Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  Of the country's three most troublesome neighbours Wales was at last quiet, while with Scotland an uneasy peace was preserved by means of constantly renewed truces; France, on the other hand, constituted a growing problem. Its King, Charles VI, was by now in even worse state than Henry of England. He still had brief spells of lucidity, during which his considerable intelligence appeared almost undimmed; but these were steadily growing less frequent, and of ever shorter duration. Meanwhile - and for some years past - there had been an unremitting struggle for power between two of his close relatives, the Dukes of Burgundy and of Orleans. The Duke of Burgundy was the king's first cousin John Sans peur, 'the Fearless', consumed with ambition and totally without scruple, who had succeeded his father Philip the Fair in 1404; his rival Charles of Orleans, the King's nephew, had inherited the dukedom even more recently, when his father Louis had been assassinated - on John's orders - in 1407, near the Porte Barbette in Paris. Charles, as we have seen, had married Richard II's widow Isabelle in 1406, and after her death three years later had taken as his second wife Bonne, daughter of the formidable Count Bernard of Armagnac - a marriage which had allied the house of Orleans with one of the most powerful magnates in all France. Unlike the Duke of Burgundy he was a man of courage and integrity, and was later to prove one of the greatest poets of his day.

  It was only natural that each of the two rivals was eager for English support; and each had a valuable prize to offer in exchange. Burgundy— which then extended from the Jura in the south as far north as the river Scheldt - could guarantee the safety of the vital bridgehead of Calais and its links with the weavers of Flanders; Orleans, on the other hand, with its Gascon ally, could give similar protection to Bordeaux and the all-important wine trade. The first to take the initiative was John the Fearless, who in July 1411 — at a time when the King lay gravely ill - appealed to England for help against Orleans and the Armagnacs, offering the Prince of Wales in return the hand of his daughter Anne. The Prince - who, having recently been appointed Captain of Calais as well as Warden of the Cinque Ports, instinctively favoured Burgundy - immediately sent out a small force of about 1,200 men under his friend the Earl of Arundel, which after a brief engagement at St Cloud secured Paris for the Duke and drove his enemies beyond the Loire. Meanwhile he opened negotiations to discuss the size of his bride's prospective dowry.

  The expedition returned to England generously rewarded by Burgundy and much exhilarated by its success; as for the Prince, it must have given him just the encouragement that he needed for the later and far more ambitious expedition that was already germinating in his mind. Unfortunately, however, towards the end of the year King Henry rallied and, as usual at such moments, took grave offence at the way in which, as he saw it, he was being elbowed aside — not on this occasion by his eldest son alone but also by his own half-brothers the Beauforts,1 the youngest of whom, Thomas, had succeeded Archbishop Arundel as Chancellor in January of the previous year. It seems quite possible that at the time of the opening of the last Parliament of his reign, in November 1411, Thomas's brother Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, may even have gone so far as to suggest the King's abdication in favour of the Prince of Wales; this would certainly have prompted a furious refusal, and made Henry still more determined to reassert his authority. In any case the Beauforts were dismissed from the council, while the Prince, shrinking from the prospect of an open breach with his father, yielded his place on it to his brother Thomas - who now became Duke of Clarence — and left London on an extended progress through the northern midlands.

  He was still away when, at the beginning of 1412, there arrived at Eltham envoys from the Dukes of Orleans and Berry. Their purpose was to frustrate the proposed marriage and the Burgundian alliance; and to achieve it they were prepared to pay a price considerably higher than that offered by their rival. As well as various other marriage proposals with members of their own families, they now offered the Duchy of Aquitaine in full sovereignty, as well as their own personal service in arms, if England would agree to join them against the Duke of Burgundy. To the King the prospect was irresistible. On 18 May, in return for extensive territory in Guyenne and several towns in Angou-leme and Poitou, he agreed to make available 1,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 archers, and even at one moment proposed to lead this army himself; but since by this time he was totally unable to walk and could hardly even ride, it was the Duke of Clarence who commanded the force which, three months later, left for Normandy.

