[In the following essay, Womersley investigates the topical significance of Shakespeare's complex and ambiguous treatment of the French in Henry V.]

‘Messires, what newes from Fraunce, can you tell! Still warres, warres.’ John Eliot, Ortho-Epia Gallica. Eliots Fruits for the French (1593), sig. A3^r

In 1559, when it seemed likely that England would find itself at war with France, John Aylmer urged his countrymen to take heart:

what people be they with whome we shall matche: are they Giaunts, are they conquerours, or monarks of the world? No good Englishe man they be effeminate Frenchmen: Stoute in bragge, but nothing in dede. They be such as you haue alwayes made to take their heles. They be your slaues and tributaries: whose Castels, Cyties, and townes, you haue possessed, whose armies you haue not ones but. 500. tymes discomfited, whose noble men you haue manfully killed, spoyled their countrey, brent their cities, taken their kynges, and crowned your owne, in the chiefest cytie of their dominion, as their owne histories do testifie. Remember our auncettors victories at Grauantum, at Vernolium, about Amias, in the borders of Normandy, at Cressiacum, at Dagincourt, when some tyme they killed. 2000. some tyme. 3000.¹

It is tempting to imagine that this strain of anti-French sentiment was a constant presence in early modern England; hence, in the eighteenth century, Chesterfield's weary dismissal of ‘that silly, sanguine notion … that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen’.²

However, the impression of constancy is illusory. Just as political relations with France during the reign of Elizabeth were volatile, so was the literary representation of France various.³ The ebb and flow of the religious conflicts which ravaged France from 1562 until 1593, and in which English forces from time to time saw action, demanded diplomatic agility as the securing of English interests was advanced or set back. Moreover, the French Wars of Religion had the effect, in the field of literary representation as in that of political reality, of jeopardizing the national unity of France. The death in 1584 of Henry III's heir-presumptive, the Duke of Alençon, greatly improved the prospects of the Protestant leader, Henri of Bourbon, King of Navarre and later Henri IV of France. However, its immediate effect was to deepen the division of France into two factions: that of the League, committed to the Catholic interest of the House of Guise and supported by Spain, and that of Navarre, Protestant in religion and supported by England. As a result of these political developments the image of France was polarized.⁴ The plentiful stream of pamphlets on French affairs which issued from the London presses of men such as John Wolfe, Edward Aggas, William Wright and Richard Field depicted France as, on the one hand, the home of ‘that viperous brood of Hispaniolized Leaguers’, a garden laid waste by ‘that haughty and aspiring house of Guyse’.⁵ But it was also the land where the Englishman's co-religionists were fighting an apocalyptic war of succession, in which were foreshadowed England's likely troubles on the death of the queen, as well as the coming of ‘the time of the Lord’.⁶ So it was that ‘the afflictions of France, may be Englands looking Glasse, and their neglect of peace, our continuall labour and studie how to preserue it’.⁷

The consequences of this figural linkage between the two nations were predictable, although they cannot but be surprising to those who lightly assume a perpetual hostility between France and England. Because the Huguenot cause was, at least as reported in England, the cause of French nationalism (as opposed to the Spanish affiliations of the League and the House of Guise), a strain of comradely fellow-feeling for the French is to be found in writing on France of the early 1590s. John Eliot avowed that ‘Surely for my part, France I love well, French-men I hate not, and vnto you I sweare by S. Siobe cap de Gascongne, that I loue a cup of new Gascon or old Orleans wine, as wel as the best French of you al …’⁸ A pamphlet published by John Wolfe in 1589, A Politike Discourse most excellent for this time present, celebrated ‘the kindely amitie that is betweene these two nations’.⁹ The purpose of the pamphlet was to argue that the English were more eligible allies for the French than were the Spanish. To that end, it noted that the French and English were ‘of one stocke’, and remarked ‘howe straightly the Frenchmen are vnited with the Englishmen, and what show of friendshippe they haue made at all times, the one vnto the other’. It also asked rhetorically: ‘And which is (I pray you) the people in the worlde, which hath iuster cause to loue vs than the Englishmen? who is so allyed to vs in bloud, conformable in conditions, and brotherlike in vertuous inclinations?’¹⁰ The consequence of such publications was that, in the 1590s, Englishmen had the opportunity to be well informed about French affairs, and their information was delivered from a standpoint of discriminated affinity. The tone of Edwin Sandys's Europae Speculum (first printed in 1629, but a ‘View or Svrvey of the State of Religion in the Westerne Parts of the World, Anno, 1599’) suggested both familiarity and sympathy as it touched lightly on a distressing but well-known subject: ‘Of Fraunce, how much the better it is knowne unto us at home, so much the lesse shall I need to speake much in this place.’¹¹

This positive conception of the French was not confined to the pamphlet literature devoted to the French Wars of Religion. On the stage, we need only bring to mind The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir (1605; perf. c. 1594), in which the audience was invited to view approvingly a French invasion of England, and in which the French king takes the lead in the comic romance subplot, to appreciate that the image of France in the Elizabethan theatre was not uniformly hostile. The reflection is important, because once we have grasped that in the 1590s disparagement of France was neither necessary nor automatic, negative portrayals of the French demand to be understood as something more complex than simple xenophobia. It is no longer possible to see such portrayals as merely the unthinking gratification by a playwright of the ingrained prejudice of his audience. The potential for hostility against the French, as against any foreign nation, was surely present throughout society. But it was there to be either inflamed or calmed through drama, and as the interests of patrons dictated. In the theatre the image of France might thus be shaped in obedience to conscious and deliberate decisions. Elements within the range of possibilities for presentation of the French (a much wider range of possibilities than we might casually suppose) could be underscored, or veiled.

If we consider Henry V in the light of these general considerations, we can see that Shakespeare's depiction of the French is both complex and unusual. Shakespeare combined respect, and even compassion, for the French, with moments of scorn which were both more offensive, and aimed with greater precision, than anything in a precursor such as The Famous Victories of Henry V. Investigation of the high-political rumours current during the play's moment—the summer of 1599—allows us to explain this distinctive enfolding of aggression within appeasement by reference to the likely interests of the Essexian faction the play seems designed to serve.

