SOURCE: Moseley, C. W. R. D. “This Sceptred Isle: Henry V.” In Shakespeare's History Plays Richard II to Henry V: The Making of a King, pp. 147-70. London: Penguin Books, 1988.

[In the following excerpt, Moseley describes the principal characters and plot structure of Henry V, emphasizing thematic elements in the drama associated with the heroic role of Henry.]

In Henry V there are so many references back in time to the events dramatized in the previous plays that, while the play is, naturally, able to stand quite independently, it gains enormously from being seen against the well-known events of the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. Even more does it gain when seen against the background of the discussion of rule and the ruler in Shakespeare's treatment of those historical events.

In watching the movement of Hal from Eastcheap towards the crown, a redefinition of his self, and an acceptance of the implications of his role, we have been constantly reminded (not least by Henry IV) of the movement of Richard away from the crown to his discovery of a new self in his new nonentity. The careers of both—and of Henry IV too—centre round their possession, or not, not only of legitimate title to the throne, but also of the Cardinal Virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude. In Henry V these virtues are seen for the first time united with legitimate possession of the throne; the earlier plays demonstrated how necessary they are to a ruler by showing men engaged in power struggles who possessed them only partially or not at all. Richard, for example, lacked both justice and temperance, and was imprudent to a degree; in his fall he learned fortitude and, when it was too late, the three divisions of prudence—memory of his own misdeeds, understanding of what was happening to him, and foresight of what would happen to his realm.¹

Henry Bolingbroke's fortitude we can take for granted; he possessed a sense of justice and was temperate, but he was led into a course of events whose outcome he did not foresee and whose consequences dog his reign with unhappiness and rebellion. In the Henry IV plays, Henry tries hard to understand and foresee his problems, but ultimately is a responder to events rather than a controller of them; his sympathetic portrait is neatly set against that of the unlikeable political schemer Worcester, who possesses almost a parody of prudence. (Worcester is also contrasted with Northumberland—a vacillating man, given to misjudgement.) Hotspur has a complete lack of the virtue of prudence—he has no policy or forethought, can control neither his tongue nor his actions, and lacks the broadness and generosity of mind that is essential to justice. Falstaff's cunning is shortsighted, working on assumptions we know to be false, and takes no thought for the time that will come when no man may work. He shies away from prudent consideration of the ultimate end of man when he tells Doll not to speak like a death's-head, a memento mori, to him (Part 2, II.iv.229-30ff.). In his lechery and gluttony he is a very figure of intemperance; he is mean and unjust in his treatment of the Hostess, his soldiers, and—had he been able—would have been so to Shallow and Silence. The idea of connecting fortitude with Falstaff is ludicrous, and the nearest the Eastcheap group come to a perception of fortitude is in the ridiculous posturing of Pistol—which hides a deep cowardice.²

Against all these is set Hal. He has prudence in full measure; his behaviour throughout Parts 1 and 2 indicate an awareness of his family history, an understanding of public opinion and people as well as political reality, and a foresight that allows him to turn his possession of the throne into a mark for later ages to aim at. This quality is also shown in his examination of the evidence in the council in Act 1 of Henry V, before committing himself to war. That council also shows his concern for a cause that is just; and his justice is shown not only in the treatment of Scroop and Cambridge but also of Bardolph, who is caught robbing a church. He is fair and just to both the Hostess and Hotspur.

The justice that Hal comes to exemplify is neatly underlined when he plays the part of his own father giving judgement in Part 1, II.iv (a picture deliberately set against the icon of misrule we have just seen in Falstaff), and in the confirmation in his speech to the Lord Chief Justice of the visible symbols of justice, the sword and the scales (which still surmount the Old Bailey). The mercy (of which more later) that goes with justice is shown in his treatment of Falstaff and his companions. His fortitude in battle and hardship is obvious, and we have seen how in the midst of intemperance in Part 1 he remained temperate. Henry in Henry V is thus not only a legitimate king, but also a good man.

He is also a Christian. The emphasis on this in Henry V is very noticeable, and the play examines, among other things, the implications of a deeply held personal Christianity for the ruler. The Prayer for the Church in the First (1549) and Second (1552) Prayer Books is virtually identical to that in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; it beseeches God to

defend all Christian Kings, Princes and Governors; and specially thy servant Elizabeth our queen; that under her we may be godly and quietly governed: And grant unto her whole Council, and to all that are put in authority under her, that they may truly and indifferently minister justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy true religion and virtue.

The prayer stresses the powerlessness of the ruler without God's help, his duty of good government, and of impartial justice. These are exactly the issues that the play deals with in the series of tableaux framed by the Choruses, and furthermore it scrutinizes what is involved in being a Christian prince. Henry in this play has to blend his role as a conqueror and legitimate ruler with his inward, personal Christianity. The tension has the potential for tragedy, but through it Henry discovers his true identity and reaches a triumphant synthesis.

