Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  Thenceforth, two steps remained to be taken. First, Richard must be legally deposed; second, he — Henry - must prove himself the rightful successor to the throne. Both steps, however, must be taken quickly, since a power vacuum might easily lead to a change of heart among the great lords of the north, or even to a move by the French King in support of his son-in-law. For the deposition there was at least the precedent of Edward II, only seventy-two years before. On Monday 29 September in the Tower, Richard signed an instrument of abdication before a group of commissioners representing the lords spiritual and temporal, the landed gentry and the law; then, laying his crown on the ground before him, he resigned it, not to the Duke of Lancaster but to God.

  The problem came with the legitimization of Lancaster as his successor. Edward II had abdicated in favour of his son and undoubted heir; Henry's claim was a good deal more tenuous. Sometime before, moreover, Parliament had declared the Mortimers heirs to the kingdom in the event of Richard's remaining childless. In vain did Henry now order all the records and chronicles of all the leading religious houses to be diligently scanned for useful precedents, or evidence that could be used in support of his case; there seemed little doubt that, however great his own personal popularity, the claim of the young Edmund of March was legally superior. He first tried to resurrect a curious old legend, according to which his maternal great-great-grandfather, Edmund Crouchback, had in fact been born before his brother King Edward I; but this was found (to no one's surprise) to be without foundation—fortunately, since had it been true it would have meant that not only Richard but his three predecessors had all reigned illegitimately. Next he considered claiming the crown by right of conquest; but that, it was pointed out to him, would be riding roughshod over the law of England. A third possibility lay in a special act of parliament; but this he wished to avoid at all costs, knowing as he did that what parliament had given it could also take away.

  The solution, such as it was, that Henry eventually found was more subtle than any of these. It was to have himself acclaimed by an assembly which, though summoned as a parliament, was technically not a parliament at all. For a true parliament the presence of the King was essential; at this particular moment there was no King. It was thus only a great representative assembly that met, according to the summons issued by Richard at Flint, on 30 September 1399, in the still uncompleted Westminster Hall; the throne on its high dais stood empty, covered with a cloth of gold. Richard's abdication was read out by the Archbishop of York in both Latin and English, together with a schedule of thirty-three articles listing the crimes and misdeeds of which he was accused. His demands to appear in person to plead his case were simply ignored, as were the courageous representations made on his behalf by the Bishop of Carlisle and various other supporters. The assembly then agreed unanimously to accept his abdication and declared him deposed.

  Now it was Henry's turn to speak:

  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster, challenge this Realm of England, and the Crown, with all its members and appurtenances, in that I am descended by right line of the blood, coming from the good lord Henry Third, and through that right that God of His grace hath sent me, with help of my kin and of my friends to recover it; the which Realm was in point to be undone for default of governance and undoing of the good laws.

  The words were deliberately vague, but they served their purpose. The entire assembly - bishops, lords and citizens - acclaimed Henry as the nation's lawful King, and he held up the signet ring which, he declared, Richard had given him on the previous day. Archbishop Arundel then led him up to the throne, from which he made another short speech of thanks, most notable, perhaps, for the following words:

  It is not my will that any man think that by way of conquest I would disinherit any man of his heritage, franchise, or other rights that he ought to have, nor put him out of that that he has and has had by the good laws and customs of the Realm, except those persons that have been against the good purpose and the common profit of the Realm.

  Thus, while the precise nature of his claim remained undefined, he had been careful to remind his hearers both of his descent from Henry III and of his status as conqueror; and nowhere had he referred to the authority of Parliament.

  Henry's coronation followed less than a fortnight later, on St Edward's Day, Monday 13 October - the anniversary of his departure from London into exile. He was anointed with oil from a miraculous phial said to have been presented to St Thomas a Becket by the Virgin Mary and afterwards hidden at Poitiers, where it had been found by the then Duke of Lancaster, the King's grandfather. The Duke had given it to the Black Prince; and he had left it in the Tower of London, where Richard Hhad found it in his turn, though unfortunately too late for his own coronation. Clearly it was hoped that the use of this oil would somehow lend additional sanctity to the ceremony, emphasizing still further Henry's right to the throne.

  There were recriminations, but not many. The Dukes of Albemarle, Surrey and Exeter, accused of complicity in the murder of Gloucester, pleaded force majeure and were merely deprived of their dukedoms, reverting to their former tides as Earls of Rutland, Kent and Huntingdon; the Bishop of Carlisle, similarly charged (though he pleaded innocent), lost his bishopric. For the rest, the new King proved surprisingly merciful: both Rutland and Huntingdon were members of the council again before the end of the year.

  For impeccable dramatic reasons Shakespeare runs together various separate incidents - including the ceremonies of both the abdication and the accession - in the single scene of Act IV, set in Westminster Hall. The scene begins with Sir William Bagot and others accusing Albemarle (Aumerle) of the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, and the angry challenges by which he rejects the charges. (All this in fact occurred over two weeks later, in parliament on 16 and 18 October.) It continues with the report by the Bishop of Carlisle - in nine lines which are among the most beautiful in all Shakespeare1 — of the death in Venice of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk:2

  Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought

  For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,

  Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross

  Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens;

  And, toil'd with works of war, retir'd himself

  To Italy; and there at Venice gave

  His body to that pleasant country's earth,

  And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,

  Under whose colours he had fought so long.

