The Plays of Shakespeare

King Henry
I know not what to say; my title’s weak.

The years after the Battle of St. Albans were a time of surface calm and secret plotting in and around the English royal court. Queen Margaret, who was proving to be a far stauncher defender of her husband and son than said husband himself, was convinced, probably correctly, that Richard Plantagenet would not be satisfied in the long term with anything other than the English throne — if not for him personally, than for his firstborn son Edward. For her part, Margaret was determined to ensure that the line of succession went through her own son Edward. It was a precarious situation, not least in that the effete and ascetic Henry VI had managed to give Margaret only the one child, while the robust and virile Richard had no fewer than four sons and three daughters of various ages. It was as obvious to Margaret as it was to everyone else where her principal point of vulnerability lay. She went so far as to withdraw her family from London for most of the year in a bid to keep her young son safe.

The fragile peace broke down in 1459, when the Yorkists, fearing a trap engineered by Margaret, failed to answer a summons to attend the royal family at Leicester Castle, well away from the peering eyes of London. By way of reward for their obstinacy, they were branded traitors to the crown, leaving them to choose between taking up arms against the king or going meekly to the executioner. To no one’s surprise, they chose the former. The long-brewing Wars of the Roses finally kicked off in earnest at the Battle of Blore Heath in the West Midlands of England on September 23, 1459. It was more of a skirmish than a battle really, won by the Yorkists, but it marked the first time that the Lancastrians and the Yorkists had openly taken up arms against one another since the Battle of St. Albans. There were much larger, bloodier battles than either of the aforementioned soon to come.

As before, Richard Plantagenet’s most important allies were the father and son Richard Nevilles, Earls of Salisbury and Warwick respectively. Realizing that they needed more men if they hoped to make a long-term go of it against the Lancastrians, the trio decamped to Ireland, which had been a power base for Richard Plantagenet ever since he had served as royal governor there. While they were away, Henry’s government stripped the rebels of their titles and estates, a punishment that was in some ways almost worse than death for blue-bloods such as them, in that it cascaded down through their entire lineage. There was no going back now. Both sides were utterly committed.

In June of 1460, the father and son Richard Nevilles returned to England at the head of an army, which they boldly landed on the opposite coast from the one that everyone had expected: at the English Channel port of Sandwich, only about 150 kilometers from London. Flummoxed by the audacity of the move, the Lancastrians abandoned London to the invaders while they tried to marshal their own forces further north. Henry’s administrators were widely regarded as corrupt and rapacious. The Yorkists used this to their advantage, gathering more men from the countryside as they too bypassed London and turned north to take the fight to their enemies.

The two sides met in Northhamptonshire on the banks of the River Nene on July 10, 1460. The Lancastrians were roundly defeated at this Battle of Northamption, and Henry for the second time in his life suffered the indignity of being captured by the Yorkist faction on the battlefield.

Richard Plantagenet had stayed behind in Ireland to continue building up his forces while the Nevilles had paved the way for his return. Not until almost three months after the Battle of Northhampton did he make his own way back to England. On October 10, 1460, Richard finally entered London. The question before him now was what to do with Henry. Was he prepared to take the ultimate step of regicide? That was a decision from which there would truly be no returning.

Still trying to avoid the label of king-slayer, he agreed to a compromise brokered by Parliament, one that Henry had already declared himself willing to sign. The document was an uncanny echo of another one that had been put to a different unfit king not quite four decades earlier.

King Henry
My Lord of Warwick, hear but one word.
Let me for this my lifetime reign as king.

York
Confirm the crown to me and to mine heirs
And thou shalt reign in quiet while thou liv’st.

King Henry
I am content. Richard Plantagenet,
Enjoy the kingdom after my decease.

Like Charles VI of France had done at the low ebb of his fortunes in the Hundred Years War, Henry VI thus agreed to disinherit his son in return for being allowed to serve out the rest of his own lifetime on the throne. After he died, the line of succession would move to the House of York, where some said it ought to have been ever since the death of Richard II back in 1400. This meant that Richard Plantagenet would become the next king after Henry, assuming he outlived the latter; if not, the next king would be his oldest son Edward. To much of the nobility, it seemed a price worth paying to avoid a ruinous civil war.