The first act of Henry V is so structured as to bring these issues into consideration. Shakespeare often uses in his political plays a big Court scene at or near the beginning to introduce us to the issues the play will raise, and to the persons involved. The staging of such a scene necessarily reminds us of the hierarchy in the state that mirrors the ordo in the universe; we have seen this at the beginning of Richard II and 1 Henry IV. Frequently too (but not invariably) he structures these scenes so that we have a short introduction by some minor characters who prepare us for what we are about to witness, then the big state entry, then a third division commenting on some of the implications of what has happened.³

Act 1 opens with Canterbury and Ely talking about the king. They both agree he is ‘full of grace and fair regard’ and ‘a true lover of the holy Church’ (I.i.22-3), and Canterbury goes on to enumerate his perfections. The inevitable reference to his reformation is couched in terms specifically religious, echoing the Baptism Service of the Prayer Book of 1560; the prince's ‘consideration’ (repentance) has, as it were, undone the Fall and left a perfect man, the proper abode for the Holy Spirit. (It is noteworthy that already we have, as we did in Gaunt's complaint about Richard's mistreatment of England, reference to the Garden of Eden and that other garden, the Paradise of the blessed.) His character is more than just reformed. He can understand the subtler points of theology (ll. 38-40); he is skilled in civil law (ll. 41-2); he can speak eloquently on the art of war (ll. 43-4);⁴ he is an expert in statecraft or ‘policy’, and can by reason solve problems that would have driven even an Alexander to use his sword.⁵ He speaks with all the admired arts of rhetoric, and has married the ‘theoric’ and ‘practic’ sides of life as a good Renaissance prince should. What is being described is nothing less than the Renaissance ideal of the uomo universale we see in Sidney or Castiglione, a man who is mater of himself and master of the pleasure that would corrupt other men (l. 51; cf. above, p. 141). Ely—who holds a bishopric that, as we know from Richard III, has something of a reputation for strawberries—replies with garden/cultivation images (the strawberry thriving under the useless nettle, and so on) to suggest that there may have been an organic connection between the king's early wildness and his present excellence.

After this prologue comes the state entry. We should envisage a stage crammed with people—even if we only allow two attendants per noble (mean by Renaissance standards) there would be twenty-one people on stage before Canterbury and Ely enter. This company obviously must have been organized as nearly as possible in a pattern like that of the Elizabethan Parliament. Henry's opening of the matter of his claim to the French throne shows exactly those qualities Canterbury has enumerated: mastery of the legal issues, eloquence, a readiness to defend his right by battle, a recognition that the king bears a heavy responsibility under God for his actions. He is a king who is far from trigger-happy, but cares deeply about justice. He is aware that the rightness of his cause is not one he alone can decide (I.ii.10-12) and warns Canterbury not to ‘fashion, wrest, or bow [his] reading’ to suit what he thinks Henry wants to hear. A far cry from the flattering counsellors of Richard! Canterbury's reply is to be taken seriously, however difficult we find it to do so; it emphasizes the justness of Henry's claim and the legitimacy of his decision to pursue it by war if negotiation fails.⁶ Henry is adamant on this point: ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ This careful weighing of the legal and moral rights shown by Henry is highlighted by the parallel with his father, for although Bolingbroke had right and law on his side, this careful consideration never crossed his mind. He was pulled by the logic of his own actions into rebellion and the deposition of an anointed king.

Ely supports Canterbury, and caps the latter's roll-call of English heroes and his reminiscence of the well-known story of the Black Prince at Crécy with a call to Henry to live up to their valiant example.⁷ Prophetic; for Agincourt was, like Crécy, a desperate throw against huge odds, and Edward and Henry did, in 1356 and 1415, ‘forage in blood of French nobility’. A lesser king would immediately be swayed by such a volume of ecclesiastical agreement; but Henry still holds back. The ‘policy’ Canterbury described is exemplified in his concern to protect his realm from the incursions of the Scots. But, as his counsellors agree, here is no Irish expedition of a King Richard; this realm is properly and harmoniously organized, and Canterbury's memorable speech about the mutual interdependence of the commonwealth of the bees finally convinces Henry of what he should do.

Yet this part of the scene is not quite so simple as this makes it sound. For a start, the support of two senior bishops is pretty powerful; and we ought to remember that Bolingbroke's actions to seek the throne were strongly opposed by Carlisle, and his continuance on it by the Archbishop of York. Both appealed to divine sanction for their opposition; but Canterbury and Ely represent such a sanction supporting Henry. The contrast with his predecessors could hardly be more powerful. Secondly, Canterbury's speech about the bees holds up an analogy to the well-ordered state, an ideal to be worked for, rather than offering a description of what actually is. There is an implied conditionality in his lines,

                                                            I this infer,
That many things, having full reference
To one consent, may work contrariously

(ll. 204-6)

which reinforces his earlier suggestion that ‘obedience’ (i.e. this interdependence in the state) (l. 187) is ‘an aim or butt’ to be worked for. It may not yet have been achieved, and the achievement may be temporary. The confidence—and it is a real confidence—of this scene is set off by the recognition that the ideal is not automatically achieved; the details of the hive of England are, in fact, examined in subsequent scenes. Henry has to be the ‘sad-eyed justice’ delivering over to execution, at whatever personal cost, those who break his trust and their own faith.

But that painful act of self-control is still in the future. A more pressing one is immediate. To highlight Henry's nature, Shakespeare made a significant change to his sources at this point. In the sources the Dauphin's insult arrives before the decision is taken to press Henry's claim. Here it is clear that the decision has been reached in fair and open concert of the prince with his counsellors, working together like the commonwealth of the bees, and that the Dauphin's insult does not affect the issue one way or another. What it now serves to do is to underline that, as the ambassadors report (II.iv.29ff.), the rest of Europe must take note of the change in Henry as his own country has had to do in 2 Henry IV.

