A rich and vivid history of the Plantagenet cousins and rivals for the English throne

‘Richard II tried first being a Good King and then a Bad King without enjoying either very much. Then being told he was unbalanced, he got off the throne whereupon his cousin Lancaster (spelt Bolingbroke) quickly mounted the throne and said he was Henry IV, Part 1.” This, anyway, is how it goes in 1066 and All That, the classic parody of garbled schoolroom rote-learning. And while Helen Castor, a historian of great nuance and meticulous scholarship, would not put it quite so baldly, this remains pretty much the through-line of her luminous 600-page study of the Plantagenet cousins who between them generated the plots for three of Shakespeare’s history plays.

The Hart of Castor’s title is Richard II, who came to the throne at the age of 10 in 1377 and never stood a chance. His early accession was a consequence of his father’s death the previous year. Edward, the Black Prince, had led England to its first big win in the hundred years war at the Battle of Crécy, after which France gave up a third of itself to England. And now in his magnificent place came this thin-skinned, spoilt, effeminate boy. Harts – male deers – are generally depicted in heraldry as beefy, bulky, russety animals with a forest of antlers. But Richard chose a white hart as his personal emblem instead and commissioned artwork, which features on Castor’s cover, showing a pale animal, as slender as a greyhound, tethered to the ground by a heavy golden chain.