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Hotspur: Sir Henry Percy and the Myth of Chivalry
On 21 July 1403 Sir Henry Percy – better known as Hotspur – led a rebel army out at Shrewsbury to face the forces of the king Henry IV. The battle was both bloody and decisive. Hotspur was shot down by an arrow and killed. Posthumously he was declared a traitor and his lands forfeited to the crown. This was an ignominious end to the brilliant career of one of the most famous medieval noblemen, a remarkable soldier, diplomat and courtier who played a leading role in the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. How did he earn his extraordinary reputation, and why did Shakespeare portray him as a fearsomely brave but flawed hero who, despite a traitor’s death, remained the mirror of chivalry? These are questions John Sadler seeks to answer in the first full biography of this legendary figure to be published for over twenty years.
Hotspur’s exploits as a soldier in France during the Hundred Years War, against the Scots in the Scottish borders and at the battles of Otterburn, Homildon Hill and Shrewsbury have overshadowed his diplomatic role as a loyal royal servant in missions to Prussia, Cyprus, Ireland and Aquitaine. And, as the heir to one of the foremost noble families of northern England, he was an important player not only in the affairs of the North but of the kingdom as a whole. So, as John Sadler reveals in this highly readable study, Hotspur was a much more varied and interesting character than his narrow reputation for headstrong attack and rebellion suggests.
Hotspur’s exploits as a soldier in France during the Hundred Years War, against the Scots in the Scottish borders and at the battles of Otterburn, Homildon Hill and Shrewsbury have overshadowed his diplomatic role as a loyal royal servant in missions to Prussia, Cyprus, Ireland and Aquitaine. And, as the heir to one of the foremost noble families of northern England, he was an important player not only in the affairs of the North but of the kingdom as a whole. So, as John Sadler reveals in this highly readable study, Hotspur was a much more varied and interesting character than his narrow reputation for headstrong attack and rebellion suggests.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published June 30, 2022
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About the author
John Sadler
111 books22 followersBorn in 1953, John Sadler has law degrees from Northumbria University and the University of Westminster. A part-time lecturer in military history at Sunderland University Centre for Lifelong Learning, he is currently studying toward a PhD in history and is soon to begin an Imperial War Museum Fellowship in Holocaust Studies. He is the author of over 20 books, including Scottish Battles, published by Birlinn in April 2010. He is married with two children and lives in Newcastle.
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May 9, 2024
John Sadler begins his biography of Sir Henry “Hotspur” Percy by describing a bronze statue of Percy in Alnwick. "He looks a bit of an automaton,” he says, “a fighting machine, rather impersonal, like it's all about the armour, nothing special inside.” The photo on my Kindle screen seems too small to reflect the unsettling quality of the statue that Sadler describes. Photographed from behind, it could depict anyone. I think idly that his thighs seem rather impressive. It takes me a few moments to find high-resolution photos online and there is still that sense: it could be anyone. In one photo, the statue’s raised arms obscure the face, in another the face is cast in shadows so deep the helm seems empty, and when I do find a clear shot of the face, it’s so nondescript I struggle to describe it. This, I suppose, is what Sadler means. There’s little sense of individuality, little sense of that there was person inside the shell. The armour is impressive but there could anyone – or nobody – inside it.
Other depictions of Percy – the illustrations of him at Shrewsbury, the cover of Sadler’s biography, the statue of him mounted at Alnwick Castle – seem to have a similar problem. We recognise him by his armour and his surcoat, but there’s no sense of individuality. It feels at odds with his vivid depiction in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, but then, Shakespeare was a playwright, trading in fiction.
I picked up Hotspur: Sir Henry Percy and the Myth of Chivalry hopeful that I would gain a sense of the “real” Hotspur. I had read Andrew Boardman’s Hotspur: Henry Percy - Medieval Rebel several years ago in hope of finding the same and been disappointed, feeling he had created another mythic version of the man. I hoped I would fare better with Sadler, that I would finally get a sense of who the real Henry Hotspur was.
Sadler makes interesting points but his biography – like Boardman’s – seems to reflect those armoured bodies. Much attention is given to Percy’s military career, with the three major battles he fought – Otterburn, Homildon, and Shrewsbury – serving as centrepieces to Sadler’s narratives. These are important aspects of Percy’s life but I couldn’t help but wonder: isn’t there anything more to his life beside this? It’s hard to reconstruct a life when we’re busy reconstructing battles. As if to prove my point, Percy’s wife – Elizabeth Mortimer – is mentioned once, when it Sadler discusses their marriage, but not when the marriage produced a son, while the existence of their daughter goes unmentioned. Nor is there anything that suggests what kind of relationship they had.
