Deliver'd up again with peaceful words?
Mort Dieu!
Since Salisbury specifically calls Warwick his son, there can be no doubt that the speaker is the young Richard Nevill — he who, with his father and the Duke of York, was to head the Yorkist forces at St Albans and later to be known as 'the Kingmaker'. But Nevill was born only in 1428 and did not inherit the earldom until 1449, four years after the arrival of Margaret in England: clearly Shakespeare is confusing him here with his wife's father, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, from whom he derived his title. Beauchamp was a fine old warrior - in 143 7 he had been appointed Lieutenant of France and Normandy - but even he could hardly have made the extravagant claim attributed to his son-in-law.
After Gloucester's exit, Cardinal Beaufort predictably does his best to discredit him:
So, there goes our Protector in a rage.
'Tis known to you he is mine enemy;
Nay, more, an enemy unto you all,
And no great friend, I fear me, to the King . . .
He will be found a dangerous Protector.
Those references, in the first line of his speech and again in the last, to Duke Humphrey as Protector come as something of a surprise. The Protectorate had been formally ended by Parliament in November 1429, only a week or two after Henry's coronation; and it may well be asked why Shakespeare decided to continue it for another sixteen years. Unless this was an oversight — which seems unlikely - he probably had three reasons. The first and most immediate would have been to lend additional force to Beaufort's speech, allowing the Cardinal to contrast the concept of protectorship with the veiled imputation of treason in his last two lines; later it would serve also to increase the dramatic impact of Gloucester's fall, the strange story of which begins — somewhat anachronistically - in the next scene; finally, it would strengthen the motive for the Duke's quite unhistorical assassination, which would otherwise have been based only on the unjustified suspicions that he was conspiring against the King.
The Cardinal now departs, and is immediately vilified by Somerset to the Duke of Buckingham in much the same way as he himself has just spoken of Duke Humphrey, being accused ofpersonal ambition and the determination to assume the Protectorate for himself. Buckingham's reply could hardly be more direct:
Or thou or I, Somerset, will be Protector,
Despite Duke Humphrey or the Cardinal.
As these two leave in their turn, Salisbury turns to his son Warwick and to his brother-in-law Richard, Duke of York, and urges them to join him in support of the Duke of Gloucester
In what we can, to bridle and suppress
The pride of Suffolk and the Cardinal,
With Somerset's and Buckingham's ambition;
And, as we may, cherish Duke Humphrey's deeds,
While they do tend the profit of the land.
Finally, the stage is left to Richard of York, whose closing soliloquy leaves no doubt of his own intentions:
And therefore will I take the Nevils' parts
And make a show of love to proud Duke Humphrey . . .
Then will I raise aloft the milk-white rose,
With whose sweet smell the air shall be perfum'd,
And in my standard bear the arms of York,
To grapple with the house of Lancaster;
And force perforce I'll make him yield the crown,
Whose bookish rule hath pull'd fair England down.
We are left as Shakespeare means us to be left, with a sentiment of bleak foreboding. The realm is being torn apart, with at least six separate factions intriguing for power under a weak, incapable King. It is perhaps unfortunate that the two principal themes running through this vitally important opening scene - the loss of the two French provinces and the office of Protector - should both be based on historical inaccuracies; but in a broader sense the scene carries its own truth. Dissatisfaction, resentment, personal ambition, spite: all these were real enough, and were running uncontrolled. It was a recipe for disaster, and that disaster was not to be long in coming.
With the second scene of Act I, Shakespeare begins to chronicle the slow succession of events which lead eventually to the death of Duke Humphrey. The disgrace of Humphrey's over-ambitious second wife, Eleanor Cobham - who is arrested in I.iv and sentenced in Il.iii - had actually occurred in 1441, four years before the arrival of Queen Margaret in England,1 and thus properly belongs to the first part of the trilogy; but to have included it there would have meant losing the impact of a steady dramatic crescendo, for which strict chronological accuracy was surely a small enough price to pay. All those named as being associated with the Duchess in the black arts - Margery Jourdain, Roger Bolingbroke, John Southwell and the odious agent provocateur Hume (called John by Hall and Shakespeare but Thomas in the earlier chronicles) are historic personages. Shakespeare ignores Hall's reference to the slow melting of the wax image of the King, concentrating instead on the spirit (which makes its brief appearance in scene iv), and its answers to Bolingbroke's three questions concerning the fate of the King, Suffolk and Somerset.
