The Plays of Shakespeare

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had been slowly turning from friend to foe of Henry VI ever since Henry allowed Gloucester’s wife Eleanor to be arrested and imprisoned for witchcraft and treason. The Treaty of Tours proved to be the last straw. Gloucester complained bitterly about the dishonorable peace Henry had made with France and his demeaning acceptance of Margaret of Anjou as his queen — an ironic position for him to take, in view of his own marriage to a low-born woman, but a strongly held one nonetheless. Finally, his carping got to be too much for even the usually tolerant Henry. He too was arrested for treason in 1447 and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He died there within weeks.

There was and is every reason to believe that he was the victim of murder, in order to avoid giving him the bully pulpit of a public trial. His apparently unmolested body was not taken as exculpatory evidence, because it was well known that there are ways of killing that leave no mark. Some said that he was asphyxiated with a pillow, others that he took a hot poker up the anus (!). Some said as well that his downfall was personally engineered by the young Queen Margaret, who was already earning a reputation as exactly the sort of Machiavellian schemer that her husband so conspicuously was not. To what extent these allegations were true and to what extent they were a reflection of her lonely position as an unwanted, foreign-born queen is difficult to say, but it is clear that she was an intelligent, strong-willed woman with agendas of her own.

As for the deceased Gloucester, he would go on to become something of a folk hero in the chaotic years to come, his period as Lord Protector being widely seen as a time of order and stability in the realm in comparison to what came after. In that spirit, Shakespeare would later place a prophecy upon his lips, one vastly more far-reaching than that which had gotten his wife imprisoned before him.

Gloucester
Ah, gracious lord, these days are dangerous.
Virtue is choked with foul ambition
And charity chased hence by rancor’s hand;
Foul subornation is predominant
And equity exiled your highness’ land.
I know their complot is to have my life,
And if my death might make this island happy
And prove the period of their tyranny,
I would expend it with all willingness.
But mine is made the prologue to their play,
For thousands more, that yet suspect no peril,
Will not conclude their plotted tragedy.

The principal if partially unwitting impetus behind the tragedy that was to come was the current Duke of York, Richard Plantagenet. He was the direct descendant of Edward III’s second son Lionel, and thus the man who ought to be king of England if one hewed to the point of view that Henry VI’s grandfather had not had a right to take the throne.  Yet Richard, who was 36 years old at the time of Gloucester’s death, had never yet shown any sign of seeking to advance the claims that were whispered on his behalf by others. On the contrary, he had served Henry loyally as the supreme commander of the English forces in France since 1436, the year the king had first come into his majority. Most historians agree that he was pretty good at his job on the whole, managing to keep a bad situation from deteriorating into a complete disaster until the Treaty of Tours could be negotiated and signed. But now, with the initial 21-month truce of Tours having been recently renewed, he was sent to Ireland, a recalcitrant would-be possession of England that was in a constant state of simmering unrest. His replacement in France was Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, a great favorite of Henry and his queen. Time would show it not to be a particularly wise appointment.

In 1449, King Charles VII of France renewed hostilities after using the period of truce to refresh and rebuild his armies, just as Gloucester and others had predicted he would. Somerset proved to be less adept on the battlefield than he was in court politics. The French delivered to him a series of embarrassing defeats and took back more and more territory. Back in London, it was now impossible to deny that Charles had sacrificed a pawn, in the form of his niece Margaret, to checkmate a fellow king. Poor Margaret, trapped in the capital of the kingdom with which her own people were at war, was left in a perilous spot indeed. A different, more confident and ruthless king might have tried to have the marriage annulled and the woman done away with, especially given that the couple had managed to produce no heir as of yet. But, fortunately for Margaret, Henry was not that sort of king. And yet she looked upon his passivity with more contempt than gratitude.

Queen
All his mind is bent to holiness,
To number Ave-Maries on his beads;
His champions are the prophets and apostles,
His weapons holy saws of sacred writ;
His study is his tiltyard, and his loves
Are brazen images of canonized saints.
I would the college of the cardinals
Would choose him pope and carry him to Rome
And set the triple crown upon his head.
That were a state fit for his holiness.

