[In this essay, Saccio provides a background for the historical events addressed in Shakespeare's history plays—events that also comprise the subject matter of several other chronicle plays of the period.]

Methinks the truth should live from age to age.

Late in Shakespeare's Richard III, three royal ladies, the dowager queens Margaret and Elizabeth and the dowager duchess of York, sit upon the ground to catalogue their losses:

MARGARET.
I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him.
[to Elizabeth]
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him.
DUCHESS.
[to Margaret]
I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him;
I had a Rutland too, thou holpst to kill him.
MARGARET.
[to Duchess]
Thou hadst a Clarence too, and Richard killed him.
From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept
A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death.

This passage of mingled mourning and rebuke is a fitting summary of the self-destructiveness of the royal house of Plantagenet. Margaret and the duchess, ancient enemies, lament their dead and savagely point out each other's guilt for the deaths. But who are all these people? Some the playgoer or play-reader knows: the murderous Richard is the hero-villain of the piece, and several scenes have been devoted to his killing Clarence and the Edward and Richard of lines three and four. But Harry has appeared in this play only as a corpse, while the Edward of line one and the duchess's Richard and Rutland perished in an earlier play much less familiar to modern audiences. All these persons, moreover, are not only intricately related to each other in a prolific royal house, but also surrounded by a gallery of Norfolks, Suffolks, Warwicks, and Northumberlands connected to them by blood, marriage, alliance, or common interests, a throng confusing to a modern reader who tries to keep track of the large casts.

Shakespeare wrote eight plays on the later Plantagenets. Oddly, he did not write them in chronological order. He started with a tetralogy on the events from 1422 to 1485—the three parts of Henry VI, Richard III—and then, dovetailing into the previous work, composed a tetralogy whose story runs from 1398 to 1422—Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V. Although the plays vary in quality, the first set being prentice work compared to the second, and although the reverse-chronological order of writing suggests that he started with an incomplete vision of the whole, the series of eight has high coherence as a history of fifteenth-century England. Indeed, far more than any professional historian, and despite the fact that the professionals have improved upon him in historical accuracy, Shakespeare is responsible for whatever notions most of us possess about the period and its political leaders. It is he who has etched upon the common memory the graceful fecklessness of Richard II, the exuberant heroism of Henry V, the dazzling villainy of Richard III.

Unfortunately, such central characterizations are often all that we retain from Shakespeare's history plays. Sometimes they are all a reader or playgoer ever firmly grasps. Not that Shakespeare neglected the exposition of surrounding circumstances: the problem lies in us. The characteristic complexity of Elizabethan plays suggests that Elizabethan audiences were more accustomed to comprehending a large cast and an intricate plot than modern drama has trained us to be. In the history plays, moreover, Shakespeare could rely upon a measure of prior knowledge in his audience. For example, Richard II opens with (among other things) the dramatic question, “Who killed the duke of Gloucester?” Many Elizabethan theatergoers would have known who this duke was and why his death provoked a political crisis. The Elizabethans frequently derived from the reign of Richard II analogies to their own political problems. To a modern audience the question seems less than pressing. Editors of Shakespeare, of course, write explanatory introductions and footnotes. Introductions, however, are usually brief, and footnotes, by nature fragmentary, are awkward vehicles for conveying any quantity of historical information as well as distracting interruptions for a reader concerned with the dramatic values of a scene. As a teacher of Shakespeare and an inveterate eavesdropper on lobby conversation at the various Stratfords, I find that many people let most of the history slip, consigning much of the dialogue about past relationships, present claims, and future intentions to a dimly perceived penumbra uneasily labelled “political complication.” The process is understandable but unfortunate: it robs the playgoer of a good deal of the theatrical experience, and it places in the way of the student a considerable barrier to intelligent criticism of the plays.

