When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound;
But now two paces of the vilest earth
Is room enough. This earth that bears thee dead
Bears not alive so stout a gendeman
during which he covers the dead man's face with the plumes from his own helmet; there follows a short comic interlude in which Falstaff scrambles to his feet - he has feigned death to escape Douglas — and boasts unwittingly to Hal that he has killed Hotspur himself; and we then move on to the final, even shorter, scene in which the King condemns Worcester and Vernon to death, while the Prince orders Douglas to be freed as a tribute to his valour. Henry's closing speech points the way to the play's sequel, and the curtain falls.
King Henry IV Part II [1403-1413]
KING.
God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways I met this crown, and I myself know well How troublesome it sat upon my head.
KING HENRY IV PART II
The second of Shakespeare's two Henry IV plays is even more episodic than the first. Since the decade it covers - from the aftermath of the Battle of Shrewsbury to the death of the King in 1413 - occupies five times as much space in Holinshed's chronicle as do the three years covered by Part I, the author has had to be ruthlessly selective of the events he has decided to include. Just how selective, we shall see as we go on; first, however, we must briefly trace the course of the last ten years of Henry's unhappy reign.
The Parliament that met from January to March 1404 might have been expected to show some appreciation of a monarch who had risked his life — and very nearly lost it — in the defence of his crown. In fact it proved openly hostile, being principally concerned with securing an official pardon for the father of the rebel leader. The Earl of Northumberland appeared in person at Westminster, confirmed the submission he had made at York five months before and swore a public oath of loyalty, both to the King himself and to the Prince of Wales as heir apparent. Parliament then returned to the attack. It demanded the immediate removal of four members of the King's household, drastically cutting down on that of the Queen; it decreed the expulsion from the kingdom of all aliens and schismatics; it severely reproved Henry for his alleged extravagance, despite the fact that his expenses were in fact little more than a fifth of his predecessor's; it insisted that the ludicrously small sum of £6,500, voted for the defence of the realm, should be paid not directly to the King himself - for fear of misappropriation -but to specially appointed 'treasurers of war'; and it stipulated finally that no mention should be made of the last item in the official records, lest it be taken as a precedent for the future.
This defence grant in fact proved to be so inadequate that Henry was obliged to summon another Parliament only seven months later. His need was now urgent, largely owing to the activities of the French. For ten years already, Charles VI had been subject to periodic fits of insanity, which with the passage of time were becoming increasingly prolonged; he seems by now to have developed a pathological hatred of Henry, whom he had forgiven neither for the deposition of his son-in-law nor for his refusal to maintain Queen Isabelle in the style to which she was accustomed. It was ostensibly on her behalf that French ships had for some time been raiding the Channel coast: in the early summer of 1404 there had been a serious attack on Dartmouth. Fortunately this had been repelled, causing heavy losses to the would-be invaders; it was soon afterwards learnt, however, that the French court had given a warm welcome to envoys from Glendower, with whom it was even then negotiating an alliance. Meanwhile Maud, Countess of Oxford - mother of Richard's favourite Robert de Vere — together with the Duke of Orleans and the Count of Saint-Pol, was found to be planning another invasion, this time in Essex, in support of Richard - whom she firmly believed to be still alive - and Isabelle. This second landing failed to materialize only because the young Queen did not share the Countess's illusions, and at the critical moment announced her engagement to Orleans's son Charles Count of Angouleme. Maud herself, with several others involved — mostly churchmen - was sent to the Tower on a charge of treason, but was eventually pardoned.
The French, on the other hand, continued to make trouble. Orleans ' turned his attention to Guyenne, where he was soon marching on Bordeaux - still of course in English hands; and at the great council meeting which was held at Lichfield in August 1404 it was reported that no less than sixty ships were gathered at Harfleur, with men-at-arms and provisions intended for Glendower. Henry immediately sent letters to various points along the south coast, urging the local authorities to keep a close watch for this fleet, and to intercept it when possible. Ideally, he would have liked to lead another expedition into Wales in a combined operation with the Prince, who had been in command there since the beginning of the year; but he had no more money than his son, who had already complained in a letter to Archbishop Arundel that he had had to pawn his own plate in order to pay his expenses.
