SOURCE: Slights, Camille Wells. “The Conscience of the King: Henry V and the Reformed Conscience.” Philological Quarterly 80, no. 1 (winter 2001): 37-55.

[In the following essay, Slights probes the historical context of Henry's conscience in Henry V, including his mediation between personal judgment and social obligation as King of England.]

Since the celebrations of Shakespearean characters as portrayals of universal human nature have been largely silenced by scholarly attacks on the universalizing of the bourgeois subject, analyses of early modern representations of human life have risked an equally ahistorical projection of a postmodern fragmented subject onto early modern texts and have sometimes avoided attributing all meaning to originary subjects only by effacing human agency altogether. If we assume that reality is grasped through language, that there is no pre-linguistic knowledge, then we need to be wary of how we use our own vocabulary in analyzing early modern subjectivities and to look carefully at historical linguistic practice. As Anne Ferry has shown, sixteenth-century English had yet to develop a vocabulary for the analysis of internal experience. Such terms as “superego,” “unconscious,” and “emotions” are relatively recent developments, and words like “self” and “subject” were used in ways different from ours.¹ As Ferry observes, the closest term for continuous internal awareness available in sixteenth-century vocabulary was “conscience.”² Thus when William Fenner advises, “Let a man examine himself, that is, his conscience,” the appositional construction assumes that the self is the conscience.³ Conscience was usually defined as the part of practical understanding that applies inherent knowledge of the basic principles of good and evil to particular actions, judging past actions and legislating future ones. According to the influential preacher and theologian, William Perkins, conscience “is (as it were) a little God sitting in the middle of men[s] hearts, arraigning them in this life as they shal be arraigned for their offences at the tribunal seat of the everliving God in the day of judgement.”⁴ Thus, in contrast to contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, which assumes a pre-moral psyche, Fenner assumes the inherently moral nature of the self.

While conscience signified moral self-awareness, it was also the efficient cause of political action. For example, John Speed observed of the Elizabethan settlement that “many that had fled the Realm in case of conscience, returned,”⁵ and the plethora of books published during the 1640s and 50s with such titles as The Ancient Bounds, or Liberty of Conscience (1645) and Against Universall Libertie of Conscience (1644) demonstrates that, by the time of the civil war, “conscience” had become a code word for political controversy. In early modern England, then, conscience was a site where subjectivity and politics, ideas of salvation and of nationhood, were inextricably entangled. The representations of conscience in theological, legal, political, and literary texts provide significant access to the self-understanding of early modern selves and their social relations. By focusing on conscience in William Perkins's Discourse of Conscience, James VI and I's Basilicon Doron, and Shakespeare's history plays, particularly Henry V, I hope to illuminate tensions between individual judgment and obligations to authority within the concept of conscience that give us more precise understanding of religious and national identity in early modern England.

In Shakespeare's history plays, conscience is the nexus where internal self-awareness and external political action, the obligations of obedience and the authority of personal judgment converge. In Richard III, it performs a unifying function both structurally and politically. In the ruthless world Richard of Gloucester bustles in, most characters attempt to maintain or to acquire power and do so in defiance of their consciences. From Richard's sardonic announcement that he is “determined to prove a villain” (1.1.30), through his gleeful boast that he has seduced Anne with “God, her conscience, and these bars against me” (1.2.234), to the murderer's decision not to “meddle with it [conscience], it makes a man a coward” (1.4.134-35), the play directs our attention to characters' choosing to act against their own understanding of moral goods.⁶ But, as Perkins warns, although sinning against one's conscience is common, finally the judgment of conscience is unavoidable: “as God cannot possibly be overcome of man, so neither can the judgment of Conscience being the judgement of God be wholly extinguished” (3). In Richard III, attempts to ignore conscience are futile. In Clarence's dream, the men he has betrayed return to accuse him. His murderer discovers that his conscience will not stay neatly packed away “in the Duke of Gloucester's purse” (1.4.128) and repents “this most grievous murther” (1.4.273). The murderers of the princes flee “with conscience and remorse” (4.3.20). King Edward, Hastings, Buckingham, and Lady Anne all face the accusations of their guilty consciences and repent shortly before death. Only Richard continues to deny his conscience. Lady Anne's report of his “timorous dreams” (4.1.84) alerts us that the “worm of conscience” has been gnawing at his soul as Margaret's curse predicted (1.3.221), and on Bosworth field Richard's guilty conscience is performed on stage as his victims haunt his dreams. But even as he acknowledges that “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, / And every tongue brings in a several tale, / And every tale condemns me for a villain” (5.3.193-95), he dismisses conscience as “but a word that cowards use … to keep the strong in awe” and determines to let “Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law” (5.3.309-11). Yet his desperate determination to carry on “pell-mell; / If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell” (312-13) fulfills the curses to “Despair and die!” of his conscience-stricken dream. Richard's reckless despair, as well as the pattern of sin and repentance, illustrates Perkins' admonition that conscience cannot be extinguished. Those who “goe on in their owne waies against conscience,” he warns, “after the last judgement, shall have not onely their bodies in torment, but the worme in the soule and conscience shall never die” (3).

