
The Eagle and the Hart
The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV
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Narrated by:
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Helen Castor
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By:
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Helen Castor
About this listen
From an acclaimed historian and author comes an epic history: the dual biography of Richard II and Henry IV, two cousins whose lives played out in extraordinary parallel, until Henry deposed the tyrant Richard and declared himself King of England.
Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, cousins born just three months apart, were ten years old when Richard became king of England. They were thirty-two when Henry deposed him and became king in his place. Now, the story behind one of the strangest and most fateful events in English history (and the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most celebrated history plays) is brought to vivid life by the acclaimed author of Blood and Roses, Helen Castor.
Richard had birthright on his side, and a profound belief in his own God-given majesty. But beyond that, he lacked all qualities of leadership. A narcissist who did not understand or accept the principles that underpinned his rule, he was neither a warrior defending his kingdom, nor a lawgiver whose justice protected his people. Instead, he declared that “his laws were in his own mouth,” and acted accordingly. He sought to define as treason any resistance to his will and recruited a private army loyal to himself rather than the realm—and he intended to destroy those who tried to restrain him.
Henry was everything Richard was not: a leader who inspired both loyalty and friendship, a soldier and a chivalric hero, dutiful, responsible, principled. After years of tension and conflict, Richard banished him and seized his vast inheritance. Richard had been crowned a king but he had become a tyrant, and as a tyrant—ruling by arbitrary will rather than established law—he was deposed by his cousin Henry, the only possible candidate to take his place.
Henry was welcomed as a liberator, a champion of the people against his predecessor’s paranoid despotism. But within months he too was facing rebellion. Men knew that a deposer could in turn be deposed, and the new king found himself buffeted by unrest and by chronic ill-health until he seemed a shadow of his former self, trapped by political uncertainty and troubled by these signs that God might not, after all, endorse his actions.
Captivating, immersive, and highly relevant to today’s times, The Eagle and the Hart is a story about what happens when a ruler prioritizes power over the interests of his own people. When a ruler demands loyalty to himself as an individual, rather than duty to the established constitution, and when he seeks to reshape reality rather than concede the force of verifiable truths. Above all, it is a story about how a nation was brought to the brink of catastrophe and disintegration—and, in the end, how it was brought back.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 Helen Castor (P)2024 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.
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A Fascinating, Funny, and Moving Account of Egypt
- By Jefferson on 07-23-19
By: Peter Hessler
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The Wizard and the Prophet
- Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
- By: Charles C. Mann
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 18 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In 40 years, Earth's population will reach 10 billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups - Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin.
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Fantastic
- By BKATX on 01-26-18
By: Charles C. Mann
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Without Precedent
- Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times
- By: Joel Richard Paul
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 17 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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No member of America's founding generation had a greater impact on the Constitution and the Supreme Court than John Marshall, and no one did more to preserve the delicate unity of the fledgling United States. From the nation's founding in 1776 and for the next 40 years, Marshall was at the center of every political battle. As Chief Justice of the United States - the longest-serving in history—he established the independence of the judiciary and the supremacy of the federal Constitution and courts.
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Scholarly and Accessible
- By Diana Black Kennedy on 03-01-18
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Alice
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker
- By: Stacy A. Cordery
- Narrated by: Alex Picard
- Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From the moment Teddy Roosevelt's outrageous and charming teenage daughter strode into the White House—carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette—the outspoken Alice began to put her imprint on the whole of the twentieth-century political scene. Her barbed tongue was as infamous as her scandalous personal life, but whenever she talked, powerful people listened, and she reigned for eight decades as the social doyenne in a town where socializing was state business.
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Interesting but sometimes infuriating
- By Info Seeker on 05-16-23
By: Stacy A. Cordery
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The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
- A Journey Through History's Greatest Treasures
- By: Bettany Hughes
- Narrated by: Bettany Hughes
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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For millennia, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have been known for their aesthetic sublimity, ingenious engineering, and sheer, audacious magnitude: The Great Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis, the Statue of Zeus, the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. Echoing down time, each of these persists in our imagination as an emblem of the glory of antiquity, but beneath the familiar images is a surprising, revelatory history.
