V.ii. 103-6.
Induction, 1. 37.
which emphasizes instead only the size of the rebel force and the relative inconsequence of the victor:
The Earl Northumberland, and the Lord Bardolph,
With a great power of English and of Scots,
Are by the shrieve1 of Yorkshire overthrown.
John of Lancaster also, whom we saw in Part I having distinguished himself at Shrewsbury, appears at Gaultree in a distinctly unpleasant light, being principally responsible for the shameless betrayal of trust by which the Archbishop and his fellow rebels were apprehended. This is the more surprising in that, although he may have formally accepted the surrender of the rebels as his father's representative, in Holinshed the negotiations are handled throughout by Westmorland. What prompts this gratuitous slur on young Lancaster is not entirely clear; the suggestion sometimes made that Shakespeare is trying to emphasize the cold-bloodedness of the Bolingbroke line is surely untenable: John was after all the full brother of the Prince of Wales, and the foremost scion of that line was Hal himself. Nor is it easy to accept the theory that the trick would have appeared perfectly legitimate to Elizabethan audiences, in whose eyes - it has been suggested - the end would have justified the means.2
And so we come to one of the most dramatic scenes of the play, Act IV scene v, in which the Prince, watching alone by the bedside of his father, picks up the crown from the pillow, places it on his own head and leaves the chamber. The sick man suddenly awakes, sees that the crown has gone and summons his attendants. They find Hal in the adjoining room and bring him back; and this allows Shakespeare his second great reconciliation scene — the first was in Part I, III.ii — in which the King first chastises his son:
Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair
That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honours
Before thy hour be ripe?
1. i.e. sheriff.
2. This point is debated at length in 'The "Dastardly Treachery" of Prince John
of Lancaster', by P. A. Jorgensen (Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America, Menasha, Wisconsin, Vol. lxxvi, Dec. 1961).
Henry, however, has his answer ready, and there is no suggestion that it is anything but sincere:
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore thou best of gold art worst of gold' . . .
Accusing it, I put it on my head,
To try with it, as with an enemy
That had before my face murder'd my father,
The quarrel of a true inheritor.
His words have their effect. The King instantly accepts his explanation and gives his son
the very latest counsel
That ever I shall breathe.
For him, the crown still imposes its load of guilt, but this will be expiated by his death:
To thee it shall descend with better quiet, Better opinion, better confirmation, For all the soil of the achievement goes With me into the earth.
The story has a long pedigree, going back to recollections of the fourth Earl of Ormonde - on whom Henry V was to bestow a knighthood at Agincourt- and to the Chroniques of the near-contemporary Burgundian writer Enguerrand de Monstrelet, from whom it was adopted by the 1513 translator of Titus Livius, passing through him to Hall, Holinshed, The Famous Victories and Samuel Daniel. These two original sources -which are, so far as we know, unrelated - give to what would at first seem an obvious invention some claim to authenticity: Ormonde could quite possibly have heard something of the kind from Henry himself. But even if, like one of the King's more recent biographers,1 we dismiss
1. Harold F. Hutchison, Henry V: A Biography, London 1967.
the whole thing as 'magnificent fiction', we have to agree that 'during the last few years of the reign of Henry IV his eldest son must frequently have considered how the crown of England would fit him'.
By the beginning of Act V, Henry V is already King. Of its five scenes, the first and third are set in the house and orchard of Justice Shallow in Gloucestershire; the remaining three are concerned, first, with the meeting between the King and the Chief Justice, discussed above; second, with the arrest of Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet; third, with Henry's rejection of Falstaff. Of these the last is by far the most crucial to the drama — the rights and wrongs of it have been argued, very probably, since the first performance - but it bears little relevance to this book. Where history is concerned, this last act serves one purpose only: to emphasize the all-important fact that the young King has put his disreputable past behind him, once and for all.
... I survive
To mock the expectation of the world,
To frustrate prophecies, and to raze out
Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down
After my seeming. The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flow'd in vanity till now.
Now doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea,
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods,
And flow henceforth in formal majesty.
Both his reconciliation with the Chief Justice and his treatment of Falstaff make this same point, in their two very different ways. Even the arrest of the two women indicates clearly enough that the old order has changed: for them as for their beloved Sir John, life will never be quite the same again.
Harfleur and Agincourt
[1413-1415]
EXETER.
... And bids you, in the bowels of the Lord,
Deliver up the crown and to take mercy
On the poor souls for whom this hungry war
Opens his vasty jaws; and on your head
Turning the widows' tears, the orphans' cries,
The dead men's blood, the pining maidens' groans,
For husbands, fathers and betrothed lovers
That shall be swallowed in this controversy.
