Introduction

Henry Ⅵ: the reign and the plays

Far better it were to loose a piece of right,

Than limbs and life in sousing for the same.

William Baldwin, ‘Richard Plantagenet’, 155–6, in The Mirror for Magistrates, 1559¹

Thus was the principality posted over sometimes to Henry, sometimes to Edward, according to the sway of the party prevailing: ambition and disdain still casting faggots on the fire whereby the heat of hatred gathered the greater force, to the consumption of the peers and the destruction of the people.

Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1587²

The promised end?

The opening shot of Jane Howell’s 1983 television version of 3 Henry Ⅵ is a close-up of a wounded corpse, the disposition of the body suggesting the dead Christ, a kind of pietà. The camera then withdraws, revealing that this corpse is but one of a whole heap of corpses. There is, it turns out, no transfiguration, only a holocaust. Spectators or readers coming to 3 Henry Ⅵ after their experience of the first two parts of the play may, justly perhaps, be expecting an ending that is a conclusion, a redemptive or tragic vision to set against their overall experience of political duplicity and martial carnage. They will not, however, find it: just a relentless demonstration of political degradation as the turbulent warlords who rule England destroy what is left of the commonweal.³ Horror, moral horror, rather than Aristotelian ‘terror’ might be the appropriate reaction. 1 Henry Ⅵ concentrated on war, war between England and France. 2 Henry Ⅵ focussed on the extinction of justice and equity by political intrigue and popular rebellion.⁴ The struggle continues, but, given the absence of monarchical power and authority in 3 Henry Ⅵ, ‘rebellion’ does not seem to be an appropriate label for the cause of the Yorkists. What we have instead is ritualised anarchy. As Francis Bacon wrote, ‘For many a man’s strength is in opposition, and, when that faileth, he groweth out of use.’⁵ The ‘case of truth’⁶ has dissolved, the opposing

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This last play depicts the consequences of that primal act of faction-forming that occurred in the Temple Garden in 2.4 of Part 1, and, like the first play in the sequence, it concentrates on battles: the play moves from slaughter to slaughter on the battlefield – and elsewhere. In its first scene Henry declares that the very Parliament House, filled with bloodstained warriors, has become a ‘shambles’ (1.1.71) or butcher’s shop: the motif of butchery is ironically echoed in Henry’s lines to Gloucester, his murderer, as he faces him in his prison cell:

So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece

And next his throat unto the butcher’s knife.

(5.6.8–9)

Between opening and close Shakespeare fills the bulk of his chronicle history with the representation of four battles: Wakefield where York was butchered, Towton where Henry was given his emblematic vision of the horrors of internecine conflict, Barnet where Warwick was slain, and Tewkesbury where the Lancastrians were finally defeated. Is there anything of a theodicy here, a justification of the ways of God to man, or is it rather a story of what Yeats called ‘blind ambitions, untoward accidents, and capricious passions’?¹ There are some signs that in 3 Henry Ⅵ Shakespeare was laying down markers that were to be taken up in Richard Ⅲ where the intrigue and murder goes on, although in another (Senecan) dramatic mode.² Does the play depict a divided kingdom or, by implication at least, the agonised throes of a society fatally divided between monarchy and aristocracy? Does the play demonstrate that royal prerogative is mere fiction, necessarily subject, to use a term from Holinshed, to ‘imbeciling’ by the nobles?³ It is up to a critic or director to find transfiguration – if that can be done.

Rather than beginning with a description of the ‘transgressions against history’⁴ of which Shakespeare has been deemed to be guilty in his Henry Ⅵ plays – his account, that is, of the period from the funeral of Henry Ⅴ in 1422 to the murder of Henry Ⅵ in 1471 and the ransoming of Queen Margaret in 1475 – or a rehearsal of arguments over what parts of the plays Shakespeare may or may not have written,⁵ let us consider what might have drawn him to this complicated chapter in the history of fifteenth-century England. Complicated it is, and so it was inevitable that its very wealth of incident led the dramatist to begin his career as a writer of ‘history plays’ by concentrating as much on actions and their outcomes as on personalities and their motives: he could not avoid investigating politics and the secular as well as morality and the theological.