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Great overview with lots of additional history
- By McFitz on 03-26-25
By: Bettany Hughes
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The Missing Thread
- A Women's History of the Ancient World
- By: Daisy Dunn
- Narrated by: Daisy Dunn, Jenny Funnell
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women—whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power—were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it.
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Not quite what I expected
- By havanese lover on 01-13-25
By: Daisy Dunn
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The Reopening of the Western Mind
- The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment
- By: Charles Freeman
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 27 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Freeman, lauded historical scholar and author of The Closing of the Western Mind (“A triumph”—The Times), explores the rebirth of Western thought in the centuries that followed the demise of the classical era. As the dominance of Christian teachings gradually subsided over time, a new open-mindedness made way for the ideas of morality and theology, and fueled and formed the backbone of the Western mind of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.
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Fascinating survey of 1,000+ years of thought
- By Roger on 11-07-23
By: Charles Freeman
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Papyrus
- The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
- By: Irene Vallejo, Charlotte Whittle - translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before books were mass-produced, hand-copied scrolls made from Nile River reeds were the treasures of the ancient world. Emperors and pharaohs, determined to possess them, dispatched emissaries to the edges of the known world to bring them back. Exploring the deep and fascinating history of the written word, from the oral tradition to scrolls to codices, internationally bestselling author Irene Vallejo shows that books have always been a precious and precarious vehicle for civilization.
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Great read
- By Hunter Pechin on 12-15-22
By: Irene Vallejo, and others
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A Death in Malta
- An Assassination and a Family's Quest for Justice
- By: Paul Caruana Galizia
- Narrated by: Paul Caruana Galizia
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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An archipelago off the southern coast of Italy, Malta is a picturesque gem eroded by a climate of corruption, polarization, inequality, and a virtual absence of civic spirit. In this unpromising soil, a fearless journalist took root. Daphne Caruana Galizia fashioned herself into the country’s lonely voice of conscience, her muckraking and editorializing sending shock waves that threatened to topple those in power and made her at once the island’s best-known figure and its most reviled. In 2017, a campaign of intimidation against her culminated in a car bombing that took her life.
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Wow…just shocking
- By Kathy Roy on 06-19-24
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Otherlands
- A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
- By: Thomas Halliday
- Narrated by: Adetomiwa Edun
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life.
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Great book brilliantly read
- By Dipam on 04-06-22
By: Thomas Halliday
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Klan War
- Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction
- By: Fergus M. Bordewich
- Narrated by: Landon Woodson
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.
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a great but depressing book
- By D. Littman on 12-12-23
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Nero
- Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome
- By: Anthony Everitt, Roddy Ashworth
- Narrated by: Greg Patmore
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The Roman emperor Nero’s name has long been a byword for cruelty, decadence, and despotism. As the stories go, he set fire to Rome and thrummed his lyre as it burned. He then cleared the charred ruins and built a vast palace. He committed incest with his mother, who had schemed and killed to place him on the throne, and later murdered her. But these stories, left behind by contemporary historians who hated him, are hardly the full picture, and in this nuanced biography, celebrated historian Anthony Everitt and investigative journalist Roddy Ashworth reveal the contradictions inherent in Nero
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Nero - Sociopath or Spoiled Brat? How about both?
- By Ahmir Khan on 06-30-23
By: Anthony Everitt, and others
Helen Caster describes the world after the worst of the Black Death, the changes in the fortunes of those left behind, and the struggle to turn the kingdom back from tyranny.
Caster’s narration is flawless and easy to listen to.
Divine right goes with the usurper?
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Readers not steeped in British history of the time will sag a bit under the weight of an endless array of aristocratic titles. There’s really no help for it, and it is not fatal to the flow of the story. The essential characters are presented clearly.
The storyline was good enough to catch eye of Will Shakespeare, and this author is gifted enough to do the tale justice. If you’re at all curious about the origin of England’s terrible ordeal of the late medieval years, this is a good place to start.
Solid re-telling of a fascinating story.
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Meticulously researched, beautifully written and beautifully narrated. Excellent.
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Helen is Always a Treat!!!
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Riveting start to finish
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Wonderful!
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Excellent and compelling
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Great Book!
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wonderful
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A thrilling read
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