The second Parliament of the year met at Coventry in October. Known as the 'Unlearned Parliament' since all lawyers were excluded by proclamation, it seemed to be principally interested in attacking the Church. There had recently been a notable upsurge of feeling throughout the country in favour of the Lollards - those followers of John Wycliffe who, basing their faith on the Scriptures alone, opposed many of the fundamental principles and practices of the established Church, including transubstantiation, the celibacy of the clergy and the sale of indulgences. Angry calls were made for the confiscation of ecclesiastical estates; Archbishop Arundel is said to have spent his nights in prayers and tears. He and his colleagues finally won the day — some of the Commons actually sought absolution for their earlier attitude — but there is no doubt that they were severely shaken. Where the all-important defence grant was concerned, however, the assembly proved surprisingly generous; and it was with a somewhat less heavy heart that the King returned, by easy stages, to London in time for Christmas. With a determined effort in the following year, he might succeed in crushing Glendower once and for all.
But again he was doomed to disappointment. In early April 1405 he had issued a summons to all knights, squires and others who could be called upon to march against his enemies; and immediately after Easter he headed west with an army, reaching Hereford on 14 May. It was there that he received a long letter from his council. It began favourably enough. A loan had been raised for his son Thomas, who was in command of the fleet at Sandwich, and another for the defence of Calais; a third, for Guyenne, was being negotiated and should be in place within a few days. Other monies would be available for the forthcoming Welsh expedition. Then came the bad news. Thomas, Lord Bardolph, who had been ordered to Wales, had quietly slipped away to join his long-time friend and ally the Earl of Northumberland, and there were disquieting rumours of a new rising along the borders. So great was the council's concern that it had ordered the Chief Justice, Sir William Gascoigne, and Lord Roos post-haste to the north to see what was afoot.
The King took this report very seriously indeed. If it were true, there could be no possibility of a campaign in Wales. A few days later it was followed by another, from an unknown source, which seems to have confirmed his worst suspicions; indeed, he now saw the situation to be even more serious than the council had led him to believe. Northumberland, heedless of the oath he had sworn little more than a year before, had once again risen against him - together with not only Lord Bardolph but Thomas Mowbray the Earl Marshal1 and, worst of all, the Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope. In the seven years that he had been in office, Scrope had shown no previous signs of ill will towards the King; now, however, violently hostile manifestos were appearing on the doors of the York churches and were believed by many to be the work of the Archbishop himself.
They contained all the usual accusations: Henry had broken his oath and deposed the rightful sovereign; he had put to death Harry Percy and others without trial; by imposing unjust levies he had extorted money f
rom his subjects and brought them to misery. They called first for the removal of the King; then for the enthronement of Richard's rightful heir (whom they were careful not to name); next for the restoration of peace with the Welsh; and finally for the abolition of all unfair and unwarranted taxation. In support of these demands the Archbishop had gathered a small army, consisting for the most part of members of his own flock but commanded by the Earl Marshal and three local knights, with which he proposed to join up with Bardolph and Northumberland. Temporarily abandoning the Welsh expedition, Henry left Hereford on 23 May and himself set off for the north to fight, for the second time in less than two years, for his throne.