Aside from the double tetralogy, Shakespeare wrote two other plays on English history, one on King John (reigned 1199-1216) and one on Henry VIII (reigned 1509-1547). These are also fairly intricate works, and about these kings as well Shakespeare could expect at least some of his audience to be knowledgeable. Since both of these plays are entirely self-contained works, not part of a series employing cross-reference between plays, their potential for confusing the reader is somewhat smaller. They present a different version of the problem: moderns are surprised by the contents of the plays. Nowadays if ordinary readers know anything at all about John before they take up the play, they know that his barons forced him to seal Magna Carta, an event that is held to be of great constitutional significance in the history of English-speaking peoples. Shakespeare does not even allude to Magna Carta, although the play dramatizes the baronial revolt that led to it. If ordinary readers know anything about Henry VIII, they know that he married six wives and brought about the English Reformation. There may also leap to mind the image of a cruel and gross king, handy with the chopping block and boorish in his table manners. Shakespeare's play, however, includes only two of the wives, deals scantily with the Reformation, and generally portrays the king with the greatest respect. With these two kings, Shakespeare has had little influence upon the common memory. Constitutional struggles after Shakespeare's time endowed Magna Carta with its present nearly sacred character, and the popular notion of Henry VIII owes a great deal to Holbein's paintings, a television series, movies, and historical romances.

This book is intended as background reading for Shakespeare's ten history plays. Only incidentally does it touch upon criticism or the more specialized problems of Shakespearean source-study: many excellent books are available on the artistry and the significance of these plays. I aim to provide a brief coherent account of English history in the reigns concerned, concentrating on the persons and the issues that Shakespeare dramatized. I hope that it will serve as a clear introduction and a useful work of reference for the complicated story told by the plays, so that the reader and playgoer may enjoy Shakespeare more fully and more swiftly. I have composed the narrative so that those pressed for time and interested only in certain plays may, after reading this introductory chapter, turn immediately to sections that concern them. I hope that others will wish, with Shakespeare, to grasp the whole saga.

Since students and playgoers may be thrust into the double tetralogy at any number of different points, it would be well, before plunging into detailed narration, to sketch the main lines of fifteenth-century English history. (Save insofar as this chapter will close with a few generalizations about Shakespeare's handling of history, the following remarks will not concern the two independent plays, King John and Henry VIII.) Different accounts and interpretations of the fifteenth century have of course prevailed at different times. Distinguishing them is one of the tasks of this book. Since Shakespeare's version is dominated by a struggle within the royal house, the following summary stresses the dynastic issue.

We must begin with Edward III, seventh of the Plantagenet kings and ruler of England for the middle half of the fourteenth century (1327-1377). This monarch's extraordinary capacity for begetting offspring lies at the root of subsequent internecine strife. Of his twelve legitimate children, five sons grew up, were endowed with extensive powers and possessions within the kingdom, and passed these on to their issue. As long as the royal family itself remained united, Edward's generosity to his sons constituted an effective policy for governing England. In the absence of family harmony, the kingdom was almost sure to follow the Plantagenets into disorder.

Family harmony hinged largely upon the strength of the king. Unfortunately, Edward III's eldest son and heir, Edward the Black Prince, predeceased his father. Consequently, upon Edward III's death the crown went to a boy ten years old, the Black Prince's son Richard II. Although Richard stayed on the throne for twenty-two years, distinguishing himself in several crises by great personal courage, his reign never fully recovered from the circumstances of its inception. Surrounded as he was by powerful, not to say greedy, uncles and cousins, Richard the child was perforce submissive and Richard the adult tyrannically vengeful. Finally, in 1399, he overreached himself. After the death of his most powerful uncle, John of Gaunt duke of Lancaster, he seized the Lancastrian estates. Gaunt's son Henry of Bolingbroke, exiled in Paris, returned to England and gathered an army. Although Bolingbroke's professed aim was merely the recovery of his inheritance, he soon pushed Richard off the throne, into prison, and (some months later) into his grave, there being little else to do with a deposed medieval king.