The ambassadors enter with a good deal of trepidation. Henry reassures them:

We are no tyrant but a Christian king,
Unto whose grace our passion is as subject
As in our wretches fettered in our prisons

(I.ii.242-4)

—a reply which not only endorses the law of nations, but reminds us of the standards of kingship we are to apply to Henry and of the justice in him that controls both his subjects and his own passions. His own passions need that self-control, for he is clearly deeply offended and angry at the Dauphin's joke. He contains his anger, even turns it into a series of bitter puns and images, but it is clear that the irresponsibility of the Dauphin, a more foolish Hotspur, must bear a good deal of the blame for the decision to refuse Henry's demands, and thus for the war that will devastate France. Five times in the last twenty-five lines of the first act Henry emphasizes that he is acting in God's name and that his cause is just, and there is no reason to suspect any irony on his or Shakespeare's part. After all, the historical tradition attributed to Henry V a piety and seriousness about religious issues that there is no reason to doubt; he is known to have had long and earnest theological arguments with Oldcastle to win him back to the orthodox religion so that he could save him from execution. Shakespeare has already made Canterbury endorse this, and the whole of Act I has been focused on demonstrating what qualities make him a credible ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ (II,Chorus,6). Shakespeare could have left the matter there and merely taken Henry off to a gung-ho expedition to bash the French. But he does something much more interesting. He shows Henry developing those qualities in action that the mere statement by Canterbury might not be enough to convince us he possessed, and developing a piety and humility that reflect, perhaps, Richard's later consciousness of his place in God's sight. Henry grows and develops in this play not only as a ruler but as a man conscious of his huge moral responsibility, at the cost of his own personal feelings. The justice Canterbury speaks of is shown not only in the patient searching of his own title to the French throne, where he stands to gain a good deal, but also in the extremely painful and wounding confrontation with the conspirators in II.ii.

He clearly knows all about the treason of Scroop, Grey and Cambridge before he asks them their opinion about the treatment of the wretch who committed lèse-majesté. Those who themselves would have betrayed him advise severity—the advice of flatterers who say what they think he wants to hear. But he shows the wretch the royal prerogative of mercy; and their own mouths have denied the conspirators the chance of mercy for their more heinous crime. All their betrayals are bad enough; but the one that is particularly wounding is that of Scroop, for clearly Henry loved the man. He is given a long speech of reproach (II.ii.79-144) in which the tones of the public man give way to the broken cadences of a betrayed friend. The most common grammatical structure is a pained, reproachful question; the second person singular (signalling the intimacy of the reproach) dominates, and the imagery moves from money to extortion (l. 99), to devils tempting a man to fall, then to the devils' ability to deceive with fair-seeming, and finally to the open mention of what had been more and more insistent in the subtext: the Fall itself. Like Adam, Scroop has fallen from grace, and has committed the sin of Judas in betraying his master. The reminiscence of Richard is inescapable in this, the last betrayal, as that of Richard was the first. The speech is full of the tones, even the very rhetorical patterns (ll. 127ff.), of Richard; yet their positions are antithetical. Richard was powerless against his betrayers, and had to fall to learn what being a king meant; Henry knows what being a king entails, and has to use his power to punish, however unwillingly. Against the desires and pain of the private man they must be punished. Henry assumes again the royal plural in their sentence, for this is a necessary act of policy. His passions are indeed in prison. We may applaud so just a prince, but we are made aware of the cost to the man.

Memory of the other plays again highlights this moment. When Bolingbroke indicts and condemns Green and Bushy (Richard II, III.i), there is more than a hint of personal animus in what purports to be justice; and neither of them accepts either his authority or the justice of his condemnation. Worcester, when condemned by Henry IV (1 Henry IV, V.v), can merely ‘embrace this fortune patiently’, and does not accept Henry's right though he must accept his power. Mowbray and the Archbishop of York (2 Henry IV, IV.ii) are also indignant at Prince John's stratagem—which is not, incidentally, so unlike his brother's here. But these traitors not only accept Henry's justice and right, not only repent of their crimes and ask for God's pardon, but also applaud his action. There could be no stronger endorsement of Henry's kingship than this, from those who would have destroyed him.

Scene ii extends the private self-control of I.ii into public action. The world is having to notice this prince who indifferently ministers justice. The contrasting comic scenes, II.i and II.iii (of which more later) give some idea of the sort of people for whom Henry has responsibility; even there, as Falstaff lies dying, his heart ‘fracted and corroborate’ by the king's rejection, Nym accepts ‘the King is a good king’. In II.iv the news of the formidable nature of this prince reaches France. Here is another of those visual parallels Shakespeare used so often; the court of England in I.ii, presided over in harmony by Henry, is contrasted with that of the France he claims. Here is no country acting in concert. In the face of external threat, the counsellors disagree. The Dauphin shows a foolish and imprudent disregard of Henry as a monarch, and speaks with the contemptuousness of a Hotspur, while the Constable urges that the ambassadors' report of his excellence must be taken seriously. King Charles wisely agrees, remembering Crécy and the tree of which this prince is a shoot. When Exeter and his train are announced, again the Dauphin foolishly butts in, implicitly comparing the English to a pack of dogs and the French to the noble deer; the irony of which he is unconscious is that the deer is hunted and pulled down by the dogs (II.iv.69-70). Exeter's message to the king reveals a good deal about Henry. He is not entering on this war lightly, and, like the French king himself just before, is terribly aware of the horror of war and its insatiable appetite (ll. 104-5;109). He beseeches Charles ‘in the bowels of the Lord’ whom they both acknowledge (l. 102) to deliver up the crown to save the suffering of the innocent. To the Dauphin he sends back insult in the same terms as he received it; and that foolish young man desires nothing more than the arbitrament of war without thought of the cost. His folly, over-confidence and silly pride masquerading as honour keep alive in this play, as a coarsened and distorted reflection, the memory of Hotspur whose character was strongly contrasted with the inner honour of Prince Hal.