But just as had been the case in France back in the day, others among the English nobility were made of sterner stuff than their king. Most prominent among them was Queen Margaret, who scarcely bothered by now to hide her disdain for her weak husband.

King Henry
Pardon me, Margaret. Pardon me, sweet son.
The Earl of Warwick and the duke enforced me.

Queen Margaret
Enforced thee? Art thou king, and wilt be forced?
I shame to hear thee speak. Ah, timorous wretch.
Thou hast undone thyself, thy son, and me,
And giv’n unto the house of York such head
As thou shalt reign but by their sufferance.
To entail him and his heirs unto the crown,
What is it but to make thy sepulchre
And creep into it far beyond thy time?
Had I been there, which I am a silly woman,
The soldiers should have tossed me on their pikes
Before I would have granted to that act.
But thou preferr’st thy life before thine honor;
And seeing thou dost, I here divorce myself
Both from thy table, Henry, and thy bed
Until that act of Parliament be repealed
Whereby my son is disinherited.

Margaret kept away from the capital where her husband now sat emasculated on his throne. She rallied supporters of a Lancastrian succession in the north, playing on rivalries among the nobility that long predated these current Wars of the Roses and, indeed, even the Hundred Years War.

Believing that his position was more or less secure after signing the new document of succession, Richard Plantagenet committed the fatal error of underestimating his remaining opposition. He, his second son Edmund, and the Duke of Salisbury marched north with a relatively small force that Christmas, thinking the task that lay before them was merely one of showing the flag, demonstrating who was in charge now, and perhaps cleaning up a few recalcitrant pockets of rebels. Instead they met a full-blown Lancastrian army in Yorkshire on December 29, 1460, at the Battle of Wakefield.

It was a disaster for the Yorkists. Richard and Edmund Plantagenet were both killed in the fighting; Salisbury was captured and promptly beheaded by the Lancastrians, who showed themselves to be more ruthless than their enemies now that their backs were against the wall. The heads of all of the dead Yorkist nobles were taken to the city of York, where they were mounted on spikes and left to decay before the eyes of the populace. The head of Richard Plantagenet was topped by a paper crown in mockery of his ambitions; whatever happened next, he was not ever going to become king of England.

But devastating though the defeat at Wakefield had been, all was not yet lost on the Yorkist side. Edward Plantagenet, now officially the crown prince of England by the imprimatur of Parliament, had an army of his own off to the west, even as the Duke of Warwick still held London. Events piled upon one another thick and fast during the first quarter of 1461.

Edward met some of the Lancastrians in Herefordshire on February 2, in what became known as the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross. It is said that three suns were to be seen in the sky on the morning of the battle. This was presumably the optical illusion colloquially known by modern meteorologists as a “sun dog,” caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere. But Edward took the sight to be a sign from God, with the three suns representing himself and his two surviving younger brothers.

Edward
‘Tis wondrous strange, the like yet never heard of.
That we, the sons of brave Plantagenet,
Each one already blazing by our meeds,
Should notwithstanding join our lights together
And overshine the earth, as this the world.

Sure enough, Edward went on to partially avenge his father with a major victory that day over a Lancastrian general named Owen Tudor, whom he executed afterward. The Tudor family were destined to play a massive role in the future history of England, but for now, the glory was all on the side of the Plantagenets. Edward took as his new battle standard a flag sporting three brightly shining suns.

Knowing that the main body of the Lancastrian forces was still moving toward London, Edward went that way to meet them, but he was unable to get there in time. With the Lancastrians almost at the gates of the capital, Warwick made the questionable decision to march out with those soldiers he had to hand and engage them. He brought along in his train the hapless King Henry, in whose name he still claimed to be fighting; Henry had, after all, signed the new document of succession which the Lancastrians were now refusing to abide by.

The two armies met on February 17, 1461, at, of all places, St. Albans, the same town where Warwick had helped to win the day back in 1455, when he was an attacker rather than a defender of the capital. Much to his disappointment, this day went to the attackers once again. Warwick fled back to London with the remnants of his army, and the Lancastrians scooped their king back up as he sat there looking befuddled in the midst of all the carnage that had been committed in his name. This king was a pawn; the poor fellow just wasn’t made for this sort of thing.

