From a Shakespearian perspective, the name of the 1536 rebellion must have seemed both ironic and prophetic, since the Reformation and the Renaissance combined to create a culture in which everyone was a pilgrim of grace in one or more senses of the word. Grace as the divine gift which redeems sinful mortals, making them pleasing in the eyes of God, was, as Norton sharply implied, a distinguishing and proprietorial concern of Reformation theology. And everything required by Castiglione and his like from the gentleman seeking grace and favour at court—eloquence, wit, versatility, sprezzatura, modesty, and an unfailing sense of fitness or propriety—was comprehended in that one word: 'every thing that he doth or speaketh, let him doe it with a grace'.²³ Thus in Elizabethan usage the spiritual and the socio-aesthetic senses of this unusually polysemous word tended to reinforce each other so as to make it an index of supreme value.

Not surprisingly, 'grace' is a conspicuous idea in a number of Shakespeare's plays. It is most obvious in those which concentrate on the nature of kingship and 'the Lord's anointed'. In 3 Henry VI (in the characterization of Edward), in Richard III, and in Richard II, the word 'grace' functions primarily as an ironic index of the ruler's unfitness for his office and of a more general sense of lost excellence—honour, civility, moral integrity—in the nobility and the nation at large. The word actually occurs more often in Richard III than in 1 and 2 Henry IV; but as a theme the notion of grace is much more deeply embedded in the two-part play. This is due in the first place to the fact that Shakespeare is here concerned not only with loss and decline but also with the struggle for personal and national renewal (redemption, reformation); and in the second to the way in which he has complicated the meaning of grace by tying it to the notion of rebuke or censure, thus drawing upon a central feature of Calvinist spirituality. Indeed with its complex vision of grace in all its senses and associations—socio-aesthetic, spiritual, and political—Henry IV becomes something like a dramatic encapsulation of the Tudor century.

Intemately connected, the concepts of grace (with its antonyms 'disgrace', 'shame', and 'impudence') and rebuke (with its synonyms 'check', 'rate', 'chide', and 'upbraid') dominate dialogue and action in both parts of the play. Since disgraceful conduct invites rebuke, the connection is instantly intelligible; but the prominence and full significance of the twin motif can only be understood in relation to Augustinian and Calvinist theology.

Dealing in the Institutes (II.v) with objections to his teachings on grace, free will, and predestination, Calvin refers to the claim that if men are predestined to be saved or damned, then 'exhortations are vainely taken in hande … the use of admonitions is superfluous … it is a fond thing to rebuke'. Augustine, he replies, wrote his book De Correptione et Gratia (On Rebuke and Grace) in answer to this objection; and he proceeds to summarize an argument on 'the medicine of rebuke' to which Augustine often returns in his anti-Pelagian writings. When addressed to the reprobate, rebuke beats and strikes their conscience in this life, and renders them more inexcusable on the judgement day. When addressed to the elect, 'if at any time they be gone out of the way sith they fell by the necessarie weaknesse of the fleshe', it avails much 'to enflame the desire of goodnesse, to shake off sluggishness, to take away the pleasure and venimous swetnesse of wickednesse'. It 'stirreth them to desire … renuing', prepares them 'to receiue … grace', and 'maketh them a new creature'. Thus the prophets, Christ, and the apostles never ceased to 'admonishe, to exhorte and to rebuke'.²⁴ Preliminary reflection alone would suggest that all of this resonates through Henry IV, a play whose seemingly reprobate and much censured hero was fixed in history as one of the elect. But in order to appreciate just how deeply embedded is this play in the culture of its time, one must note that Calvin's discussion of rebuke and grace is really a preamble to his exposition of church discipline (II.xii), 'whereof the chiefe use is in the censure and excommunication'. This provided the theological foundation for what was arguably the best-known feature of Tudor Puritanism: its censoriousness. Fired with a 'whitehot morality', the Puritan saw himself as 'a prophet in his generation, one who freely rebuked both high and low alike'.²⁵

Why the Puritan preoccupation with grace-and-censure should have coloured the whole of Henry IV has to be ascribed ultimately to Falstaff's uncensored identity as Sir John Oldcastle or Lord Cobham, the Lollard burned for heresy by his friend Henry V and revered by Puritans as a heroic martyr. Much as Falstaff dominates many a performance of Henry IV, so Oldcastle dominates John Foxe's 'ecclesiasticall historie' of Henry V's reign: for him, that was the time when a synod was called 'to represse the growing and spreading of the Gospell, and especially to withstand the noble and worthy Lorde Cobham', chief favourer of the Lollards.²⁶ Oldcastle, however, was the subject of religious controversy in the sixteenth century and had a dual identity as reckless profligate (the Catholic version) and repentant sinner-turned-saint (the Protestant).²⁷ Shakespeare's comic debunking (and final 'excommunication') of the Protestant hero counterbalances whatever anti-Catholic attitudes might have been read into his presentation of northern rebellion; and the ideas of sin, rebuke, repentance, and grace which are intrinsic to the fat rogue's characterization are gravely relevant to the uncomic characters on both sides of the political divide.

