Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  Son of the wretched Earl of Cambridge who had been executed for complicity in the Southampton plot, he had inherited the title from his uncle, who had died (of natural causes) at Agincourt.

  Charles's first wife - Richard II's widow, Isabelle of France - had died in childbirth at nineteen; his second, Bonne of Armagnac, had died childless during his captivity. Despite the thirty-two-year difference in age, this third marriage was to prove a remarkably happy one. Seventeen years later, in 1457, Mary was to present Charles with another daughter, also named Mary, almost half a century after the birth of his first.

  greedy, sensual woman of doubtful antecedents'1 who was formerly waiting-woman to his first wife, Jacqueline of Hainault - was accused of using sorcery against the King by making a wax image of him and melting it over a slow fire. Her motives were plain - Gloucester was heir to the throne - and the evidence incontrovertible. Of her two accomplices, one - Roger Bolingbroke, a known professor of the black arts - was hanged, drawn and quartered; the other, Margery Jourdain, was burnt at the stake. Eleanor, her life spared by the King, was sentenced to walk barefoot for three days through the City of London carrying a lighted taper, and to perpetual imprisonment thereafter; she was to die fourteen years later, at Peel Castle on the Isle of Man. Her husband, we are told, did not lift a finger to save her.

  The eclipse of Gloucester left something of a vacuum on the political stage; but it was quickly filled. William de la Pole, fourth Earl of Suffolk, has already made his appearance in these pages. Born in 1396, he and his family had devoted their lives to the French wars. His father had died before Harfleur, from which he himself had been invalided home; his elder brother, the third earl, had been killed at Agincourt; another brother had met his death at Jargeau where, as we have seen, William had been taken prisoner. Having managed to pay his own ransom, he had returned to England in 1431 and married the Countess of Salisbury, the widow of his old chief.2 Thenceforth his rise had been rapid. A close friend of Charles of Orleans - whose official custodian he became in 1432 — he was an active and influential member of Beaufort's peace party and consequently a bitter opponent of Gloucester; it came as no surprise when he was appointed one of the commissioners to inquire into the charges of sorcery made against the Duchess. His principal achievement of these years, however, was to engineer at Orleans's suggestion - and, it need hardly be said, in the teeth of vociferous objections from Duke Humphrey - the marriage of the King to Margaret, daughter of Count Rene of Anjou.

  Margaret's name was not the first to have been proposed in this connection: among other candidates there had been the daughters of

  1. Dictionary of National Biography.

  2. She was the granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Her extraordinary tomb, with its macabre memento mori beneath, stands in the church of Ewelme, Oxfordshire, and is well worth a visit.

  the Holy Roman Emperor Albert II, of the King of Scotland and of the Count of Armagnac. The year 1438 even saw the beginning of negotiations for a daughter of Charles VII, but the French had proved so unenthusiastic that the English delegation had taken offence and gone home. Margaret, however, was different. Her father, known universally as le bon roi Rene, was not only Count of Anjou and Provence, Duke of Bar and Lorraine; he was also titular King of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem and the brother-in-law of Charles VII, who had married his sister Mary. And even this was not all: through her mother, Isabella of Lorraine, Margaret was a direct descendant of Charlemagne. In 1444, though still only fifteen, she was already famous for her beauty and her intelligence. Her strong personality would, it was hoped, instil some backbone into her feckless husband; at the same time she was young enough to take direction from those in authority. Suffolk was deputed to lead an embassy, first to Charles VII to seek at least a temporary peace, and then to Count Rene to make a formal request for his daughter's hand. At first he seems to have been distinctly reluctant to accept these two tasks, demanding (and receiving) a formal indemnity in advance for any agreement he might make in the course of either set of negotiations; but both ultimately proved successful.