Unlike the reigns of Henry Ⅴ and Richard Ⅲ, that of Henry Ⅵ was not dominated by the personality of its monarch – Edward Ⅳ’s rule during the last years of Henry’s ‘reign’ is stark evidence of this. Rather it was a period of war between nations (the Hundred Years War) and within the kingdom (the Wars of the Roses). It was also a time of dynastic strife which manifested itself in both aristocratic factionalism and popular insurrection, a sequence of contests between allegiance to the monarchy and alliance among peers. Shakespeare offered to the playhouse audiences of sixteenth-century London a deliberate rearrangement of historical events into dramatic themes. For this reason, therefore, the plays are best regarded not simply as ‘adapted history’ or as vehicles for dramatic biography but as a set of complex essays on the politics of the mid-fifteenth century – essays which, of course, also offer reflections on Shakespeare’s own times. For it was only after he had in this way learned to convert chronicle into political analysis that he turned to the kind of history that thrusts personality out into the foreground of the action: Richard Ⅱ, Henry Ⅳ, and Henry Ⅴ were written after the Henry Ⅵ plays and Richard Ⅲ. The great sequence of studies of the history and politics of England was not composed in the order of the chronology of her Plantagenet rulers.

The loss of France and the wars of the roses

Henry Ⅵ came to the throne as a nine-months-old infant in 1422,¹ and, while he was a minor, England was ruled through a council, his uncle ‘good’ Duke Humphrey of Gloucester being Protector. Henry’s reign began with some military success: John Talbot, first Earl of Shrewsbury, displayed conspicuous heroism on the field of battle, and the champion of the French, Joan, la Pucelle, was overthrown and burned alive (1 Henry Ⅵ 5.3–4). However, by 1453 the French territory won back for England by virtue of his father Henry Ⅴ’s heroic victory at Agincourt in 1415 (Henry Ⅴ 4.1–8) had been recovered for the French by their king Charles Ⅶ, Henry Ⅵ’s maternal uncle.

In 1 Henry Ⅵ, Shakespeare moved from the funeral of Henry Ⅴ through to the marriage of his son. He took us through a sequence of battles – at Orléans (1 Henry Ⅵ 1.2 ff.), Rouen, and Bordeaux (3.2 ff. and 4.2 ff.) – which led to a truce which was called at Tours in 1444 (5.4) and which centred on a politic marriage for Henry (arranged with an eye to his own benefit by the Earl of Suffolk) with Margaret of Anjou, a cousin to King Charles. Although 1 Henry Ⅵ thus ended, unhistorically, with success for the English, Shakespeare demonstrated en route that the empire had been irremediably weakened and that this was principally caused by internal sedition.

Part 1, therefore, constituted a historical prologue, a demonstration of the way in which the Hundred Years War affected the Wars of the Roses which are dramatised in Parts 2 and 3. The title of the ‘bad Quarto’ of Part 2, The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, therefore,

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Whilst the wars between the two nations of England and France ceased . . . the minds of men were not so quiet, but that such as were bent to malicious revenge sought to compass their prepensed purpose, not against foreign foes and enemies of their country, but against their own countrymen and those that had deserved very well of the commonwealth.¹

The coronation, in 1445, of Margaret of Anjou as Queen of England marks the beginning of 2 Henry Ⅵ. That play concentrated largely on the conspiracy of Buckingham, Somerset, and Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, to take power from Humphrey of Gloucester, Protector of the kingdom and father-figure to the king, and on the civil tumult of the Wars of the Roses. These had begun when Henry’s cousin Richard, third Duke of York, laid claim to the throne. The claim was based on the grounds that York was the maternal great-great-grandson of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward Ⅲ (1327–77), whereas Henry was great-grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the fourth son.² York chose as his badge a white rose, while the Lancastrians, led by York’s enemy Somerset, wore red roses (1 Henry Ⅵ 2.4). (Henry Ⅵ’s claim was further weakened by the fact that his grandfather Henry Ⅳ – ‘Bullingbrook’ – was commonly held to have usurped the throne and murdered the childless Richard Ⅱ in 1400.) Moreover, rebellion broke out in Ireland, and York, who was assigned to put it down, took the opportunity to make his army serve his own ambition (2 Henry Ⅵ 3.1), winning the first battle of St Albans on 22 May 1455. This is depicted in the final sequence of 2 Henry Ⅵ.

