The remaining scenes of the act show, if anything, still more fidelity to More and Hall. Shakespeare introduces the gullible mayor to represent the 'many substancial men out of the cytie' to whom Richard and Buckingham, 'harnessed in olde evill favoured briganders', explain the sad necessity which has obliged them to kill Hastings; he makes Richard dispatch Buckingham to Guildhall to spread the word of his brothers' illegitimacy; another henchman, Lord Lovell, is sent to fetch the mayor's brother Dr Shaa — he who is shortly to preach the sycophantic sermon - while his trusted Sir Richard Ratcliffe goes off to find Friar Penker,1 Provincial of the Augustinian Friars - 'bothe great preachers, bothe of more learnyng then vertue, of more fame then learnyng, & yet of more learnyng then trueth'. In scene v, which contains only fourteen lines, we even have a scrivener illustrating More's point that the proclamation of Hastings's death was so long and elaborate that it could only have been prepared many hours in advance. This brings us to the final scene of the act, which falls into two parts. In the first, which can be dated to 24 June, Buckingham tells Richard of his fruitless efforts to persuade the citizens of London to acclaim him at Guildhall; instead of which
they spake not a word,
But like dumb statues or breathing stones
Star'd each on other, and look'd deadly pale.
The second part covers the visit - which actually took place on the following day — of Buckingham, the mayor and a group of citizens to the Protector at Baynard's Castle to beg him to take the crown as of right. Twice he refuses; finally, with every show of reluctance, he accedes to their wishes:
But if black scandal, or foul-fac'd reproach,
Attend the sequel of your imposition,
Your mere enforcement shall acquittance me
From all the impure blots and stains thereof:
For God doth know, and you may partly see,
How far I am from the desire of this.
1. Holinshed's spelling; Hall calls him Pynkie.
In the play, the mayor and citizens are genuinely deceived by Richard's attitude: by the prayer book in his hand, and by the two reverend churchmen flanking him. Historically speaking, however, we can be fairly sure that the leaders of the delegation were by now fully aware that they were participating in a cold-blooded charade.
With the beginning of Act IV we are back once more in the world of Shakespeare's imagination. Stanley's first speech, bidding Queen Anne to go straight to Westminster for her coronation, makes it clear that the first scene is set on Sunday 6 July; the widowed Queen Elizabeth, who is seen on the way to the city to visit her sons, was then still in sanctuary. It is true, on the other hand, that at this time - and probably for at least a fortnight before - no access was allowed to the two little Princes in the Tower. As for the Marquess of Dorset, Elizabeth's son by her first marriage, he too had taken sanctuary, but escaped at about this time; we read that although Richard sought him with dogs, 'after the manner of huntsmen', he eventually managed to escape to France. Even if his mother, emboldened by her anxiety for her sons' safety, had ventured to the Tower, he would certainly not have been able to accompany her.
Scene ii once again shows us Richard at his most villainous. First he discusses with Buckingham how best to rid himself of the Princes; next he arranges with Stanley to spread the word of his wife's sickness, so that he may more easily dispose of her also and marry his niece; then he whispers his deadly instructions to Sir James Tyrell; and finally he refuses to listen when Buckingham claims the promised earldom of Hereford. In essence this and the succeeding scene hi are simply a dramatization of More's account; the only important difference is that Shakespeare brings forward the death of Queen Anne by nearly two years, making it roughly contemporary with the murder of the Princes. It is immediately after Tyrell confirms their deaths that he soliloquizes:
The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham's bosom,
And Anne my wife hath bid this world good night.
By this time, one feels, Stanley could scarcely have begun to spread the rumour that she was sick. In fact, as we know, the poor Queen survived till March 1485 - dying possibly of slow poison, but more probably of natural causes.
★
In the first part of scene iv the reappearance of the ghastly Queen Margaret is of course unhistorical; but by now she is hardly Queen Margaret at all. Her character, since the battle of Tewkesbury, has been transformed. What we see before us is a figure scarcely human, belonging more to Greek tragedy than to English, a personification of malignant vengeance who is capable of expressing satisfaction even over the death of the Princes. The second part of the scene on the other hand, during which Richard demonstrates once again his remarkable powers of persuasion in inducing Queen Elizabeth to press his suit with her daughter, makes historic sense so long as we accept - and, as Shakespeare's audience, accept we must — that his first wife Anne is already dead. In the third part the King is informed first of the imminent arrival of Henry Tudor in alliance with Buckingham, and then of the failure of their insurrection and Henry's return to Brittany. Since Buckingham is obviously still alive and we know that he was executed on 2 November, this enables us to date the end of the scene confidently to late October 1483.
The curious little scene v which brings the act to an end - and in which Lord Stanley explains that he cannot actively support Richmond while Richard holds his son as a hostage — might more appropriately be transposed with its successor, V.i: it belongs quite clearly to August 1485, when Richmond had made his landing. (He did so, incidentally, not at Haverfordwest or Pembroke as Sir Christopher Urswick maintains, but at Milford Haven.) With Act V we briefly return to 1483 and Buckingham's execution after the botched rebellion; then, with scene ii, we are back again in 1485 — Shakespeare having passed over the events of 1484 in silence — where we remain to the end of the play. This short scene with Richmond and his principal followers, somewhere on the road towards Bosworth, is a precursor to the fight. The three scenes which follow, iii to v, are all set on the field of battle; and it is on this, after Richard's death and a suitable concluding speech by Richmond — now King Henry VII — that the final curtain falls.