A speech in Henry V without an apparent source in either Holinshed or Famous Victories is Burgundy's lament for the effects of war on France:

                              … let it not disgrace me
If I demand before this royal view,
What rub or what impediment there is
Why that the naked, poor, and mangled peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas, she hath from France too long been chased,
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in it own fertility.
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned dier; her hedges even-plashed
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair
Put forth disordered twigs; her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery.
The even mead—that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover—
Wanting the scythe, withal uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And all our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country,
But grow like savages—as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood—
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire,
And everything that seems unnatural.(12)

Although there is no parallel to this speech in the historical and dramatic sources of Henry V, the play's first audiences would not have found it unprecedented. Burgundy's complaint that peace ‘hath from France too long been chased, / And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps, / Corrupting in it own fertility’ would, for an Elizabethan audience, have brought to mind the very recent past more vividly than the early fifteenth century. ‘The miseries of civil war’ was a distinctive minor genre in the pamphlets of French news published in the 1580s and 1590s. Although these pamphlets for the most part offered high-political narratives, diplomatic analysis and reports of military engagements, they at times broke off from those topics to lament the ‘disorders, violence and miseries of warre’.¹³ When they did so, they frequently anticipated the pastoral emphasis and vocabulary of Burgundy's speech. His vision of France's melancholy transformation from ‘this best garden of the world’ to a wilderness was a particularly common topic: ‘It is woonderfull … to see the miseries of Fraunce, and as miraculous to compare our present estate in the contrary, she hauing beene called the Garden of the world for pleasure, and we (now so happie) calde none of the world, (in time past) in respect of our Ilandes littlenes.’¹⁴ Burgundy's vision of fruitfulness lapsing into waste, and of the supplanting of crops by weeds to the detriment of ‘both beauty and utility’, was a frequent image of the ‘vnhappie state of Fraunce’:

For through this foundation [‘good reconciliation’] … the fieldes and champion should returne to tilth, which in most places are giuen ouer and lye in frith, and in stead of such fruites as they were wont to bring forth for the sustenance of man, are now ouergrowne with thornes and thistles, which at this time make euen the face of them most hideous to behold.¹⁵

In The Restorer of the French Estate (1589), France herself speaks of the detriment her countryside has suffered through the wars, and like Burgundy goes on to relate that neglect of the countryside to the corruption of the country people from their innocent bucolic nature:

All my villages & champion soyles are conuerted into sepulchres, monuments and churchyardes, my poore Villagers doo resemble goblins, ghoastes forepined of skin & bone, without flesh; so many Pesants, so many Anatomies: they be labourers no more, they be all counsellers of Estate, they obserue no longer the seasons of the yeere, the motions and alterations of the ayre; and they haue reason: since that they sow no more, the iniuries of th'ayre can hurt them no more …¹⁶

The people might even be metaphorically conflated with the countryside:

And thou people, when the nobilitie and townes shall be deuided, what rest shalt though enioye? people, the garner and storehouse of a realme: the fertile fields of this estate, whose trauaile nourisheth Princes, whose sweate dooth water them, whose occupations doo maintaine them … thus behold the effects of warre.¹⁷

When The Reformed Politike (1589) cajoled its readership to embrace Protestantism, it did so by evoking a future replete with the miseries of the present, in which human suffering and the decay of the land were images of one another:

you shall languish in warre without enioying your commodities, which for the most part shall remaine subiect to the souldiour and thiefe, as your cattell to be driuen out of your pastures, and your tillage to cease: some of you to be taken and ransomed, others to die of the enemies sword, and so to leaue their widowes and orphanes desolate, yet doth not the end of all these calamities depend vpon the sword: for how long haue we hoped for it [peace], and yet can not get it?¹⁸

English presses of the 1590s, then, not infrequently placed before their readership ‘the face of the florishing Kingdome of France, whose lustre and glorie at this present is a little eclipsed and dymmed by the cyuill dissention and bloudy broiles that a long time haue afflicted it’.¹⁹

Why, however, should Shakespeare have chosen to echo the evocations of French desolation, which had been most prevalent at the beginning of the decade, in a play first performed during the summer of 1599, when France had enjoyed five years of calm, and when Henri IV's policy of building up the wealth of his kingdom was already bearing fruit?²⁰ In order to frame an answer to that question, we must examine some of the other peculiarities in the play's depiction of the French and their concerns.

The relation between the two textually significant versions of Henry V—the quarto of 1600 (Q) and folio of 1623 (F)—was placed in a new light with the publication of Gary Taylor's Oxford edition. What previous editors had tended to disregard as merely a ‘bad’ quarto of no authority, Taylor persuasively represented as a memorial reconstruction of a version of the play cut to make it suitable for a small touring troupe. The importance of Q was as a result greatly increased, since it now appeared ‘a transcript of the text of Shakespeare's play by two men whose living depended on their memories, and who had acted in Henry V within a year or so of its first performance’.²¹ In Taylor's view, some of the divergences between Q and F reflect the reshaping of the play for a smaller number of actors. Others, however, have no impact on the resources required for staging, and therefore appear to be features of the play as first performed between the summer of 1599 and 1600, which have been preserved in Q but which were altered or expunged in F. One of the most fascinating of this group of divergences is the substitution in the Agincourt scenes of the Dauphin for the Duke of Bourbon (III. vii and IV. ii). That F's inclusion of the Dauphin amongst the French troops at Agincourt is probably a revision of the text as represented in Q, rather than Q's being a corruption of F, is suggested by the French king's instruction to the Dauphin to stay with him in Rouen.²²Q is consistent with this, whereas F contradicts it by having the Dauphin present at the battle. As Taylor points out, the presence of Bourbon at Agincourt ‘happens to be historically accurate’, but mere historical accuracy seems never to have been an overriding concern of Shakespeare's in the history plays.²³ The aesthetic effect of its being Bourbon rather than the Dauphin who fulfilled one English stereotype of the French by playing the role of braggart has been brought out by Taylor, who judges that it makes more favourable the depiction of the French in the play.²⁴ That the embodiment of French vanity should be not the heir to the throne, but simply one nobleman amongst a number of noblemen, makes vanity less a national characteristic than the failing of a particular individual. This transferral of a failing from a whole population to a single man was further emphasized by Shakespeare's handling of the other French nobles. Henry V staged a much fuller and more detailed picture of the French aristocracy than that to be found in The Famous Victories, a picture which included ‘the … scepticism and professionalism of the Constable; the silence and peacemaking of Rambures; the high spirits, common sense, and loyalty of Orléans’. However, this vesting of what was more commonly seen as a national failing in an individual character raises a question of its own. Why should Shakespeare have wished, in 1599, to have made the embodiment of French vanity a character who bore the name Bourbon, while at the same time exempting the other French peers from the scope of this traditional insult?²⁵

