Welcome to The H Files

H is for History, Helen, Hello

I write history – which is still, years on, a pinch-myself thing to be able to say.

I started falling in love with the medieval and Tudor world when I was five. My wonderful parents bought me these two books, and I read them over and over (and over) again:

Now I write books of my own – most recently this one, available in boxfuls from all good bookshops:

It was – it always is – a long process: five years between typing the first sentence and holding the finished book in my hand, not to mention the decades (decades!) of reading and thinking about Richard II and Henry IV that made me want to write about them in the first place.

And every time a book comes out, so much gets left behind.

There are good reasons for that. I’m telling a story, and that means making choices: every paragraph, every sentence has to move the story forward, to say something about its protagonists, to build the world in which they live.

But there are so many other stories I could tell along the way. People whose lives play out in the margins; moments that would look different through another pair of eyes; sources containing wonders I have to pass over; thoughts and questions scrawled in piled-up notebooks.

Those are my H Files, and here on Substack is where I’m going to unpack them: to send dispatches from behind the scenes of the books I’ve written and the one I’m writing now.

I’m going to talk about Richard II drafting his own epitaph and why he chose to compare himself to Homer. I’m going to explain why I think the ‘leopardus’ that Henry of Bolingbroke brought home to Peterborough from a trip to Jerusalem was actually a trained cheetah (given to him as a present along with a specialist cheetah-wrangler named Mark).

Detail from Benozzo Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (c. 1459)

I’m going to dig into household accounts for details of splashy outfits, and examine chronicles for signs and portents. I’m going to visit specific days of Joan of Arc’s trial, sit in on sessions of medieval parliaments, and pore over private letters written by the Paston family during the Wars of the Roses.

‘It[em] I bequeth to John Paston my sone…’: will of Margaret Paston (detail), 1482

I’m going to think about the image and reality of medieval rule; about the words and pictures through which power was expressed, and the battles – of all kinds – in which it was lost and won.

I’m going to tell stories about women who stood centre-stage – my next book is about Elizabeth I – and about women in the wings of books I’ve already written: Lucia Visconti and her bittersweet relationship with Henry IV, or the three noblewomen in Richard and Henry’s immediate family who had affairs outside their marriages. (Four, if you count Richard’s mother – and it’s the ‘if’ I want to talk about…)

I’m going to mull over the history I meet along the way. Watching a new version of Shakespeare’s Richard II. Learning from the curators of a groundbreaking exhibition about Medieval Women. Triangulating the allusions in HBO’s Succession. Working out why, thanks to Jean Plaidy’s words and William Randell’s drawings, in my head the young Elizabeth I still looks something like this:

And while I do all that, I’d love your company.

Here’s the plan. There’ll be a post a week, delivered directly to your inbox, of which at least one a month (and sometimes more) will be free for all subscribers to read. Each post will be available in audio (read by me) as well as written form.

If you like what you see (or hear), you could consider supporting my work by upgrading to a paid subscription. That way you’ll get access to every weekly post and the whole archive as it grows, as well as membership of the community chat where we’ll talk about the medieval and Tudor world and the reading and writing of history.

And everyone who joins the top subscription tier – the H List – will get a personalised signed copy of one of my books as a welcome and thank you. You’ll have the choice, every year, of either individual answers to three of your questions about history (the history I know about!) and historical writing, or feedback on up to 3,000 words of your own historical work.

If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, please hit the subscribe button – and then let me know what you’d like to read and discuss.

Whatever you choose, thank you for being here.