  This second expedition achieved little of the success of that led by the Earl of Arundel in the previous year. While it was still engaged in somewhat desultory raiding and pillaging in the Cotentin peninsula around Cherbourg, the Armagnacs unexpectedly concluded a truce with the Burgundians, paid off the English army and sent it home. Clarence, it appeared, had been made a fool of; the King scarcely less so. The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, had been vindicated; what

  The sons of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford. See p. 100.

  was more, he had not only the Beauforts but virtually the whole of Parliament on his side. Relations between himself and his father grew worse than ever.

  But did all the blame for this increasing estrangement lie with the King? Not, perhaps, entirely. If Bishop Beaufort had indeed suggested abdication - which, fourteen years later, he hotly denied - had the Prince of Wales been behind the suggestion? During his long absence in the midlands the Prince had taken the opportunity to raise a considerable armed force, which accompanied him when he returned to London in June 1412; and though he made no threats - and was indeed vociferous in his denials of the several accusations of conspiracy that had been made against him - his protestations that this force was intended to supplement Clarence's campaign against the Armagnacs deceived nobody. His followers were still with him when on 25 September he arrived at Westminster to defend himself against a charge of peculation at Calais - from which, in due course, he was completely exonerated. It was, incidentally, on this occasion that he is said to have forced his way into his father's presence in that extraordinary costume described by Holinshed,1 for a moving scene of reconciliation and forgiveness.

  In the autumn the King's health declined fast. As late as November he was still talking about the Crusade that he had so long contemplated, but by now his words carried little conviction; in early December came another period of unconsciousness, and although he recovered sufficiently to celebrate Christmas as usual at Eltham there could no longer be any doubt that the end was near. Soon afterwards he fell into an intermittent coma, and the Parliament that had been summoned for the following February came to nothing. In mid-March he asked to be taken to Westminster Abbey, to pray before the shrine of his saintly predecessor King Edward the Confessor; and it was there that he suffered the sudden seizure that was to kill him. He was carried to the Abbot's private drawing-room, known - from the inscription round the fireplace - as the Jerusalem Chamber. Holinshed relates that on regaining consciousness he inquired where he was; when he was told, he murmured: 'Now I know that I shall die here in this chamber, according to the prophecy of me declared, that I should depart this life in Jerusalem.'

  See p. 141.

  He lingered a little longer, finally dying on Monday 20 March 1413, a fortnight before his forty-sixth birthday.

  His embalmed body lay in state at Westminster; then it was taken slowly down the river to Gravesend and thence by road to Canterbury for burial, as he himself had commanded, in the cathedral. There, in the Trinity Chapel where once stood the shrine of St Thomas a Becket, near the tomb of his uncle the Black Prince, Queen Joan built for her husband one of the most elaborate alabaster monuments ever created, a massive sarcophagus in which, just twenty-four years later, her body was to join his. Upon it, under canopied niches, He their two recumbent effigies. Henry's at least, his head lying on a pillow smoothed by solicitous angels, is clearly a portrait. We see a heavy face, bloated by disease, with drooping moustaches and a short, forked beard. There is little enough evid
ence of the outstanding physical beauty on which he had prided himself in his youth; he looks nearer sixty than forty-five. In 1832 the tomb was opened and the face revealed. The beard, thick and surprisingly red, was still evident. The features at first glance showed less signs of the 'leprosy' which, according to the chroniclers, ravaged them during his last years; but, on being exposed to the air, the flesh almost immediately fell away into dust.1

  To his family and friends, as well as to himself, the reign of Henry IV can only have been one long anticlimax. The vaillant chevalier, aigre et subtil contre ses ennemis, who had carried all before him in 1399, winning a kingdom without the loosing of a single arrow and establishing a new dynasty on the throne of England, had declined in just fourteen years into a hopeless, hideously disfigured invalid. At the time of his accession the richest man in England, he had almost immediately found himself in the desperate financial difficulties which had continued throughout his reign, throwing him on the mercy of a hostile and parsimonious parliament on which, thanks to the circumstances of his accession, he was never able to impose his authority. The ultimate irony

