Helen Castor: evaluation

Transcript context

…Where do you stand on those disagreements? I think they’re enormously interesting questions. The first one, could England have held onto much more of France than, in the end, it did? Because by 1453, all England had left was Calais. England lost first the reconquest that Henry V had achieved, and then it also lost Aquitaine that had been English for 300 years. Devastating loss in all sorts of ways, not least because England got its wine from Bordeaux. What are you going to do for wine if you lose your link with southwestern France? I think things could have looked very different. If Henry V hadn’t died in 1422 very unexpectedly — he got dysentery on campaign; he died very young; he was only 35 — the course of the war thereafter could have been very different. Essentially, the problem was that the people who took over from him — his brothers, particularly his brother, John, Duke of Bedford, who was an extraordinarily able man — did not have the authority to vary the terms that Henry V had agreed. They didn’t have the authority to retreat from the maximalist position that Henry V had set up, that he was king of France as well as king of England. When Henry V’s son grew up — he was only nine months old when he became king — when he grew up, he was a complete nonentity, so he, too, couldn’t vary those terms. But if there had been a competent king, competent in an ideal world, militarily and diplomatically, he could — like Edward III before him — perhaps have negotiated a treaty whereby England held on to a lot of what they had in return for giving up the claim to the crown of France. As it was, England was left with the claim to the crown of France that the monarchs of England didn’t give up till 1801 but with almost none of the territory. Calais, of course, was then lost in the 16th century. I do think that could have been different. In terms of the development of the English state, I don’t see a huge gulf between what is described as a war state and a law state. I think they went hand in hand. I think kings who had to deal with their subjects in terms of the needs of defense, including aggressive defense, also understood that they needed to deal with their subjects in terms of effective government at home, the imposition of law, and the provision of justice. Edward III and Henry IV both showed how that could be done and, in fact, that the two went hand in hand. In the broader arc of English state building and its history, which, of course, stretches over centuries, do Richard II and Henry IV even matter? Both reigns are truncated. Are they just blips on the screen? Or how should we think about how they might have mattered?…

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