Another way of putting that question would be to ask why Shakespeare should have wished to mock the present French king, Henri IV. Before his coronation in 1594, Henri IV was commonly referred to as ‘Henri de Borbon King of Nauarre’ or as ‘King Henrie of Bourbon’, and even afterwards, in English publications of the late 1590s, his family name was prominent.²⁶ In 1594 Robert Parsons had considered Henri in the context of the fortunes of the ‘howse of Burbon’.²⁷ In 1597 he was styled ‘Henrie of Burbon King of Nauarre’. In 1598 his title to the French throne was explained for an English readership in terms of ‘the genealogie and discent of the house of Bourbon’, and his style given as ‘Henry of Bourbon, the fourth of that name, king of France and Nauarre’.²⁸ In The View of France (1604; composed 1598), Sir Robert Dallington repeatedly alluded to Henri IV's extraction from the ‘house of Burbon’.²⁹ Moreover, after the death of his uncle the Cardinal de Bourbon in May 1591, Henri IV was the only prominent member of his family with whom the name ‘Bourbon’ was commonly associated.³⁰ In 1599, when one referred to a Bourbon, one referred in the first instance to Henri IV.

Before Henri abjured Protestantism on 25 July 1593, he had been extravagantly praised in English publications on France as the latest and greatest scion of ‘the race of Bourbon, fatall vnto Rome’.³¹ Thereafter, however, he was attacked as an apostate and trimmer. The anonymous publication of 1597, The Mutable and wauering estate of France, from the yeare of our Lord 1460, untill the yeare 1595, deplored Henri's inconstancy:

this noble and famous Prince who had for the space of foure or five and twentie yeeres so valiantly and fortunately defended the Gospell, and that with the hazard and perill of his owne life, freely exposing his royall person, his treasor, his friendes, and all other meanes whatsoeuer for the maintenaunce thereof, beganne to waxe calme in the defence of his profession, and to encline to that false and superstitious Religion of Rome, to the high displeasure of almightie God, the great dishonour of his princely Maiestie, and to the extreme greefe and astonishment of all the Protestants.³²

The author then went on to elaborate Henri into an image of mutability. The decline in Henri's English reputation, which had set in with his abjuration of the Huguenot faith, steepened with the signing on 2 May 1598 of the Treaty of Vervins between France and Spain. Sir Robert Dallington had been particularly incensed by this desertion (as he saw it) of his sovereign, whose earlier support for Henri had entitled her in his eyes to the style ‘Protetrix of France’:

As for the French, what could he have done, more dishonourable to himselfe, or profitable to his enemies, or preiudiciall to his late Allies? what lesse agreeing with the time, with his cause, with his oath, then to yield to this peace? But it hath bene an old tricke of the French, to obserue neither promise, nor oath … But let the French take heede there come not a day of payment for this, who are so hastie to abandon their friends, and make peace with their foes, onely vpon a foolish naturel of theirs, to desire change …³³

From being England's ally, Henri had become an object of suspicion. His recent actions revealed him to be a monarch without principle or gratitude.³⁴ Even the Edict of Nantes of February 1599, which extended a limited toleration to the Huguenots and protected them with certain privileges, seems not to have raised his reputation on this side of the channel. Although the Edict and its accompanying Declaration were quickly translated and published in England, its first readers in England were most concerned with the restoration and establishment of the Catholic Church which the Edict also brought about, and to the offensive styling of the Huguenot faith throughout the text of the Edict as ‘the said pretended reformed religion’.³⁵

However, at the very moment of Shakespeare's play—the summer of 1599—rumours about the French king far more dramatic and alarming than anything he had actually done were circulating in London.³⁶ In April 1599 Francesco Contarini, the Venetian ambassador in Paris, had reported to the doge and Senate that Henri IV was seeking a new wife:

He [Henri IV] declares openly that he intends to marry again, and has shown some inclination towards the Princess Maria, niece of the Grand Duke of Tuscany; the Huguenots also suggest a wife for his Majesty, as they wish him to marry one of their sect, for although she would be obliged to become Catholic, they think she would always retain a partiality for their faction; among others they suggest a Princess of the house of Saxony, who would bring a large dower; and an English lady, a daughter of the Earl of Derby, a relation of the Queen of England, through whom the King would acquire a certain claim to the English throne [‘qualche pretensione sopra quel Regno’].³⁷

The daughters of the Earl of Derby were cousins of Elizabeth, and traced their royal ancestry back to Mary, daughter of Henry VII and thus Elizabeth's aunt. They formed part of the House of Suffolk, which was often mentioned in discussions about the succession during the 1590s as having ‘much show to be preferred’.³⁸ It was a while before the rumour which Contarini had reported in April figured in English intelligence. The last cryptic sentence of this letter from William Resould to Cecil of 25 July 1599 may have been a ripple of it:

Here goeth the whole rest of Spain; spoil this and wear the Spanish Crown; their sweet speeches that they come for no conquest, but to raise up the next heir that is a Catholic to the English Crown, are dangerous; possibly some Jesuits' persuasions have seduced the English Papists to believe it, but let them not be deceived; it is the English Crown the Spaniards covet, and not religion nor conscience. I fear there is some great personage already obtained unto that which the last Earl of Derby denied, though I can accuse none; yet by their speeches, it is a dangerous suspicion.³⁹