As Henry IV, first king of the Lancaster branch, Bolingbroke was a ruler with obvious liabilities: a flawed title to his crown, blood on his hands, and debts in his pocket. Of the three, the debts were the most immediately important. Various noblemen had helped him to his precarious height. As soon as he displeased them (and no king can afford continual complaisance), it occurred to them to help him down again. For most of his reign, Henry's energies were consumed in meeting rebellions. As he was a shrewd politician and a competent soldier, he contrived to defeat the dissidents and die in his bed (1413). The record of his son was more spectacular. Henry V was another shrewd politician and probably the best general ever to sit on the English throne. Reviving an old claim of the English kings to the crown of France, he united his nobles by leading an expeditionary army across the Channel. At the end of two campaigns he was the acknowledged master of both kingdoms.

At this climactic moment history began to repeat itself. In 1422 Henry V died of dysentery at the age of thirty-five. The heir to two crowns, his son Henry VI, was nine months old. The house of Lancaster, having won its throne out of the turmoils of a royal minority, came to grief two generations later by producing a similar vacuum at the center of power.

Henry VI remained king of England for nearly forty years, but only nominally. The royal child became an adult saintly in personal character, incompetent in politics, and subject to occasional mental derangement. The royal uncles and cousins, in concert and in rivalry, asserted themselves. Driven out of France, which had been reinvigorated by Joan of Arc, they retired to England to bicker with each other. By the 1450s, their quarrelling had become armed conflict. In 1460, one of the royal cousins went so far as to claim superior right to Henry's crown. This was Richard duke of York, descended on both sides from sons of Edward III. Since his mother was heiress of the Mortimer family, the line springing from John of Gaunt's elder brother Lionel, Richard did indeed have a powerful claim, although it depended upon the principle that the royal succession could pass through a female—a controversial notion. The civil war thereupon became the dynastic struggle conventionally known as the Wars of the Roses: the Yorkists (white rose), led by Richard, versus the Lancastrians (red rose), led nominally by Henry but actually by his remarkable wife, the energetic Margaret of Anjou. When the dust finally settled, Richard, Henry, and Henry's son Edward were all dead, and occupying the throne was the house of York in the person of Richard's eldest son, Edward IV.

Except for a brief Lancastrian restoration in 1470-1471, Edward ruled competently for twenty-two years. Indeed, according to the arguments of recent historians, the reorganization of government that created the strong monarchy of the next century was in good part Edward's work. Dynastically, however, he created two serious difficulties for his house. First, instead of marrying the usual foreign princess, he wed an English widow named Elizabeth Woodville, a lady with an extraordinary quantity of relatives who promptly took advantage of their new royal connection by securing for themselves an abundance of titles, posts, and wealthy spouses. The inevitable quarrels between the older nobility and the upstart Woodvilles boded ill for the house of York. All might have been well but for the other dynastic difficulty: Edward died at the age of forty, when his two sons, Edward V and Richard, were but twelve and nine years old.

The familiar script was acted out once more, but this time at top speed. When Edward died in April 1483, the Woodvilles had custody of the young princes, whereas by the king's will authority was to reside in his brother Richard duke of Gloucester, who had no use at all for Woodvilles. Within three months and without a battle, the Woodvilles were out, the princes had disappeared forever, and Gloucester was crowned Richard III.

Richard's bold stroke, however, gave him only a two-year reign. In August 1485, one Henry Tudor invaded England from France, and the treachery of some of Richard's followers cost the last Plantagenet king his life at the battle of Bosworth. Henry claimed the crown by right of conquest and by Lancastrian inheritance: his mother was descended from the Beaufort family, John of Gaunt's bastard offspring who had been legitimated when Gaunt made his mistress his third wife. This rather feeble dynastic claim was strengthened by parliamentary confirmation and by Henry's subsequent marriage to Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter to Edward IV and sister to the missing princes. York and Lancaster were united in the new house of Tudor. The claim was made impregnable by Henry's efficiency as a king and by his and his son Henry VIII's thoroughness in disposing of the remaining Plantagenet heirs. The dynastic quarrel was over.