  Reaching Harfleur in mid-March 1444, Suffolk and his train joined the Duke of Orleans a month later at Blois. Together they sailed down the Loire to Tours, where they were met by Rene and where Charles VII received them all on 17 April. Negotiations for both the marriage and a two-year truce proceeded smoothly enough and were virtually completed by early May, when Margaret and her mother arrived from Angers. On 24 May 1444 the betrothal of herself and Henry was solemnly celebrated in the church of St Martin at Tours, with Suffolk standing proxy for the absent King. Charles, we are told, took a prominent part in the ceremony, which was followed by a great feast in the Abbey of St Julien, Margaret being treated with all the respect due to a Queen of England.

  Another year was to pass before bride and groom were united. The next winter Suffolk returned to France, this time to Lorraine where King and Count were together besieging Metz; not till the end of February 1445 did the city surrender, and only then did the French and Angevin courts return together to Nancy, where the final negotiations were completed. It was probably this unexpected delay that led to the widespread delusion in England that Charles and Rene had insisted on fresh concessions - including the surrender of all the territories that the English possessed, or claimed to possess, in Maine and Anjou. In fact there is no evidence that they did anything of the kind, still less that Suffolk agreed to any such demands; Henry's voluntary surrender of Maine to his new father-in-law at the end of the year seems to have been at the instigation of his young Queen alone. But the rumour was enough to destroy such popularity as Suffolk enjoyed, and was certainly a contributory cause of his downfall less than five years later.

  Early in March 1445 the royal marriage was celebrated at Nancy by the Bishop of Toul, after which Margaret, escorted by Suffolk and a numerous following of her own, made her way by easy stages via Paris and Rouen to England, where she arrived at Portsmouth on 9 April, 'sick of the labour and indisposition of the sea'. She remained ill for a fortnight; not till the 23rd was she well enough to travel the nine miles to the Abbey of Titchfield, where Henry - now twenty-three - was anxiously awaiting her and where the two were quietly married by his confessor, the Bishop of Salisbury. Their movements over the next few weeks are unknown, but they entered London in triumph on 28 May, and two days later Margaret was crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Stafford, in Westminster Abbey.

  Her compatriot Queen Isabella, who had been primarily responsible for the deposition of her husband Edward II one hundred and eighteen years before, had been known to her English subjects as 'the she-wolf of France'. For Margaret, as will soon become clear, such a description would have been an understatement.

  King Henry VI Part I

  [1422-1453]

  EXETER.

  This late dissension grown betwixt the peers

  Burns under feigned ashes of forg'd love,

  And will at last break out into a flame;

  As fester'd members rot but by degree

  Till bones and flesh and sinews fall away,

  So will this base and envious discord breed.

  And now I fear that fatal prophecy

  Which in the time of Henry nam'd the Fifth

  Was in the mouth of every sucking babe:

  That Henry born at Monmouth should win all, And

  Henry born at Windsor should lose all. . .

  KING HENRY VI PART I

  The First Part of King Henry VI is - with the arguable exception of Titus Andronicus - probably the earliest of Shakespeare's plays to have come down to us. Like its three sequels - for Richard III is so closely connected to the others that it can be considered part of a single series - it appears in the Stationers' Register after Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which is dated December 1589; on the other hand it must surely predate the reference to 'braue Talbot (the terror of the French) . . . that hee should triumphe againe on the Stage' in Pierce Penilesse his Supplication t
o the Divell by Thomas Nashe, registered on 8 August 1592. All three plays, therefore, are those of a young man, written when their author was still in his twenties. Perhaps partly for this reason, their authorship has been queried again and again, though the various arguments put forward have no place in this book. Suffice it to say that few modern scholars have any serious doubts that all are essentially from Shakespeare's pen. The question for us is, as always, how closely do the plays conform to historical truth?

  This time the short answer is 'not very'. The young Shakespeare seems to have been a good deal less conscientious in these youthful productions than he was when he came to write those histories which come earlier in the chronological canon and which have consequently been discussed in earlier chapters of this book. In his defence, however, it must be said that he was attempting something different, and a good deal more ambitious. His aim in these four plays is to portray not just the character of a King but a vast sweep of history. Henry VI Part I alone covers the period from the funeral of Henry V in 1422 to the death of John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1453. The need to compress over thirty years into the two-hour traffic of his stage obliges him to take considerable liberties with strict chronology, and the need to provide his audience with excitement and drama involves him in a good many more. But there: historical playwrights, like the authors of lapidary inscriptions, are not on oath; and few of us, I suspect, will find it in our hearts to blame him.

