Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  Henry had got no further than Northampton when he heard of a rising in Wales. It stemmed from a long-standing quarrel between Lord Grey of Ruthyn, one of the King's most stalwart supporters, and Owen Glen-dower, a rich and influential Welsh landowner whose diligent legal studies at Westminster had not prevented him from ravaging the border lands along the Wye, sacking several large towns and terrorizing the inhabitants. As the word spread, many Welshmen resident in England, including virtually all those studying at Oxford and Cambridge, returned to their homeland - a clear indication that additional forces were being recruited. On 19 September the King summoned the levies of ten shires and marched by way of Coventry and Lichfield into Shropshire, but the invaders took to the woods and forests and escaped him. The Welsh expedition ended after less than a month, as ingloriously as the Scottish had done. In the following year a Statute for Wales laid down - among several other provisions - that all lords with castles there would forfeit them if they were not properly kept, and that certain offices in North Wales were to be held by Englishmen only; but on Good Friday 1401 a party of Welshmen seized Conway Castle. Glendower's rising had begun in earnest.

  If the operations in Scotland and Wales had been intended to increase the royal prestige, they had failed - though they may have taught Henry a lesson. He was back in London to receive, four days before Christmas, an outstandingly distinguished visitor: Manuel Palaeologus, Emperor of Byzantium, who had spent the past two months at Calais awaiting the King's return from the north. Henry met him at Blackheath, rode beside him into the capital, and entertained him on Christmas Day to a splendid banquet at Eltham. Though he was powerless to grant the Emperor's appeal for military aid against the encroaching Turks, he somehow contrived to find 3,000 marks to contribute to the Christian cause before bidding his guest farewell.

  This represented something of an achievement, because Parliament was still keeping him on a strict financial rein. Almost continuously since his accession, Henry had been obliged to rely on loans from the wealthier of his subjects (among them the future Mayor of London Richard Whittington who, with his cat, has somewhat surprisingly passed into legend); he had already made dramatic reductions in the expenses of the court, and was forever on the lookout for further economies. One of the steady drains on his exchequer was the continued presence in England of Richard's widow, Queen Isabelle. Though she was still only eleven, her household had cost him nearly £3,000 during the first year of his reign, and once it was clear that she was not to become his daughter-in-law he was anxious to return her as soon as possible to her family. There were, however, problems. One was that her dowry - which Charles VI expected her to bring back to France -had already been completely spent; another, that a Queen of England and a Princess of France could not simply be shipped back home. She must travel in the full panoply of state - and that would itself be an expensive business. Negotiations, which began in early 1401, continued for nearly five months; a final agreement was not reached until 27 May. On 28 June Isabelle called on the King to take her leave - an embarrassing occasion for both of them, since she had been genuinely attached to her husband and doubtless believed Henry to be his murderer - and then set off for Dover.

  In the circumstances, the long procession that wound its way through the London streets was muted and solemn; but it cannot have failed to impress. The Queen's immediate entourage consisted of the Duchess of Ireland - widow of Robert de Vere - Henry's mother-in-law the Countess of Hereford, the Bishops of Hereford and Durham, the Earls of Worcester and Somerset, four other lords, six knights and Isabelle's chamberlain, confessor and secretary. With them went a vast number of ladies, damsels and squires, many of whom were attended by their personal troops of yeomen, maids and grooms. The majority doubdess rode their own horses; the court nevertheless provided another ninety-four. The mourning clothes worn by Isabelle and her attendants had been made specially for the occasion; a full service of silver accompanied them, together with several suites of fine furniture. Further loans, amounting to a total of £8,000, had been raised to cover all this expenditure, and to provide the Queen herself with enough money to bestow appropriate presents on all those who had served her. The journey from London to Calais took a full month: not till 31 July was she formally handed over to a reception committee headed by Waleran of Luxemburg, Count of Saint-Pol.1 In 1406 she was married again,

  1. Married to a half-sister of Richard II, the Count of St Pol later declared a personal war - which was consequently not covered by the existing truce - with Henry IV, to avenge his half-brother-in-law. He took a fleet to the mouth of the Garonne in an attempt to seize the ships carrying wine to England, and in 1403 made several raids on the English coast and the Isle of Wight.

  this time to her cousin, the fourteen-year-old Count of Angouleme, who in the following year succeeded his murdered father - the King's brother - as Duke of Orleans. Two years after that, in 1409, she died in childbirth. She was just nineteen.