Part 3 begins when Henry is compelled to acknowledge York as heir apparent to the crown (1.1),³ but York is defeated and savagely killed at the battle of Wakefield two months later (1.3–4), a battle in which the barbarous Cliffords played a prominent part on the Lancastrian side. The Yorkists were defeated again at the second battle of St Albans in February 1461 (2.1), but the Lancastrians then withdrew north while York’s eldest son Edward was proclaimed as King Edward Ⅳ in London. The next month Edward marched northwards and won the battle of Towton, which established him on the throne (2.3–6),⁴ and Henry took refuge in Scotland (his wife and son going into exile in France) until he was captured (3.1). He was imprisoned in the Tower (3.2) from 1465 until 1470 when he was restored to the throne by the ‘kingmaker’, Earl of Warwick (4.2 and 4.6). Warwick had been enraged by the news that Edward, ‘taking counsel of his own desire’,⁵ had made an impolitic marriage with the widow Elizabeth, Lady Grey (3.2) while Warwick was abroad negotiating for the hand of a French princess for the new king. In April 1471, after losing the battle of Barnet, in which Warwick was killed (5.2–3), Henry fell into the hands of Edward again, and Queen Margaret was defeated by Edward’s younger brother

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The reign, then, was a pattern of disorder, a mirror for Shakespeare’s contemporaries of the disastrous effect of dynastic strife, centred on personal ambition rather than any desire for reform, which could so easily have broken out upon the death of Elizabeth. Francis Bacon was to rejoice at the succession of King James, fearing that without it:

after Queen Elizabeth’s decease, there must follow in England nothing but confusions, interreigns, and perturbations of estate, likely far to exceed the ancient calamities of Lancaster and York.²

To dramatise all this was massively ambitious, innovative – there were no popular plays on English history before the Armada in 1588 – and potentially radical. A dramatic sequence as long as this must also have created distinctive theatrical conventions – as modern revivals have demonstrated. It would have been expensive to perform in sequence without recourse to a standardised repertory style with some uniformity in costumes and with doubling – which may itself have made telling political comments on the action. These plays are not vehicles for star performers – although modern actors have amassed great reputations from playing in them.

Political plays fell out of favour in the Jacobean period, and in the eighteenth century the plays disappeared almost completely from the canon of performed works. Perhaps they were too radical and anti-establishment; the female characters, moreover, were not objects of sentiment but seekers after power.⁶ The nineteenth century found them unsuited for performance with the naturalistic sets that were in vogue – and perhaps their analysis of empire was too extreme. In our own times literary critics have found them disappointingly based on narrative rather than significant structure, lacking both psychologically complex characters and the kind of verbal density that Shakespeare was to attain in his later plays. But this is to ignore the particular theatrical qualities – bold dramatic patterns, strong theatrical rhythms, the cumulative effects of deeply etched stage images – that modern directors have found in them, and their tough-minded anatomy of the political nation of England.

The play: ‘what should be the meaning of all those foughten fields?’¹

Part 3 will always be remembered for its scenes of death: those of the children Rutland² and Prince Edward, that of York,³ those of the arch-enemies Clifford and Warwick the kingmaker, and that, finally, of King Henry. It may be that Shakespeare had in mind the chronicles of the falls of great men recorded in The Mirror for Magistrates – figures from the period of the Wars of the Roses count for about half the exempla found in the 1559 edition – but Shakespeare’s treatment of their ‘tragedies’ is generally more complicated than that of William Baldwin and his collaborators.⁴ As he has done throughout the sequence, Shakespeare explores not just the moral but the political dimensions of these noble lives. For despite the way that many die with a quotation or rhetorical figure on their lips, thus turning event into occasion, image into moral emblem, they may be simply cheering themselves up, dramatising themselves in extremis in a way that is not categorically different from the way their political antagonists had disguised their true motives under rhetorical shows of honour or compassion. A political theme is announced in the second line of the play’s second scene when Edward claims to be best at ‘playing the orator’: the proverbial phrase will be repeated on two other occasions.⁵ Rhetoric was traditionally distrusted: in this play eloquence, like prowess in battle, is always seen as a means to power and, as we have hinted, a way of giving understanding at least to an audience exposed, through spectacle, to what is almost intolerable.

Part 2 of the sequence was much concerned with trials: significantly the word ‘trial’ does not appear in Part 3 which is largely a succession of battles that stem

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This battle fares like to the morning’s war

When dying clouds contend with growing light,

What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,

Can neither call it perfect day nor night.

Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea

Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;

Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea,

Forced to retire by fury of the wind.

Sometime the flood prevails and then the wind;

Now one the better, then another best,

Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast

Yet neither conqueror, nor conquerèd:

So is the equal poise of this fell war.

(2.5.1–13)