Orleans was a symbol. To every loyal Frenchman the city stood for France, and the victory - which was unquestionably due in large measure to Joan - was seen as conclusive proof of her divine mission and of the truth of her message. It comes, therefore, as something of a surprise to find Shakespeare, at the very beginning of Act II, representing the quite unhistorical recovery of the city by Talbot and his men. He draws here on Hall's account of the taking of Le Mans, when 'the French men which wer scarce up, and thought of nothyng lesse then of this sodain approchement, some rose out of their beddes in their shertes, and lepte ouer the walles, other ranne naked out of the gates for sauyng of their Hues, leuyng behynde theim all their apparell, horsses, armure and riches'.
There follows Talbot's lament over Salisbury, for whom he vows to erect a tomb 'within the chiefest temple' of the French. (The body was in fact carried back to England and buried in the family priory at Bisham in Berkshire.) Scarcely has he completed his speech than a messenger arrives with an invitation for him from the Countess of Auvergne — which he suspects, rightly, of being a trap. Once again the source is Hall, but the story itself is clearly fictitious: such stories are common in the border ballads, as they are in the legends of Robin Hood. It is surely unthinkable that so experienced a soldier as Talbot should knowingly or unknowingly deliver himself into the hands of so powerful a woman as the Countess, who could easily have had him killed before he could summon his soldiers. And she for her part would have been fully conscious of the fact.
We return now to London, but simultaneously (as it later appears) go back a few years in time. The scene in the Temple1 Garden is as
1. The Temple is the home of two of London's four Inns of Court - the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple - which have the exclusive right of admitting young lawyers to practise at the Bar.
imaginary as that of Talbot and the Countess; but it is of considerably more importance, since it introduces the incipient power struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York, identifying them for the first time with the red and the white rose respectively. For Lancaster, the protagonist is the Earl of Somerset, the grandson of John of Gaunt through John Beaufort - Gaunt's eldest son by Katherine Swynford -and consequently a first cousin of Henry V. (He appears later in the play as a Duke, which he became in 1443.) He picks a red rose for his badge, and the Earl of Suffolk plucks another after him. Chief spokesman for the house of York is the man who appears in the dramatis personae as 'Richard Plantagenet, afterwards Duke of York’ - although in fact he had already succeeded to the dukedom on the death of his uncle at Agincourt. He picks a white rose, and is followed by the Earl of Warwick, the enthusiastic Yorkist Vernon,1 and a lawyer.
Already in this scene - which, being fictitious, is undatable - we are reminded of Richard's claim to the throne, when Warwick points out that
His grandfather was Lionel Duke of Clarence,
Third son to the third Edward, King of England:
while Richard himself replies to Somerset's taunt that his father, the Earl of Cambridge, was executed for treason (after the Southampton Plot) with the words
My father was attached, not attainted,2
Condemn'd to die for treason, but no traitor.
Scene iii provides a further opportunity to emphasize the Yorkist claim, with Richard's last visit to the dying Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, who has apparently been long imprisoned in the Tower. Here Shakespeare may once again be deliberately adjusting historical truth in the interests of his drama; it is possible, on the other hand, that Hall
It has been suggested that he may be the Sir Richard Vernon (d. 1452) who was Speaker of the House of Commons in the Leicester Parliament; but if so, why did Shakespeare not call him by his full name?
i.e. arrested, not convicted by a bill of attainder. This was in fact a quibble, since Cambridge had been executed summarily, on the direct orders of the King.
has led him astray. He was never very clear in his mind about the Mortimers: he confused them in Henry IV Part J, and was to confuse them again in Henry VI Part IV There can be no doubt that the aged prisoner whom we see here is meant to be Edmund Mortimer, fifth Earl of March and uncle of the Duke of York, who on his deathbed passes on to his nephew his title to the throne; unfortunately the historic earl, born in November 1391, died of the plague in Ireland in January 1425, when he was only thirty-three and Richard of York just thirteen. Shakespeare's Mortimer reveals to his nephew that he has been imprisoned ever since the Southampton Plot; but, as we well know,2 March - who was potentially the beneficiary of the plot - was also the one who revealed it; and although he was perhaps a little more hesitant in doing so than Henry V would have liked, the King soon restored him to favour and gave him his complete trust. It is perhaps significant in this connection that in his treatment of the conspiracy in Henry V, II.ii, Shakespeare makes no mention of March at all; he may well have remembered the dying prisoner whom he had invented a few years before and, rather than admitting that he was a fabrication, preferred to omit the character altogether from his new play.
'In the iiii. yeare [of the reign, i.e. 1426-7] fell a greate diuision in the realme of England, whiche of a sparcle was like to growe to a greate flame.' So wrote Edward Hall of the feud between Bishop Beaufort of Winchester and Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, which was now threatening the country with civil war. The specific incident represented at the beginning of Act III, in which Gloucester charges the Chancellor with having refused him admittance to the Tower (see I.iii), with attempting to have him murdered at London Bridge and even with having designs on the King himself, actually occurred during the parliament which met at Leicester on 18 February 1426; Shakespeare moves it to the Parliament House in London and conflates it with what had happened at London Bridge some four months previously, when the Duke had persuaded the Mayor to hold the bridge against the Bishop. Stones had been thrown, there had been a number of casualties, and the shops had been shut throughout the city. At Leicester the Lords
See Chapter 6, pp. 137-8 and Chapter 14, p. 273.