Three times, however, he interrupts his story — on two of those
1. See Chapter 11, p. 228-9.
occasions deliberately shifting the focus back to Richard of York. The first is in I.iii, when Peter, the armourer's apprentice, accuses his master of upholding York's claim to the crown. Clearly the Duke cannot be held responsible for a reported remark by someone else, which the accused in any case has indignantly denied; but his name is somehow tarnished and it is Somerset, in place of himself, who is appointed Regent in France.1 (The same scene contains the highly enjoyable incident where the Queen gives the Duchess of Gloucester a box on the ear and the Duchess turns on her like a fishwife.) Richard steps still further towards the centre of the stage in II.ii, when — presumably in the interests of those members of the audience who had either missed the previous play or forgotten it - he reiterates the details of his claim,2 with Warwick solemnly pledging his support.
The least important of these interruptions is the scene of the hawking party (Il.i) which provides the nobles with yet another opportunity for quarrelling among themselves and showing their animosity towards Duke Humphrey. It comes as a distinct relief when their bickering is brought to an end by the arrival of Buckingham with the news of the Duchess's arrest. There follow her trial and judgement, the surrender by her husband of his Protectorship (which, as we have already seen, he had not in fact possessed for well over a decade) and, immediately afterwards, the duel between Horner the armourer and his apprentice, where the apprentice triumphs and the dying Horner confesses the truth of the accusation against him.
The second act ends with the scene of the Duchess's penance. Dressed in a white sheet and holding a taper in her hand, she pauses on her barefoot three-day march through the city streets to address her husband — who in the play is powerless, rather than unwilling, to help her. (The penance itself is a historic fact, though the conversation between the two must clearly be Shakespeare's invention.) The Duchess warns him of his imminent fall; he, with innocent optimism, reassures her:
I must offend before I be attainted.
1. Somerset actually superseded Richard in this position in the summer of 1448.
2. As usual, muddling the Mortimers. See Chapter 6, p. 137-8 and Chapter 12, p. 241.
The two are still in conversation when he is accosted by a herald and summoned to the Parliament at Bury St Edmunds where, as we know, he is to meet his death.
But what form was that death to take? For Shakespeare as for Hall, there was no question: Duke Humphrey was murdered, with the unanimous approval of his enemies, all of them for once united against him. But Shakespeare and Hall were almost certainly wrong. The suddenness of Gloucester's death, following as it did so soon after his arrest, certainly looked suspicious; but those who knew him best were convinced that there was no foul play. He was admittedly only fifty-six, but years of drink and debauch had had their effect: the palsy w
as already upon him, and both his portraits1 show a worn, tired old man. Besides, what by then would have been the purpose in killing him? He had had no real power, and very little influence, since his wife's disgrace of six years before; he was not standing in the way of any of the presumed conspirators, and was doing no real harm to anyone. True, he was widely suspected of conspiring against his nephew, but there was not a shred of evidence to support it. Where his own death was concerned, nothing that we know of the two principal suspects, Suffolk and Beaufort, suggests that they would have been capable of such a crime. And if indeed he did come to a violent end, it is to say the least surprising that when Suffolk fell just three years later and was charged with a long list of crimes, the murder of Duke Humphrey was not among them.
The entire action of the third act takes place in Bury St Edmunds. The first scene, in the abbey,2 covers the late arrival and immediate arrest of Gloucester and the nomination of Richard of York to put down a new rebellion in Ireland. Historically, seven months separated these two events: Gloucester died on 23 February 1447, while Richard was 'retained' as the King's Lieutenant in Ireland on 29 September, his
There is one in the Oriel College MS of Capgrave's Commentary on Genesis (engraved in Doyle's Official Baronage, ii, 22) and another, from a window in Old Greenwich church, engraved in the Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Bodleian, 1697.