At the end of the first tetralogy, then, the conscience that brings murderers to repentance and troubles Richard's dreams is the clear voice of God's judgment, manifested in external events as well as in the individual soul. The psychic division of Richard's guilty conscience (“I love myself. … Alas, I rather hate myself’ [5.3.187, 189]) epitomizes the condition of the nation itself, an England torn apart by the rivalry of York and Lancaster, “Divided in their dire division” (5.5.28). On Bosworth field, Richard is defeated and killed by Richmond, who has slept the sleep of the just, and by an army in which “Every man's conscience is a thousand men” (5.2.17). Richmond's final speech announcing the uniting of the houses of York and Lancaster and praying for lasting peace tells us that the clear consciences of Richmond and his army have been the means through which God's providence will heal the divisions of the nation.⁷

In Henry V, the end of the second tetralogy, conscience is again a central issue, but its presentation is more complicated and ambiguous. Instead of a pattern of parallels and contrasts, in which several characters are defined in terms of their adherence to their consciences, the conscience of Henry himself commands the audience's attention. While in Richard III political problems are treated as the consequences of sin, of individuals acting against their consciences, in Henry V, an opaque political world is the given, the field in which moral decisions must be made.

When King Richard just before the battle of Bosworth Field dismisses “coward conscience” (R3, 5.3.179), his echo of the second murderer's equation of conscience and cowardice reminds us of the universality of the moral economy: the decisions of king and hired thug are basically homologous. All people have consciences that tell them to do good and avoid evil, and for all the differences in rank and power and severity of sin, the rejection of conscience is a rejection of God and a maiming of self by king and commoner alike. In contrast, Henry V directs our attention to the differences between Henry's moral responsibilities and those of his subjects. He is not primarily a symbol of his country, the product and cause of its guilt, nor an Everyman working out his individual salvation. As a person, Henry has a conscience that directs and judges his actions as he moves towards salvation or damnation. As a king, he is supreme political authority whose decisions have direct life-and-death consequences for his subjects and a moral authority with responsibility for the spiritual health of his country. In the year that Henry V was first performed, James VI of Scotland published Basilicon Doron, dedicated to his son and instructing him in “all the points of his calling, aswell generall, as a Christian towards God; as particular, as a King towards his people.”⁸ According to James, conscience is “the conseruer of Religion, … nothing else, but the light of knowledge that God hath planted in man,” and he advises Prince Henry, “Above all … labour to keepe sound this conscience” by carefully examining it daily (17). Henry V similarly focuses on a monarch's dual responsibilities as a Christian and a king. In Richard III, an England guilty of rebellion and regicide has produced and suffers under the guilty ruler it deserves, and with Richard's death exorcizes its guilt and produces a king who will heal the nation morally as well as materially. Henry V demystifies this symbiotic relationship, scrutinizing the conscience of a king who would also be his country's conscience.

From his first appearance, where Henry questions the justness of his claims in France, to his soliloquy the night before the St. Crispin's Day battle, where he struggles with a sense of guilt for his father's usurpation of the crown, Henry's conscience is troubled. Such doubts and anxieties are signs of an active, rather than an evil, conscience, and demand resolution before action. Perkins repeatedly warns that “Whatsoever is not of faith, that is, whatsoever is not done of a setled perswasion in judgement and conscience out of Gods word, however men judge of it, is sinne” and thus “Whatsoever is done with a doubting conscience is a sinne” (41). Henry refuses to proceed against France until he is fully persuaded that he may “with right and conscience make this claim” (1.2.96). And he does not announce himself “well resolv'd” (222) until he is assured that England will be securely protected in his absence. Similarly, in his restless anxiety the night before the battle at Agincourt, Henry does not, like Richard before Bosworth, recklessly reject his conscience in guilt and despair, but thoughtfully analyzes his moral responsibilities in debate with common soldiers. When the disguised Henry claims, “I will speak my conscience of the King” (4.1.118-19), the Riverside gloss of conscience as “honest opinion” does not fully register its self-reflexive force. As Perkins explains, when men use such expressions as,