In Act III, war has arrived. Henry's physical courage, fortitude and prowess does not need exploring in this play; had Shakespeare wished to do so, he could have dramatized the famous and historical combat with the Duc d'Alençon he found in his sources—he alludes to it in some detail at IV.vii.150ff. What is explored as the play goes on is his inheritance, and more, of his father's gift of inspiring and leading men. The speech before Harfleur (III.i), the favourite old warhorse of anthologists, would never have acquired that status had it not been indeed inspiring. It belongs to a recognized genre for which Shakespeare and his generation must have known a plethora of classical precedents—‘the general's address to his soldiers before the battle’—and a masterpiece of rhetoric was obligatory, particularly in an ‘epic’ play. Its first half centres round a striking image: a peaceful human face physically distorted by rage into the mask of ‘grim-visaged war’, nostrils flared, teeth set, eyes staring. The second half appeals to pride of family and of country, to a consciousness of national worth about to be tested, before Henry's own face distorts in the roar of the battle-cry. The material on which he must bring his inspiration to bear is immediately underlined by the next scene. Shakespeare obviously cannot—as he keeps reminding us through the Chorus—show the siege of Harfleur, but he can illustrate the responses of the combatants. Bardolph's first line is a broken, comic reminiscence of Henry's own—quite serious, though; but the old sweats and bravos of Eastcheap, Nym and Pistol, are finding things too hot for their liking, and the poor Boy would rather have a pot of ale than any amount of glory. (There is more than an echo of Falstaff here) Fluellen enters in high rage and drives them on, leaving the Boy behind. Alone, he outlines his contempt for their cowardice and their thieving—and their silliness in both. It is such men that Henry has to turn into heroes.

But Fluellen, Captain Jamy and Captain Macmorris are another matter, comic as they are. (There were stage Welshmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen in Elizabethan theatre, as there are in our own.) Their disputes are comic and longwinded, but they are about the art of war and the serious matter in hand—unlike the ludicrous quarrel of Nym and Bardolph in II.i; here are representatives of the whole of Britain uniting in the king's service and sinking their pride and difference in a common purpose.

Shakespeare has not given Henry a simple attitude to war. Henry has been convinced his war is just, and we ought to accept that the audience would have agreed, whatever our own feelings. Shakespeare shows him proceeding on the course that he lays out for him very carefully and thoughtfully—even cautiously. If his claim to the throne of France is just, then the war the French engage in by rejecting his claim is a civil war—‘impious war’, as he calls it at III.iii.15. He is therefore acting according to Elizabethan ideas with every bit as much—and more—justice and legitimacy as Henry IV did in putting down the rebellions of his reign. His ambassadors gave the French a chance to agree, and warned them of the consequences; by refusing, they accepted the graphically realized horrors of an invasion. So Henry proceeds to his first campaign at Harfleur. But before committing his troops to the sack of the town, he stops, and gives the Governor another chance to acknowledge his lordship. His speech at III.iii.1ff. is imperious, frightening; he spells out what happens when a city is sacked—something Elizabethans knew all about, from the upheavals in the Low Countries. It is not a nice picture. The images of violence, pain, fire, devils and monsters swirl in and out of the speech to make a picture that chills the blood. The soldier whose blood is up is like a hunting-dog, ‘fleshed’, mowing down without remorse children and young girls, deflowering⁸ them even while they shriek and their old fathers have their brains knocked out against the walls. This hellish picture is further intensified by images that send us back to the Mystery play of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents—babies spitted and jerking on the swords and spears of Herod's men while their mothers look on.⁹

Henry does not want this to happen—he is himself horrified by the picture—but he has the wisdom to know the limits of command: no general, in wars from Troy to Vietnam, has ever been able to control his troops in victory. And he is trapped; he cannot raise the siege and end the war now, for what is done cannot be undone. He has to play the role of king through to the end. The only way out of this horrible fate is for the town to acknowledge his lordship. When it does, instead of the punishment it might deserve for resisting in the first place he commands Exeter to ‘Use mercy to them all’. For mercy becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.

The daring juxtaposition of this tense moment and the little scene with Katherine (III.iv) works interestingly. The scene is charming. After the noise and heat of battle that the language has conjured up, there follows this picture of peace and quiet and innocence, with a delicate play of cross-language bawdy. The violent rapes of Henry's imagination give way to hints of peaceful and willing dalliance. The scene serves a particular purpose: it shows us the future Queen of England, whose femininity will complement and complete the manhood of her king. But a darker side shows in this symbol of the innocence that war might have destroyed. The war, however just, is a terrible risk, and might destroy the very thing it sought to win.