  His two principal sources are once again Raphael Holinshed and Edward Hall; but since in the Henry VI plays his subject is above all the Wars of the Roses and the events which led up to them, it is hardly surprising that Hall's Chronicle of the Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke should make a rather larger contribution here than it does to the plays covering the earlier period. For Shakespeare as for Hall, the underlying theme is always retribution: the price that the House of Lancaster must continue to pay for the original sin of Henry IV in usurping the throne. His son Henry V, by a combination of personal glamour, high intelligence and astonishingly good luck, succeeded in almost all he set out to do; his grandson Henry VI, who possessed none of these attributes, was to prove a catastrophe.

  It is hardly surprising that an English play about the Hundred Years War should reflect a degree of anti-French feeling:

  How are we park'd and bounded in a pale

  -A little herd of England's timorous deer,

  Maz'd with a yelping kennel of French curs!

  Such feeling was, however, particularly strong in 1589, when the three parts of King Henry VI were being written. The Spaniards, smarting from the defeat of their Armada only a year before, were already

  planning a new invasion of England, this time using Brittany as a springboard. Meanwhile the Protestant Henry of Navarre was struggling — with the help of English arms and money — against the Catholic League in his ultimately successful attempt to gain the French throne. At this of all moments, Catholic France was fair game — it even offered a witch like Joan of Arc - and Shakespeare was not one to miss such an opportunity.

  The very first scene of Henry VI Part I seems to contain the whole play in miniature. It is set in Westminster Abbey, against a background of the funeral procession of Henry V; but the dead King's body is scarcely cold before the two most powerful men in the realm are at loggerheads, with the Duke of Gloucester hurling insults at Bishop Beaufort - a quarrel which will all too soon be paralleled by that between York and Somerset and their two champions, Vernon and Basset. Bedford tries to calm them, but is almost immediately interrupted by the first of the three messengers who successively bring news of a whole series of military disasters across the Channel. Thus the three principal themes of the play - the inadequacy of the young King, with the consequent dissension among the nobles and ultimately the loss of France - are all introduced within the first sixty lines. At the same time we are given a particularly striking example of Shakespeare's technique of telescoping events. The first messenger announces the loss ofGuyenne, Compiegne (which he confusingly calls 'Champaigne'), Rheims, Rouen, Orleans, Paris, Gisors and Poitiers - towns which in fact fell to the French at various times between 1427 and 1450; at the time of Henry V's funeral in November 1422 all of them were still firmly in English hands. With the second messenger comes the news of the Dauphin's coronation at Rheims, which occurred on 17 July 1429, just a month after the capture of Talbot ('Retiring from the siege of Orleans') at the Battle of Patay on 18 June - not, as Shakespeare has it, 1 o August - which is the subject of the third messenger's report. None of this of course would trouble the average audience, whether in the sixteenth century or the twentieth; some of us, on the other hand, may be a little bewildered to find Talbot, three scenes later, fighting on the walls of Orleans and very much at liberty.

  Another source of surprise is the third messenger's report of the cowardice of Sir John Falstaff, an affecting account of whose death in 1415 is given by Mistress Quickly in the second act of Henry V. We have already seen in Chapter 61 how Shakespeare borrowed the name of this unfortunate knight in the two parts of Henry IV and in Henry V, when he found that he could no longer call him Oldcastle; it is nevertheless worth repeating here that in fact Fastolf-Falstaff had an unusually distinguished military career covering some forty years, during which he occupied many important posts and was awarded a number of honours-which included, in February 1426, the Order of the Garter. At Patay too he had displayed his usual gallantry; he was unfortunate, however, in that one of his tactical manoeuvres was misunderstood by his own men, who panicked and fled the field. According to Jean de Wavrin, an eyewitness, he himself continued to fight bravely on, retreating only when the day was seen to be irretrievably lost; the accusation of cowardice is made only by the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, who is also our sole authority for the story of his being stripped of his Garter. Even if, as seems possible, Bedford did order an inquiry into his conduct in the battle, Fastolf emerged from it fully vindicated; the offices in which he was later employed - Lieutenant of Caen, English ambassador to the Council of Basle, one of the chief negotiators of the Peace of Arras - were every bit as distinguished as those he had held before it. He certainly did nothing to deserve the character of a drunken poltroon which Shakespeare was so unfairly to foist upon him.