In my conscience I never thought it … they signifie that they thinke something or they thinke it not, & that their consciences can tell what they thinke. … For there be two actions of the understanding, the one is simple, which barely conceiveth or thinketh this or that: the other is a reflecting or doubting of the former, whereby a man conceives or thinks with himselfe what he thinkes. And this action properly pertaines to the conscience. … By it I conceive and know what I know.

(7-8)

When Henry says, “Methinks I could not die any where so contented as in the King's company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable” (4.1.126-28), the audience is to understand that he has examined his conscience and is at peace with himself.

The establishment of Henry as a king with an active conscience begins even before he appears on stage. In the play's first scene, the bishops of Ely and Canterbury describe the radical transformation of madcap prince into gracious king:

The breath no sooner left his father's body,
But that his wildness, mortified in him,
Seem'd to die too; yea, at that very moment,
Consideration like an angel came
And whipt th'offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise
T'envelop and contain celestial spirits.
Never was such a sudden scholar made;
Never came reformation in a flood
With such a heady currance, scouring faults.

(1.1.25-34)

The emphasis here is on the intellectual nature of the virtue Henry has acquired—“Consideration” has effected the change and produced a “scholar”—and on the sudden totality of his conversion. These emphases signal that the king's sobering experience is not merely grief at his father's death but enlightenment and rectification of his understanding. Also, as Gary Taylor observes in his note to reformation in line 33, “The Protestant Reformation must surely have influenced the nuance of this word for Elizabethans.”⁹ Henry has acquired not only a reformed, but a proto-Reformation conscience.

While the concept of conscience was pervasive, it was also unstable. English Protestant treatises on conscience by William Perkins, William Ames, Robert Sanderson, and Jeremy Taylor all define conscience and its workings, substantially as Aquinas had done, as the human mind operating morally, but Reformation emphasis on salvation by faith alone and on the individual's unmediated relation to God modified the understanding of conscience. While Catholic theologians held that the conscience derives its authority from God and insisted that acting against one's conscience is sinful, they also emphasized that an individual conscience may be wrong, and dealt with the troublesome problems of “erroneous” or “doubting” consciences by maintaining that they should be corrected and resolved by the guidance of the church. In contrast, Reformed theologians insisted that conscience is subject only to God's word as revealed in Scripture. And, though they accepted the traditional view that all humans have consciences, they also insisted that only regenerate consciences are good consciences and that a regenerate conscience requires a conversion through faith. According to Perkins, “Regenerate conscience is that which beefing corrupt by nature, is renewed and purged by faith in the blood of Christ. For to the regenerating of the conscience, there is required a conversion or change; because by nature all mens consciences since the fall are evill, and none are good by grace. The instrument serving to make this change is faith” (44). The implication for Protestant thought of this linking of conscience and faith is that conscience functions not only to apply knowledge of God's law to particular actions, as it does in scholastic thought, but to judge the person as a whole.¹⁰ As the sphere of conscience expanded from ethics to salvation, its emotional dimension became more important—for Luther, as important as the rational dimension, according to Michael Baylor.¹¹ Perkins echoes Luther's understanding of the judgment of conscience as corresponding to God's judgment of the individual as a whole, and, while he defines conscience as a cognitive faculty, he too emphasizes its emotional effects—the shame, sadness, and terror of an accusing conscience and the confidence and joy of a clear conscience (39-41). Thus Huston Diehl's description of the Protestant conscience as an internalized self-disciplinary spectator should be qualified with acknowledgment of its empowering force. As she correctly observes, frequently “metaphors of sight and spectatorship … convey the inner workings of conscience,”¹² but metaphors of conscience as precious jewel, guide, compass, book, ship, and physician are also common. On a single page, for example, Perkins calls an evil conscience sergeant, jailor, witness, judge, hangman, and hellfire, and figures a good conscience as man's best friend, a continual feast, and an earthly paradise (74). Perhaps most significantly, he claims that “two notable effects” of a regenerate conscience are boldness and confidence and echoes Luther in citing Proverbs 28:1 as a description of a regenerate conscience: “The righteous are bold as a lyon” (41).¹³

In Henry V, what David Kastan calls Henry's “characteristic idiom of moral certainty”¹⁴ suggests the boldness of a regenerate conscience as described by Protestant theologians. But Henry is also specifically a medieval Christian, “a true lover of the holy Church” (1.1.23), according to the Bishop of Ely. In the course of the play, Henry moves from a position as a medieval king consulting ecclesiastical authorities on political policy to one as an English Protestant king who recognizes no higher political or religious authority. By portraying this change, Henry V explores the moral and political implications of the emergent Protestant conscience in sixteenth-century England.