On 30 July 1599 George Fenner wrote to Nottingham that ‘his Majesty [Henri IV] is full determined to marry’, though without mentioning the daughters of the Earl of Derby.⁴⁰ However, in August John Petit in Brussels wrote to a London merchant, Peter Halins, linking Henri IV to the English succession. Petit's letters to Halins had run on the succession and the likely candidates for the English crown for some while. Earlier in 1599 he had been particularly concerned that James VI would try, in his Aesopian metaphor, to ‘gather grapes before they are ripe’.⁴¹ Then in August he reported something yet more difficult to believe:

If these incredulous people [English statesmen] will not believe known truths [that ‘the King of Scots intends to cut the grass under Her Majesty's feet’], how will they believe what I am going to tell you now? Sir Jas. Lindsay, returning here from Paris, says he hears that some English and French have put it into the head of the King of France,—considering the Queen's age, the nearness of the country to his,—that the King of Scots is a man of little courage, and his people half barbarians,—and that it is not convenient for France that England and Scotland should be joined,—to take England himself, alleging that when the Queen dies, the waters will be troubled, and there will be good fishing; and that France is full of people that will run headlong to the enterprize; they say that the King intends it, as a matter necessary for France, and is laying his plots.⁴²

On 29 August he repeated the warning: ‘do not neglect what I said about the French King's fishing in troubled waters, for I have heard more of it since’.⁴³ Then, on 2 October, Petit picked up an echo of the rumour Contarini had written of in April:

The news that I told you before, sent in cipher in great secresy, is now in the Roman Gazetteer, viz., that the marriage treaty between the French King and great Duke [of Tuscany] cools, for the Queen of England has promised him a near cousin of her own, whom she loves much, and whom she intends to make her heir and successor.⁴⁴

By 15 October, it was apparently the common talk of Paris:

In Paris they will needs have their King the Queen's heir and successor, and in ‘hasty French fury’, they are ‘shaking their light heads at the matter, as though there were no doubt in it’. I would rather he were in a fishpool, with his mistress for a millstone about his neck. I do not like this light talk; it argues something brewing.⁴⁵

Matters then cool a few degrees. In December even Petit, whose strongest suit was not scepticism, seemed doubtful: ‘The French still profess that they will do something in England when the time serves, but it may be French brags.’⁴⁶ But then, in the spring and summer of 1600, the rumours came back in full strength:

The French King gives the King of Scotland fair words, promising to assist his pretences for England, but meanwhile divers near him give out that the Queen is offering to declare the French King her successor. I believe he has such an intention when the Queen dies, if not before; the smoke does not rise without some fire, though covered with ashes of deep dissimulation.⁴⁷

This on 24 March, from Petit to Halins. It was confirmed by another report, sender and recipient unknown, on 7 April:

The King of France still gathers money, and furnishes himself with stores of armour and ammunition; he promises to assist the King of Scots in his pretences for England, and meanwhile divers near him give out that the Queen intends to make him her successor.⁴⁸

Finally, in June 1600 Petit told Halins that ‘a book has been made entitling the King of France to the Crown of England. Bruce, a Scot, had some doing in it.’⁴⁹

The accuracy and reliability of these reports is, for our purposes, irrelevant. For us, the consideration of importance is that, from the summer of 1599 to the spring of 1600, in London and the major cities of Europe, Henri IV was discussed as a probable—and, in English eyes, unwelcome—contender for the English crown. This is the essential political context which throws light on Q's substitution of the Dauphin for Bourbon. Shakespeare's Henry V offset the image of masculine, military, Protestant and charismatic kingship it generated through its central character with a lampoon of a new candidate, identified by his patronym and by his notorious sexual incontinence (Petit's expostulation against Henri IV's mistress is paralleled in the play by the Constable's dry and punning reply to Orléans' praise of Bourbon as ‘simply the most active gentleman of France’: ‘Doing is activity, and he will still be doing’).⁵⁰ The entry of Bourbon as a silent captive after Agincourt was the dramatic nemesis to that hubris which, in the late 1590s, was the dominant characteristic of both the real Bourbon, and his Shakespearean stage counterpart.⁵¹ But when the moment of Henri IV's connection with the English succession had passed, Bourbon's assumption of the role of braggart at Agincourt may have seemed only to deflect the force of the customary insult on to a mere nobleman; and so in F, it is the Dauphin who writes sonnets to his horse.

Two further elements of Henry V bore an offensive implication for the French king: the archbishop's long speech discrediting the Salic Law, and the play's justification of the Lancastrian title to the English throne.⁵² The Salic Law speech has been much, if narrowly, discussed by critics. The debate has focused exclusively on the question of whether Shakespeare intended the speech to be manifestly ridiculous (thereby mocking the genealogical basis of Henry's claim to the French throne), or whether it was offered as a straight account of an issue of importance in the play. The occurrence of serious expositions of genealogical minutiae in other plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries indicates that the archbishop's subject was not in itself ridiculous, and that Shakespeare's audience would not have found the detail of his analysis indigestible. Moreover, the phrase most often seized on as revealing Shakespeare's ironic intent—‘So that, as clear as is the summer's sun’—is, like much of the wording of the speech, taken with very little alteration from Holinshed.⁵³

If the case for reading the speech as a mock exposition is, on inspection, flimsy, the question arises of why Shakespeare should have wished so thoroughly to have discredited the Salic Law. The material to do so lay to hand in Holinshed, but the availability of material is not in itself a motive for inclusion—there was much available to Shakespeare in Holinshed which he left out of Henry V. The thoroughness of the archbishop's demolition of the Salic Law assumes greater prominence when we compare it with the equivalent passage from The Raigne of King Edward the Third. Artoys, the renegade French peer, indicates Edward's claim to the French throne via his mother Isabel, and explains how the French pretend to exclude it:

The French obscurd your mothers Priuiledge,
And, though she were the next of blood, proclaymed
Iohn, of the house of Valoys, now their king:
The reason was, they say, the Realme of Fraunce,
Repleat with Princes of great parentage,
Ought not admit a gouernor to rule,
Except he be discended of the male;
And thats the speciall ground of their contempt,
Wherewith they study to exclude your grace:
But they shall find that forged ground of theirs
To be but dusty heapes of brittile sande.(54)

Artoys gives no detail about the historical origins of this French law of succession; he does not show how the French themselves have on occasion disregarded it; he does not even name it as the Salic Law. In comparison, the speech in Henry V stands out for its explicitness, and the legal and historical power of its arguments.