Examination of the ways in which Henry IV is shaped by ideas of grace and rebuke, so that an earlier age seems to disclose the major patterns of Tudor experience, must begin with the associated ideas of pilgrimage, crusade, and reformation. The chroniclers mention that Henry had plans at the end of his reign to go on a crusade to recover Jerusalem from the infidels. Shakespeare seizes on this idea, makes it frame the whole of Henry's reign, and gives it the character of a pilgrimage. Henry's motives in this project combine and confuse the political and the spiritual: he would busy restless minds with foreign quarrels, and he would expiate the murder of Richard II, a shared guilt which he never explicitly acknowledges until the end. Henry's sense of guilt and shame, his feeling that present and impending troubles are retribution for past mistreadings, seems to involve the whole nation, so that his postponed pilgrimage effectively symbolizes a general quest for redemptive grace. As in Holinshed, whose favourite rendering of anno domini is 'in the year of our redemption', and above all as in St Paul, who urges the Ephesians to put off the unregenerate old man, 'redeeming the time: for the days are evil' (Ephesians 5.15-16), history here is time conceived as a quest for liberation from the sins of the past and the present. Falstaff, the sensual, time-wasting 'old boar' who feeds 'in the old frank' with pagan 'Ephesians … of the old church' (2:2.2.111-14), personifies (among other things) the unregenerate order.²⁸ It is that order which Hal must reject if he is to redeem time past and present and crown the future with a glittering 'reformation' (1:1.2.201-5), thus fitting the role, given him by the chroniclers, of a madcap prince who miraculously became 'a new man'.²⁹

The idea that England is almost hopelessly seeking to recover lost grace is posited in the opening scene of Part 1. Westmoreland discloses that Council had to 'brake off' its 'business for the Holy Land' on hearing that 'the noble Mortimer' and his men had fallen into 'the rude hands' of 'the irregular and wild Glendower', and that the corpses of his butchered men suffered 'Such beastly shameless transformation … as may not be / Without much shame retold or spoken of (1.1.38-46). Henry complains that 'riot and dishonour stain the brow' of the heir apparent and that the pride and malevolence of his erstwhile friends compel him to 'neglect / Our holy purpose to Jerusalem' (lines 84-101).

Although the word itself is not introduced until 1.2, this opening scene begins to suggest the wide spectrum of meaning in 'grace'. Initially there is grace in the religious sense, and it refers primarily to the process by which military-political aggression is given supreme justification. In Part I the Percys make much of the fact that the 'noble prelate well beloved', the Archbishop of York, 'commends the plot' to overthrow Henry: 'it cannot choose but be a noble plot', concludes Hotspur (1:3.165, 277; 2.3.19). Gadshill's comment on the parallel action to rob royal officers and pilgrims reflects ironically on the northern prelate's blessing (while hinting perhaps at the historical parallel in a characteristically ambivalent manner): the involvement in the action of the 'nobility and tranquillity'—who 'pray continually to their saint, the commonwealth, or rather … prey on her'—serves to 'do the profession [of highwaymen] some grace' (1.1.69-78). It is only in Part 2, however, that 'The Archbishop's grace of York' (1:3.2.119) becomes actively rebellious. Without him, the people could never have been persuaded to rise with the Percys a second time. 'The gentle Archbishop', reports Morton to Northumberland, binds his followers because he 'Derives from Heaven his quarrel and his cause', 'Turns insurrection to religion', and arms himself with a holy relic, 'the blood / Of fair King Richard, scraped from Pomfret stones' (2:1.1.189-206). That this speech is given in the opening scene to a character called Morton (who never appears again) is adroit. There is no comparable character, and no one of that name, in any of the sources, but it was well known that the Northern Rebellion of 1569 was stirred up by Dr Nicholas Morton, an exiled priest and former Prebendary of York sent by Pius V to foster Catholic resistance to Elizabeth.³⁰ When the rebels confront the King's deputy at Gaultree, and are defeated in the most elaborately treacherous manner, the word 'grace', both as honorific and as abstract quality, will ring through the dialogue no less than nineteen times; for the historically minded, the Pilgrimage of Grace is vividly anticipated. But Morton's name and role ensure that the insurrection in Part 2 is implicitly paralleled with the other major rebellion of the Tudor period as well. As we have seen, Shakespeare's audience was familiar with complex historical parallelism of this kind.