However glorious and admirable as a war-leader Henry may be, therefore, Shakespeare has not presented us with a simplistic view either of human conflict or of the man himself. Throughout the four plays, from Richard's and Carlisle's prophecies onwards, the horror of war has constantly been realized. The little people do suffer in the conflicts of the mighty, and the vulnerable and guiltless new growth is uprooted by its terrible storm. The question must be asked: how can a war be just, fought (as Henry's is) in the name of a just and merciful God, and yet perpetrate such unjust cruelty? The answer, which the play faces squarely, lies in the very nature of man in his fallen state. … God gave man not only a nodal position in the chain of being, but free-will so that he could be a responsible moral person and not a mere automation. That freedom necessarily entails the possibility of refusing to do God's will, and this means that man's decisions will have effects far beyond himself. Man fell in Eden and the whole earth subject to him inevitably suffered, not for any sin of its own but because its governor had failed in his responsibility to it. In his mercy, as Augustine said, God instituted states and law to contain the effects of the Fall, but the Fall could not be undone, nor could the intimate connection between man's actions and the world he lived in be severed. Strife became a condition of man's existence. War was a consequence not of God's will but of man's refusal to obey it; and when the mighty disobeyed the right, their subjects suffered because of the structure of the world and society within it. The king thus shoulders a frightful responsibility, and Henry is agonizedly aware of it. Hence his caution on starting the war and in conducting it, and his appeals to the French to reconsider their disobedience; hence the responsibility for the suffering of the innocent lies on those who refuse, as the devils refused, the right. But if war is a consequence of the disorder caused by human sin, God's providence can nevertheless use it to punish the guilty and redress the disorder of the world into a temporary balance—before the next round of sin caused by man's fallen state. ‘War is His beadle’ (IV.i.164)—that is, his policeman: the idea is not far from that which Marlowe gives to Tamburlaine, who causes cruel havoc by his conquests, seeing himself with huge pride as ‘the scourge of God’. War, however horrible, is thus somehow purging and cleansing; it is also a necessary consequence of human freedom and the love God showed for man in giving him that freedom.

But while Henry accepts his own, and King Charles's, peculiar responsibility, there are limits to it. The issue is discussed acutely in the conversation with Bates and Williams (IV.i). The peasant sense of Williams is sceptical of the disguised Henry's assertion of the ‘king's cause being just and his quarrel honourable’ (ll. 123-4): ‘That's more than we know.’ Bates sees, however, that they are not qualified to judge the issue, and that if they as individual soldiers behave as good subjects even in a bad cause, they are guiltless of that cause's guilt. Williams rejoins that if the cause is not good, the king must bear a ‘heavy reckoning’ (l. 131) for leading men to their deaths before they could put their own souls in order—that is, he must carry not only the responsibility for his own misjudgement but for the damnation of those who might die in sin. With careful logic Henry demonstrates that this cannot be so (ll. 143ff.) and the individual soldiers must be responsible for their own moral conduct as individuals in so far as it is based on their own choice and actions—this the king cannot take on himself: ‘Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own’ (ll. 171-2). War is no excuse for conduct that would be evil and immoral in peace, even in the heat of the sack of a town like Harfleur. The effective argument convinces Williams and Bates,¹⁰ and is yet another demonstration of Henry's power of leadership and his possession of that inspiring common touch that can make a ruler not just obeyed but loved. (When Henry later reveals himself to Williams in IV.viii, he does so with such grace, humour and generosity that the 200-year-old tradition of Henry as an exceptional king of men becomes credible indeed.)

Henry's reaction to this conversation (ll. 218ff.) is his only soliloquy in the play (it is briefly interrupted by Erpingham, recalling Henry to his public duties), and that alone is enough to signal its significance. He reveals as nowhere else in the play the deepest elements in himself; and the speech shows him not only as a philosopher who understands the burden of rule, but also as an honest man. He explores more deeply the attitude to the crown we glimpsed in his reaction to his father's sickness in 2 Henry IV (and Henry IV himself, in his guilt, observed: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’; cf. 2 Henry IV, III.i.4-31 and IV.v.22ff.). He is no longer an observer, though; he wears it himself and knows its cost. He is lonely; the king is separated by his role from his subjects, yet he is a man as they are, and his crown cannot cure his ills. The common labourer knows delights of rest and sleep and simple honest work the king can only envy, and the king must take responsibility, at great personal cost, for providing the conditions in which the peasant can sleep in peace (ll. 272ff.). The king must bear, too, the blame the commons put upon him without thought. In this moment of stillness in the play, before the great clash of Agincourt, Henry has found himself and accepted the full implications of the hard condition of a king, on whose decisions rest both peace and war. As his prayer confirms (ll. 283ff.), he has not only committed his cause to God but also accepted his own sinfulness and his inheritance of guilt. His pious acts cannot undo that primal Fall, be it Richard's murder or the Fall of man. He, like his subjects, is under judgement, dependent on the mercy of God. The Chorus opening this act reminded us of the terrible tension between the public face on whose confidence and courage everyone depends, and the pain and fear felt by the inner man. We have seen both in action in this scene.