An issue which commentators have not much considered is the question of the significance of the Salic Law in the late sixteenth century.⁵⁵ The assumption seems to have been that this was a genealogical nicety which had little present relevance or topical prominence for Shakespeare's first audiences. In fact, this principle of succession to the French throne was of great importance in the French Wars of Religion, was much discussed in the pamphlets relating to those wars printed in London, and held particularly important implications for Henri IV.

Before 1584 the official Huguenot line on the Salic Law was that it had no authority to determine the succession. In the Franco-Gallia (1573), for instance, the Huguenot jurist François Hotman argued that originally the Salic Law, ‘constantly on the tongues of our contemporaries’, applied only to private inheritances.⁵⁶ This was an argument dictated solely by political circumstances. Before the death of the Duke of Alençon, the Salic Law lay as an obstacle in Henri of Navarre's path to the throne. After the death of Alençon, however, Henri became the heir-presumptive, and his pretensions to the throne were now strengthened, not weakened, by the Salic Law. In consequence, the stance taken by Hotman in the Franco-Gallia was gravely embarrassing.⁵⁷ The events of 1584 had transformed the Salic Law from an impediment to Henri's title to the principle which guaranteed its primacy before all others. Parsons explained the dependence of the French king's title on the Salic Law repeatedly and very clearly for an English readership in his Conference Abovt the Next Svccession to the Crown of Ingland (1594)—a book which, according to Sir Thomas Craig, made ‘deep impressions on the minds of men’.⁵⁸ Moreover, the validity of the Salic Law was a recurrent topic in the pamphlets relating to the Wars of Religion published in London during the early 1590s, all of which championed the interest of Henri of Bourbon and which were offered for their English readers' approval:

The most certaine and true fundamentall law of this realme for the succession thereof, is the Salicque lawe, which is so entiere perfect, & excellent, that (next God) vnto it appertaineth the first & chief honour of the conseruation of it in the estate where it hath so long continued, even to this present: It is also so neat and pure that neuer it would receiue or allowe of any interpretation or exception.

the Salike lawe, a lawe that is the onely oracle of France, bought with the price of our auncestors bloud, with the destruction of our townes, with the decay of our houses, and with the losse of two wretched battailes Cressy and Poictiers: a law that preserueth vs from the dominion of strangers, and that cutteth off all forraine fashions and kindes of life, which long since had filled ours with bastardy …

I speake generally, leauing all questions of law, and election of persons, and cleaue onely to the Salicque fondamentall law, inuiolably obserued by the French, who aboue all nations haue euermore beene highly commended and renowned for their most faithfull obedience and loue to their kinges and the princes of their bloud.⁵⁹

In the early 1590s, only those opposed to the English interest—the allies and supporters of the League and the House of Guise—were represented as opposed to the Salic Law.⁶⁰ This changed in the late 1590s, as Henri's reputation in England declined. Sir Robert Dallington, who as we have seen became disenchanted with the French after the Peace of Vervins, in 1599 dismissed the Salic Law as mere fraud:

they would needes make the world beleeue that it is of great antiquitie, wherewith they very wrongfully tromped the heires of Edward the third, of their enioying this Crowne of France, which to them is rightly descended by his Mother, and whose claime is still good, were the English sword well whetted to cut the Labels of this Law.⁶¹

In Shakespeare's play, too, explicit rejection of the Salic Law—a move which struck at the basis of Henri IV's title—is part of a more general antipathy to the political behaviour of the French monarch. Far from having any claim to the English throne, the implication runs, he does not even possess a sound claim to the throne he presently occupies. In 1589 English readers might have discovered, in the words of Henri of Bourbon himself, that ‘this foure yeares space I haue bene the argument of the tragædies of France’.⁶² When Shakespeare put an image of Bourbon on a literal stage, he twisted that dignified self-image into a buffo counterpart to the embodiment of true regality he fashioned in the character of Henry V.

This discrediting of one of the main principles justifying Henri's title to the French throne, which comes so early in Shakespeare's play, was reinforced in Act IV. In The Famous Victories, the defeat of the French at Agincourt was a satisfying smiting of the ancient enemy. In Henry V, however, Henry's prayer on the eve of the battle deepens the significance of the battle immensely. The miraculous English victory is transformed into a sign of divine favour for Lancastrian kingship. After the battle Henry rules by God's ordinance, and any faults his father made in compassing the crown are as nothing.⁶³

This carried implications for Henri IV's title to the French throne, because the validity or otherwise of the Lancastrian dynasty was, in the 1590s, seen as a relevant precedent when trying to determine the thorny primogenitural crux of whether, in the absence of a directly lineal claimant, the uncle or the nephew (that is, propinquity in degree or the elder line) had the better title. Parsons discussed the Lancastrian kings in this context, and made the relevance of the issue to recent French politics explicit:

So that the question now is, whether after the deposition of king Richard, Edmond Mortimer nephew remoued of Leonel (which Leonel vvas the second sonne to king Edward) or els Henry duke of Lancaster, sonne to Iohn of Gaunt (which Iohn vvas third sonne to king Edward) should by right haue succeeded to king Richard, and for Edmond is alleaged, that he was heyre of the elder brother, and for Henry is said, that he vvas neerer by two degrees to the stemme or last king, that is to say, to king Richard deposed, then Edmond was, for that Henry vvas sonne to king Richards vncle of Lancaster, and Edmond was but nephew remoued, that is to say, daughters sones sonne, to the said king Richards other vncle of Yorke. And that in such a case, the next in degree of consanguinitie, to the last King, is to be preferred (though he be not of the elder lyne) the fauourers of Lancaster alleage many proofes, whereof some shalbe touched a litle after: & we haue seene the same practized in our dayes in France, where the Cardinal of Burbone by the iudgement of the most part of that realme, was preferred to the crowne for his propinquity in blood to the dead King, before the king of Nauarre, though he were of the elder lyne.⁶⁴