One aspect of Henry's development is increasing independence. At the beginning of the play he is a young king accepting the moral and political direction of the church. In Act 2, stung by the betrayal of trusted friends, he manipulates them to condemn themselves. By Act 3 he is a battle-hardened warrior making agonizingly difficult moral choices—to fight on with his exhausted army, to refuse to set a ransom for himself, to agree to the execution of his old friend, and in Act 4 to order the killing of the French prisoners—and making them alone. With this growth in independence comes a display of interiority. When Henry in his first scene has “some things of weight / That task our thoughts” (1.2.5-6), he sends for advisers. In Act 4, he looks for solitude: “I and my bosom must debate a while, / And then I would no other company” (4.1.31-32). His sardonic reference to the vastly larger enemy forces as “our outward consciences” because they serve as reminders “That we should dress us fairly for our end” (4.1.8, 10) calls attention to the inwardness of his examination of his conscience in the two soliloquies that follow. In the first, Henry complains about, but does not consider shirking, the responsibilities of kingship. Although his description of the mindless complacency of his subjects is obviously inaccurate and unfair as a description of the men he has just been talking with, his analysis of the discrepancy between the king's two bodies—his physical vulnerability and mental anguish as a man and his power as a king—is tough-minded and accurate. His analysis of the emptiness of ceremony, as Norman Rabkin has pointed out, is as clear-sighted as Falstaff's of honor.¹⁵ But the crucial difference is that, while Falstaff rejects honor, Henry does not reject ceremony. His attitude toward the ceremonies of monarchy reflects the Protestant attitude toward religious ceremonies: they have their uses but should not be idolized. King James advises his son to “learne wisely to discerne betwixt points of saluation and indifferent things, betwixt substance and ceremonies” (19) and to remember that “this glistering worldly glorie of Kings, is giuen them by God, to teach them so to preasse so to glister and shine before their people” (13). Similarly, Henry scoffs at ceremony as superstition—as an idol, a god eliciting adoration—but also understands that in social reality ceremony is “place, degree, and form, / Creating awe and fear in other men” (4.1.246-47), and he has no intention of rejecting “place, degree, and form” or the responsibilities they entail.

In his second soliloquy, Henry takes his problems of conscience directly to God, without the intervention of priestly authority explicating French law. Praying to the “God of battles” (4.1.289) to give his soldiers courage and confessing his inherited guilt from his father's usurpation, he illustrates the basic paradox of the emotional workings of the early modern Protestant conscience, the simultaneous presence of buoyant certainty and abject fear. Protestants stress the confidence of the regenerate conscience, but they also insist on its total humility. Luther, for example, argues that faith produces confidence that “the works which you do are acceptable and pleasing to God, whatever they may turn out to be,” but also insists, “you can have the confidence … when you realize that through these works you are nothing in His sight.”¹⁶ Within this frame of reference, Henry is bold and decisive at Agincourt because he knows that “all that I can do is nothing worth, / Since that my penitence comes after all / Imploring pardon” (4.1.303-5).

This internalization of conscience is expressed in a developing sense of nationhood. Henry's ambitions in France, which in the opening scenes are discussed in terms of family lineage and inherited right, by the battle at Agincourt have become a matter of national honor, transcending linguistic and class differences and uniting “a band of brothers” (4.3.60) in a common cause. Moreover, in assuming the moral authority of the church, Henry assumes responsibility to act as moral as well as military leader. According to James, God has made a king “a little GOD to sit on his Throne, and rule ouer other men” (12). Just as a king can learn “all the things necessarie for the discharge of [his] duetie, both as a Christian, and as a King” by looking to God, “seeing in him, as in a mirrour, the course of all earthly things, whereof hee is the spring and only moouer” (13), so a king should act as “a mirrour to [his] people … that therein they may see, by [his] image, what life they should leade” (34). A “King is not mere laicus [a mere layman]”(52); as conscience is “the light of knowledge that God hath planted in man” (17) so a king should be “a lampe and mirrour … giuing light to [his] seruants to walke in the path of venue” (42). As James recommends, Henry serves as a model to others: he inspires his army with his own courage, keeps his word to refuse to set a ransom for himself, applies the law impartially, and insists on attributing the English victory to God.¹⁷ When scrupulous Fluellen, whose tag phrase is “in my conscience,” wistfully asks whether boasting a bit about the body count is allowable, Henry agrees with a condition: “with this acknowledgment, / That God fought for us” (4.8.119-20). In Fluellen's response, “Yes, my conscience, he did us great good” (4.8.121), “my conscience” ambiguously both registers that in his own conscience he has accepted that human actions themselves are “nothing worth” and addresses Henry as his conscience.