  1. No credence should be given to the portrait of Henry that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. When, at the end of the sixteenth century, it was thought desirable that there should be a complete run of portraits of all British sovereigns since William the Conqueror, this one was hastily adapted from a wood engraving of Charles VI of France. The adapter placed the red rose of Lancaster in his right hand in place of Charles's falcon, and gave him a beard and moustache; but he left him the fleur-de-lys sceptre.

  was that when, after the death of Northumberland in 1408 and the collapse of Glendower two years later, he might at last have achieved his frustrated ambitions - including, perhaps, even his long-promised Crusade — disease should have reduced him, while still in his early forties, to virtual incapacity. His father had lived to be fifty-nine, his grandfather to sixty-four: given another fifteen years of health and vigour, he might have proved himself one of the greatest of our medieval kings. Instead, he died a broken and pathetic figure, lacking alike the tragedy of his predecessor and the dazzle of his son.

  And what does Shakespeare make of him? Not, perhaps, as much as he might have; not, certainly, as much as he made of Richard. The fault, of course, lies with Falstaff. In King Henry IV Part I the swaggering old ruffian plays a prominent role; in Part II— written very soon afterwards, probably in the summer of 1598 — he comes dangerously near to taking over the play, with the result that the strictly historical element is reduced to only eight scenes, all fairly loosely connected one with another. It could be argued — indeed it frequently has been - that this is no disadvantage: that the rollicking old knight is a greater character than the dying king, and that through him we are given a unique vision of Elizabethan England, an England which is no longer confined to monarchs and magnates but which embraces the publicans, the tapsters and the whores of Eastcheap as well as the country squires and peasantry of Gloucestershire. All this is perfectly true; but the pathos of the final rejection of Falstaff- who obviously deserves all he gets — by the newly crowned King is surely nothing when compared with the tragedy of Henry Bolingbroke dying, after a brilliant youth, disappointed and disillusioned, at forty-five already an old man. Again and again in Part II, we feel we are watching, not as in Part I a play with a sub-plot, but two quite different dramas; and it leaves us at the end, like its royal protagonist, with a clear impression of promise unfulfilled.

  But this is not a book of literary criticism. We are concerned here less with the artistic quality of Shakespeare's history plays than with their historical accuracy, and the very construction of King Henry IV Part II— the need to compress the business of a whole decade into those eight short scenes - makes strict accuracy impossible. Shakespeare does not falsify the facts to any great extent; but he is repeatedly obliged to compress the time scale, telescoping events together as the need arises and sometimes even taking them back to the previous play. Thus it is already in the closing lines of Part I that we see the King bidding his son accompany him to Wales immediately after the battle of Shrewsbury, and in the first act of Part II we have a clear indication that the Prince actually did so.1 In fact, the chroniclers leave no doubt that he remained in the north-west of England for several weeks, dealing with the rebels and recovering from his wound; and when the King returned from his expedition to the north to receive the submission of Northumberland and marched against Glendower towards the end of September, his eldest son was not with him. On the other hand the years immediately following saw the Prince in command of the army on the Welsh border, and it is presumably his later service in Wales that Shakespeare had in mind.

  The account of the rebellions by Northumberland and Archbishop Scrope is even more dramatically compressed. According to Holinshed— still Shakespeare's principal authority - Northumberland first considered rebellion immediately after the battle of Shrewsbury, but this came to nothing. He then hatched a conspiracy jointly with the Archbishop in 1405, but gave up as soon as he heard of the fate of Scrope and Thomas Mowbray, the Earl Marshal. Finally in 1408 he led a new rising, which ended with his death on Bramham Moor. In the plays, all three separate movements are telescoped together. Again, the story begins in the last scene of Part I, when the King sends his son John of Lancaster with the Earl of Westmorland

  To meet Northumberland and the prelate Scroop,

  Who, as we hear, are busily in arms.

