV of England. And when you think about it, English kings prior to 1397 (the starting point of Shakespeare’s Richard II) are vague shadows in the national consciousness by comparison with the characters of the Shakespeare histories. Has the man in the street heard of John of Gaunt, ‘time-honoured Lancaster’? You bet he has. From Shakespeare. Does he know about Gaunt’s father-in-law, the incredible Henry of Grosmont, a more remarkable man in almost every way? No. That is the power of Shakespeare the historian.

I always end my response to that question in the same way. Imagine someone writing about your life in six hundred years time. Would you like that writer to be whoever is a university lecturer? Or Shakespeare?

If readers want to know more about my books, there’s a piece about writing each of them on my website – ianmortimer.com