The preceding summary of fifteenth-century English history makes the dynastic issue paramount. Royal persons argue over who has the right to the crown; laws of inheritance and precise family relationships appear to control events altogether. To rest there, however, would be to falsify the picture. For example, given female succession, Richard duke of York did have a better claim than his cousin Henry VI. He refrained, however, from pressing that claim for many years; even after he asserted it, he was content at one point to be declared Henry's heir rather than his replacement. The original usurpation, that of Henry IV in 1399, was accomplished without much thought being given to the superior rights of the Mortimer line that was later to prove so troublesome. There was in the fifteenth century no written law governing inheritance of the crown, not even any established practice beyond the first principle that the eldest son of a king should succeed. Even the case of a grandson, as with Richard II, could raise some question, let alone circumstances involving more than two generations or descent through a woman. The various acts of parliament confirming monarchical titles in this period did little more than ratify accomplished fact, producing the genealogical justification appropriate to the case at hand and conveniently omitting whatever else might be said about the family tree. Whether parliament even had the right to declare who was king was a very delicate matter, debated then, and still under discussion by constitutional historians. This does not mean that anybody with sufficient influence, military capacity, and luck could have secured the crown for himself. The blood royal was necessary. Henry Tudor's promise to join his Lancastrian claim to the Yorkist claim by marrying a Yorkist princess brought him significant support. Given some dynastic justification, however, other factors determined the outcome.

Of other factors there was an abundance. International politics played a role. Edward IV's recovery from the brief Lancastrian restoration of 1470-1471 was made possible by the assistance of the duke of Burgundy. Henry Tudor's attack on Richard III received aid from the king of France. Needless to say, these continental rulers were not acting out of disinterested charity. England, France, and Burgundy were engaged in ceaseless diplomatic maneuvering, each power fearful of alliance between the other two.

Probably more important than external pressures were social and economic conditions within England. The original Lancastrian usurpation was for many people vindicated by the success of the first two Lancastrian kings. Only in the social chaos of Henry VI's time, when the incompetence and the injustice of Henry's government were exacerbated by chagrin at the loss of France, did the York-Mortimer claim receive significant support. Edward IV's hold on the crown was in turn made acceptable to most people by his strenuous effort to correct local abuses and stabilize the royal finances. The usurpation of his brother Richard III was welcomed by some who feared another prolonged royal minority and who respected Richard as an energetic administrator.

Possibly even more important influences upon events—at least at any given moment—were the ambitions of individual noblemen outside the royal family. The immediate success of a royal claimant depended very largely upon his ability to attract support from nobles who could call up a fighting force, and these nobles were not driven by abstract passions for the rights of Lancaster or York. They aimed to secure properties or protect rights of their own; an alliance with a Henry or an Edward arose from temporarily congruent interests. Much betrayal and side-switching resulted. In 1455-1461, for example, the house of York had no greater ally than the earl of Warwick, who was the duchess of York's nephew; yet in 1470 Warwick betrothed his daughter to the Lancastrian heir and drove Edward IV temporarily from the throne. Perhaps influenced by modern civil wars fought on fundamental ideological issues, we are likely to imagine the York-Lancaster strife as an affair of more massive, coherent, and irreconcilable parties than was the case. Our inclination is reinforced by the romantic label, the Wars of the Roses, evoking as it does a vision of England divided into two camps whose members proudly flourished their red or white badges. In fact, there was almost no ideology involved, the armies were very small, and England went unscathed by any general destruction of life or property. As for the roses, they were made prominent by the Tudor historians rather than the Plantagenet combatants, popularized by Shakespeare, and turned into the standard formal name for the war only in the nineteenth century.¹