King Henry
O God! methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run.
So minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years,
Passed over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto the quiet grave.
Ah, what a life were this! How sweet, how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep
Than doth a rich embroidered canopy
To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?
O yes, it doth, a thousandfold it doth.
And to conclude, the shepherd’s homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree’s shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince’s delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couched in a curious bed,
When care, mistrust, and treason wait on him.

Even though it was a tactical defeat for the Yorkists, the Second Battle of St. Albans produced enough of a delay that Edward and his army were able to join up with Warwick as he returned to London. With their puppet king lost and their holdings reduced to little more than the capital itself, there was nothing for it but to make the grab for the brass ring which they had been shying away from for so long. On March 4, 1461, Richard Plantagenet’s firstborn son was proclaimed King Edward IV. He was not yet twenty years old, but he had been battle-tested and shown himself worthy of the crown in the eyes of many. All knew that there lay more battles ahead of him if he wished to keep it.

Luckily, the Lancastrians had made themselves more unpopular than ever with the peasantry by “living off the land” during their march on London  — that is to say, looting, raping, and pillaging their way across the countryside. With a proper Yorkist king in London around which to rally, one who was able to lead from the head of an army in exactly the way that Henry had never had it in him to do, the peasants rallied to Edward’s cause as he pressed the attack northward, even as the Lancastrians retreated back the way they had come. On March 28, the two armies met in a titanic clash in Yorkshire known as the Battle of Towton, involving some 80,000 soldiers in all, enough to make it by the reckoning of many historians the largest single battle ever fought in England. In the midst of a freak early-springtime snowstorm that made longbow archery and other comparatively advanced technologies of warfare impossible to utilize, the sides engaged in a frenetic ten-hour-long hand-to-hand melee that brought to mind the bloody barbarism of ancient forebears such as the Greeks and the Trojans. In the end, it was the Lancastrians who broke and ran first, while their enemies chased after them, throwing axes and spears at their exposed backs. It was said that the waters of the Cock Beck, a stream around which much of the fighting clustered, ran red with blood for five kilometers. As many as 20,000 men — a quarter of the combined fighting force — may have died that day.

It was an astonishing reversal in the fortunes of war. In the barely three months since the Battle of Wakefield, in which they had lost their would-be King Richard, the Yorkists had overcome the Lancastrians completely. Margaret, Henry, and their son Edward accepted an offer of asylum from the king of Scotland, while all of the apparatus of the English state rushed to anoint and legitimize Edward IV, the new king of England, a warrior-king in the tradition of his great-uncle Henry V and his great-great-great-great-grandfather Edward III. He was publicly crowned with full pomp and circumstance in Westminster Abbey on June 29, 1461.

Over the next few years, the rump of the old Lancastrian regime made regular incursions into northern England, aided by both the Scots and the French, who were always happy to make trouble for England if they could do so without paying too high of a price themselves. In the view of most of the English nobility, however, the question of the succession was settled. Edward was the new king of England by writ, right, and might. He was wise enough to be generous and forgiving even toward those who had taken up arms on the Lancastrian side, as long as they were prepared to swear absolute loyalty to him now. The crisis seemed largely passed. But the life of England was soon to be complicated by Edward IV’s choice of a queen, just as it had once been by Henry VI’s choice of same.

The young king’s right-hand man, in peace as it had been in war, was the Duke of Warwick, a man so consequential that history has dubbed him “the Kingmaker”; Warwick is widely viewed as the principal reason that Edward was so wisely forbearing toward his former enemies. He knew that Edward’s choice of a spouse was all-important, and he was determined to avoid the mistakes of the Duke of Suffolk, the man who had foisted Margaret of Anjou upon the kingdom and been rewarded for his efforts by death at the hands of a mob of pirates. Warwick too looked to France for a queen of England, but he set his sights higher than a mere niece of the French king. After much delicate negotiation, he secured an agreement in principle to wed Edward to Bona of Savoy, a sister-in-law of King Louis XI, who had recently succeeded Charles VII to the French throne. This marriage, Warwick believed, would allow the two kingdoms to put the unpleasantness of the Hundred Years War fully behind them, even as it broadcast to all and sundry that they now considered one another equals and allies on the European stage, just in time for the beginning of a new era of continental politics, marked by the rush for overseas empire. Then, too, friendlier relations with France stood to deprive Margaret of Anjou of her most valuable lifeline in her stubborn ongoing campaign of rebellion against Edward. If the old dream of a single joint Anglo-French mega-kingdom had to be put out to pasture, this was surely the next best thing.