The depth and thoughtfulness of Henry's understanding of his role and conduct is illuminated by the contrast with the French reactions to his campaign. In III.v, after the quiet delicacy of the scene with Katherine, the French Court—thirty nobles on stage at once, nearly all to be killed at Agincourt—explodes in anger and hurt pride, at once mystified by the success of the enemy and scornful of them. The Dauphin is particularly strident. The French do not pray; they merely swear. Here is no policy, merely folly. The Constable, against all the warnings of the siege of Harfleur, wishes the enemy stronger so that the personal glory of defeating them might be the greater.¹¹ There is strong contrast with the (comic) pride in their mastery of the practical arts of war that Fluellen and Macmorris have shown in III.ii and the quiet dignity and efficiency of Henry. When Henry receives the insulting message insultingly delivered by Montjoy (III.vi.116ff.), his self-control shows in his firm and courteous reply. There is no Dauphin-like bravado; he is aware that his army is small, tired, sick, yet—‘God before’ (l. 154)—he will advance. Gloucester's trepidation (l. 166; cf. IV.i.1ff.) only elicits once more Henry's confidence that his cause is ‘in God's hand’ (l. 167).

In the scene that takes place the night before Agincourt, Shakespeare has shown us the king understanding, in his isolation, the burden he must bear; the same scene also shows us an army tense, serious, yet united by the personality of Henry. Against this is set, in point for point contrast, the other, deliberately parallel, night scene in the French camp (III.vii). While the English are serious, tense, fearful, the French nobles are longing for the night to pass. Henry visits his soldiers and understands them; the Dauphin is insufferable, boastful, praising his horse—it is not even a proper warhorse!—to a ludicrous degree. He is insulting to the Constable, and there is an undertone of mere quarrelsomeness for its own sake that only the Constable's good humour prevents from flaring into open anger. This is not the sensitivity to the real issue of the king's trustworthiness that lies behind the ironic comedy of Williams's quarrel with Henry—just the sort of thing that might happen in moments of such tension—which is rapidly smoothed by Bates. The Dauphin and Rambures are stupidly over-confident, holding their enemy in derision. Yet the Constable, far more sensible and experienced than the others, suggests that the Dauphin's courage and abilities are strictly limited (ll. 89ff.). The picture is not a flattering one, and in the Dauphin we see what royalty should not be. The contrast with Henry's attitude to war could hardly be greater.¹²

We see the same qualities in IV.ii. The Constable's speech (ll. 13ff.), another ‘general's address to his soldiers’, obviously contrasts with Henry's before Harfleur. Its over-confidence and contempt for the enemy is not simply ironic—for we know that Henry will win the battle; it illustrates a godless tempting of Providence, a regret that the slaughter will not be greater. Set against this the humanity, humour, true honour, generosity and courage of Henry's rallying call to his army in IV.iii, where the idea of the king as leader of a united country is brought vividly to life. This is where all the discussions of honour in the Henry IV plays reach their climax; the very tones of Hotspur—a Hotspur who, unlike the Dauphin, has grown up—are heard in

But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.(13)

(ll. 28-9)

Montjoy's second arrival (IV.iii.79) reminds us of Henry's appeal to the Governor of Harfleur to surrender; but the only mention of mercy is ironic—a suggestion that the soldiers make a good confession before their inevitable deaths. Henry's reply is gallant and even manages humour; but underneath, as the hypermetric line (l. 128) musingly reveals, he knows their plight is dangerous.

The success of Henry—beautifully conveyed by the verbal slapstick of IV.iv, where even Pistol, the comic simulacrum of soldierly valour, wins a prisoner—throws the French into angry and horrified confusion (IV.v). Even the Dauphin at last recognizes the real nature of the enemy. The reaction is to lead a counter-attack to retrieve ‘honour’ by a pointless death—not the honourable and noble death of York, recounted by Exeter (IV.vi.7ff.), but an attack that is far from noble. Its fruit is the killing of the unarmed boys of the baggage train. Fluellen, from whom we hear of it first, is horrified by this breach of the law of arms (IV.vii.1ff.). Gower's anger leads him to applaud Henry's reported order for an action that would be equally horrific: to cut the throats of the prisoners (ll. 8-10). But Henry, angry and shocked as he is, is no butcher; he is prepared to do this only if the French—the Dauphin and others, who did not take part in the attack—do not join the fight, or leave the battlefield (ll. 56-7). Even here, in the heat of battle, the motive is to limit further slaughter.

Casualty lists are never pretty reading. But the size of the English victory, emphasized by the roll-call of the great names of France fallen in this field (IV.viii.75ff.), had a central place in the Elizabethans' myth of their own history, just as their defeat of the Armada had for later generations. Shakespeare could have shown Henry here simply as the glorious and triumphant king and got away with it. In fact he makes him turn right away from any pride, ascribing the honour and glory to God alone. His first thought is of humble gratitude and of his own littleness in the eye of Providence. The seriousness of the faith of this mirror of all Christian kings has been tested in the furnace, and God has vindicated him. He is a holy monarch. In line 106 he quotes the first verse of what is now Psalm 115 in the English Prayer Book, and later orders it to be sung in thanksgiving (l. 122); it is one of the psalms of celebration of God's deliverance of his chosen people Israel from their enemies, and in the Vulgate Latin text is part of Psalm 114, which begins: ‘When Israel came out of Egypt, and the House of Jacob from among a strange people’. The link in Henry's—and the audience's—mind between the English army defended by God from the power of the French and the Israelites' escape across the Red Sea from Pharaoh's army is quite open. Then and in later times, many Englishmen (in particular the Puritans) saw their nation as a holy country in whose affairs Providence frequently took a hand, as God had intervened in the politics of Israel. Such a country needs a monarch who will be both a David and a Solomon.¹⁴ Henry is shown to have been both, and a mirror for future monarchs.