Of the three, scene iii is by far the longest and the most important, inescapably reminiscent of the finest scene (IV.i) of King Henry V, the night before Agincourt. In the early part at least, the two enemy camps share the stage as Richard and Richmond make their dispensations for the morrow. Both show their concern for Stanley, uncertain as they are both of his precise position and of his intentions; but it is to
Richmond that Stanley presents himself under cover of night, to explain for the second time how the King's possession of his own son as hostage makes it impossible for him to side openly with his stepson as he would otherwise have done. (The visit is obviously unhistorical; it should be noted too that - perhaps to simplify the story, or even to economize in casting - Shakespeare presents us with one Stanley only; he makes no mention of Sir William, whose last-minute intervention was to decide the battle.) It is at this point that the ghosts appear - eleven of them, each speaking first to Richard, cursing him, and then passing on to the sleeping Richmond, to whom they wish victory. Then Richmond and Richard deliver their orations to their men, and the battle begins.
Scene v, apart from containing the most famous line in the play1 -twice delivered - serves to emphasize the King's valour in battle as he determinedly seeks out Richmond to engage him in single combat. It also suggests that the latter protected himself by dressing a number of others in similar armour:
I think there be six Richmond's in the field:
Five have I slain today instead of him.
This appears to be an invention of Shakespeare's. The use of doubles was a well-known trick of medieval warfare,2 but there is no suggestion of it at Bosworth, where Richard is known to have worn the regal circlet on his helmet. Hall claims on the contrary that Richmond 'perceyved wel the kyng furiusly commyng towarde him, and by cause the hole hope of his welth and purpose was to
be determined by battaill, he gladlye proferred to encountre with hym body to body and man to man'. But the encounter takes place at last, at the beginning of scene v, and Richard is killed. We shall never know at whose hands he met his death; we can be confident they were not those of Richmond, since if he had personally struck the fatal blow the fact would almost certainly have been recorded. Here of all places, however, a little dramatic licence can surely be forgiven.
The story of the presentation of the crown by one of the Stanleys to the victorious Richmond on the field of Bosworth was a venerable
'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!'
See Chapter 6, pp. 146-7.
tradition long before Shakespeare's day. In the circumstances it can only have been Sir William, since his brother had refused to engage himself or his men in the Battle. Richmond's closing speech is unhistoric but unexceptionable - unless we take issue with his description of himself and Elizabeth as 'the true succeeders of each royal house'. Elizabeth, whom he was shortly to marry, was indeed the heir to the house of York, although after the death of Richard's only son in 1484 (unmentioned by Shakespeare) he had in fact adopted his nephew John de la Pole as his heir; but to that of Lancaster - even of what was left of it -Henry's claim was legally a good deal more questionable. No matter: in the immediate aftermath of Bosworth there would have been few men in all England who would not have knelt before Henry Tudor as their rightful King.
Epilogue
This book has covered, very sketchily, a century and a half of English history, forming the framework of Shakespeare's nine greatest historical plays. The story is one of almost incessant fighting: first comes the Hundred Years War with France, and then those three further decades of the Wars of the Roses during which Englishmen confronted not the French but their own compatriots. Both conflicts are misleadingly named. The former lasted a good deal longer even than its epithet implies, while the second possessed neither beauty nor romance - and, to those involved, smelt anything but sweet. On the other hand, they did the country comparatively little material harm. These were still medieval wars. The armies were tiny by modern standards. For the individual soldiers there was, as there has always been, the risk of being killed or wounded; but the survivors of the fighting in France quite often returned with their pockets stuffed with ransom money, dragging behind them whole cartloads of plunder. Civil war admittedly exacted a heavier price on the domestic population, especially in the regions through which the armies marched; but the fighting, nightmarish as much of it must have been, continued for a total of only thirteen weeks. To the vast majority of the King's subjects the rival claims and counter-claims, the conflicts and ambitions of the nobility must have seemed remote indeed. They too had their struggles, as they had always had - against the elements, against economic depression, against the iniquity of a landlord or the injustice of a magistrate; but life for them continued largely unchanged, and would continue to do so for many years to come.
The true cost of the wars was not material but moral. Under the old feudal system the vassal had given his service to his lord, for a fixed number of days per year, in return for the land which the lord allowed him to farm; but the old feudal system was slowly breaking down, and as it did so there was an increasing need for professional or semi-professional
armies, who would stay in the field over a protracted campaign, and who sold their services for money - and the hope of plunder - not necessarily to their lord but to the highest bidder. Thus there grew up private militias who owed their allegiance to whoever was prepared to pay them and who, when the fighting was over and they could no longer find legitimate occupation for their swords, turned into armed bands of marauders who would devastate one village after another, helping themselves to its food and its women and then moving on to the next.