Imagine Warwick’s dismay, then, when his previously tractable king chose this moment to suddenly defy his mentor. On May 1, 1464, while Warwick was in the final stages of negotiating his marriage to Bona of Savoy, Edward secretly married a member of the minor English nobility named Elizabeth Woodville. Everything about her was wrong, starting with the fact that she was a widow five years her new husband’s senior, continuing with the one that she brought no material or political advantage whatsoever with her. And arguably worst of all, her former husband, the father of her two extant sons, was Sir John Grey, a knight who had died at the Second Battle of St. Albans fighting on the Lancastrian side. Reconciliation was all well and good, thought Warwick, but there was no need to take it this far.

But outweighing all of the drawbacks in the mind of Edward — or in some other part of him – were the temptations of the flesh. Elizabeth Woodville was widely considered the most desirable woman in England, oozing the strange allure that fifteenth-century men detected in young widows. Edward was no blushing virgin himself, having already sired several illegitimate children with a veritable harem of mistresses. Yet there was something about this woman that completely undid him. For her part, Elizabeth played her hand masterfully, making it clear that marriage was the only route Edward could take into her bed. Driven to distraction by her charms, he gave in and let her have it her way.

Warwick was livid when he learned what Edward had done. Marrying for love — much less for lust — was an irredeemable sin in his book; love and lust were the reason that mistresses existed. Edward had thrown away the possibility of a union that would benefit his kingdom for decades to come, all for a roll in the hay with a wench whom he would probably grow tired of before the summer was over. And in marrying Elizabeth even as Warwick had been busily negotiating with the French, Edward had made his mentor look like a fool or a knave at the same time that he angered the very government Warwick had been trying to placate. “Alas, how should you govern any kingdom that know not how to use ambassadors?” asked Warwick (as channeled through Shakespeare). The wedge the hasty marriage drove between the king and his formerly closest advisor would have serious consequences for England.

Still, there was some good news. In July of 1465, the former King Henry VI was tracked down and captured during one of his incursions into Lancashire. He was brought to the Tower of London, where he would remain for years to come. For, whatever his other faults, Edward wasn’t an overly vindictive man by nature. He didn’t wish to treat this pathetic figure of a displaced monarch with undue harshness. Yet the decision to spare his life and inter him in relative comfort was a dangerous one by the code of realpolitik, in that Margaret was still at large and still plotting on behalf of the Lancastrian cause. For all that there was no love lost between her and Henry by this point, a potential once and future king alive in the Tower of London made her cause easier to sell than it would have been if she had had only her never-crowned child to point to as the next king. With the British Isles becoming altogether too hot for them, Margaret and her son were given refuge in France by the aggrieved King Louis, the very outcome Warwick had been trying to avoid by arranging his king’s marriage.

Meanwhile a cancer was gnawing away at the heart of Edward’s court. The rest of the sprawling Woodville family began marrying well above their previous station and taking over many of the plum jobs in the kingdom, bouncing Warwick’s Neville clan out of a fair number of them. The Woodvilles were generally regarded as an avaricious lot, whose tendency toward rank corruption smacked disturbingly of the government of Henry VI. Once again, peasant uprisings and a generalized sense of unrest in the countryside became a fact of life for England.

From the depths of his bitterness, the Kingmaker wondered whether he had backed the wrong horse in the Wars of the Roses, and whether there was still time and opportunity to correct that error. He found an unexpected ally in conspiracy in George, Duke of Clarence, the third son — the second one still living — of the deceased elder Richard Plantagenet. Smitten by jealousy, a common malaise in heirs to thrones once removed, George thought he might make a pretty good king himself, if he could just get rid of his brother Edward, who was making such a hash of it under the baleful influence of his wife’s family. So much for the one-for-all, all-for-one spirit of King Edward’s three-sunned battle standard!

