28 quotes
This was the most damaging aspect of Richard’s rule. With a mercurial, unstable and sometimes vicious king, the entire top rank of society was made to feel insecure. It was difficult to know whom to trust.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-made King (2007)
By 1390 the Teutonic Knights were hardly crusaders at all; they were more like a militant Christian state in their own right, making alliances with their neighbors and fighting enemies of various faiths, including fellow Christians.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-made King (2007)
The bureaucracy which had stopped functioning since 9 August [1399] started slowly to regain its usual efficiency. The civil servants knew who and where their king was, and they knew in whom sovereign power lay. That these two facts were not embodied in the same man was not essential for them to do their work.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-made King (2007)
Historians have argued for many years over whether Richard went mad in 1397. In the mid-twentieth century it was thought that he had indeed lost his mind, and the death of Queen Anne was identified as one of the catalysts. But really this is a modern myth: there is no evidence of madness in the king, just an ever-increasing tendency to rule his subjects through the medium of terror.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-made King (2007)
Modern scholars now see Richard as essentially narcissistic, convinced of his own perfection, and yet deeply insecure. We might elaborate on this slightly and see that he was exceptionally self-conscious: so much so that his own identity, royal percentage, ideas, rivalries and feelings formed not only the core but the limit of his entire world.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-made King (2007)
It is not surprising that Lucia Visconti fell for him [Henry IV]. Considering his crusading, his pilgrimage and his jousting, it is not going too far to say that he had made himself into an exemplary knight, combining the spiritual and chivalric values of his age more completely perhaps than any other Englishman of the late fourteenth century.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-made King (2007)
The original reasons to doubt Richard’s fitness to rule – his unwise grants of lordships and lucrative offices, his lack of military leadership in the face of encroaching enemies and his lack of judgement in political and diplomatic affairs – all remained valid. He continued to advance his favourites and friends without regard for lordly or public opinion.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-made King (2007)
In the fifteenth century it was Henry’s grandfather, Edward III, who was regarded as the model for greatness: a man who took the war to France and Scotland and won, and who presided over peace at home for half a century. Henry IV was not deemed ‘great’ by his contemporaries for the simple reason that he failed to live up to this example.
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-made King (2007)