The role imputed to the archbishop concurs nicely with the demystifying polemics of Tudor orthodoxy. But of course the eye of the demystifier has settled also on the monarchy from the start, and never leaves it until almost the end. Henry's habitual self-righteousness, his proclaimed desire to 'draw no swords but what are sanctified' (2:4.2.4), Gadshill's 'graced' attack on the pilgrims, and 'his grace' Prince John's smug claim at Gaultree that 'God, and not we, hath safely fought today' (2:4.1.142, 266, 280, 349) complete the picture of a political world where all claims to moral authority must be scrutinized with the utmost care. This is Tudor England as many Protestants and Catholics must have seen it.

Converging on grace in the religious sense is the notion of grace as the quality and title of true royalty: kings being sacramentally exalted, appointed 'by the grace of God', and expected like Him to be bountiful and forgiving as well as just and firm. The 'title of respect' which Henry (in his opening speech) complains he is denied by the Percys (1:1.3.8) is possibly 'Your grace', the honorific first used in England in royal address during the reign of Henry IV.³¹ Henry's loyal followers readily grant him this title; in fact Westmoreland, engaging with the Yorkist Mowbray in a bout of partisan historicizing, claims that in Richard's time the people's prayers 'were set on Hereford, whom … they blessed and graced indeed more than the king' (2:4.1.136-40). But the key question is whether Hal deserves this title. Symptomatically, Falstaff denies this, dis-gracing the Prince in their first scene together: 'God save thy grace—majesty I should say, for grace thou wilt have none … not so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg and butter' (1:1.2.15-20). But it is noticeable that when Falstaff has spoken 'vilely' of him in Part 2 ('a good shallow young fellow, a would have made a good pantler'), both Doll and Mistress Quickly show a conspicuously different attitude: 'O, the Lord preserve thy grace! By my troth, welcome to London. Now the Lord bless that sweet face of thine' (2.4.193, 236-7). Henry himself endorses this attitude in his dying advice to the Prince's brothers. Although 'being incensed, he is flint', Harry 'is gracious if he be observed', having 'a tear for pity, and a hand / Open as day for meting charity'; they must not 'lose the good advantage of his grace' by ignoring or alienating him (2:4.2.28-33).

Henry's advice introduces the kindred notion of royal 'grace and favour' and what it entails in terms of generosity and indulgence. His politic withdrawal of such from the Percys, his 'first and dearest … friends', is a major cause of the civil war. In the parleys at Shrewsbury, Worcester complains that Henry 'turn[ed]' his 'looks / Of favour' from 'all our house' (1:5.1.30-1); Hotspur that he 'disgraced me in my happy victories' (4.3.97). But it is in Falstaff's relationship with the heir apparent that this issue becomes one of major importance, both dramatically and politically. Far from being a herald of democratic republicanism, as Graham Holderness has claimed,³² Falstaff is from the start wedded in soul to the idea of a monarchical order in which royal grace and favour is entirely at his disposal, to be enjoyed, dispensed, and denied by him as he pleases. In the same opening dialogue where he denies Hal 'his grace', Falstaff (with graceful wit) pleads for the titles of respect which will grace and 'countenance'—the word signifies both favour and patronage as well as pretence—his own and his friends' disreputable activities: 'Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty. Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of … our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal' (1.2.22-8). At Shrewsbury, Hal magnanimously accedes in part to this request, allowing Falstaff to steal the credit for killing Hotspur: 'if a lie may do thee grace, / I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have' (5.4.152-3). So Falstaff expects 'to be either earl or duke' (line 158); but Part 2 tells the familiar tale of court preferment endlessly deferred. On his first appearance here he huffily admits (in effect) that he is now out of favour with Hal: 'He may keep his own grace, but he's almost out of mine, I can assure him' (1.2.20-1).