  The Bishop then launches into the furious diatribe against Bolingbroke's actions3 which results in his own arrest. Only then does Richard enter, to hand the crown to his cousin and to make his great abdication speech:

  IV.i.92-100.

  He died there of the plague on 22 September 1399, on his way back from Jerusalem, and was buried in St Mark's. All that remains of his tomb — an armorial plate - can now be seen in the Hall of Corby Castle, Cumbria.

  According to Holinshed his speech, made only on 22 October, was directed primarily against the proposal that Richard should be put on trial.

  I give this heavy weight from off my head, And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths; All pomp and majesty I do forswear . . .

  Inevitably, the legal aspects involved over both this and the accession are simplified or ignored altogether: Shakespeare is far more interested in Richard's character, and in his reactions to his deposition. All the anger has left him, all the arrogance and bombast. There remains only his own majestic self-pity: an unedifying emotion, but never - surely — more heartbreakingly expressed. The scene ends with the Abbot of Westminster giving Albemarle and the Bishop of Carlisle the first intimation of a plot - prematurely as it happens, since the first meeting of the conspirators did not take place until 17 December.
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  Mention of the plot leads us into Act V, where another of Shakespeare's sources assumes importance for the first time: Samuel Daniel, whose First Fowre Bookes of the civile wanes between the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke bears the date 1595 on its title page. There are echoes of this long epic poem earlier in the play, but they are for the most part insignificant; only in this final act does the connection between the two become unmistakable. Daniel - who was born in 1562 and is, at his best, one of the most dazzling of all Elizabethan poets - was no more pledged to historical accuracy than was Shakespeare himself; and it may well have been he who originated the idea both of making Richard's Queen Isabelle a mature young woman rather than the girl of eleven that she in fact was, and of giving her an emotional farewell scene with her husband. The first scene of Act V is in any case sheer invention, as is York's moving comparison of Henry's and Richard's processional entries into London in the scene that follows. Henry -who, as Adam of Usk puts it, had 'within fifty days, conquered both king and kingdom' — certainly made such an entry: Holinshed describes the vast crowds that lined the streets, and the rapturousness of their welcome. But Froissart, unreliable as he may be,1 specifically emphasizes

  1. At this time over sixty years old, he had not visited England for thirty years, apart from a brief visit to the court at Eltham in 1395.

  that Richard was not forced into any such procession; indeed, the new King's primary concern seems to have been to deal with him as quickly and discreetly as possible.

  He did, however, take careful and considered advice from many of his counsellors before deciding the ex-King's fate. On 23 October, through the Earl of Northumberland, he consulted a full assembly of the House of Lords; fifty-eight of those present recommended that Richard should be removed to some secret place from which no mob could attempt a rescue. Four days later parliament was officially informed that he had been sentenced to imprisonment for life; the place of his captivity was not revealed. On 28 October he was taken in disguise from the Tower, and carried first to Gravesend and then to Leeds Castle in Kent. A few days later he was transferred from Leeds to ‘Pomfret’ — the Lancastrian castle of Pontefract in Yorkshire. He never saw the outside world again.

  Pontefract may have been safe from mob violence; but Richard's incarceration did not prevent the former Bishop of Carlisle — now removed from his see - and a number of his friends, including Huntingdon, Kent, Rutland and Salisbury, from plotting the assassination of Henry IV and his sons during the Epiphany celebrations at Windsor on 6 January 1400. The plan might actually have succeeded had not Rutland unaccountably revealed the details to his father the Duke of York - Shakespeare, with Holinshed, has York catching sight of an incriminating letter and demanding to read it1 - who naturally informed the King. Henry left Windsor immediately with his family for London but was unable to halt the rebels, who seized the castle - simultaneously spreading the rumour that Richard had escaped and was even then gathering an army in the valley of the upper Thames. The Londoners, however, refused to be intimidated, and within two days the King had a force of some 20,000 men. An encounter near Maidenhead was inconclusive but the insurgents were finally caught at Cirencester, where Kent and Salisbury were beheaded on 8 January. Huntingdon escaped to Shoeburyness in Essex, but was soon captured and executed in his turn; the ever-slippery Rutland turned his coat just in time. The triumphant King returned to Westminster on the 15th, preceded by a forest of long poles bearing the heads of his enemies.

  V.ii.56ff.