Sadler emphasises that Percy’s behaviour in these battles show he was not, as Shakespeare depicted, a reckless youth but a seasoned, mature man who was no man’s dupe, and he was neither the idealised chivalric knight that we might wish him to be but a product of his time. The latter injects a dose of realism into our understanding of Percy but it does little to help us see him as an individual. As for the former, I agreed with Sadler’s argument and I appreciate that this has to be emphasised but the repeated emphasis rapidly worn thin, especially when coupled with simplistic literary analysis (I don’t think we can dismiss Shakespeare’s Percy as “just a foil” to Shakespeare’s Hal and the description of a Elizabethan playwright creating a character that is “pure Hollywood” is just strange).
As for the discussion of the battles themselves, I struggled with the discussion of the Battle of Otterburn. Perhaps it was because I was less familiar with it than others but Sadler’s detailed comments on other historians’ discussion of this battle made me feel like I was only reading only half of a conversation. However, I enjoyed the discussions of Homildon and Shrewsbury. Also welcome were the times Sadler delved into the psyche of Percy as a soldier, especially the fact he was willing to consider the possibility of Percy and other medieval soldiers may have developed PTSD in response to their experiences, even though it was concluded that it’s impossible to tell and “almost pointless” to speculate on. However, I found was suspicious of the Great Universal Theory of a military psyche with repeated references to The Iliad and 20th century warfare as telling us something about Percy’s own experiences and viewpoints. There is plenty of work reconstructing the medieval knight’s experiences, e.g. Michael Prestwich’s Knight: The Medieval Warrior's (Unofficial) Manual or the numerous work on Chaucer’s Knight, that seem a better fit than Homer.
The book ends with an epilogue in which Sadler seeks to explore the cultural legacy of Percy, which largely consists of tracing his Shakespearean counterpart (no mention is made of the novels that feature the historical Percy as protagonist, such as Juliet Dymoke’s A Border Knight or Edith Pargeter’s A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury). It is somewhat surprising the Sadler made no reference to the more recent productions, particularly the BBC’s The Hollow Crown but more odd is a paragraph in which he declares that Percy “seems hardly an ideal role mode” for the “political left” who “fits all their ‘must-hate’ stereotypes”.
It seems strange that Sadler seems to be implying that it’s only the political left, blinded by a hatred based on stereotypes, who would dislike a man or character who was a “gangster, bully and militarist” (I believe he’s referring to Shakespeare’s Percy here but I struggle to recognise Shakespeare’s Percy as such). Given the rash of productions and retellings that have cast Percy as an marginalised figure and the character’s idealism (and the way his behaviour in Henry IV can be read as coming to terms with trauma), it does seem strange that to assert that the left would have no interest in him. While I agree with Sadler that Netflix’s 2019 film The King was a terrible film, I’m not sure what was so “woke” about it beyond its hackneyed “war is bad” message.
As I wrote this review, I looked over the images I’d collected of the historical Henry “Hotspur” Percy – as much as they can be said to be images of this man, given no contemporary images survive and so all are reconstructions produced long after his lifetime. All of them lack individuality, a sense of personality. Percy could be anybody. For Boardman, he was a legend, for Sadler a man of his time and perhaps even a right wing icon. We project onto him what we would like him to be, we cannot and do not know him. Shakespeare gives us a firestorm of a character but he was a playwright, eschewing accuracy (perhaps unknowingly) for a great character and a great story. The real Percy is illusive, fragmentary but still sought-after.
Other depictions of Percy – the illustrations of him at Shrewsbury, the cover of Sadler’s biography, the statue of him mounted at Alnwick Castle – seem to have a similar problem. We recognise him by his armour and his surcoat, but there’s no sense of individuality. It feels at odds with his vivid depiction in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, but then, Shakespeare was a playwright, trading in fiction.
I picked up Hotspur: Sir Henry Percy and the Myth of Chivalry hopeful that I would gain a sense of the “real” Hotspur. I had read Andrew Boardman’s Hotspur: Henry Percy - Medieval Rebel several years ago in hope of finding the same and been disappointed, feeling he had created another mythic version of the man. I hoped I would fare better with Sadler, that I would finally get a sense of who the real Henry Hotspur was.
Sadler makes interesting points but his biography – like Boardman’s – seems to reflect those armoured bodies. Much attention is given to Percy’s military career, with the three major battles he fought – Otterburn, Homildon, and Shrewsbury – serving as centrepieces to Sadler’s narratives. These are important aspects of Percy’s life but I couldn’t help but wonder: isn’t there anything more to his life beside this? It’s hard to reconstruct a life when we’re busy reconstructing battles. As if to prove my point, Percy’s wife – Elizabeth Mortimer – is mentioned once, when it Sadler discusses their marriage, but not when the marriage produced a son, while the existence of their daughter goes unmentioned. Nor is there anything that suggests what kind of relationship they had.