But he sees himself too in the role of patron. He has his own realm where hopefuls like Justice Shallow believe that 'a friend i' th' court is better than a penny in purse', and where servants like Davy complain that 'a knave should have some countenance at his friend's request' (2:5.1.25-6, 36). Hopes for Falstaff and his followers soar with news of the old King's death. He thinks of himself instantly as 'Fortune's steward' Pistol he will 'double charge with dignities' and 'Lord Shallow' can choose what office he will: 'I will make the king do you grace … do but mark the countenance he will give me' (5.3.102-7; 5.5.5-7). The key to his failure lies in the way he approaches the new King. Arriving travel-stained and sweaty to stop the coronation procession with 'God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal' (5.5.36), he publicly dis-graces Henry V and presumes to appropriate his royalty. Falstaff's quest for grace is hilarious to begin with and pathetic in conclusion; but its negative underside has been made clear: in the King's fears that Hal's reign will reenact that of Richard II, when 'sage counsellors' gave way to 'apes of idleness' (4.2.249-51); in Falstaff's promise of revenge on the Chief Justice (5.3.113); and in the conviction of Warwick, Clarence, and John that no one in office can now be 'assured what grace to find' unless he is prepared to abandon his principles and 'speak Sir John Falstaff fair' (5.2.30-3).

Falstaff's performance at the coronation procession is a highly theatrical and 'jocoserious' example of social impropriety: of disregard, as Castiglione would express it, for the circumstances of time, person, and place;³³ he is rebuked at this point in just such terms by Hal, and earlier by the Chief Justice (2:5.5.44, 2.1.49-50). The dazzling verbal dexterity with which he entertains his prince and fits his holiday mood make him in one sense the perfect Renaissance courtier; but his decline and fall are defined in terms of the courtly code which justifies his 'graceful recklessness'.³⁴ Even in Part 1 his sallies can displease because mistimed ('is it a time to jest and dally now?' (1:5.3.54)). In Part 2 the sheer impudence in his responses to rebuke precludes 'the right fencing grace' to which he still lays claim (2.1.151). His perpetual fooling seeks to impose the timeless world of holiday (where disregard for 'the circumstances' is the norm) upon the timebound world of politics, and to collapse the difference between him-self and youth and royalty. Applied thus, the courtly code of social grace is inseparable from a philosophy of natural order and a sense of historical necessity. It is the same philosophy which tells us in Twelfth Night that there are times when a joke is not a joke (3.1.59-67), and that the rain it raineth every day.

In the wider perspective, the play's concern with grace in the socio-aesthetic sense seems to reflect a selfconscious, Tudor-establishment contrast between medieval and modern, North and South. The contrast is dramatized in the rivalry between Hal, 'king of courtesy' (1:2.4.10), and 'that same mad fellow of the north, Percy' (lines 324-5)—noble and lovable in his way, but more 'rude', irregular and wild' than his Welsh allies. His 'dearest grace', as his uncle perceives, is his outspoken contempt for falsity; but too often this declines into frenetic bluntness and crude philistinism; and his response to tactful criticism is itself graceless: 'Well, I am schooled. Good manners be your speed!' (3.1.177-85).

Hal by contrast proves himself to be the complete Renaissance man.³⁵ Witty, eloquent, and adaptable as well as valiant, he is obviously schooled in both 'arts and martial exercises' (2:4.2.203). He is eloquently modest as well as concerned to save lives when he issues his challenge to Hotspur, chiding 'his [own] truant youth with such a grace' as 'became him like a prince indeed' (1:5.2.60-2); and with equal grace he relinquishes the name of victor to Falstaff. There is nothing fraudulent in these gracious gestures; no hint of an unfit relationship between what he seems and what he is. His 'fair rites of tenderness' and 'courtesy' when alone (as he believes) with the dead Hotspur (5.4.93, 97) are one of several indications that he is not the coldhearted 'princely hypocrite' imagined by some critics.