  Then, in Part II (IV.i and ii), we see their arrival at 'the Forest of Gaultree' (the ancient royal forest of Galtres, just to the north of York) where John and Westmorland trick them — by a piece of double-dealing so shameless that one cannot read the passage today without a shock of repugnance - into sending home their forces and then immediately place them under arrest. When the report is brought to the King - who is already in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster — it is followed within a few lines by the news of the victory at Bramham Moor;

  1. I.iii.83.

  whereupon Henry suffers that sudden seizure which in fact occurred five years later, but which in the play leads directly to his death.

  Holinshed, it should be noted, ignores the early stages of the King's illness, mentioning it only in 1412 and suggesting that until that time Henry was still leading a vigorous military life: the clear inference is that he did not personally put down the rebellions of 1405 and 1408 only because they were already crushed before he could get to them. In the play, on the other hand - in which the King does not appear at all until the third act - Falstaff refers as early as I.ii to an 'apoplexy . . . a kind of lethargy'; and in II.ii we have further testimony of the sickness from Prince Hal himself. When finally the King makes his appearance -just before the Archbishop's rebellion of 1405 - he is not only sleepless but 'hath been this fortnight ill';1 and the next time we see him, in IV.iv, he is already in the room where he is to die. It may well be that this is another example of the influence of Samuel Daniel, whose whole account of the period is coloured by the King's sickness; but Henry's decline certainly began soon after the execution of Scrope — with which, as we have seen, it was connected in the public mind — so there can be no doubt that in this respect it is Shakespeare and Daniel, rather than Holinshed, who have history on their side.

  In II.ii we return to the curious affair of the Lord Chief Justice, who on his very first appearance is referred to by Falstaff's page as 'the nobleman that committed the Prince for striking him about Bardolph'. Later in the same scene Falstaff reminds him of the incident: 'For the box of the ear that the Prince gave you, he gave it like a rude prince, and you took it like a sensible lord.' The story of Hal's being sent to prison in consequence of threatening the Justice, Sir William Gascoigne, goes back to a book known as The Gouernour, written in 1531 by Sir Thomas Elyot for the instruction of Henry VIII and other princes.2 Historically, it is almost certainly without foundation. Had the heir apparent to the throne been committed as Elyot maintain
s, the event would surely have been recorded at the time and noted by the lawyers

  1. III.i.104.

  2. Neither Elyot nor John Stow (who in his Chronicles and Annales of England reproduces the earlier work almost verbatim) report that the Prince actually landed a blow on Gascoigne, though Robert Redmayne (Vita Henrici Quinti, c. 1540) and the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth both suggest that he did.

  as a significant precedent. But Shakespeare has an excellent reason, none the less, for introducing it here. He does so not to show the Prince in an unfavourable light, but to illustrate his generosity of spirit when, after his succession, he confirms the Lord Chief Justice in his office:

  Therefore still bear the balance and the sword;

  And I do wish your honours may increase

  Till you do live to see a son of mine

  Offend and obey you, as I did.1

  The only awkward point that must be recorded here is that Gascoigne did not in fact continue in office after the old King's death. Although he seems to have been summoned to the new Parliament on 15 May 1413, the patent of his successor, Sir William Hankford, is clearly dated 29 March of the same year. Whether or not young Henry removed him we cannot tell, but he was by this time well into his sixties and was certainly not disgraced: in 1414 a royal grant allowed him four bucks and four does annually from the forest of Pontefract.

  For the rest, the play's inaccuracies — if inaccuracies they are — stem more from personal prejudice than from historical misconception. Shakespeare's instinctive dislike of Northumberland, for example, results in a blackening of his character to a quite unjustified degree. Not one of our sources accuses the Earl of being 'crafty-sick'2 at the time of his son's last rebellion — in other words that he feigned illness to account for his non-appearance at Shrewsbury. Nor is there any suggestion elsewhere of his deliberately abandoning Archbishop Scrope in 1405, 'to ripe his growing fortunes' in Scotland; according to Holinshed, he took flight only when the rising had failed and all hope was lost. All the evidence suggests that Northumberland showed outstanding courage at Bramham Moor where, Holinshed tells us, he 'incountred his aduersaries with great manhood... for whose misfortune the people were not a little sorrie, making report of the gendemans valiantnesse, renowme [sic], and honour'; but there is no mention of this in the play,