In July of 1469, the nineteen-year-old George Plantagenet married one of Warwick’s daughters in Calais, whose government his new father-in-law had stocked with loyalists over the last few years in order to turn the port city into a bolthole and staging ground. With his alliance with George now right out in the open, Warwick landed with a small group of armed men on the coast of Kent that same month. Meanwhile several other rebel cells that had been lying in wait in other parts of England sprang into action as well. King Edward, who had advanced from vigorous martial youth to a comfortably corpulent middle-age before his third decade on Earth was over, was well to the north at the time, in Nottingham. He was slow to react.

Wanting to keep his options open, Warwick gave lip service to that old saw that Richard Plantagenet and so many others had held to, that he was not acting to depose the king but to save him from unscrupulous advisors who were leading him astray. Happily for him, this rhetoric gave him carte blanche against his most hated rivals, the Woodville family. His men captured and beheaded the queen’s father and one of her brothers in short order. But the mass popular support he felt he needed to take his project further wasn’t quite in evidence yet, and so Warwick retreated back to Calais to plot his next move. In April of 1470, he and George were declared traitors to the crown by an official proclamation of King Edward.

Trapped in Calais, the conspirators’ position did not look to be an overly strong one. But, convinced by previous experience that fortune favored the bold, Warwick gambled everything on one more totally unexpected roll of the dice. Working through Louis XI, he made peace and common cause with Margaret of Anjou, changing sides from the Yorkists to the Lancastrians with the feckless alacrity of a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist; he even got a nonplussed-seeming George to agree to switch sides with him. To cement the alliance, Warwick married his youngest daughter Anne Neville off to Margaret’s sixteen-year-old son Edward, whom he and Margaret hoped would soon be once more officially recognized as the crown prince of England. In exchange for a promise that a Lancastrian England would be slavishly supportive of French interests, King Louis agreed to help fund the rebellion.

Once again, Warwick waited until Edward was off in the north of England. He returned to his homeland in September of 1470, this time on the southwestern coast at Devon with a much larger army. He joined up with other supporters there — among them one Jasper Tudor, whose father had been executed by the Yorkists after the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross nine years earlier — while still more compatriots rose up elsewhere in the kingdom. It was a replay of the previous year’s plan, albeit carried off more effectively, lavishly, and, as it would transpire, successfully. Feeling beset from all directions, King Edward fled across the English Channel to Flanders without a fight. Just like that, England belonged to the Lancastrians again. Warwick marched unopposed into the capital, where he ordered the Tower of London’s jailers to release Henry VI from his five-year-long imprisonment.

King Henry
Master lieutenant, now that God and friends
Have shaken Edward from the regal seat
And turned my captive state to liberty,
My fear to hope, my sorrows unto joys,
At our enlargement what are thy due fees?

Lieutenant
Subjects may challenge nothing of their sovereigns;
But if an humble prayer may prevail,
I then crave pardon of your majesty.

King Henry
For what, lieutenant? For well using me?
Nay, be thou sure I’ll well requite thy kindness
For that it made my imprisonment a pleasure;
Ay, such a pleasure as incaged birds
Conceive when, after many moody thoughts,
At last by notes of household harmony
They quite forget their loss of liberty.

On October 3, 1470, Henry was pronounced king of England for the second time in his life. Yet the bird had not truly been freed from his captivity, merely removed from one humble cage to another, more gilded one. It is said that the bedraggled monarch had to be tied onto his horse for his triumphal parade through the streets of the capital, that he looked like a shaggy bag of wool as he smiled sheepishly and waved half-heartedly to the people, squinting in the sunlight that he had seen so little of in recent years.

With such a scarecrow as this at its head, the restored Lancastrian monarchy hardly inspired confidence. The ranks of the nobility remained a viper’s nest of conflicting alliances, hissing and writhing most of all around the contradictory figure of young George, Duke of Clarence, who had wandered into his alliance with Warwick on the assumption that it would wind up making him king. He now felt cheated by Warwick’s sudden conversion to the Lancastrian cause, no matter the extreme duress that had produced it. Meanwhile Queen Elizabeth, his older brother’s wife, had been trapped in London by Warwick’s army, and now lived an uneasy existence under house arrest. Her fourth child with Edward, the couple’s first son, was born under these difficult circumstances on November 2, 1470. Christened, inevitably, Edward, he represented a Yorkist heir to the throne, if only his family’s supporters could somehow seize it back for him. Few infants have ever been born into as much human-made peril as this one. Then again, none of the adults around him felt safe either; nor should they have.