But if the king was, as Kevin Sharpe says, “the conscience of the commonweal,”¹⁸ Henry also clearly distinguishes individual consciences. In addition to his exemplary courage, integrity, and humility, the characteristic form Henry's moral leadership takes is the urging of others to examine their consciences. Even in submitting his own case of conscience to the bishops, he warns them that his trust that “what you speak is in your conscience wash'd / As pure as sin with baptism” (1.2.31-32) involves them in responsibility for the consequences of their advice. A similar motive to guide his subjects in the path of virtue can explain his stratagem to trick the traitors, Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, to condemn themselves out of their own mouths and to repent their perfidy. Insistence on personal moral responsibility also informs his charges against the French enemy. He sends word to the Dauphin that “his soul / Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance” (1.2.283) and to King Charles that “the widows' tears, the orphans' cries / The dead men's blood” are “on your head” (2.4.105-7) and warns the men of Harfleur, “you yourselves are cause” of the threatened horrors (33.19). Most notably, he rejects the charge from his own soldiers that the king is responsible for the souls of the men he leads into battle: “Every subject's duty is the King's, but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier … wash every mote out of his conscience” (4.1.17680). Henry is not merely evading responsibility and blaming the victim, but insisting that every person has a conscience accountable to God.¹⁹

Shakespeare's representation of the Protestant conscience is far more sympathetic than, say, Jonson's satiric portrait of Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy. From the perspective of the Reformation conscience, Henry's combination of self-righteous certainty and self-effacing humility, which has proved so disturbing to modern critics, does not appear as Machiavellian hypocrisy.²⁰ As king, Henry scrupulously examines his conscience, acts only when he has resolved his doubts, articulates profound awareness of the terrible consequences of his actions in innocent suffering, performs his duties zealously, administers the law justly, and inspires his subjects with a sense of national purpose. But without undercutting Henry's good intentions, the play also raises questions about the decisions themselves and the devious and violent means by which they are carried out and thus about the implications of the transfer of moral authority from the universal church to the sovereign state. Henry's assumption that he can both respect the individual consciences of his subjects and yet command their obedience exemplifies, as Kevin Sharpe observes, “the central problem of the early modern state: if conscience were the foundation of the duty of obedience to princes, yet conscience informed some subjects that the ruler acted ‘directly against God’, how could monarchy and the commonweal survive?”²¹

The most direct challenge to Henry's image as his country's conscience comes from the soldier Michael Williams the night before the battle of Agincourt. Williams is skeptical about the justice of the war and imagines the judgment the king would face for wasting lives for an unjust cause: “if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’” (4.1.134-38). More disturbing for Henry, however, Williams goes on to hold the king morally responsible for placing his soldiers in a situation where they are unable to prepare themselves for death and judgment:

I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

(4.1.141-46)

Henry presents two arguments to defend himself. First, by drawing an analogy linking king, master, and father, he argues that authorities are not responsible for the unintended consequences of their orders: “The King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services” (4.1.155-58). His second argument is that each soldier is morally responsible for himself: “Besides, there is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers … every subject's soul is his own” (4.1.158-77).