  At the time of Isabelle's departure Henry IV had been seven years a widower. With four sons by Mary Bohun, he had assured the succession; but he was still only thirty-four, and for some time he had been considering remarriage. His opportunity had come with the death in November 1399 of the elderly Duke of Brittany, John IV, who left his young wife Joan - the daughter of Charles II, King of Navarre1 - as regent for his young son. Henry had met her, if at all, only briefly; but discreet negotiations began as soon as the fixed period of mourning for the Duke was over, and on 3 April 1402, in the absence of both parties, a proxy wedding took place at Eltham. It was almost another year before the two were able to meet as husband and wife: after a five-day crossing in the teeth of a heavy gale, Joan's ship failed to reach Southampton and landed instead at Falmouth on 19 January 1403, Henry riding the ninety-odd miles to Exeter to meet his bride. A second ceremony was held at Winchester on 7 February, and on the 26th Joan was crowned at Westminster. Five months later the Duke of Burgundy compelled her to resign the regency and to surrender her sons to his custody, so if Henry had had designs on Brittany, he was disappointed; but the marriage, though it remained childless and produced, in the number of Joan's foreign attendants, something else for Parliament to grumble about, seems on the basis of the meagre evidence available to have been a happy one, with Henry a faithful, generous and considerate husband.

  Shakespeare's History of Henry the Fourth - there was, at the time of its first publication in 1597,2 no suggestion of its being a First Part only - opens between the two weddings, some time during the summer of 1402. We cannot put an exact date on it, since in the very first scene

  A small independent country between France and Spain, at the western end of the Pyrenees.

  According to the Old Style, whereby the year began on 25 March. By the New Style, which was not officially adopted in England till 1752, the year would have been 1598.

  the King simultaneously receives the news of two military encounters which were in fact separated by nearly three months. The first was a skirmish at Pilleth in Radnorshire on 22 June, during which Glendower's men had captured Edmund Mortimer, uncle of the young Earl of March. On hearing the news, Henry had decided on a major campaign to put down the Welsh once and for all; and he now summoned three separate armies — a total, it was said, of 100,000 men — respectively to Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford, to be ready to march on 27 August. He himself would command the Shrewsbury contingent. Alas, the expedition was no more successful than its predecessors. As always, the Welsh refused to be drawn into Battle. The weather, moreover, was atrocious, so bad that it was popularly attributed to magic spells cast by the Franciscan friars, who had never forgiven Henry his usurpation of the throne. On 8 September the King's tent was blown down during a hail storm: his lance fell on him, and he was saved only by the armour which - we may be surprised to read — he was wearing as he slept. Three weeks later he was back in England; once again, he had achieved nothing.

  The second encounter was the Battle which Shakespeare calls 'Holmed
on' - better known to us as Homildon Hill. It was fought on 14 September, against a Scottish army under Archibald, fourth Earl of Douglas, which had crossed the English border some weeks before and had penetrated as far south as Durham, plundering and burning crops. On its return journey it had been intercepted by the Percy militia under Northumberland and his son Harry Hotspur and had suffered heavy losses, 500 fugitives from the field being drowned in the river Tweed. Douglas, with a number of other noble Scots, was taken prisoner. England was in sore need of a victory; yet when the news was brought to the King at Daventry, he was rather less jubilant than might have been expected. He was beginning to see the Percys, if not yet as a clanger, at least as an increasing irritation. Their successes against the Scots stood out in embarrassing contrast with his own continued failures in Wales; besides, no one could fail to compare the valour of Hotspur with the dissolute life of his own son Henry:

  O that it could be prov'd

  That some night-tripping fairy had exchang'd

  In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,

  And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!1

  Peremptorily, he demanded that all the prisoners should be sent at once to London; Hotspur replied that he would send all but one: the Earl of Douglas would remain in the north. Just fourteen years before, in 1388, he himself had been captured by the Scots at Otterburn (Chevy Chase) and held to ransom; revenge to him must have been particularly sweet, and Douglas was too great a prize to let out of his hands. For Henry this was the last straw. He had, as he well knew, no legal right to his claim: by the law of arms only princes of the blood royal needed to be surrendered to the King.2 But Hotspur's refusal continued to rankle, and led indirectly to an unpleasant scene during the Parliament which met the following October.

  It was on the 20th of the month that the Earl of Northumberland and his son presented themselves before the King and Parliament in the White Hall at Westminster, accompanied by the Earl of Fife and a number of other prisoners taken at Homildon Hill. Henry treated the captive Scots with every courtesy, complimenting the Earl on his gallantry and entertaining them all at his own table in the Painted Chamber; but he could not forget (or forgive) the absence of Douglas, and a furious argument ensued — it was further embittered by his refusal to allow the Percys to ransom their kinsman Mortimer3 - ending with

  I.i.85—88. Shakespeare, following Samuel Daniel, suggests that the two men were of similar age; and in III.ii.103

  the King emphasizes the point yet again. In fact they were separated by twenty-three years. Hotspur, born in 1364, was already thirty-eight at the Battle of Homildon Hill. The young Prince of Wales was fifteen -a little young even for roistering.

  Only one of Hotspur's prisoners fell into this category: Murdoch Stewart, Earl of Fife, son of Robert, Duke of Albany and Regent of Scotland. Shakespeare (I.i.71) calls him 'Mordake' and - led astray by a misprint in Holinshed - makes him the son of Douglas.