Inspired by the news of a son, seeing the weakness of Warwick’s position, the adult Edward rediscovered some of his old backbone and determined to try to regain his kingdom. With the support of Flanders and also Burgundy, which had fallen back into its old ways of making trouble for the French king, Edward raised an army and landed it at Ravenspur, in the northeast of England, on March 14, 1471. Now came the most delicious twist in the tale yet. The jilted George Plantagenet, whom Warwick had given a formidable army of his own as a consolation prize for the throne that was not to be his, abruptly switched teams for a second time to join his brother in pointing it at Warwick. This betrayal threw the Lancastrians into chaos, with nobody seeming to know who was fighting for or against whom. While Warwick was in the Midlands town of Coventry trying to figure it out, Edward marched unimpeded into London to be reunited with his queen and his infant crown prince. The poor bird Henry VI found himself back in his old cage in the Tower of London. On April 11, 1471, Edward IV was proclaimed king for the second time in his life.

But he knew that he would have to defeat Warwick once and for all on the field of battle before he could call his crown secure. Indeed, Warwick himself was already on his way down to London to settle the matter, one way or another. Edward sallied boldly forth to meet him, accompanied not only his reunited brother George but by his youngest brother, a lad of just eighteen summers, who bore the name of his father: Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester (a title which Shakespeare has him accept with the most extreme reluctance, given the fate of the former Lord Protector Humphrey, also Duke of Gloucester). The two armies met at the town of Barton on Easter Sunday, April 14, 1471, for the largest, bloodiest battle on English soil since the one at Towton. Warwick probably had the advantage of numbers, but his soldiers came into the fight shaken by the defection of George and the uncertainty of, well, just about everything. The Yorkists won the day, with young Richard reportedly acquitting himself particularly well, demonstrating a heretofore unsuspected flair for tactics. Warwick either fell in battle or was captured and executed without further ado.

Warwick
These eyes, that now are dimmed with death’s black veil,
Have been as piercing as the midday sun
To search the secret treasons of the world.
The wrinkles in my brow, now filled with blood,
Were likened oft to kingly sepulchres;
For who lived king but I could dig his grave?
And who durst smile when Warwick bent his brow?
Lo now my glory smeared in dust and blood;
My parks, my walks, my manors that I had,
Even now forsake me; and of all my lands
Is nothing left me but my body’s length.
Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live how we can, yet die we must.

Edward carried the mutilated body of his former mentor with him back to London and hung it up in front of Westminster Cathedral. He may not have been an unusually vindictive man by the standards of his time, but there were limits to his forbearance.

All that was left of the Lancastrian forces were off to the west, ostensibly under the direct command of the would-be Lancastrian crown prince Edward, who was now seventeen years old. But the person really calling the shots was Margaret of Anjou, who still refused to give up on her quest to restore the line of succession to her family. Mother and son met their Yorkist enemies under King Edward on May 4, 1471, at the Gloucestershire town of Tewkesbury. The outcome was another total defeat for the Lancastrians. The young Edward was killed in one way or another; Margaret was captured. When she was told that her son was no more, her indomitable spirit was broken at long last. This woman who had often been accused of being more of a man at heart than most of the men around her — by no means an unmitigated compliment for a woman in fifteenth-century England — had been neutered at last. A shadow of her old self, she was placed under house arrest.

With the Lancastrian crown prince out of the way, Henry VI was the only obstacle left to the House of York securing the succession permanently, thus righting the wrong, if wrong it was, of 71 years earlier. Again, Edward decided he had had quite enough of being merciful. Henry died in the Tower of London on May 21, 1471. The official report was that he expired due to natural causes, but murder was always suspected. These suspicions would be confirmed centuries later, when the deposed king’s coffin would be opened to reveal that his skull had been stove in with an axe or other heavy implement.

Thus this underwhelming man who was nonetheless destined to lend his name to three of Shakespeare’s plays went to his rest at age 49. From first to last, he had had things done to him rather than doing much of anything for himself.

