Shakespeare got it wrong

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King
by Ian Mortimer

Henry IV, in Ian Mortimer’s graceless (and sense-defying) words, is ‘the least biograph-ied English king to have been crowned since the Conquest’. No longer. Here is a full and richly detailed life. Not a deal more would need to be said were it not that Mortimer has invited us to look upon his book as representative of a new species of biographical history.

In his introduction Mortimer argues against the traditional view that a lack of documentary evidence (chiefly letters) places limits on medieval biography. His book is intended to demonstrate that not only is a ‘personality-based’ biography of Henry possible, but that biography is the most important approach to the past. Only biography can uncover ‘why this had happened, or that had not happened’. It can do this, however, only if historians throw academic caution to the winds and eschew ‘judgmental’ biography, Mortimer’s example of which is K.