Henry's argument that he is not responsible for other men's souls provides the theoretical foundation for his speech at the siege of Harfleur, where he not only charges the consciences of the men of Harfleur with guilt for the terrible consequences of resistance, but by invoking the image of a soldier “With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass / Your fresh fair virgins and your flow'ring infants” (3.3.13-14), he implicitly distances his own conscience from the savage latitude of his soldiers' in the heat of battle. By acknowledging the independent consciences of his soldiers and the capacity of the fallen human conscience to embrace hellish acts, he also admits limits to his moral authority and acknowledges that he does not embody a collective English conscience. Indeed he emphasizes his inability to exercise moral authority over his troops:

We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon th' enraged soldiers in their spoil,
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. …

(3.3.24-27)

Henry's speech at Harfleur, then, is consistent with his emphasis on each soldier's moral independence in his reply to Michael Williams, but it also reveals the inadequacy of his response to the problems Williams raises, revealing the oversimplification of his primary argument that a king is morally responsible only for the results he consciously intends. His analogy linking king, master, and father is familiar. Citing Cicero, James uses it to contrast a “good King,” who is like a “naturall father and kindly Master,” with a tyrant, who is like “a step-father and an uncouth hireling” (20). In both cases the analogy obscures important differences among political, familial, and economic relationships. First, Henry's claim of innocent intentions is simplistic. Although Henry may “purpose not their death” when he sends men into battle, he makes clear that he fully intends the “waste and desolation” (3.3.18) they commit. Of course, he does not actually subject the city's inhabitants to the savage violence he threatens. The violence of his language, in fact, is a successful tactic for avoiding the horrors he describes. Yet if Henry distinguishes his repugnance for “murther, spoil, and villainy” from the ferocity of “th' enraged soldiers in their spoil” (32, 25), he also insists that the decision to cause the “waste and desolation” is his to make and that he will make it without regret. After Agincourt he attributes victory to God, but when the crucial battles are yet to be won, he does not rely on the “God of battles,” nor does he, like Richmond at Bosworth field, suggest that his forces will win because their hearts are pure and their cause just. He uses the threat of rape and rapine as a military tactic and announces his willingness to use them in fact. Far from being “the mirror of all Christian kings” (2.6), in which his people can see themselves in an image of virtue, Henry deliberately sets up “the blind and bloody soldier with foul hand” (3.3.34) as the mirror in which he sees himself: “I am a soldier, / A name that in my thoughts becomes me best” (5.6).

The play's foregrounding of the clash between Henry's image of himself at Harfleur releasing “the flesh'd soldier” to range “in liberty of bloody hand” (3.3.11-12) with his image of himself before Agincourt keeping watch “to maintain the peace” (4.1.283) dramatizes not the hypocrisy of a callous manipulator but the inadequacy of a concept of conscience as wholly internal good intentions. While the clergymen who advise Henry that his cause is just in order to protect the financial interests of the church show the limitations of a consequentialist morality, Henry illustrates the dangers of an intentionalist morality. The play presents him as genuinely convinced of the rightness of his cause and appalled by the horrors of war but unaware that, as Jeremy Taylor says in his monumental work on conscience written after the civil war, there are “social crimes, in which a man's will is deeper than his hand” and people are responsible for the crimes others commit in their name with their approval.²² According to Taylor, although sin always involves some degree of choice, responsible choice includes diligent consideration of the consequences of one's actions, and people are responsible for the sins they foresee and cause but commit involuntarily.²³ Although Henry's defense relies on the concept of intention, Michael Williams has argued that the king is morally responsible for the unintended consequences of his actions, for imperiling the souls of his subjects: “if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it” (4.1.144-45). Like King James, Henry assumes that a king is responsible for promoting the spiritual as well as the material well-being of his subjects, but, although he acknowledges responsibility for the physical suffering and death consequent on his decision to invade France, he fails to accept responsibility for the moral and spiritual consequences for his men of his decision to fight at Agincourt against overwhelming odds. His advice that “every soldier in the wars [should] do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience” (4.1.178-80) rings hollow after his vivid description of the bloodlust of “enraged soldiers” with “conscience wide as hell” (3.3.25, 13).

Henry's debate with his soldiers raises troubling questions about the moral responsibilities of subjects as well as of the king. Williams is unconvinced by the disguised king's self-defense and continues to express skepticism about his trustworthiness, but since he never argued that the sins of the soldiers who die unrepentant are somehow transferred to the king, he easily agrees that “every subject's soul is his own” and that no one can avoid God's judgment: “'Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head, the King is not to answer it” (4.1.186-87). And he apparently concurs with John Bates's opinion that common soldiers are not responsible for judging the justice of the cause they fight for: “we know enough, if we know we are the King's subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us” (4.1.131-33). But Williams's pessimism about the possibility of virtue on the battle field and his belief that “to disobey were against all proportion of subjection” (4.1.145-46), opinions he shares with Henry, show soldiers in an impossible moral dilemma and reveal how attenuated the concept of volition is within an ethic of unquestioning obedience. Theorists of conscience present the same impasse, agreeing both that conscience dictates obedience to human rulers and that the law of God supersedes human authority. Perkins, for example, indignantly condemns “notorious rebels … that beefing borne subjects of this land, yet choose rather to die then to acknowledge (as they are bound in conscience) the Kings Majestie to bee supreame governour under God in all causes and over all persons” (37-38), and he is equally adamant that if human authority commands “things that are evill and forbidden by God, then is there no bond of conscience at al; but contrariwise men are bound in conscience not to obey” (34). Citing the locus classicus on obedience, Romans 13.5, “yee must bee subject not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake,” he comments, “Magistracie is indeede an ordinace of God to which wee owe subjection, but how farre subjection is due, there is the question” (26).