  The third scene of the play contrasts the initial pride and confidence of the French - until they suffer an unpleasant reverse - with the despondency of the English; but it is chiefly notable for the introduction of Joan of Arc, la Pucelle, into the drama. Audiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were repelled by Shakespeare's portrayal of the simple and heroic Maid of Orleans as a witch and a harlot, and a good many in the twentieth have doubtless felt the same way. But the fault is hardly his. He had found this picture of her already fully developed in Holinshed and Hall; and in his own day it was still - on this side of the Channel - almost universally accepted. Of Joan's supernatural powers there is no doubt in his mind; immediately on her first appearance she recognizes the hidden Dauphin, and shortly afterwards overcomes him in the fight by which he insists on testing her claims. But whence do these powers come? Clearly, there are only two possible sources,

  1. See p. 139-40.

  God or the Devil; and for the English to have accepted that they came from God would have been tantamount to an admission of the injustice of their cause. Joan, therefore, was a witch; and the mildly ridiculous opening of Act V, scene iii - when she conjures up the fiends who have aided her in the past — merely confirms the fact.

  A brief return to London enables us to witness an unpleasant confrontation between the Duke of Gloucester's men and those of the Bishop of Winchester, who refuse to admit the Duke to the Tower. Already, it appears, England has begun to suffer the consequences of the new reign: with the firm hand of Henry V no longer at the helm and his infant son altogether lacking in authority, the kingdom is already falling victim to dissension and internecine strife. A few minutes later, however,r />
  we are once more back at Orleans for the death of Salisbury, the most famous of the English captains and the most skilled in war. He had fought with distinction at Agincourt, since when — apart from a few brief intervals for diplomacy - he had ever been in the thick of the fray.

  Shakespeare's version of his death is remarkably close to Holinshed's: he even introduces the boy — son of the master gunner of Orleans - who was believed to have fired the fatal shot. The facts as we know them are essentially the following. On 24 October 1428, when the Earl was storming Tourelles, the fortification at the southern end of the bridge across the Loire, and surveying the situation from a high window, the stone window-frame was shattered by a cannon-ball and he was seriously wounded in the face, losing an eye. Carried to Meung, he died there ten days later. To his compatriots, his death came as yet another body-blow; to the French it was simply a further example of divine retribution. v

  The same scene also introduces us to John Talbot, first Earl of Shrewsbury, who is the real hero of the play. Talbot had already led campaigns on the Welsh borders, and had served two separate terms of office as Royal Lieutenant of Ireland. Now some forty years old, he seems to have been a Hotspur-like figure who made up in daring and general panache what he lacked in any real military brilliance. Quarrelsome and argumentative, he was not invariably popular among his peers; but he was a born leader, and his men adored him. He first appears in the play with an anachronism already on his lips, describing his recent ransom and exchange for the French knight Pothon - not, as he calls him, Ponton - de Santrailles; he was not in fact taken prisoner until the battle of Patay in May 1429, six months after Salisbury's death. The act ends with the obviously unhistorical hand-to-hand fight between the effective protagonists of the two sides: Talbot and the Pucelle. Thanks to her witchcraft she defeats him, while inflicting no serious harm - his hour, she tells him, is not yet come - and her victory is reflected by that of her followers. Orleans is relieved, and the furious Talbot gives his men the order to retreat.