Sadler emphasises that Percy’s behaviour in these battles show he was not, as Shakespeare depicted, a reckless youth but a seasoned, mature man who was no man’s dupe, and he was neither the idealised chivalric knight that we might wish him to be but a product of his time. The latter injects a dose of realism into our understanding of Percy but it does little to help us see him as an individual. As for the former, I agreed with Sadler’s argument and I appreciate that this has to be emphasised but the repeated emphasis rapidly worn thin, especially when coupled with simplistic literary analysis (I don’t think we can dismiss Shakespeare’s Percy as “just a foil” to Shakespeare’s Hal and the description of a Elizabethan playwright creating a character that is “pure Hollywood” is just strange).
As for the discussion of the battles themselves, I struggled with the discussion of the Battle of Otterburn. Perhaps it was because I was less familiar with it than others but Sadler’s detailed comments on other historians’ discussion of this battle made me feel like I was only reading only half of a conversation. However, I enjoyed the discussions of Homildon and Shrewsbury. Also welcome were the times Sadler delved into the psyche of Percy as a soldier, especially the fact he was willing to consider the possibility of Percy and other medieval soldiers may have developed PTSD in response to their experiences, even though it was concluded that it’s impossible to tell and “almost pointless” to speculate on. However, I found was suspicious of the Great Universal Theory of a military psyche with repeated references to The Iliad and 20th century warfare as telling us something about Percy’s own experiences and viewpoints. There is plenty of work reconstructing the medieval knight’s experiences, e.g. Michael Prestwich’s Knight: The Medieval Warrior's (Unofficial) Manual or the numerous work on Chaucer’s Knight, that seem a better fit than Homer.
The book ends with an epilogue in which Sadler seeks to explore the cultural legacy of Percy, which largely consists of tracing his Shakespearean counterpart (no mention is made of the novels that feature the historical Percy as protagonist, such as Juliet Dymoke’s A Border Knight or Edith Pargeter’s A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury). It is somewhat surprising the Sadler made no reference to the more recent productions, particularly the BBC’s The Hollow Crown but more odd is a paragraph in which he declares that Percy “seems hardly an ideal role mode” for the “political left” who “fits all their ‘must-hate’ stereotypes”.
It seems strange that Sadler seems to be implying that it’s only the political left, blinded by a hatred based on stereotypes, who would dislike a man or character who was a “gangster, bully and militarist” (I believe he’s referring to Shakespeare’s Percy here but I struggle to recognise Shakespeare’s Percy as such). Given the rash of productions and retellings that have cast Percy as an marginalised figure and the character’s idealism (and the way his behaviour in Henry IV can be read as coming to terms with trauma), it does seem strange that to assert that the left would have no interest in him. While I agree with Sadler that Netflix’s 2019 film The King was a terrible film, I’m not sure what was so “woke” about it beyond its hackneyed “war is bad” message.
As I wrote this review, I looked over the images I’d collected of the historical Henry “Hotspur” Percy – as much as they can be said to be images of this man, given no contemporary images survive and so all are reconstructions produced long after his lifetime. All of them lack individuality, a sense of personality. Percy could be anybody. For Boardman, he was a legend, for Sadler a man of his time and perhaps even a right wing icon. We project onto him what we would like him to be, we cannot and do not know him. Shakespeare gives us a firestorm of a character but he was a playwright, eschewing accuracy (perhaps unknowingly) for a great character and a great story. The real Percy is illusive, fragmentary but still sought-after.
September 5, 2023
This was a very interesting, and in-depth study of Sir Henry 'Hotspur' Percy and the world that formed him. It also charts the rise and fall of a prominent medieval noble family. Sadler gives a detailed account of Percy's life, battles, and reputation in context with the medieval period and particularly the border warfare on the Scottish/English border. His literary reputation from Shakespeare's work is also examined in the context of historical evidence.
Sadler has researched Hotspur's life using a variety of original sources and examines them critically, and has often walked the battlefields in person, to give the best information on the events as possible. For a researcher, this was immensely helpful, as well as the illustrations of line formations and likely movements of the forces to understand the battles Hotspur faced.
I would recommend this to those interested in medieval warfare, and Marcher history, both in Scotland and Wales, as it provides information on the noble northern houses, their in-fighting, warfare development, political collaboration, and why the Percy family betrayed Henry IV to side with Owain Glyndwr during the Welsh Revolt.
Sadler has researched Hotspur's life using a variety of original sources and examines them critically, and has often walked the battlefields in person, to give the best information on the events as possible. For a researcher, this was immensely helpful, as well as the illustrations of line formations and likely movements of the forces to understand the battles Hotspur faced.
I would recommend this to those interested in medieval warfare, and Marcher history, both in Scotland and Wales, as it provides information on the noble northern houses, their in-fighting, warfare development, political collaboration, and why the Percy family betrayed Henry IV to side with Owain Glyndwr during the Welsh Revolt.
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