Early fifteenth-century England was thus not without implications for late sixteenth-century France: and the two might be brought together in the context of the Elizabethan succession. Inasmuch as the Lancastrian title was strong, as Parsons made plain, then to the same degree was Navarre's title to the French throne weak. One consequence of Shakespeare's justification of Lancastrian kingship (though not the prime motive for that justification) was therefore a further turn of the screw in the play's disparagement of Henri IV. The purpose of Burgundy's evocation of a France ravaged by war is equally part of Shakespeare's dismissal of the pretensions of the French monarch. When the miseries which preceded Henri's accession are recalled, the much vaunted prosperity of his rule is pushed to one side.⁶⁵

Eighteen years ago, Marie Axton suggested that Henry V was a play to be understood, at least in part, in relation to the succession controversy.⁶⁶ Certainly the absence of reprintings after Q and before F suggests that it was a play of brief, if perhaps intense, topicality, whose popularity declined abruptly once the grounds of its appeal had been removed. The present essay corroborates that suggestion, although on grounds different from the high jurisprudential arguments canvassed by Axton. Shakespeare's depiction of the French in Henry V was responsive to popular representations of the French in the pamphlet literature of the late 1580s and 1590s. It was also sensitive to changes in those representations which occurred late in the decade, and to the rumours which surrounded them. The Chorus to Act V, with its panegyrical reference to Essex, suggests the play's allegiances. In the early 1590s, Essex had been a great friend and champion of Henri IV, both on the field and in the council chamber.⁶⁷ Even as late as 1597 the Venetian ambassador in Paris could refer to ‘the Earl of Essex, the great supporter of the King of France.’⁶⁸ But by the late 1590s, their relationship had cooled. In the aftermath of Essex's rising, Henri offered no support to his erstwhile comrade, despite being approached.⁶⁹ The affiliations between Henry V and Essex contrive to be both definite and tantalizing. Nevertheless, the play's implicit yet pointed hostility to Henri of Bourbon is, in 1599, compatible with support for Essex, and another strand of political allusion which ties the play in yet more tightly to the anxieties and suspicions of the Elizabethan succession.⁷⁰ It is hard now to know quite what Essex's aims were in the period following the débâcle in Ireland and leading up to the rising in February of 1601. The government, however, had reason to believe that one outcome which Essex's followers at least had envisaged was the earl's claiming of the throne for himself:

More reports that when it was asked among Essex's friends why they should send for the King of Scots, seeing the dangers that might ensue if they prevailed; it was answered that it was only to persuade the King that they pretended for him, and thus prevent his opposing them; but if they found their own power sufficient, and the people applauded their doings, they would put the crown on the Earl of Essex's head, and let the Scot go shoe goslings.⁷¹

Hence Cecil's outburst in council, that Essex ‘had been devising five or six years to be King of England’.⁷² But whether Essex sought the throne, or wished merely to be kingmaker, in the complicated endgame to Elizabeth's reign any disturbing intrusion from abroad would be unwelcome. Henri IV's refusal to come to Essex's assistance in his hour of trial is easily misread as ingratitude. Aspects of the portrayal of France and the French in Henry V suggest that Essex himself knew well, and had perhaps already exploited, the difference between political friendship and personal affection.

Notes

1. John Aylmer, An Harborovve for Faithfull and Trevve Svbiectes (Strasbourg, 1559), sig. Q1^v. The death of Henri II on 10 July 1559 made the husband of Mary Queen of Scots, Francis II, king of France. Both husband and wife were pliable instruments of the Catholic Guises, who thus controlled France and Scotland. In the minds of fervent Protestants such as Aylmer, this looked like a pincer movement aimed at an isolated outpost of reformed religion, England; and indeed French pretensions to the English throne were not diminished until the mid-1560s. See W. MacCaffrey, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (1969), 57-9 and 90-1.

2. Chesterfield, Letters (4 vols., 1774), ii. 140.

3. On the complexity and volatility of English relations with France during the reign of Elizabeth, see for instance R. B. Wernham, The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1558-1603 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980). J B Black, Elizabeth I and Henry IV: Being a Short Study in Anglo-French Relations, 1589-1603 (Oxford, 1914) provides a detailed narrative and explanation of relations at the diplomatic level.

4. On the printing of news from France during the late sixteenth century, see: M. A. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England: 1476-1622 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1929); R. O. Lindsay and J. Neu (eds.), French Political Pamphlets, 1547-1644 (Madison, Wis., 1969); D. C. Collins, A Handlist of News Pamphlets: 1590-1610 (1943). The impact of these pamphlets on political thought is surveyed in J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1959).

5. The Mutable and wauering estate of France, from the yeare of our Lord 1460, vntill the yeare 1595 (1597), v.

6. The Restorer of the French Estate (1589), 151. That England might suffer from unrest akin to the French Wars of Religion on the death of Elizabeth was a warning explicitly made by Robert Parsons in his Conference Abovt the Next Svccession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594), sigs. Ii6^vff.

7. The Mutable and wauering estate of France, from the yeare of our Lord 1460, vntill the yeare 1595 (1597), dedication (no sig.) and 38.

8. John Eliot, Ortho-Epia Gallica (1593), sig. A3^r. Eliot placed the familiar disparagement of the French—(‘They are but bragging fooles of France, / Hardie at the bottle, and cowards at the Lance’)—in the mouth of an emptyheaded Englishman, ‘The Bragger’ (sig. S4^r).