So far we have only seen Henry at war, or preparing for it. The arts of peace belong to a monarch too, and Act V concentrates on these. Before taking us on in time (five years) to the final peace, the Chorus to Act V describes the return to London in a triumphal procession quite proper to a conqueror, but here again the emphasis is on Henry being ‘free from vainness and self-glorious pride’. Once more there is a heightening comparison—this time to Julius Caesar, another of the Nine Worthies.¹⁵

But a conqueror must be judged not just by the battles he has fought but the peace he concludes, and it is that which constitutes the business of this final act. The complex tableau of the peacemaking is preceded by the lightness of V.i, where Pistol gets his comic come-uppance at the hands of the delightful Fluellen. It is not mere diversion; symbolically it is integral to what follows, for here, in the comic mode, the proper ruler shows up the fake for the deceit and silliness it is. As Henry re-establishes England and the crown, so Fluellen cleanses the English camp of the fakes and the cheats and the rogues. We have had plenty of time to observe both Fluellen and Pistol in the play, and the similarities between them emphasize a deep contrast. Both of them maul the language to the point of occasional incomprehensibility; both are proud to a fault; both love Henry (Pistol may be taken as sincere in IV.i.44ff.); but Fluellen is a real soldier and an honest man, not the mere appearance of both that Pistol has attempted (sometimes with success) to sustain. (In III.vi.12ff. it is clear that he managed to fool Fluellen himself for a time.) The scene is important, since it dramatizes in Fluellen's punishment of Pistol the final rejection and discomfiture of all false honour and pretence. Pistol's grotesque language is a mere extension to nonsense of the hyperbolic posturing that heroes, in and out of plays, are often given to. His connection with the miles gloriosus of Roman comedy should not blind us to his connection with the selfish, sterile, hyperbolic honour of Hotspur and the Dauphin, while his capture of Monsieur le Fer must remind us of Falstaff's similar capture—by illusion—of Colevile of the Dale. Real honour appropriate to his rank is shown by the honest, frank, not frightfully eloquent, touchy Fluellen—who, indeed, in his love for and pride in Henry, signals to us one very important standard of assessment.¹⁶

But the world is not cleansed finally; it will always have its Pistol. He sets off for a new career as bawd, thief and professional Old Soldier, who fakes wounds and scars in order to beg the better. (The number of vagrant old soldiers—genuine or not—begging in this way was one of the scandals of Shakespeare's age, incidentally.) Falstaff, at the end of 1 Henry IV, merely did the same thing on a larger and more barefaced scale. Eastcheap will always be with us.

The second scene divides into three parts: the full Court scene, the wooing of Katherine by Henry, and the final conclusion of the peace. In the first section the dominating speech is that of Burgundy, the peacemaker, but before he speaks the queen gives a striking reminiscence of Henry's own conceit before Harfleur—of the face distorted by anger into that of ‘grim-visaged war’ (V.ii.14ff.); now, the ‘venom of such looks … / have lost their quality’. Burgundy, as I have said above (p. 110), pulls together all the garden/farming images of the four plays in a formal and exhaustive catalogue of the disorder in the kingdom—a disorder caused by the war against her true master. Vines, hedges, fields and meadows all need tending, the weeds must be uprooted, and the tide of blood must be turned back by a proper gardener. The whole catalogue is governed by the personification of peace that introduces it:

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?

(ll. 34-7)

The pathos of this personification of peace as vulnerable, abused femininity focuses the images of rape and sexual violence that have been insistent accompaniments to the war. (Interestingly, the French when invaded saw their honour as somehow sexually connected: cf. III.v.5ff., 27ff.; IV.v.15-16.) As the delegates leave to discuss the treaty, Peace herself puts up her lovely visage. For just as the delicacy of the earlier scene with Katherine—which on the personal level more than suggested her interest in King Henry—made visible the femininity that war could debauch and destroy, this part of the scene works both as a delicate wooing of the two persons, with all the charm of Henry's soldierly gaucheness, and also uses Katherine as a symbol of that peace that will be restored in the marriage of the two kingdoms. She is, as Henry says, ‘our capital demand’ (l. 96). But philosophers like Erasmus had stressed that a marriage merely for the sake of an alliance was likely to lead to further strife. Shakespeare is at pains to show us, within the conventions of the stage, that this is a love-match too.

The switch to prose signals a drop to intimacy and privacy after the publicity of the Court. It shows Henry in a most attractive, entirely new, light. He is, we know, witty and fond of word-play, but in the Henry IV plays that wit had been at someone else's expense. Here it is at his own. He is eloquent, yet his long prose speech is uncomfortable in its rhythms, embarrassed and confused in its argument, lacking in any of the devices of the stage wooer. For a moment we are reminded of the curiously attractive clumsiness of Hotspur with Lady Percy. And his conclusion is that ‘a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon—or rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly’. This is what this sun-like king is offering. The scene is completely convincing and suddenly makes the hero entirely human and believable. The ‘silken dalliance’ the youth of England left in the wardrobe for the war (II, Chorus, l. 2) is worn again. The divorce of king from country symbolized by the separation of Richard from Isabel is healed; these lovers, unlike Glendower's daughter and Mortimer, can understand each other despite the barrier of language. …