The great Benedictine abbey, once among the half-dozen most important in all England, was largely destroyed at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, between 1536 and 1540. There remain only the two tremendous gateways, of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries respectively, giving into the precinct.
formal letter of appointment being dated as late as 9 December. As we know, he was extremely reluctant to accept the position and actually delayed his departure for a year and a half; but Shakespeare is certainly allowing full rein to his imagination when he gives the Duke of York the extraordinary soliloquy with which the scene ends, suggesting first that he has agreed to his appointment only as a means of obtaining an army to lead against the King, and then that he has personally engineered the coming insurrection under Jack Cade:
'Twas men I lack'd, and you will give them me:
I take it kindly; yet be well assur'd
You put sharp weapons in a madman's hands.
Richard showed on at least four occasions in his life that he was capable of raising an army whenever he wanted one, and although after his return from Ireland he was to be the subject of various wild accusations of association with Cade, no one either then or later took them very seriously.
Scene ii is set in 'a Room of State', presumably in the house of Cardinal Beaufort, to whose care Gloucester has been most unwillingly committed. The earliest version of the play, published in quarto form in 1594, includes at this point an opening stage direction: 'Then the Curtaines being drawne, Duke Humphrey is discouered in his bed, and two men lying on his brest, and smothering him in his bed. And then enter the Duke of Suffolke to them.' For some reason — possibly the insistence of the censor - these words were omitted from the version in the First Folio of 1623, in which the murder occurs offstage. A short conversation between the murderers and Suffolk makes it clear that it is he who has given them their orders, whereupon the King and Queen, accompanied by Beaufort and Somerset, enter on the scene. What brings them to the Cardinal's house is never explained, because they are apparently still unaware of Gloucester's death; when this is announced to them, the King falls in a swoon. He recovers only to launch a most uncharacteristically violent tirade against Suffolk, which gives rise to two still more passionate outbursts from Queen Margaret. The group is then joined by Warwick, leading an indignant delegation from the Commons; somehow they have already heard rumours of what has occurred, and it is Warwick who draws back the bed-curtains to reveal the body, pointing out as he does so that the Duke has died a violent death - for which, he alleges, Beaufort and Suffolk are responsible.
Beaufort leaves at once, not deigning to defend himself; Suffolk on the other hand angrily denies the charges and, after a furious and abusive exchange, he and Warwick draw their swords. Bloodshed is averted only by the arrival of Salisbury, demanding the immediate execution or exile of Suffolk; the King complies at once with a sentence of banishment, then withdraws. Now Suffolk and the Queen are left alone, and there follows a scene of parting which would have done credit to Romeo and Juliet themselves. It includes those haunting lines of Margaret's:
So, get thee gone, that I might know my grief;
'Tis but surmis'd whiles thou art standing by.
Such tenderness comes as something of a surprise. True, in the somewhat ridiculous scene where Margaret first makes her appearance (Part I, V.v) Suffolk is seen to be infatuated with her; but the theme is not pursued, and up to this point in the present play the Queen has been represented as hard, bitter and vindictive. There has been no evidence until now that the two are anything more than political allies, and political allies is in fact all that they were. As we saw in the previous chapter,1 Shakespeare cannot take the entire blame for a quite unjustifiable slur on both characters, based as it is on pure fable; both Hall and Holinshed - and even Michael Drayton, in his Heroical Epistles—make similar allegations. Still, he has given the pair some exquisite poetry - which is, perhaps, compensation of a kind.