No one in the debate in Act 4 questions the extent of subjection, but the play raises the issue obliquely through the figure of the Boy. Shamed and disgusted by the antics of the “three swashers,” Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, the Boy concludes his catalogue of their cowardice and thievery with a complaint about their requirements of him and a decision to leave their service:

They would have me as familiar with men's pockets as their gloves or their handkerchers; which makes much against my manhood, if I should take from another's pocket to put into mine; for it is plain pocketing up of wrongs. I must leave them, and seek some better service. Their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up.

(3.2.47-53)

In deciding to leave his masters, the Boy faces a case of conscience much like Launcelot Gobbo's dilemma of whether to flee from Shylock's service and the one Prince Hal poses to Francis. Launcelot Gobbo, who thinks of his decision as a psychomachia with his conscience advocating obedience to authority and “the fiend” encouraging flight, is irremediably caught between two evils, since his conscience tells him to stay with “the Jew my master, who … is a kind of devil” and “the fiend … is the devil himself’ (MV2.2.22-27). When Prince Hal challenges Francis, he puts the question in terms of courage and cowardice rather than of good and evil but also points the paradox involved in renouncing the service of a lawful master: “darest thou be so valiant as to play the coward with thy indenture, and show it a fair pair of heels and run from it?” (1H4 2.4.46-48). Like Prince Hal, the Boy sees the decision as a question of valor and, like Launcelot Gobbo, he understands it as a moral choice. But only the Boy is unequivocal that he must “seek some better service.” None of these plays invites the audience to endorse the actual repudiation of a lawful master. Shylock willingly agrees to negotiate Launcelot Gobbo's change of service, and poor Francis does not understand the question much less attempt to act on the suggestion. The Boy presumably is killed in the French slaughter of the boys guarding the luggage before he can act on his decision, but his response to the “plain pocketing up of wrongs” raises the possibility of disobedience as a moral duty.

Henry V portrays with remarkable fullness the understandings of conscience current at the end of the sixteenth century. The Chorus's descriptions present conscience as the voice of God manifested in Henry as “the mirror of all Christian kings” shaping human history; soliloquies dramatize conscience as the fallible capacity for self-reflection in the individual soul's relation to God; and scenes of dialogue and debate dramatize, in the circumstantial particularities of human interaction, the conflicts arising from the tension between a concept of conscience as God's will always and everywhere the same and a concept of conscience as private and individual. The play does not attempt to harmonize the unsettling resonances between Bates's principle that subjection removes moral responsibility and the Boy's visceral decision that he can no longer stomach following villainous orders. Similarly it does not reconcile the mercifulness of Henry's order to treat French civilians leniently and respectfully with the ruthlessness of his command to kill all the French prisoners, nor does it mitigate the emotional impact of the application of the order against looting in the execution of Bardolph. The primary effect of these unresolved problems, I think, is not to render the figure of Henry ambiguous but to engage the consciences of the audience with these doubtful cases. Gary Taylor suggests that the pattern of audience response in Henry's decision to invade France, to threaten Harfleur, and to kill the prisoners is to raise our suspicions and then to allay them, emotionally at least.²⁴ I would argue rather that in each case the play directs us to understand Henry's conscientious decisions but neither to condemn nor to endorse them. While Henry resolves his doubts, the play stimulates doubt in the audience. Joel Altman has demonstrated that imaginative participation in Henry's on-stage war allowed original audiences to play out the emotional ambivalences of the off-stage Irish war and to embrace the imperialist venture even while questioning its values.²⁵ Although Altman's analysis brilliantly accounts for the play's emotional power, I am skeptical that the theatrical sacralizing of violence he describes silences the questions the play raises, either about Henry's decisions or about their application to other times and places. That is, the interplay of choric commentary, soliloquy, and debate activates the consciences of the audience without offering clearly right answers to specific cases; the imaginative participation the play invites includes the engagement of our moral reason.