The fact that he was not finally obliged to do so was entirely due to the prompt action of Ralph Nevill, Earl of Westmorland. With Henry's third son, John of Lancaster, he too hastened to York, catching up with the Archbishop six miles from the city at Shipton Moor. At the ensuing parley on 29 May the rebels were promised immediate redress of all their grievances — excepting, presumably, those relating to the King himself — in return for disbanding their forces. They agreed; whereupon,
Thomas was the son of the first Duke of Norfolk, who had died in Venice in September 1399 (see p. 124). He had not been allowed to inherit his father's dukedom, but was allowed to retain the title of Earl Marshal, now dissociated from the office of Marshal of England.
the moment their men had returned to their homes, both the Archbishop and the Earl Marshal were arrested as traitors. On 3 June at Pontefract they were brought before the King, who took them to York to await his judgement; and there, at the Archbishop's palace of Bishopthorpe just to the south of the city, and despite the urgent intercession of Thomas Arundel — who had ridden throughout the day and night of Whit Sunday to plead for his fellow archbishop - Scrope, Mowbray and one of the knights, Sir William Plumpton, were condemned to death. All three were beheaded on the spot.
To the King's enemies - and to many of his friends - the murder of an Archbishop was an unspeakable sin; rumours began to spread of miracles at Scrope's tomb, and it was natural that when Henry's health began to fail not long afterwards his illness should be ascribed to the vengeance of God. On the other hand his throne was safe again; on hearing of the fate of his allies, Northumberland had given up his rebellion and fled with Bardolph to Scotland, leaving his two remaining castles, Warkworth and Alnwick, in the King's hands. But Glendower continued to threaten: the French fleet had finally arrived at Milford Haven in early August, Carmarthen was quickly captured, and by the time Henry reached Worcester on the 23 rd French and Welsh together were little more than ten miles away to the west. At the end of the month, for the fifth and last time, the King invaded Wales, only to be attended by his usual ill fortune. Although he managed to relieve the long-beleaguered castle of Coyty in Glamorgan, most of his baggage train was swept away by sudden floods and much of the rest captured by Glendower. When he returned to London in early December he was in a state bordering on despair — and conscious, too, that he was now a very sick man.
The rest of the story of the reign of King Henry IV can be quickly told. His illness not only sapped his physical strength, but seems also to have demoralized him. Precisely what it was we shall never know, but what little evidence we have points to some form of heart disease, accompanied by a horrible skin complaint which, while almost certainly not leprosy as several chroniclers maintain, nevertheless became disfiguring to the point where his intimates could hardly bear to look at him. His customary progresses through the country were henceforth impossible: by Easter 1406 he was unable to ride even the short distance from Eltham to Windsor, and was obliged to travel by river. He fought no more campaigns and made only one more painful journey to the north. This was in 1408, after Northumberland, Bardolph and their men had made one last attempt at insurrection and had been soundly defeated by the Sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir Thomas Rokeby, on 19 February at Bramham Moor. Northumberland had been killed in the Battle; Bardolph, taken prisoner, had died of his wounds that same evening. Somehow Henry dragged himself to Yorkshire where, at the palace near Selby of his friend and supporter the Bishop of Durham, he sentenced some of the rebels, pardoned others, and hanged the Abbot of Halesowen who had played a leading part in the rising. He was back in London by the end of May, never again — apart from one short visit to Leicester and one to Kenilworth — to leave the home counties.
Meanwhile more and more of the day-to-day business of government was entrusted to Archbishop Arundel, now Chancellor of the Realm, and - insofar as his responsibilities in Wales allowed - to the King's eldest son who, whatever the chroniclers may say, by this time had little time for dissipation. Now twenty-one, young Henry had been campaigning against the Welsh since the age of thirteen; for the past five years he had exercised effective command and gone a long way towards turning the tide. On St George's Day 1406, having finally brought the rebels to a direct encounter, he had fought a victorious Battle in which one of Glendower's sons had been killed; soon afterwards he had surrounded and captured a considerable number of the French men-at-arms. Even when he was in London his visits to the stews were less frequent than before. Clearly he was beginning to settle down, and was already showing signs of being as gifted in the arts of statesmanship as he was in those of war.