The pair are interrupted by a messenger, Vaux, who brings news that Cardinal Beaufort is near death, thus preparing the ground for the third and final scene of Act III, which is set in his bedchamber. We have to assume that we are still at Bury, since the King, Salisbury and Warwick are all at the Cardinal's bedside;2 we know for a fact, however, that Beaufort died on 10 April 1447 - two months after Duke Humphrey - in the Wolvesey Palace at Winchester. His terrifying delirium is also
1. See p. 257.
2. I can find no authority for the statement of Dr Andrew Cairncross, the distinguished editor of the Arden edition of the play, that 'the Cardinal dies in the same house, and bed, as his victim Gloucester.' The house, perhaps; but Beaufort is hardly likely to have given up his bed to his prisoner.
pure invention: an eyewitness reports that he spent his last days attending to his will. On the evening of 9 April it was read over to him, and he made such additions and corrections as were necessary. On the morning of the next day he confirmed it in an audible voice; then he took leave of all around him and died quietly and with dignity. He was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where his magnificent tomb may still be seen.1 Act IV of the play is concerned with two themes only: the murder of Suffolk and the rebellion of Jack Cade. On the face of it, Shakespeare makes no direct suggestion that Suffolk's captors are anything but common pirates; certainly they appear to have no idea of their prisoner's true identity until he himself reveals it. The pirate 'lieutenant', on the other hand, is clearly a man of considerable education. His first speech, with which the scene opens, begins with seven lines worthy of the most high-flown tragedy:
The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea,
And now loud-howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night;
Who with their drowsy, slow, and flagging wings
Clip dead men's graves, and from their misty jaws
Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air.
and the long diatribe which follows shortly afterwards - thirty-three lines of furious invective, obviously well-informed, embellished with classical allusion and even a Latin tag - strikes one as distinctly unpiratical. It could hardly provide a greater contrast with, for example, the language of Jack Cade and his followers in the following scenes. Is Shakespeare hinting that there may after all be something more in the Duke's capture than meets the eye, or is this merely a piece of literary self-indulgence?
With scene ii, set at Blackheath, we come to Cade's insurrection. George Bevis and John Holland, two minor characters whom we meet here for the first and last time, seem to ha
ve been actors in Shakespeare's company; he probably saw no reason to change their names. His account
1. It seems a little hard that a modern statue of Joan of Arc should have been placed opposite it, the idea apparently being that she can confront her persecutor for all eternity. In fact Beaufort was only marginally involved in her trial and condemnation.
of the rising is inevitably no more than an imaginative reconstruction; as we saw in the previous chapter, Cade is unlikely to have been the unlettered rabble-rouser depicted here, with his unconcealed contempt for literacy or learning. A brief, somewhat macabre parenthesis in scene iv introduces Queen Margaret grieving over Suffolk's head, and there is another short passage in scene ix in which a messenger reports the return of the Duke of York from Ireland; for the rest, the act essentially follows Cade's progress, with a fair degree of accuracy, until his final flight, capture and death. There is no suggestion in Hall that the garden in which he was found was actually the property of sheriff Iden, but it hardly matters.
From Ireland thus comes York to claim his right,
And pluck the crown from feeble Henry's head:
Ring, bells, aloud; bum, bonfires, clear and bright,
To entertain great England's lawful king.
These opening words of Act V leave Shakespeare's audience in no doubt as to the reason for Richard of York's unauthorized return, in August 1450, across the Irish Sea. It was not, however, as simple as that. For Shakespeare, as he has indicated many times before, York was a self-seeking villain consumed with personal ambition. In fact, from the moment of his arrival in Wales, Richard had never ceased to emphasize his personal loyalty to the King. His quarrel was with Somerset, who had returned from his disastrous regency in France and had been appointed - to almost universal dismay - Constable of England. Buckingham's assurance in the first scene that the King has already had Somerset arrested and imprisoned in the Tower is of course premature: it was only after Richard's second march on London - not from Ireland but from his northern estates — eighteen months later in the early spring of 1452, that the King promised to take action against his favourite, and even then failed to do so. Shakespeare is thus telescoping the events of two years into a single scene: Cade's death in July 1450, Richard's return from Ireland at the end of August and his interview with the King at Blackheath in early March 1452. In the circumstances, this seems reasonable enough; more seriously off-beam, however, is the second part of that scene, after the entrance of Somerset. The sight of the man who he had been assured was in prison throws York into a fury:
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