9. A Politike Discourse most excellent for this time present (1589), sig. B4^v.

10. A Politike Discourse most excellent for this time present (1589), sigs. C1^r, B4^r and B3^r.

11. Edwin Sandys, Europae speculum (1629), 176. The imaginative closeness between the two nations is perhaps also revealed in the way episodes from the history of one nation might be used to illustrate current affairs in the other. Edward II was a popular choice; see Thomas Walsingham's Histoire Tragique et mémorable de Pierre de Gaverston (Paris, 1588), and George Harte, A Declaration concerning the needfulnesse of peace to be made in Fraunce (1575), sigs. Eii^v-iii^r. Robert Parsons' Conference Abovt the Next Svccession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594) repeatedly illustrates English politics with French examples; as does the translation of E. de Lallouette's Apologie Catholique, A Catholique Apologie (1585), against which Parsons was often writing in the Conference.

12. Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1984), v ii. 31-62.

13. The French Kings Edict (1594), sig. A3^r; cf. also the ‘miseries and calamities that hang on ciuill warres’ deplored in George Harte's A Declaration concerning the needfulnesse of peace to be made in Fraunce (1575), sig. Fviii^r.

14. Nevves from France (1591), sig. A2^r. Compare Sir Robert Dallington's praise of France as ‘the Garden of Europe’ (The View of France, 1604, sig. B2^r).

15. A Proposition of the Princes, Prelates, Officers of the Crowne, & others of his Maiesties Councell, propounded to the Duke of Mayenne (1593), sig. A3^r.

16. The Restorer of the French Estate (1589), sig. Bii^r. For another complaint put in the mouth of ‘France’, see The Contre-Guyse (1589), sig. Mi^v.

17. A Letter written by the King of Nauarr (1589), sig. C1^r.

18. The Reformed Politike (1589), sig. Iiii^r. Cf. also A Caueat for France, vpon the present euils (1588); ‘Howe many domages must this estate encurre during these alterations? how manie good families destroied, how many good townes laid wast? howe manie widowes and orphanes? how much land be vntilled? & how many poore households must die for hunger? France through these long robberies will growe to a forest …’ (sig. D2^r).

19. John Eliot, A Svrvay or Topographical Description of France (1592), sig. A3^r. The laying waste of France was not, of course, something that occurred suddenly in the late 1580s and early 1590s. In 1570 Geffray Fenton was already deploring the ‘late French troubles’ (A discourse of the Ciuile warres and late troubles in Fraunce, 1570, sig. Aii^v). And even as late as 1598 Sir Robert Dallington could endorse La Noue's judgement, that in France ‘more than half the Noblesse is perished, the people diminished, the Treasure exhausted, the debts increased, good Order ouerthrowen, Religion languished, maners debaucked [sic], Iustice corrupted, and the men diuided’ (The View of France, 1604, sig. Y2^v).

20. For the date of Henry V, see Taylor's edition, pp. 4-7. For Henry IV's fiscal policy, implemented by Sully, and its effects on the French economy, see Mark Greengrass, France in the Age of Henri IV: The Struggle for Stability (1984), ch. 4, pp. 88-116.

21. Henry V, 23.

22. Henry V, III. v. 64.

23. Henry V, 24. For Shakespeare's indifference to matters of strict historical accuracy, see Lily B. Campbell's analysis of how the history plays were shaped to match present, rather than past, actualities: Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (Los Angeles, 1947).

24. Sir Robert Dallington identified vanity and boastfulness as prominent aspects of the French character: ‘a bragging Rhodomonte … an endles & needles prater, fastidious & irksome companion, where you shall see the French naturel, very liuely & admirably well described’ (The View of France, 1604, sig. X4^r: cf. also V4^v and X2^v).

25. He is so named by the other characters: Henry V, III. vii. 86. In Famous Victories, it is the Dolphin who embodies most powerfully the characteristics of lightness and boastfulness, but they are also to be found in the Constable: see G. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. IV (1962), 327-8.

26. Newes from Rome, Spaine, Palermo, Genevœ, and France (1590), sigs. A2^r and B3^r-v.

27. Robert Parsons, Conference Abovt the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594), sig. M8^r.

28. The Mutable and wauering estate of France, for the yeare of our Lord 1460, vntill the yeare 1595 (1597), 134. J. de Serres and P. Mathieu, An Historical Collection of the Most Memorable Accidents and Tragicall Massacres of France (1598), sigs. L13^v-4^r, Vv2^r.

29. Sir Robert Dallington, The View of France (1604), sigs. E1^r, E4^v and H4^v.

30. The Prince de Condé seems never to have been referred to by his family name, which was also Bourbon.

31. Michel Hurault, A Discourse vpon the present state of France (1588), 53. For an example of preapostasy panegyric, see John Eliot's A Svrvay or Topographical Description of France (1592), sigs. A3^r-v.

32. The Mutable and wauering estate of France, from the yeare of our Lord 1460, untill the yeare 1595 (1597). 146.

33. The View of France (1604), sigs. Y1^v and Y2^r. For Elizabeth's own fury at this fickleness (as she saw it), see the letter quoted by Black, Elizabeth I and Henry IV, 137.

34. Elizabeth seems to have been indifferent to the religious aspect of Henri's apostasy, and to have been concerned only for its practical and political consequences; see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984), 127. She may even have encouraged him to change religion in order to secure his political ends; see CSP Venetian 1592-1603, item 107, p. 48 and item 230, p. 112. Her chief objective in the late 1590s was always to secure repayment of the money she had advanced to Henri: see the letter of 19 February 1599 from the newly-appointed English ambassador in Paris, Henry Neville, to Thomas Windebank in CSP Domestic 1598-1601 (1869), 164. Black believed that the ‘question of reimbursement [For the £400,000 spent by Elizabeth in the French cause], therefore, became one of the prime questions of this later period [i.e. 1598-1603]’ (Elizabeth I and Henry IV, 154).

35. The King's Edict and Declaration (1599), sigs. B1^r, B2^r-v and C3^v.

36. For the date of Henry V, which we know with unusual precision, see Henry V, 5-7.

37. CSP Venetian 1592-1603 (1897), 366-7.

38. Robert Parsons, Conference Abovt the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594), sig. Kk^r. For the House of Suffolk, see the letter of 15 June 1599 from Robert Parsons to an unknown recipient in CSP Domestic 1598-1601 (1869), 211-12, and Conference, sig. Ii2^r.