Grace in Henry IV also means honour, the respect due to those who live by the knightly code whose cardinal values are valour and fidelity.³⁶ What most stains Hal's honour in his father's eyes is his surrender of military glory to Hotspur. But although Hal's redemption in Part 1 depends on his defeat of Hotspur, the value of supreme importance in both parts is not valour but truth. Hal's triumph at Shrewsbury is less crucial as a martial achievement than as the fulfilment of a solemn promise (that he would 'redeem' all his shames by killing the rebel leader or dying in the attempt); it accords with his awareness that 'redemption' also means 'fulfilling a promise' (OED 2), and with his self-conception as 'the Prince of Wales who … never promises but he means to pay' (1:3.2.132-59, 5.4.41-2). Feudal England celebrated the verbal pledge of trust as the foundation of society; thus as J. Douglas Canfield has argued, the word as bond and the contest between fidelity and betrayal are central to the representation of conflict in literature from Beowulf to Dryden.³⁷ But this contest acquired a singular intensity and painfulness in the sixteenth century with the coming of the Reformation and the disputes about royal sovereignty and succession. The anguish of conflicting loyalties and mutually contradictory vows is vividly registered in the historical documents of the major rebellions. Precisely the same experience is dramatized in that most overtly topical of Shakespeare's plays, King John (probably written just before Henry IV), where the conflict between Pope and King intensifies the succession dispute and forces conscientious subjects into humiliatingly repetitive changes of allegiance: setting 'oath to oath', making 'faith an enemy to faith' (3.1.189-90).

In Henry IV this characteristically Tudor trauma is echoed in the representation of a crumbling society where the very basis of personal loyalty has been undone, and the original and continuing sin is betrayal, perjury, and a total devaluation of the word: 'What trust is in these times?' (2:1.3.100). Mutual accusations of treachery and perjury, and consequently flawed attempts to claim the moral high ground, characterize the relations of Henry and the rebels in Part 1. The first rebellion is motivated by anger and fear; but another motive is the Percys' desire to 'redeem' their family honour and erase from 'chronicles in time to come' the 'detested blot' of regicide in which Bolingbroke's broken vow implicated them (1.3.153-82; 4.3.52-105). Distrust bred by Henry's original 'violation of all faith and troth' (5.1.70) prompts Worcester to lie to Hotspur about the King's conciliatory offer at Shrewsbury. By his stress on location Shakespeare connects this distrust with an archetypal historical event, the treachery practised on the Pilgrims at Doncaster in 1536.³⁸ Rebuked by Henry for having 'deceived our trust', Worcester insists on the King's perjury as the source of dissension, saying: 'You swore to us, / And you did swear that oath at Doncaster … Forget your oath to us at Doncaster' (lines 41, 58). The parallel is sharpened by the fact that the offer which is distrusted is four times defined as 'grace, / Pardon, and terms of love' (5.5.2-3; of.4.3.30,50,112; 5.1.106). What redeems Shrewsbury from the taint of dishonour which the remembered past introduces is the Prince's fulfilment of his promise, and his closing gesture of freeing 'ransomless' his most valuable prisoner: 'I thank your grace for this high courtesy' (5.5.32).

Part 1's pattern of treachery is re-enacted in Part 2. Having broken his word to Hotspur by failing to support him at Shrewsbury, Northumberland now resists the pleas of his wife and Lady Percy to absent himself from the planned uprising, arguing that his 'honour is at pawn' and that 'nothing can redeem it' but his going. But he is induced to betray his friends by the accusing argument of Lady Percy ('new lamenting ancient oversights') that it would dishonour Hotspur's name if his father were to keep his promise to others now (2.3.7-47). Northumberland is trapped by his disgraceful past.

But Northumberland's infidelity cannot match that of Prince John at Gaultree; not even in King John, which rings with indignation against 'perjured kings' (3.1.33), is there anything comparable to this act of royal treachery. 'His grace's' offer of pardon and redress is buttressed with oaths by the honour of his blood and upon his soul to boot; and it is solemnized by the public ritual (proposed by himself) of drinking and embracing together in token to the assembled armies of 'restorèd love and amity' (4.1.281-93). This studied act of treachery endows the breaking of the verbal bond with the quality of sacrilege.

Apart from royal treachery and the nineteen uses of the word 'grace', there is much to bring the fate of the Pilgrim leaders to mind and generally stimulate the historical sense. Mowbray predicts that Henry will not forget what they have done and will soon find some trivial cause to exact his vengeance on them (precisely what Henry VIII would do); the prelate responds that Henry, knowing that such executions are always remembered by 'the heirs of life', will rather 'keep no tell-tale to his memory / That may repeat and history his loss / To new remembrance' (lines 200-4). As if predicting the way in which the sons and nephews of the leading Pilgrims (Percys, Nevilles, Nortons, Tempests) would rise again in the rebellion of 1569, Hastings warns that, if the rebels fail, 'heir from heir shall hold his quarrel up / Whiles England shall have generation'. The young Prince retorts that Hastings is 'much too shallow / To sound the bottom of the aftertimes' (4.1.276-9).