Following this latest head-snapping whirl of attacks and ripostes, the way was clear for Edward to rule his kingdom unobstructed, free of any pesky rival claimants to his throne. He had been given a second chance, something as rare in politics as it is in life. Now the question was whether he could find it in himself to rule more wisely than he had the last time around…

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William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3 is beset by many of the same issues as its two predecessors. It’s a tottering, awkward beast, top-heavy with too much plot, too in thrall to history at the expense of character and drama, too didactic and declamatory.

For all its problems, though, it’s still a stronger play than its predecessors. We can see a new force and confidence in the writing, which in places moves beyond its fidelity to the timeline of history to flit over more profound universal truths, the kind that great literature is supposed to address. I fancy you can just about detect some of that in some of the extracts I’ve quoted above. (“What is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?”)

The character of Henry himself, whom Shakespeare has seemed so baffled by in the first two installments, finally takes on a consistent form here at the end of the line for him. Shakespeare handles this man who was asked by history to play a role he couldn’t possibly enact with an understanding and compassion that is new to his budding oeuvre. You can sense a different, probably better play trying to break through the strictures of the historical chronicle, a character study of this caged bird who doesn’t really want to fly free. But it’s only halfway there, being undermined by its genre and by the need to pack a ridiculous amount of plot into the five acts of the play.

The very best sign that Shakespeare is on track for better things is a character I mentioned only in passing near the end of the narrative above, for the reason that he didn’t seem all that terribly important to anybody at the time these events were unfolding. I speak, of course, of the younger Richard Plantagenet, the third of the three suns on King Edward’s battle standard. Knowing what is coming better than the historical actors could, Shakespeare elevates his profile considerably, to the extent of having him administer the final coup de grâce to King Henry in the Tower of London. In the process, Shakespeare begins to create his first truly memorable character, the first who would stride off of the Elizabethan stage to become an icon of Western culture. The bare fact that he is already developing Richard here, in the play before the one that bears his name, shows that Shakespeare is no longer winging it. He’s becoming a writer in full control of his fiction, who knows exactly where he’s going with his story.

Ugly and hunchbacked, twisted in both mind and body, Richard raises the people around him to new heights of scathing eloquence whenever they attempt to describe the sense of loathing he inculcates in them. Margaret calls him “Dicky,” “that valiant crookback prodigy,” “that with his grumbling voice was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies.” Henry VI, normally meek and mild to such a fault, can barely contain his disgust at this monster out of a Hammer horror movie when he walks in to kill him in his cell.

King Henry
Many an old man’s sigh and many a widow’s,
And many an orphan’s water-standing eye —
Men for their sons, wives for their husbands,
Orphans for their parents’ timeless death —
Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born.
The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign;
The night crow cried, abiding luckless time;
Dogs howled and hideous tempest shook down the trees;
The raven rooked her on the chimney’s top,
And chattering pies in dismal dischords sung.
Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain,
And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope,
To wit, an indigested and deformed lump,
Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree.
Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,
To signify thou cam’st to bite the world…

And yet Richard owns his loathsomeness with such relish and evil glee that he is weirdly, perversely charming, to us in the audience if not to the other characters on the stage around him. He is constantly breaking the fourth wall to whisper bitchy little asides in our ears, drawing us into his malevolent headspace. This is an amazing leap in sophistication for the Bard, one that seems to come out of nowhere, suddenly revealing to us that he himself must not have been more than half buying his cast’s high-flown rhetoric all along. Now, at long last, he has a character eminently suited to bringing them all down a peg or two.

In short, we are witnessing the birth of English literature’s first great antihero, the harbinger of a grand tradition stretching from John Milton’s Lucifer to Patricia Highsmith’s talented Tom Ripley. Henry VI, Part 3 comes to life like nothing Shakespeare wrote before it whenever Richard is on the stage.

Richard
Indeed ’tis true that Henry told me of;
For I have often heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs forward.
Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste
And seek their ruin that usurped our right?
The midwife wondered, and the women cried,
“O, Jesus bless us! He is born with teeth!”
And so I was; which plainly signified
That I should snarl and bite and play the dog.
Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let Hell make crook’d my mind to answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word “love,” which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me. I am myself alone.

Everybody, Yorkist or Lancastrian, had best watch their backs from here on out. Because now the younger Richard Plantagenet is about to do his thing.

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