Maurice Keen is an emeritus fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He has written a number of books on medieval subjects, including Chivalry and Origins of the English Gentleman.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
7 June 2007
Impostors
4 September 1997
Occasions for Worship
8 March 2007
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
15 December 2005
Knightly Pursuits
27 April 2000
The Hundred Years War
22 February 1996
Hydra’s Heads
18 November 2004
Anne Boleyn
RELATED CATEGORIES
Biography and memoirs, Biography, 500-1399, 1200-1399, 1300-1399, 1400-1599, 1400-1499, 1400-1449, Monarchy, Europe, Western Europe, UK, England
Vol. 30 No. 11 · 5 June 2008
pages 24-25 | 3178 words
Blood on the Block
Maurice Keen
- BuyThe Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King by Ian Mortimer
Vintage, 480 pp, £8.99, July 2008, ISBN 978 1 84413 529 5
Returning unbidden from exile in July 1399 to claim his confiscated inheritance as Duke of Lancaster while Richard II was in Ireland, Henry Bolingbroke was greeted tumultuously as the prospective saviour of the realm. Richard, hurrying home, found himself deserted in mid-Wales and faced with no alternative to putting himself in his cousin’s power. With Richard his virtual prisoner, and satisfied that those who had welcomed him would go along with the next step, Henry set about preparing to supplant the king. On 30 September, before the assembled lords and commons in Westminster Hall, he claimed the throne, which Richard had abdicated the day before, as the true heir ‘descended by right line of the blood coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 30 No. 13 · 3 July 2008
From Paul Lindsey
Maurice Keen writes that ‘on the night after Scrope’s execution, Henry … woke screaming that his skin was on fire’ (LRB, 5 June). This might well have been a manifestation of tabes dorsalis, a neurological complication of syphilitic infection. Indeed, the sudden sensation of ‘burning skin’ is a textbook symptom of neurological Treponema pallidum infection. Henry IV had been on crusade, and contemporary paleopathological opinion suggests that crusaders brought this venereal disease back from south-west Asia in the 11th and 12th centuries. Bones affected by syphilis have been exhumed at Blackfriars friary in Ipswich and Rivenhall in Essex and dated to between 1296 and 1445. If Henry did have syphilis, this would also account for the intermittent nature of his inexorably progressive illness.
Paul Lindsey
Seville, Australia