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, the man who had arranged Henry’s marriage and the truce of Tours, found himself in the worst pickle of all. In a telling sign of the king’s diminishing authority, he was arrested by order of Parliament in 1450. Henry did make a halfhearted attempt to save him, by ushering him out of the country aboard a ship. But the vessel was waylaid at sea by a supposed “privateer” and boarded. Suffolk was seized and summarily killed. It has never been conclusively determined who was behind this act, but it seems unlikely to have been any random act of piracy.

Meanwhile Henry’s government has been making itself unpopular among the peasantry as well through onerous taxation and rampant corruption. A full-fledged rebellion coalesced around a mysterious figure who called himself Jack Cade, about whom we know virtually nothing with any certainty. Shakespeare turns him into a player from Central Casting, an illiterate country bumpkin with extreme delusions of grandeur. Warming up to his satire, the Bard loses track of his chronology, inserting printing presses into an England where those revolutionary devices had yet to make an appearance.

Cade
Your captain is brave and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny; the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it a felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass; and when I am king, as king I will be —

All
God save your majesty!

Cade
I thank you, good people — there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.

Butcher
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Cade
Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. Thou [educated man] hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and contrary to the king his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure. Thou hast appointed justices of peace, to call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison, and because they could not read, thou hast hanged them, when, indeed, only for that cause they have been most worthy to live.

The real Jack Cade stopped short of saying that he wished to topple the king himself, preferring to cast the blame for the chaos in the kingdom upon his advisors. Still, he did demand that Henry “take about his noble person the true blood of his royal realm, that is to say, that high and mighty prince the Duke of York.” This created the strong suspicion among Henry’s beleaguered inner circle that Richard Plantagenet was the real instigator of the rebellion, a suspicion that was only strengthened by the widespread rumor that Cade had come over to England from Ireland.

With most of the English army off in France, Cade’s peasant throng were able to march into London practically unopposed. Henry, Margaret, and much of their court hightailed it out of town. Those who had been too brave or too arrogant to make an escape looked on from behind the walls of their last redoubt, the Tower of London, as the peasants ran wild through the streets. A frantic call went out to Somerset in France to return to England with some of his forces and restore order.

But before he could do so, the people of London took matters into their own hands. Seeing Cade’s pitchfork-wielding mob for the glass-jawed threat it was, they drove the peasants out once again. Desperate to calm the situation before Cade renewed his assault, Henry sent a messenger to tell him he would be pardoned if he would cease stirring up trouble. Presumably sensing that his best chance had slipped away from him with his failure to hold onto London after the first assault, knowing that Somerset must be fast approaching with a real army he had no prayer of withstanding, Cade fled southward on his own. He was found and killed by the royal constabulary in the county of Sussex days later. The question of whether these officers acted independently or whether a double-cross had been in Henry’s mind all along is another one of those which cannot be definitively answered.

Either way, the humiliating spectacle of having been driven out of his own capital by a peasant mob, only to watch passively on while the city’s ordinary citizens cleaned up the mess, weakened the king’s position that much more. It was the returned Somerset rather than Henry who reentered London first — not a good look for the king.

But Somerset wasn’t the only figure who came to overshadow Henry. Just weeks after him, Richard Plantagenet returned to the capital on his own recognizance, abandoning his post in Ireland. Predictably enough, he faced no consequences from Henry for having done so. He and Somerset feuded bitterly over the future direction of the kingdom, while Henry looked on as passively as ever, a bystander to events in his own realm. Richard was not yet openly pressing his own claim to the throne, but he was scarcely giving more than lip service to his avowed liege. For the time being, though, it was Somerset who had the upper hand: he had, after all, returned to play the role of the country’s savior at the explicit request of the king, with an army to back him up. Almost as importantly, he had on his side Queen Margaret, a force to be reckoned with in her own right.

While the two dukes jockeyed for position in England, the final stages of the slow-rolling disaster in France were unfolding. Somerset had left that theater in the hands of Shakespeare’s favorite John Talbot, who, while he may not have been quite everything that the Bard would later wish to make of him, was definitely a more capable man in the field than Somerset himself. He even reversed some of the French advances through wily maneuvering. But he was pinched for men and arms, what with the need for same to restore order back in England.