KING HENRY V
With the doubtful exception of Richard the Lionheart, Henry V is the only King of England who is still generally perceived as a hero. Whether he deserved the title must be open to question. Much of his posthumous reputation, inevitably, he owes to Shakespeare; but the fact remains that, while still under thirty, he twice raised the largest and best-equipped expeditionary force that the country had ever seen, transported it to France - no mean achievement in itself - and on the first occasion, in one of the most celebrated battles in English history, led it to a magnificent victory over an army many times its own size. On the other hand, those invasions were planned and carried out on the basis of a claim which, however much he tried to persuade himself to the contrary, was without a shred of legal or moral justification; that battle - which, at the last moment, he did his utmost to avoid - marked the climax of a military adventure of almost criminal foolhardiness and irresponsibility; and the pitiless brutality which he showed after its conclusion was probably without parallel in English history.
Henry was, first and foremost, a soldier. At the age of only twelve he had accompanied Richard II on his second expedition to Ireland; later, after Richard's deposition and his father's seizure of the throne, he had fought valiantly at Shrewsbury and had commanded the army in successive campaigns against Owen Glendower in Wales. His personal courage was never questioned. By the time of his own succession at the age of twenty-five he was already a seasoned general, loved and trusted by his men, possessing a thorough knowledge of siegecraft, highly experienced both in pitched Battles and guerrilla warfare. But his background was not exclusively military: his appointments as Constable of Dover and as Warden of the Cinque Ports had taught him something of ships and the sea, while during his father's long and incapacitating illness he had also had plenty of opportunity to test himself as a statesman.
It comes as no surprise to us to learn that the young King was strong and athletic — wearing his heavy armour, it was said, as if it were a light
cloak - and more than usually good-looking: several of those who knew him well have left physical descriptions of him. He had, we read, thick brown hair, and eyes of much the same colour; his complexion was fresh and fair, his teeth perfectly even and sparkling white, his chin slightly cleft. A good deal more unexpected is what we know of his character, at least as it was after his accession. Riotous his early life may have been - stories about it were already in circulation during his lifetime - but those who knew him only after his accession found those stories hard to believe. When he inherited the crown, he put away childish things. On the day of his coronation - which took place on Sunday 9 April 1413, in a blinding snowstorm - he appeared solemn and unsmiling, and was observed to eat virtually nothing at the banquet which followed the ceremony. For ever afterwards he was known for his piety, which was exceptional even by the standards of the time and which more than once laid him open to charges of sanctimoniousness. It may be, of course, that his father's misdeeds weighed upon his conscience; this might account for his early reconstruction and completion of the nave of Westminster Abbey, financed — like so much else — with the assistance of Richard Whittington, who had been Mayor of London in 1397-8 and in 1406, and was to hold the same office again in 1419. It might also go some way to explain his many works of charity and piety, including his foundation for the poor at St Giles Cripplegate in London and his establishment at Twickenham in Middlesex of a Brigittine1 monastery under the name of Syon — which was later,
1. An order founded c. 1346 by St Bridget of Sweden. A few of its houses still survive today.
ironically enough, to give its name to the great house of his old enemies, the Northumberlands.
From the outset, Henry was infinitely more popular than his father — a fact which was confirmed at his first parliament, which met in the Painted Chamber at Westminster on 15 May 1413 and willingly provided him with generous allowances, including no less than £10,000 which was granted specifically for the upkeep of the King's 'hostel, chamber and wardrobe'. A slightly chillier note was struck when it called for the expulsion from the realm of all Welshmen and Irishmen; but even the most rabid little-Englanders must have known that this would have been virtually impossible to achieve, and there were no protests when the motion was conveniently forgotten.
Perhaps the most important issue that the King had to face before he could devote all his energies to the coming struggle with France was that of the Lollards. In the last decade of the fourteenth century their numbers had shown a dramatic increase, particularly in the West Country and along the Welsh borders, where their leader was one of the closest of the King's former comrades-in-arms, Sir John Oldcastle.1 In Henry IV's day Oldcastle - presumably because of his splendid military record and, later, the barony of Cobham which he had acquired through his second wife in 1409 - had largely escaped persecution; but with the accession of the new King a wave of book-burning had been instigated in St Paul's churchyard, and one of the most dangerous of the offending volumes — a collection of short but subversive tracts -proved to be his. Summoned peremptorily to Kennington to defend himself before the King and * almost all the prelates and nobles of England', he maintained stoutly that although the volume belonged to him he had not even read it; but a number of bishops, headed by Archbishop Arundel himself, continued to insist that he should be forced to recant or take the consequences. When he refused, Henry undertook to discuss the matter personally with his old friend, but was quite unable to shake him; Oldcastle was excommunicated and imprisoned in the Tower pending a formal inquiry.