In particular, Henry's sense of monarchal duty, Fluellen's rigid adherence to law and precedent, Williams's stubborn integrity, and the Boy's planned rebellion suggest that the concept of the authority of the individual conscience may undermine national cohesiveness in a hierarchical social structure. His subjects' conscientious performance of duty, which is the foundation of Henry's power, is a potential threat to that power. Through his trick with the glove, Henry finds a way to enable Williams to keep his word and thus satisfy his conscience without violating hierarchical principle. But while this representational strategy allows the plot to move to harmonious resolution, it does not conceal the deviousness of Henry's stratagem or the suggestion that differences among individual consciences may create conflicts that cannot be reconciled. The Epilogue reminds the audience of the fortuitousness of Henry's victories—“Fortune made his sword” (6)—and of the bloodshed that follows in his son's reign when “so many had the managing” (11) of the state. That is history, already performed on the stage. It also reminds us, though not the play's original audiences, that in the future, within fifty years, England will bleed again when Royalists and Parliamentarians fight for conscience's sake.

Notes

1. Anne Ferry, The “Inward Language”: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (U. of Chicago Press, 1983), Chapter 1.

2. Ferry, 45.

3. William Fenner, The Souls Looking-glasse … With a Treatise of Conscience (Cambridge: Roger Daniel for John Rothwell, 1640), 38.

4. William Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience” in William Perkins, 1558-1602, ed. Thomas F. Merrill (Nieukoop: B. DeGraaf, 1966), 9.

5. John Speed, The History of Great Britaine (London, 1611), 832.

6. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

7. I discuss conscience in Richard III in more detail and from a different perspective in The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton U. Press, 1981), 68-79.

8. Basilicon Doron in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2.

9. Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor, The World's Classics (Oxford U. Press, 1994) 1.1.34n. In “The Hybrid Reformations of Shakespeare's Second Henriad,” Comparative Drama 32 (1998): 176-206, Maurice Hunt discusses attempts at reformation in Henry IV, I and 2 and Henry V as Shakespeare's melding of Protestant and Catholic elements.

10. See Michael G. Baylor, Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 20 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), Chapter 6.

11. Baylor, 209.

12. Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the State: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Cornell U. Press, 1997), 202.

13. Cf. Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1955-76), 25:400.

14. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (University Press of New England, 1982), 64.

15. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (U. of Chicago Press, 1981), 47-48

16. Works, 360.

17. I am not suggesting, of course, the direct influence of Basilicon Doron on Henry V. The reference to the Irish expedition in the fifth chorus suggests dating the play in the Spring of 1599. James's treatise was written in 1598 in Middle Scots, and in 1599 an English version was printed in a very limited edition of seven copies. It did not become widely available in England until 1603 with the publishing of a revised English edition with an added preface. Sommerville, “Introduction” xviii. Also see Jenny Wormald, “James VI and I: Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge U. Press, 1991), 36-54.

18. Kevin Sharpe, “Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of James VI and I” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 80.

19. Henry's evasion of responsibility is stressed by W. L. Godshalk in “Henry V's Politics of Non-Responsibility,” Cahiers Elisabethains 17 (1980): 11-20 and by Richard Helgerson in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (U. of Chicago Press, 1994), 231, 232. Dennis Kezar argues convincingly that Henry V's distribution of guilt uses theological concepts to explore metadramatically questions of authorial function and responsibility. “Shakespeare's Guilt Trip in Henry V,” MLQ [Modern Language Quarterly] 61.3 (2000): 431-61.

20. Condemning Henry, as Harry Berger says, “is currently considered a sign of liberal chic.” I want to demonstrate that focusing on Henry's conscience—its earnest humility as well as its self-righteous evasions—precludes the reductiveness of both sides in what Berger describes as “a tedious squabble … between Harry-lovers and Harry-haters.” Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford U. Press, 1997): 250.

21. [See note 18].

22. Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works, ed. Reginald Heber, rev. C. P. Eden (Oxford, 1854), 10:570.

23. Taylor, 10:611-16

24. “Introduction,” 38.

25. Joel B. Altman, “‘Vile Participation’: The Amplification of Violence in the Threater of Henry V,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] (1991): 1-32.