Just what did happen in the fifteenth century remains in many respects a puzzle. Vital documentary evidence has survived incompletely. Contemporary accounts are few in number, written by less talented chroniclers than those of the earlier Middle Ages, infected by rumor, and occasionally disfigured by prejudice in favor of one king or another. Modern historians have treated the period as something of a stepchild, a disorderly interlude between the achievements of the early Plantagenets and those of the Tudor Renaissance. Although much sound research has been done recently and many good books are available, there is little agreement on a number of issues and no authoritative history of the century. The relevant volume of the Oxford History of England, for example, is valuably detailed and instructive, but, significantly, it was the last (aside from the twentieth-century volume) of this standard series to appear, and the author is said to have revised repeatedly without feeling that he had achieved the desired synthesis.

In the following chapters, therefore, I shall be distinguishing among various perspectives. First, there is a modern understanding of what happened in the fifteenth century, incomplete and full of questions though it be, built up by research historians. Secondly, there is a Tudor understanding. Henry VII commissioned an Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, to write an official history of England. Vergil's book is the foundation of a lively tradition of Tudor historiography, culminating in two works that were Shakespeare's principal sources of information: Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) and Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Ireland, and Scotland (1578; Shakespeare used the second edition, 1587). Basic to these Tudor accounts is a belief in Henry VII as the savior of England. In part this belief sprang from the necessity to justify the Tudor acquisition of the throne: Richard III, for example, is made more spectacularly villainous than any man could possibly be, so that Tudor monarchy may appear the more desirable. In part the belief arose from the widespread sixteenth-century conviction that secular history displays patterns reflecting God's providential guidance of human affairs. Thus the deposition of Richard II is seen as a sacrilegious act interrupting the succession of God's anointed kings, a kind of original sin for which England and her rulers must suffer. The Lancastrians are then punished for their usurpation by the Yorkists, and the Yorkists by their own last king, until, England having atoned in blood, redemption may come in the form of Henry Tudor and his union of the rival houses. Thirdly, there is a Shakespearean perspective. This is, of course, still largely Tudor, since Shakespeare is writing during the reign of Henry's granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth, and drawing his material from Hall and Holinshed. Nonetheless, despite their large areas of agreement, the Tudor chronicles, poets, and playwrights who dealt with historical matters (there were many) were certainly capable of individual interpretations of men and events. Shakespeare especially deviates from the received accounts because he is translating relatively formless chronicles into drama, taking historical liberties out of artistic necessity. Although there are limits on the liberties he can take—there is no point at all in writing a history play about Richard III if you have him win at Bosworth—he can, and does, change the personalities of historical figures, invent characters, compress the chronology, alter the geography, devise confrontations that never took place, commit anachronisms, and so forth. Margaret of Anjou, whose savage lamentations were quoted at the beginning of this chapter, had in fact been dead for a year at the time the scene is supposed to occur. Above all, Shakespeare personalizes. Whether or not history is really governed by the characters and the choices of individual men and women, the dramatist can only write as if it were. Social conditions, cultural habits, economic forces, justice and the lack of it, all that we mean by “the times,” must be translated into persons and passions if they are to hold the stage.

Note

1. As S. B. Chrimes has pointed out [Lancastrians, Yorkists, and Henry VII, 1964], the Plantagenets had many heraldic badges. A red rose was only one of those used by the dukes of Lancaster and their descendants Henry IV and Henry V, and it was not employed by Henry VI, the Lancastrian king under whom the wars were fought. Richard duke of York inherited a white rose from the Mortimers, but it was seldom used by Edward IV and never by Richard III. Henry VII revived the Lancastrian red rose and, to emphasize his union of the rival houses, invented the Tudor double rose, white superimposed upon red. Some recent historians have eschewed the term “Wars of the Roses”: they consider it anachronistic (which doesn't matter: many events have been named long after they occurred) and falsifying (this does matter: the phrase directs too much attention to the dynastic issue). I shall use the phrase: the roses can scarcely be avoided in discussing Shakespeare's version of the wars.