See Chapter 8, pp. 181-2.
ordered a reconciliation, and the two men were forced to take each other by the hand; but they did so with an ill grace, and Beaufort resigned the chancellorship shortly afterwards.
In the play it is not the parliament but King Henry himself, now making a curiously belated first appearance, who urges the two to make up their quarrel; he then goes on to restore Richard of York to his inheritance. Shakespeare's authority once again is Hall; but where did Hall find this totally untrue story? The attainder and execution of Richard's father, the Earl of Cambridge, would not have prevented his son from inheriting his estate, while the dukedom would have been his by the normal process of succession after his uncle's death at Agincourt. Eleven years later, on 19 May 1426, the fourteen-year-old Richard was knighted by the young King at Leicester; it is hard to see what more Henry could have done for him. The salient point here, however, is that by his public support of Richard he is, consciously or unconsciously, advancing the Yorkist claim to the succession.
And indeed Shakespeare himself is doing much the same: he is deliberately building up the character of Richard, in order to make him the chief protagonist in the coming plays that will portray the civil war. We have now watched this process in three consecutive scenes: in the Temple Garden, where the lines between York and Lancaster are first drawn; in Mortimer's cell, where the dying man confirms Richard as his heir; and now in the Parliament House, where the young prince is restored to his blood' and girded with 'the valiant sword of York'. It is important to remember, however, that Richard's claims extended well beyond those of his dukedom, for he was descended from Edward III through both his parents - his paternal grandfather being Edward's fifth son, Edmund of Langley, while his mother traced her descent through the Mortimers (Earls of March) to the third son, Lionel Duke of Clarence. Heir to the vast estates of York, March and Cambridge -which included property in virtually every county between Yorkshire and th
e English Channel - he was now, after the King himself, the greatest landowner in the realm. At this point in the play - with all allowances made for its cavalier chronology - he is still a boy in his teens; but Shakespeare is already grooming him for stardom.
The scene ends, none the less, on a note of menace. The Duke of Somerset — the foremost champion of the Lancastrian cause and the first to pick a red rose from the Temple Garden — has muttered his curse on York, in an aside worthy of the highest tradition of the stage villain, while the rest of those present are cheering the Duke to the echo; and a moment later the stage is empty of all but the King's great-uncle, the old Duke of Exeter, who speaks the sad words quoted at the head of this chapter. The play has run barely half its course, but we can no longer be in any doubt: catastrophe is on the way.
In France, meanwhile, the fighting continues. After three fairly long and static scenes the time has come once again for action, and we are treated to one of the most improbable representations of battle that even Shakespeare ever penned, in which Rouen is captured by the Pucelle and regained by the English in little more than a hundred lines. Joan, it need hardly be said, succeeds in entering the city only by a trick, infiltrating her men in the disguise of poor farmers going to market; but her magic, such as it is, has lost its potency. The Duke of Bedford, now mortally sick, has the satisfaction of seeing the final triumph of English arms and dies happy. The scene, short as it is, somehow contrives also to introduce a panic-stricken Sir John Falstaff in full flight from the enemy and, in contrast, the heroic Talbot - to whom, we are led to suppose, the victory is due.
For his version of the French capture of Rouen Shakespeare has turned either to Hall or, more probably, to an account by a certain Robert Fabyan - whose New Chronicles of England and France were published in 1516 - of the taking of the minor castle of Cornill, for which the Pucelle's unremarkable little ruse might have been more appropriate and even conceivably successful. As for his chronology, it is as cheerfully confused as ever. We cannot put even a putative date on the scene, since Rouen remained in English hands until 1449; but Joan was burnt in May 1431, 'Old Bedford' surviving her for well over four years until he died peacefully in his bed at the age of forty-six. There is some serious telescoping, too, in the scene that follows, in which Joan effortlessly persuades Philip of Burgundy to change sides. Change he did, as we saw in the previous chapter; but his alienation from the English was a long, slow process, prompted by several different considerations. Perhaps the most important of these was the readiness of the French King to make a public apology for the assassination of Philip's father, John the Fearless; Burgundy himself, moreover, had never quite forgiven the English for their refusal to allow him to accept the surrender of Orleans in 1429. Finally there were persistent rumours that the English were considering the early release - in return for a sizeable ransom- of Philip's old enemy Charles of Orleans, their prisoner since Agincourt. The one suggestion that can be confidently ruled out is that Philip suddenly yielded to the blandishments of Joan, whom it is extremely unlikely that he ever met. Even if he had, she could hardly have mentioned the liberation of Charles of Orleans, who was to remain a prisoner for nine and a half years after her death.