For the rest, the pattern was largely unchanged. The King was, as always, in desperate need of money; in the summer of 1406 he had had to appeal for loans before he could find the £4,000 necessary to send his daughter Philippa in a respectable degree of state to her betrothed King Eric of Denmark, who had already agreed to take her without a dowry. He was consequently obliged to make every concession that a harsh and unyielding Parliament might demand. In that same year for example, at the Parliament's insistence, he had agreed on further expulsions of aliens, including the two daughters of Queen Joan herself and some forty humbler members of his own household - cooks, valets and grooms; had nominated a new council, whose approval would be necessary before he could make any grants of lands or revenues; and had given his consent, albeit reluctantly, to the auditing of the accounts of the 'treasurers of war' appointed at Coventry two years before.
But the Parliament's tight-fistedness was not confined to domestic matters; it also refused categorically to vote any money for the defence of Bordeaux. The capture of the greatest city of Guyenne had long been an obsession of the Duke of Orleans, and the army of King Charles VI was now steadily advancing upon it. On 30 June 1406, with the enemy already in the suburbs, the city's Archbishop wrote urgently to Henry. He had cried for help, he declared, until his throat was hoarse, but to no avail: his flock had by now almost given up hope. Meanwhile the mayor, Sir Thomas Swynbourne, was hurriedly preparing his fellow citizens to face a siege. Fortunately for them, however, the French — or at least the Duke of Orleans, who had hastened south to accept the surrender - had other ideas. Fearing that an English relief fleet might yet appear, he decided instead to occupy both banks of the Gironde, thus cutting off Bordeaux from the sea. This operation split the French army into two and gave the inhabitants just the opportunity they needed. Pouring out of the city on 23 December, they attacked the army on the eastern bank at Bourg and routed it. Shortly afterwards the entire invasion force withdrew. It seemed at first only a temporary reprieve; but when summer came and the French did not return, the people of Bordeaux began to breathe normally again, and when at the end of November 1407 there came the news of the Duke's assassination in a Paris street they knew that the danger was past.
The following year brought Henry equally welcome news from Wales, where the Prince was applying himself more vigorously than ever to the task in hand. The autumn of 1408 brought the fall, after a prolonged siege, of Aberystwyth; and in January 1409 Harlech followed - with results disastrous for Glendower. His son-in-law and most important ally, Edmund Mortimer, died during the siege; Owen's wife, two daughters and three Mortimer granddaughters were taken prisoner and sent to London; he himself was left without a stronghold or a h
eadquarters. It was a blow from which he would never recover: in 1410 he launched one more major attack, in which his three principal captains - Rhys ap Griffith, Rhys ap Tudor and Philip Scudamore were all captured. He himself escaped, but his rebellion was effectively at an end.
The messengers who brought the news of the fall of Harlech to the King found him desperately ill. In 1408 he had summoned one of the most famous doctors of Europe, David di Nigarellis of Lucca, who was to remain with him until shortly before his death; and it was probably Nigarellis who nursed him through his worst crisis to date during the following winter. In December he was so ill that the Prince of Wales and his brother Thomas were both summoned to his bedside; but he rallied slightly after Christmas and was taken down the river to Greenwich for a change of air. This treatment seems to have been successful, for the improvement continued; and although at Greenwich he took the opportunity of making his will — the first royal will, incidentally, to be written in English - he was strong enough to return to Eltham in time for Easter. There, as a thank-offering for his recovery, he ordered a chantry chapel on the battlefield of Shrewsbury, with provision for eight chaplains to pray for the souls of the fallen.
For the Prince of Wales, the last five years of the King's life were a difficult time. Had his father been continuously incapacitated he himself would have been Regent of England, a post which, with his now considerable experience of command in Wales, would have suited him admirably. But Henry's mysterious disease was spasmodic in its effect, with prolonged bouts of unconsciousness alternating with periods when he was able at least partially to resume control of affairs. At these latter times he was impatient and dictatorial, determined to surrender nothing of his sovereignty, resenting any attempt by his son to involve himself and seldom even asking his advice. The Prince thus found himself in an almost impossible position, which was further aggravated by the fact that on foreign policy in particular he and his father violently disagreed.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 18