On July 17, 1453, Talbot was dealt a defeat at the Battle of Castillon that was so devastating as to mark the effective end of the Hundred Years War. He and his second son were both killed in the battle (this event Shakespeare chooses to move a decade forward, into the time frame of Henry VI, Part 1) and the remnants of the English army fled the field an utterly spent force. After this debacle, the one sliver of territory England still had to show for 116 years of war was the port city of Calais, the piece of France that lay closest of all to England, just across from Dover at the English Channel’s narrowest point. As it happened, Charles VII’s great-grandfather John II had formally agreed to cede Calais to England in 1360, as part of an earlier attempt to negotiate an end to the war. The current French king now decided to leave well enough alone and let the invaders keep this last toehold on the continent, which meant that the Hundred Years War could finally end for real. The various English ambitions and claims to pieces of France would never be seriously revived; going forward, England would have to settle for being England, while France remained France.

Never a robust soul in the best of times, Henry VI suffered a serious mental breakdown when he was told that he had definitively lost the inheritance which his father had striven so manfully to deliver him. It is impossible not to feel at least a little sorry for him. Seldom has anyone been asked to play a role in history for which he was so profoundly ill-equipped.

King
Was ever king that joyed an earthly throne
And could command no more content than I?
No sooner was I crept out of my cradle
But I was made a king, at nine months old.
Was never subject longed to be a king
As I do long and wish to be a subject.

He would be even more ineffectual that usual for the next eighteen months, an invalid in an almost vegetative state, unable even to feed himself. Ironically, the beginning of his period of complete incapacity coincided with a rare piece of good news for the realm: Margaret was delivered of a child at long last in October of 1453, a bouncing baby boy who was given the proud royal name of Edward.

Richard Plantagenet was quick to blame Somerset for having bungled the war effort while he was in France, and then for having sacrificed Talbot on the altar of his ambitions by keeping too much of the army at his beck and call in England instead of sending it back to the continent. This time around, his words found immediate traction, for it was a rule of courtly life that any defeat as brutal as the one sustained at Castillon required a scapegoat. The same month that the new crown prince was born, Somerset was imprisoned in the Tower of London, having been deserted by most of the nobility who had previously supported him.

Richard was on the ascendant now. In March of 1454, he forced the discussion of Henry’s condition into the open, getting himself designated the new Lord Protector of the indisposed monarch by order of Parliament. Queen Margaret must have observed these events with trepidation. For if Henry and his son should both die under his Protectorship, Richard would be the logical next king of England even in the eyes of those who hadn’t counted themselves Yorkists in the past, a fact of which he must have been as well aware as anyone.

That Christmas, however, Henry miraculously recovered his senses. In what was arguably the most concerted burst of decisiveness of his entire reign, he dismissed Richard from his role as Lord Protector, released Somerset from the Tower of London, and restored him to his good graces.

Richard was disappointed but not dismayed. In fact, he had been quietly raising an army for just this eventuality, and cementing his support across a wide swath of the nobility as he did so. His closest allies were a father and son who were both named Richard Nevil, the father being the Earl of Salisbury and the son the Earl of Warwick. He retreated into the countryside with them to regroup and put his plans into action.

In the spring of 1455, the three Richards marched on London, still claiming to be acting for Henry’s own good, to save him from the malevolent ministrations of Somerset and his ilk. A rival army marched out of London to meet them, ostensibly led by the king himself, actually by Somerset. On May 22, 1455, the two armies met at the town of St. Albans, about 50 kilometers northwest of the capital.

The Lancasterians were slightly outnumbered by their Yorkist counterparts, but had the advantage of holding the town itself. At first, it looked like they would win the day, or at least fight the Yorkists to a draw. But then the younger Richard Nevil, Earl of Warwick, led a group of men around and behind their headquarters in the town square. Suddenly they were being assaulted from two directions; this unleashed a deadly panic in their ranks. Somerset was killed; it isn’t clear whether he went down fighting or was executed on the spot. Several other prominent Lancastrian nobles and 150 to 200 ordinary soldiers were also killed in this, the first full-fledged battle to pit Englishman against Englishman in many a generation. In addition to everything else, the Battle of St. Albans became a coming-out party of sorts for Warwick, a man who would place as much of a stamp upon English politics over the next sixteen years as any of those who actively vied to become king.