This inquiry was held in the chapter house of St Paul's on 23 and 25 September 1413; with Archbishop Arundel were Richard Clifford and Henry Beaufort, respectively Bishops of London and Winchester, with
See Chapter 6, pp. 139-40.
twelve doctors of law or divinity sitting as assessors. Oldcastle - who was at this time in regular correspondence with the Bohemian reformer John Hus - made a full statement of his beliefs, from which he once again refused to be shaken. He confirmed his belief in all the sacraments ordained by God, describing that of the Eucharist as 'Christ's body in the form of bread'; if the Church maintained that after consecration it was bread no longer, then the Church was wrong - infected, doubdess, by the poison of Popery. As to the act of confession, it might often be salutary but it was not necessary for salvation. The discussion grew increasingly heated, until finally Oldcastle denounced the Pope as Antichrist, with the prelates his members and the friars his tail. After that, there was no more to be said in his defence. Arundel reluctantly declared him a heretic and handed him over to the secular arm for punishment. Even then he was given the usual respite of forty days, during which both Henry and the Archbishop sent learned theologians to him in the Tower in a last effort to persuade him to recant; but he remained adamant.
Then, on the night of 19 October, he disappeared. How he did so we do not know. There was a persistent rumour that the King, or possibly Beaufort, was behind the escape, but from what we know of Henry this seems unlikely: he had sworn to crush the Lollards, Oldcastle was their leader, and it would have taken more than an old tie of friendship to prevent him from doing his duty. According to the royal chaplain, Oldcastle had pretended to capitulate, after which his fetters were removed and he seized the opportunity to flee. There seems in any case to have been some sort of conspiracy, in which many thousands of his co-religionists were involved; and the weeks that followed brought increasing signs of impending rebellion. The first plan - to seize the King in his palace at Eltham during a performance by a company of mummers on the Feast of Epiphany, 6 January 1414 — was revealed just in time to Henry. He returned at once to London, where he took up residence in the priory of Clerkenwell; and it was there that news was brought to him that some 20,000 armed Lollards from all parts of the kingdom were planning to assemble three days later in Fickett's Field (now Lincoln's Inn Fields), whence on the following day they proposed to march through London for a confrontation with 'the priests' prince'.
In his childhood Henry would surely have heard many stories of Wat Tyler's rebellion, only six years before his birth; and he had no desire for a repetition. On the evening of the 9th he ordered all the London gates to be closed, thus cutting off the demonstrators already within the city from those who were advancing upon it; then he himself, with a considerable armed force, moved to St Giles's Fields, a mile or two to the northwest of the assembly point, from where it was a simple matter to intercept the Lollard bands as they approached, disarm them and place them all under arrest. A special commission was appointed to sit in judgement over them; meanwhile, in sinister anticipation of the verdicts, four new sets of gallows were erected in St Giles's Fields. The precise intention of the rebels is unknown; their objectives may well have been peaceable enough, and limited to obtaining the right to practise their religion as they wished, without interference. But Henry was taking no chances. In the official indictment they were accused, ludicrously, of plotting to kill the King and his brothers, together with the principal prelates and other noblemen; to destroy and despoil cathedrals, churches and monasteries and to distribute the proceeds among themselves; to force all monks and nuns into secular employments; and to appoint Oldcastle regent of the kingdom.
Many of the Lollards may have understood in time what was happening and turned back; many others probably managed to escape in the darkness. Even then, over a hundred were executed at St Giles's alone, before the commission extended its work to the country as a whole. But the rising, such as it was, had been such an obvious fiasco that by the end of the month Henry ordered an end to the persecution, and in March he felt secure enough to declare a general amnesty. Those rebels who were still in custody were granted their freedom in return for heavy fines, and returned to their homes. As for their leader, Sir John Oldcastle, despite the reward of a thousand marks that had been offered for his recapture, he remained nearly four years at large - during which he continued, in the name of his faith, to make what trouble he
could. Only at the end of 1417 was he finally run to ground in the Welsh marches and brought back, severely wounded, to the capital. By then he could expect no mercy, and received none. On 14 December he was summarily condemned as an outlawed traitor and convicted heretic, and on the same day was 'hung and burnt hanging' at St Giles - a fate similar to that suffered by his friend John Hus in Bohemia, just two and a half years before. But the blood of martyrs, as we have learnt, is the most effective of all fertilizers; and the faith for which Oldcastle and Hus both died has lived on, only slightly transmuted to Protestantism, to the present day.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 20