A strong ruler could have done much to limit the damage; it was England's misfortune, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to suffer some of the worst kings who have ever disgraced a throne. Edward III was quite obviously not one of them: he had at least succeeded in re-establishing the prestige of the monarchy after the deposition and murder of his contemptible father. But his decision (taken largely for the sake of providing employment and occupation for the turbulent magnates who threatened to make trouble at home) to mount an aggressive war for the French throne was to cause untold suffering to the people of France and to cost, over the next 120 years, countless thousands of English lives. Moreover - and this, in the long run, was to prove almost as catastrophic - he had far too many children. For a king to have seven sons, in an age when the laws of succession were vague and unwritten, was a virtual recipe for disaster; and it was the slow, relentless unfolding of that disaster that gave Shakespeare his theme.
The premature death of the Black Prince was another tragedy. Had the Prince kept his health and outlived his father, his son Richard II might still have succeeded him; but it would have been an older Richard, perhaps even a wiser one - a Richard who might, with any luck, have outgrown that mercifully rare combination of fecklessness and arrogance that caused his downfall. He might even, one would have thought, have learnt a lesson from the fall of his great-grandfather Edward II; instead, with his worthless, self-seeking favourites and his ill-concealed contempt for the barons on whom his crown depended, he seemed almost wilfully to copy him - thereby precipitating another revolution and forfeiting, as Edward had forfeited, both his throne and, ultimately, his life. Henry IV, who deposed him, was by no means incapable; but he never managed to live down his usurpation of the throne, and he
was hamstrung by a series of parliaments more uncooperative than any before the seventeenth century. His son Henry V sought, as Edward III had sought before him, to bury his domestic problems by renewing the war with France. A courageous and inspiring leader of men though a remarkably indifferent general, he won a glorious but largely undeserved victory and thereby immense popular acclaim; but he died at thirty-four, leaving the country in no better state than he found it.
Once again an early death exacted its toll, and a far greater one than before: Richard II on his accession had been a boy of ten: Henry VI was a babe in arms. More serious still, he effectively remained one for the rest of his life. A strong hand at the helm might, at this point, have averted catastrophe; under Henry, and under the baleful influence of his councillors and his Queen, the Wars of the Roses were inevitable. The King's life was to prove, to everyone's surprise, not so much too short as very much too long; even so it was plain, in the absence of any suitable Lancastrian successor, that the throne must pass to the House of York. That it should have done so during Henry's lifetime, and should then have been returned to him at the whim of a jumped-up nobleman, says all that needs to be said about the depths to which the monarchy had fallen. Could Edward IV, after his second coronation, have redeemed it as successfully as his great-great-grandfather and namesake, a hundred and fifty years before? Quite possibly - he possessed many of the qualities necessary for the task. But he made one calamitous mistake: he married a Woodville. As a direct result of that marriage the Yorkists were split in two: and thus, with Edward's early death while his sons were still defenceless children, the way was laid open for the usurpation of Richard III - and, indirectly, for the accession of Henry Tudor.
It was said of Henry that he had never been young; but a military upbringing at the hands of an uncle, followed by an adolescence and early manhood spent largely in exile and in constant danger of capture and execution, are hardly conducive to joie-de-vivre. Seldom if ever did Henry show any of the passions, the overwhelming emotions, the terrible rages of his son and granddaughters. Cruel and inflexible he could be, but his decisions were always ruled by the head rather than the heart; far more frequently he amazed his advisers by his mercy and tolerance - which sprang, however, not from any deep wells of kindness or compassion but from the conviction that his primary task must be to reconcile the old factions and, slowly and patiently, to bring the aristocracy to its senses
. At long last, the country had a superb King; it had waited, heaven knows, long enough.
The history of England in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is tragic indeed, but it is never lacking in drama; no wonder Shakespeare saw it as fit material for his pen. There were of course danger areas, of which the most perilous was probably religion. Only forty years before he wrote his plays, under Bloody Mary, English men and women were being martyred for their Protestant faith; Elizabeth had to some degree restored the equilibrium, but feelings were still running high on both sides. Shakespeare solved this particular problem by ignoring it: there are few contemporary writers, in England or even in Europe, in whose work the affairs of the spirit play so insignificant a part. Except for the speech of the Bishop of Carlisle in Act IV of Richard II and the doggerel quatrain1 on his tomb - which it is almost impossible to believe that he wrote himself - there is scarcely a line in all his work that mentions, uncorrupted and in a serious context, the name of Jesus Christ.
More inescapable were the dethronements of Richard II and Henry VI. The Queen was known to be sensitive on such matters, and it must always be borne in mind that these plays, written for the most part while Shakespeare was still in his twenties, are Elizabethan rather than Jacobean. Besides, as things turned out, Her Majesty had good reason to be uneasy: on Friday 6 February 1601 did not a party of supporters of the Earl ofEssex demand a special performance of Richard II, promising to pay forty shillings for it and to indemnify the players against any loss? Two days later Essex was proclaimed a traitor and the same evening gave himself up.
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