  By this time Richard had already been for some two months at Pontefract. Exactly how he died, and when, will always remain a mystery. Shakespeare, following Holinshed, represents him as being struck down by a certain Sir Piers Exton, who had heard an exasperated King Henry ask if there was no friend who would rid him of 'this living fear' - much as his namesake Henry II had cried out against Thomas a Becket more than two centuries before. Such a fate is certainly possible, though in view of the traditional reluctance to shed the blood of an anointed king, it has been suggested that - if there was any violence at all - smothering was more likely. Another story relates that, on hearing that the attempt to reinstate him had failed, Richard had simply turned his face to the wall, refusing all food, and died of starvation. All we can say with certainty is that on 29 January 1400 the French King and Council referred to him as being dead; and that a few days later, in the face of continuing rumours that he was alive, his body was brought to London and displayed at various stopping-places along the way. It then lay for two days in St Paul's, where the new King attended a requiem mass as pall-bearer, before being taken to King's Langley in Hertfordshire for burial. In 1413 Henry V had the body disinterred and removed to Westminster Abbey, where it was consigned to the tomb which Richard himself had built for his first wife, Anne. The effigy above, by the London coppersmiths Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest, was created during his lifetime and is clearly a portrait. It shows a face at once sensitive and indecisive, with a pointed nose and short forked beard, crowned with waving curls.

  Shakespeare makes King Henry - once again like his distant predecessor - disown the crime, if crime there was. At the same time he cannot absolve himself of indirect responsibility, and in the last speech of the play he vows a pilgrimage, or perhaps a crusade:

  Though I did wish him dead,

  I hate the murtherer, love him murthered . . .

  I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land,

  To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.

  This, too, seems to be invention. According to Holinshed, the King did indeed make such a vow; but it was in the last years of his reign rather than the first, and there was never any suggestion that it was

  prompted by a desire for atonement. He certainly went through all the normal formalities of mourning, and ordered a thousand masses said for the repose of Richard's soul; he was, after all, a genuinely religious man. But he would not have been human if, after hearing the news of Richard's death, his strongest emotion had been not sorrow or remorse, but relief.

  PRINCE. . . . think not, Percy,

  To share with me in glory any more: Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, Nor can one England brook a double reign Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.

  HENRY IV PART I

  At the time of his accession, King Henry IV was thirty-two years old. He had been born on 3 April 1367, at his father's castle of Bolingbroke, near Spilsby in Lincolnshire, just three months after his cousin Richard, the day of the great victory won at Najera by his father John of Gaunt and his uncle the Black Prince. When he was only ten, his grandfather Edward III had made him a Knight of the Garter, and less than three months afterwards, in July 1377, he had borne the principal sword at Richard's coronation. In that year he was already styled Earl of Derby; later he acquired the additional earldoms of Leicester, Lincoln and Northampton; in 1397 he became Duke of Hereford and in 1399, on the death of his father, Duke of Lancaster. According to the sixteenth-century chronicler Edward Hall, he was 'of mean stature' but well proportioned and compact, with fine, regular teeth and a thick, dark red beard: Froissart describes him as beau chevalier. Moreover, though he possessed none of his cousin's taste and sophistication, he certainly did not lack intelligence. Unlike Richard, too, he had seen the world. Between 1391 and 1393 he had travelled first to Lithuania, on a crusade with the Teutonic Knights, and then to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, visiting Prague and Vienna, Rhodes and Cyprus, and on his return journey, Venice, Milan, Pavia and Paris, to say nothing of all the principal shrines along the way. Both journeys were undertaken in a spirit of genuine piety, for he was naturally devout. He also seems

  to have been totally faithful to his wife Mary Bohun, daughter of the Earl of Hereford and Essex, who had died in 1394 while bearing him his sixth child.

  At the time of Henry's accession, there was no doubt of his popularity throughout the country, the vast majority of his subjects rightly believing that he had seized the throne only beca
use his predecessor had shown himself incapable of government. His position, however, was still dangerously weak. Under Richard, the prestige of the monarchy might have sunk lower than at any time since Edward II - perhaps since the Norman Conquest - but Richard remained the rightful King. Henry was a usurper, who had broken not only his vows of fealty but very probably another more recent oath as well. In recent years, too, Parliament had had a chance to flex its muscles, and had developed something of a taste for power. It held the purse-strings, and was determined that the King should not be allowed to forget it.

  Parliament apart, the worst troubles of the first years of Henry's reign came from beyond his borders. The problem of France he had already foreseen. Charles VI could not be expected to countenance the deposition, and quite possibly the murder, of his own son-in-law; and his temper could hardly have been improved when Henry sent emissaries to him only a month after his coronation suggesting that Queen Isabelle might now make an excellent wife for the young Prince of Wales. Hardly had this ill-fated mission returned when the Scots, taking advantage of the absence in London of the Percys and the Earl of Westmorland, crossed the border and captured Wark Castle in Northumberland, doing extensive damage and holding to ransom its keeper, his family and his household. In August 1400 a vengeful Henry led a small force into Scotland, deliberately ignoring all Scottish attempts at a peaceful settlement and calling upon the King, Robert III, to do homage to him at Edinburgh on the 23rd. Robert refused, and when Henry reached Edinburgh it was to find the city gates closed against him. The Duke of Rothesay, commander of the garrison, offered Battle with a limited number of knights on each side, to avoid the unnecessary shedding of Christian blood; but this the King rejected out of hand. Before the end of the month he and his men were back in England, having achieved nothing but a vague promise that his claim to overlordship would be considered. Not only did he himself never invade Scotland again; it was the last time in history that an English king crossed the border at the head of an army.