39. CSP Domestic 1598-1601, 259.

40. Ibid. 265.

41. Ibid. 189; letter of 28 April 1599.

42. Ibid. 299.

43. Ibid. 314.

44. Ibid. 327-8.

45. Ibid. 330.

46. Ibid. 356.

47. Ibid. 413.

48. Ibid. 419.

49. Ibid. 442. I have not been able to identify the book to which Petit referred. The rumours persisted into 1601, although they focused on the likelihood of armed invasion, not the procurement of a claim by marriage (ibid. 42 and 148). Henri married Marie de Médicis, the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, at Lyon on 23 November 1600 (ibid. 500).

50. Henry V, III. vii. 93-4; cf. also the bawdy innuendo in ll. 91-2.

51. See, for example, CSP Domestic 1598-1601, 500.

52. Henry V, I. ii. 33-95.

53. For other such speeches, see I Henry VI, II. v. 61-92 and Sir John Oldcastle, III. i. 6-43 (as reprinted in C. F. Tucker Brooke, ed., The Shakespeare Apocrypha, Oxford 1918, 141-2); Henry V, I. ii. 86. Holinshed's phrase is ‘so that more cleere than the sunne it openlie appeareth’ (Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, IV. 379). Where Shakespeare diverged from Holinshed, he perhaps did so under the influence of the pamphlet literature generated by the French Wars of Religion. Holinshed referred to ‘Charlemaine’, but Shakespeare, like the pamphlets, referred to ‘Charles the Great’; cf. Henry V, I. ii. 61, 71, 77 and 84, and A Discourse vpon the Declaration, published by the Lord de la Noue (1589), sig. B2^v.

54. The Raigne of King Edward the Third, I. i. 19-29 (as reprinted in Tucker Brooke, Shakespeare Apocrypha, 69).

55. On the origins of the Salic Law, see J. M. Potter, ‘The development and significance of the Salic Law of the French’ Engl Hist R (1937), 235-53. A sixteenth-century conception of its importance can be found in Claude de Seyssel's La Grande Monarchie de France (Paris, 1557), 8. Marie Axton looks at the implications of the Salic Law, were it to be applied to the English succession (The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession, 1977, 112-13): a remote consideration, since the Salic Law was always acknowledged to be a local custom of the French, and the apparently parallel maxim in the English common law against alien inheritance relates only to private property. When Fabyan discussed the French king Pharamond, who allegedly drew up the Salic Law, he noted his achievements as a legislator (‘he made certaine lawes whiche longe tyme enduryd after’), but did not specify what they were because they are ‘derke to Englysshe vnderstandynge’ (Cronycle, 1516, sig. d viii^r).

56. ‘Quae cum assidue nostris hominibus in ore est’ (François Hotman, Franco-Gallia, ed. R. E. Guisey and J. H. M. Salmon, Cambridge, 1972, 269). Hotman's discussion of the Salic Law is to be found in chapter VIII of the editions of 1573 and 1574, chapter X of the edition of 1586 (ed. cit., 269ff).

57. ‘The Salic Law … became a particularly sensitive issue, in historical as well as political terms, in the last years of the civil wars’: D. R. Kelly, The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (Columbia, 1970), 293.

58. Parsons, Conference, sigs. D5^v, K2^v, M8^r and Bb8^v. Sir Thomas Craig, The Right of Succession to the Kingdom of England (published 1703; composed before 1603). sig. bl^v.

59. A Proposition of the Princes … sig. B2^r (supposedly spoken in the person of Henri IV); The Contre-Guyse (1589), sig. D2^v; An Admonition giuen by one of the Duke of Savoyes Councel (1589), sig. B2^v. See also The coppy of a Letter written by the Lord of Themines (1593), sig. A3^v.

60. See, for examples, The Flevr de Lvce (1593), sig. B4^r (where the Duke of Savoy is said to dispute the Salic Law), and Michel Hurault, A Discourse vpon the present state of France (1588), 56 (where the King of Spain ‘thinketh not that the Salicke law … was made for him’).

61. The View of France, sig. E3^r.

62. A Letter written by the King of Nauarr (1589), sig. Aiii^r.

63. For a fuller discussion of the significance of the English victory at Agincourt, see my ‘Why is Falstaff Fat?’, Rev Engl St, forthcoming.

64. Parsons, Conference, sigs. X2^v-3^r.

65. A report of 22 May 1590 to the doge and Senate from the Venetian ambassador in Germany, Piero Duodo, spoke in one breath of English resentment at the flourishing state of France, and of Henri's presumptuous overtures to secure a claim to the English throne: ‘They say the Queen is very jealous of the prosperity of the French, her ancient rebels and foes. Some weeks ago she told the Scottish Ambassador that his most Christian Majesty had demanded in marriage Arabella, daughter of Charles Stuart, and descended from Margaret, daughter of Henry VII, who is a pretender to the Crown, no less than the King of Scotland, for they are second cousins’ (CSP Venetian 1592-1603, item 883, p. 410).

66. Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (1977), 111-15.

67. See Robert Lacey, Robert, Earl of Essex: An Elizabethan Icarus, (1971), 84-5, 203 and 251.

68. CSP Venetian 1592-1603, 273-4.

69. See a fascinating report of 20 August 1601 from Marin Cavalli, the Venetian ambassador in France, to the doge and Senate (CSP Venetian 1592-1603, item 1006, p. 468).

70. That there was hostility towards France in general, and Henri IV in particular, amongst Essex's circle in the late 1590s is shown by the example of Sir Robert Dallington, whose testy opinion of the French has been quoted above. Dallington was tutor to the Earl of Rutland, and had been the earl's companion on the Grand Tour. Rutland was involved in Essex's rising in 1601, and was fined.

71. CSP Domestic 1601-1603, 42.

72. CSP Domestic 1598-1601, 554.