The act ends with a short scene, set in 'Paris, the Palace', in which King Henry creates Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury before moving on to his coronation. Once again the chronology is awry: Henry's French coronation took place in December 1431, Talbot's ennoblement - as Earl of Salop, incidentally, though he and his successors always took the name of Shrewsbury — not until May 1442. The true purpose of the scene seems to be to prepare the audience for the act to follow, which Talbot and his splendid son are to dominate - though Shakespeare actually brings down the curtain with another bad-tempered spat between Vernon and Basset, reminding us once again that however desperate the fight against the French, the growing breach between York and Lancaster is more significant still.
The opening scene of Act IV belongs, dramatically speaking, more properly to Act III. There is no interval of time; the location is unchanged, with Henry's French coronation taking place in the palace rather than in Notre Dame; Talbot's qualities are once again emphasized, the better to show up the cowardice of Sir John Falstaff, whose Garter is ripped by Talbot from his leg;1 and the insufferable Vernon and Basset lay their differences before the King, supported this time by the protagonists themselves, York and Somerset. Henry's reaction is typically inept: first, with the words
I see no reason if I wear this rose,
That anyone should therefore be suspicious
I more incline to Somerset than York
1. But see Chapter 6, p. 140 and above, p. 238. Monstrelet reports that Fastolf was stripped of his Garter by Bedford, not Shrewsbury; in fact it is far from certain that anyone but the King would have had the power to do so.
he pins to his robe a red rose; then, in an apparent attempt to oblige the two Dukes to forget their quarrel, he divides the army in France between them - giving Somerset the cavalry and York the regiments of foot. The insanity of this decision is made all too clear in the scenes covering the siege of Bordeaux which follow.
Unfortunately this sequence of cause and effect, however convincing on the stage, is set at naught by Shakespeare's cavalier chronology. The siege of Bordeaux took place in 1451, exactly twenty years after Henry's coronation in Paris; Talbot died two years later. The King never divided the army in the way that Shakespeare suggests, though in 1443 he did appoint Somerset Captain-General of Guyenne - much to the fury of York, who as Regent in France made a strong protest. Fortunately Somerset returned to England after a single ineffectual campaign and died a year later, probably by his own hand. It follows that Sir William Lucy's interviews with him and with York in scenes iii and iv are both fictitious, introduced purely to illustrate the seriousness of the breach between the two leaders. The scenes which come closest to historical truth are the fifth and sixth - which, with the first part of the seventh, cover the last hours of the Talbots, father and son. They died together, on 17 July 1453, not at Bordeaux as Shakespeare suggests — though he does not specifically say so - but at Castillon in the Dordogne, Shrewsbury having tried in vain (as he does in the play) to persuade his son, Lord Lisle, to save himself. They were the last heroes of the Hundred Years War.
The action of Act V is set essentially between the years 1442 - when the Count of Armagnac offered his daughter to King Henry as his bride - and 1444, when Henry sent the Earl of Suffolk to France to seek the hand of Margaret of Anjou. The passages in scenes ii-iv involving the Pucelle, however, can belong only to 1431. It would be tempting to describe them as flashbacks, but for the fact that Shakespeare obviously intends them to be nothing of the kind. He sees them as an integral part of a continuous story, and once again has no hesitation in sacrificing historical truth in the interests of his drama. The scenes themselves, it need hardly be said, though taken from Hall and Holinshed, merely reflect the prevailing sentiments of the English towards Joan; they are too grotesque to have any historical basis.
There is a curious moment in the opening scene of the act when King Henry VI part I
Exeter expresses surprise at seeing the Bishop of Winchester in his cardinal's robes:
What! is my Lord of Winchester install'd,
And call'd unto a cardinal's degree?
Then I perceive that will be verified
Henry the Fifth did sometime prophesy:
'If once he come to be a cardinal,
He'll make his cap co-equal with the crown.'
Beaufort had in fact been a member of the Sacred College since 1417, and is plainly referred to as 'the Cardinal of Winchester' as early as Act I, scene iii. He has already appeared three times in the play, similarly attired and in Exeter's presence. This obvious inconsistency has been cited as an indication that the play may be by a number of different authors; all the stylistic evidence, on the other hand, points to a single, Shakespearean authorship of the play as a whole. What reaso
n, then, can be found for this curious passage? It is difficult to accept that offered by the editor of the normally authoritative Arden edition that 'occasional errors and inconsistencies are to be expected, and are indeed characteristic, in authorial copy ... It may be,' he continues, 'the author forgot what he had written earlier. The inconsistency is an argument for the authorial nature of the copy, since the prompter could be expected to iron out the discrepancy for the stage.' We can only say that he does not appear to have done so. Such a glaring contradiction might have escaped the printers of the First Folio, which was published only in 1623 — seven years after Shakespeare's death — and is our only text for the play; it is hard to imagine that it could have escaped Shakespeare himself as it apparently did. In the absence of any plausible explanation, the mystery remains.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 27