  Hotspur had married Mortimer's sister Elizabeth. (Not Kate, as Shakespeare calls her.) By this time it was being widely rumoured that Mortimer had deliberately sought captivity at Pilleth; Henry must also have been well aware that - as a great-grandson of Edward III - Mortimer might be held to have a stronger claim to the throne than he did himself.

  his calling Hotspur a traitor and drawing his dagger. 'Not here’ cried Hotspur, 'but in the field!' and strode out of the assembly. The die had been cast.

  Shakespeare, in I.iii, is once again obliged to conflate several scenes into one, in which he is guilty of a number of minor inaccuracies. Apart from those already mentioned, he confuses the Edmund Mortimer who was Glendower's prisoner and later his son-in-law with his nephew and namesake who was technically heir to the throne; he identifies the English Earls of March (who were Mortimers) with the Scottish ones (who were not); and he suggests that Hotspur had tried to keep back all his prisoners, rather than Douglas alone — even though, with the extraordinary 'popinjay' speech (I.iii.28-68), he gives him an admirable excuse for doing so. The discussion then turns from the prisoners to Mortimer, whom the King accuses of having

  wilfully betray'd

  The lives of those that he did lead to fight

  Against that great magician, damn'd Glendower

  while Hotspur furiously denies the charges. After Henry's departure, the action continues with the return of Northumberland's brother Thomas, Earl of Worcester, and the decision of all three Percys to join Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, in his intended rebellion.1

  The entire scene, which runs to nearly three hundred lines, is dominated by Hotspur. To Holinshed - who seems first to have given him his nickname - he is simply the 'capteine of high courage' that his name suggests; in Samuel Daniel's Ciuile Warres we see him certainly as youthful, but also as 'rash' and 'furious'; only with Shakespeare does he emerge as a knight sans peur et sans reproche, a young man of dazzling brilliance, unfailing courage and volcanic energy, for whom war is not so much a political instrument as the path to glory:

  By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap

  To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon,

  1. Shakespeare suggests that the reason for the Archbishop's disaffection is Henry's execution of his 'brother' William, Earl of Wiltshire, with Bushey and Green at Bristol three years before. The two were in fact cousins.

  Or dive into the bottom of the deep,

  Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,

  And pluck up drowned honour by the locks,

  So he that doth redeem her thence might wear

  Without corrival all her dignities. . .’

  Unstable he may have been, impatient and intolerant as well; but for Shakespeare he was a star. Far more than Prince Hal, he is the true hero of the play and its most memorable character - excepting only Sir John Falstaff himself.

  And what of Falstaff? He certainly gave his creator a great deal of trouble. One of Shakespeare's minor sources for these histories was an anonymous play of little if any merit, entitled The Famous Victories of Henry V and published some three years before Henry IV Part I. In it he found a character named Sir John Oldcastle who figured as one of the young prince's drinking companions, and innocently introduced him into his own play. On its first production, both the play as a whole and the character of Oldcastle in particular caught the public imagination; but after the staging of Henry IV Part II there was a furious protest from Oldcastle's descendant, Lord Cobham, and his family. Far from being a drunkard and a coward, they pointed out, Oldcastle had been High Sheriff of Herefordshire, had fought with courage in the Welsh wars, and in 1411 had distinguished himself in Arundel's expedition to St Cloud. Two years later he had been accused of being a Lollard - a follower of John Wycliffe3 - and arrested; subsequently he had escaped from prison, but in 1417 he had been recaptured and burnt at the stake as a heretic. In 1563 he had gained a place in John Foxe's celebrated Book of Martyrs. Not surprisingly therefore, the Cobhams were outraged at this defamation of their ancestor and demanded changes.

  1. I.iii. 199-205.

  2. Obviously not before, since the abbreviation 'Old', instead of 'Fal’, occurs at

  I.ii.138 in the Quarto edition of 1600. We do not know why the Cobham family

  waited so long before complaining; perhaps they were prepared to overlook Part I just

  as they had overlooked The Famous Victories, but could not accept the grosser travesty

  of Part II.

  3. See pp. 57, 153.

  The family was too powerful to be ignored, and Shakespeare saw that something must be done. Rather than create a new character altogether, however, he turned to the first of his early King Henry VI plays and resurrected another historical figure, Sir John Fastolf, whom he transmuted into 'Falstaff’. In the earlier play he had already portrayed him as an arrant coward, who had deserted the gallant Lord Talbot both at the Battle of Patay and then again before Rouen, and had been stripped of his Garter and banished in consequence; but this too seems in retrospec
t to have been somewhat unfair. Fastolf had in fact fought bravely at Agincourt, and had later been appointed Governor of Maine and Anjou and Regent of Normandy. Only in 1429 at Patay had he failed: his men put to flight by Joan of Arc, had deserted him, and Talbot had been captured. But if there was a subsequent inquiry he had been exonerated, and he kept his Garter until his death.