For his part, Henry suffered the indignity of being captured. He was forced to ride back into London in Richard Plantagenet’s train while the people looked on. Yet Richard, a calculating and cautious man in many ways, must have felt that he still lacked the necessary support to depose and possibly execute the king and his infant son and seize the crown for himself. Instead he made a great show of returning the royal crown and scepter to Henry in front of a crowd of onlookers. Nonetheless, the subtext was all too clear to everyone: the kingship was in Richard’s control now, Henry more of a puppet than ever before. Passive as ever, deprived of his chief mentor and motivator Somerset, Henry seemed inclined to accept that it would really be Richard who ruled England going forward. But there were others who were less willing to go along to get along, among them his own queen Margaret, the families of those who had fallen at the Battle of St. Albans, and plenty of the other nobles whom Richard had trampled over to reach his current apex of power…

…and it is here that Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 ends.

The Bard’s depiction of all of these events is best described as workmanlike — perhaps even more so than Henry VI, Part 1. This play is more lacking in quotable passages than almost any other by Shakespeare. The one line that you do still see trotted out from time to time today, more in a spirit of shallow irony than earnest appreciation, is the exhortation by one of Jack Cade’s cronies to “kill all the lawyers.” As is the case with most of the bits and pieces from Shakespeare that our chattering classes love to rip out of their proper context, it’s not the playwright himself who’s saying this but one of his characters, and a decidedly clownish, ignorant character at that. But it makes a fine bon mot to let drop at a cocktail party, in some hall of state or other, or in a business boardroom, so what can you do?

Part 2 is so weak that there are some scholars who believe that the three Henry VI plays may not have been written and presented in order, that Shakespeare may have started with this one, then gone back to write Part 1 before Part 3. Certainly his portrayal of the characters involved points to an author working with something less than a detailed master plan for the whole endeavor. Gloucester in particular changes personality markedly from Part 1 to Part 2 . In the former, he’s a steadfast, loyal steward of the realm; in the latter, he becomes a more enigmatic, ambivalent figure, uncomfortably well aware almost despite himself that if Henry and his son should die, and the Yorkist claim to the throne continue to be sidelined, the title of king of England would devolve to him.

Cardinal
So, there goes our Protector in a rage.
‘Til known to you he is mine enemy;
Nay more, an enemy unto you all,
And no great friend, I fear me, to the king.

As a piece of Bardic juvenlia, Henry VI, Part 2 is often read for hints of the deeper and more masterful playwright and poet that Shakespeare would soon become. It’s hard not to see a foreshadowing of Lord and Lady Macbeth in the relationship between Gloucester and his ill-starred wife Eleanor. Here as there, the wife whispers temptations and insinuations in her husband’s ear like the Devil in folk tales and cartoons, in service of her own boundless craving for respect and power. (All of this fits more properly into the time frame of Henry VI, Part 1, but, as we’ve seen, Shakespeare plays fast and loose with the real dating of events throughout these plays.)

Eleanor
List to me, my Humphrey, my sweet duke.
Methought I sat in seat of majesty
In the cathedral church of Westminster;
And in that chair where kings and queens were crowned,
Where Henry and Dame Margaret kneeled to me
And on my head did set the diadem —

Gloucester
Nay, Eleanor, then must I chide outright.
Presumptuous dame, ill-nurtured Eleanor,
Art thou not second woman in the realm,
And the Protector’s wife, beloved of him?
Hast thou not worldly pleasures at command
Above the reach or compass of thy thought?
And wilt thou still be hammering treachery
To tumble down thy husband and thyself
From top of honor to disgrace’s feet?
Away from me, and let me hear no more.

Eleanor
What, what, my lord? Are you so choleric
With Eleanor for telling but her dream?
Next time I’ll keep my dreams unto myself
And not be checked.

In the opinion of Shakespeare, it seems, one excellent modern rule of thumb already holds true: never trust anyone who talks about herself in the third person.

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)