The return of the rest of the Court confirms, as expected, Henry's title to France. Peace is concluded. But before that announcement is made, Shakespeare includes a striking prose passage between Henry and Burgundy, the imagery of which is of the greatest importance. The marriage of Katherine and Henry, the male aggressive and the female receptive, is of course a symbol of the equilibrium of balanced opposites that constitutes the best peace man can hope for; Katherine is France and Henry England. But Shakespeare draws in other ideas through a chain of sexual word-play. ‘Conjure up the spirit of love’ (ll. 284-5) has an obvious play on ‘spirit’, and Mercutio uses virtually this phrase to Romeo; ‘conjure’, though, introduces ideas of magia, which Burgundy picks up. The spirit of love, Cupid, will be called up ‘naked and blind’, which leads into other plays on ‘wink’, ‘yield’, ‘do’, ‘stands’, ‘girdled’, ‘walls’, ‘will’, and so on. Now this joyous playing with the idea of sexual intercourse transposes into the major key the subtheme in the imagery throughout, of war as violently sexual; it has a last echo here (ll. 355-8). This congress is willing and willed without destroying proper feminine modesty. But the aim of the magus was the ‘alchemical marriage’ of opposites in a balance that would be healing and harmonious, and go some way towards restoring the image of Eden on earth. The imagery delicately suggests this hope for Katherine and Henry, perhaps even suggests the necessity for this in Elizabethan politics. Moreover, the symbolism of Katherine is underlined both by her lover, ‘who cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in [his] way’, and by her father in his response: ‘Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively,¹⁷ the cities turned into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls, that war hath never entered.’ The obvious reference to virginity hides from us another neat visual allusion. Cities were often depicted allegorically as women, crowned with a crown of walls. Katherine ‘is’ these cities of France that she will bring with her as her dowry to her lord.

And so in the mystery of marriage the just war is over, the rebellion quenched, the effects of the fall stayed for an interim. The land can be cultivated once more, and the gardener knows his job. In one sense the ending of Henry V is comic at this point, for the ideal king has found himself and his role, is married to his kingdom in a harmony that reminds us of that costly harmony at the end of some of Shakespeare's comedies. But the cost, public and private, has been huge, and payment will continue to be exacted till the day of doom. For the play does not end with peace and the marriage; it closes with the Chorus predicting, in a regular Shakespearean sonnet, what the audience knew had actually happened—the loss of all that Henry had won.

The choice of a sonnet is itself of interest. Sonnets, to most of us, are just sonnets; but the Elizabethans recognized several different types which did specific jobs. Shakespeare's choice of the sonnet form (as in the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet) is therefore a signal to the audience, at the very least of a serious and aphoristic overview of the experience of the play. It begins and ends with the difficulties of the medium—a favourite idea, the inadequacy of words or vision to compass reality. This is, indeed, how the play began. But in the third quatrain, which builds up to the conventional emphatic pause before the final couplet, the Chorus looks forward to the loss of France by Henry VI. ‘So many had the managing’ of his state that Henry V's achievement was undone, and, in a last and striking return of the images of Richard II and the opening of 1 Henry IV, ‘made his England bleed’. This is history, and the material of Shakespeare's own popular 1 Henry VI; but it is also a deliberate and open warning. If the state is not united in counsel, as in the 1590s England was not, if the wrong counsellors have the prince's ear, then England will bleed again. The ideal monarch is but a man, and men die. Elizabeth had not yet named an heir, and was obviously nearing her end.

We must therefore return briefly to that picture of the monarch Shakespeare has given us. He is a just prince and a good man, who understands his people, be they Pistol who bumps into him (significantly, in the dark), or Fluellen, or Williams; he understands his father too. We have in him a deliberate conflation of the ideal of a Christian man whose every act is felt to be in God's eye, and the classically derived ‘Aristotelian mean’—the man in whom passions are felt but controlled, who knows himself for what he is and avoids excess in any particular. Then add to this the ideal of Christian kingship, where king, people and Church act in concert: the play shows Henry harnessing not only the support of the Church and his nobles to the cause, but also that of the common people, down to the very rogues. Finally, Henry is linked to the great conqueror Alexander, but surpasses him. Fluellen's delicious attempt to find parallel incidents in the lives of the two men (IV.vii.12-51) is highly comic. Pedant that he is, versed (not very well) in the ancients, he constructs in the proper rhetorical manner a ‘comparison’ between the two. He compares the places where they were born, seeking similarities between the Monmouth he knows and the Macedon he does not, and then moves on to look for parallel events in the lives of the two. All he can manage is the dissimilarity between Alexander killing Cleitus when drunk and (significant!) a sober Hal turning away Falstaff. Behind the humour is something serious; Henry is actually superior to the great Alexander, for he is a Christian and not a pagan prince.

The true hero knows when to fight and when to seek peace, when to beat the ploughshare into the sword and when to return to the field. Before Harfleur his imagery, particularly his pun on ‘metal’, kept alive the notion of an England of farmers suddenly and exceptionally called to labour in a different field:

                                                  And you, good yeomen,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture,

(III.i.25-7)

who sold their pasture to buy their warhorses (II, Chorus, ll. 3-5). But summoning up the blood must have an end and the fields must be ploughed after the blood has been shed for another harvest. Behind the glory of the figure and the reign of Henry, Shakespeare lets us see the shadows. And they will not go away. All flesh is grass, the grass withereth, and the flower thereof fadeth away. Here is no abiding city, and there will never be peace on earth, for man is fallen.

And so man—all men—can only throw themselves on God's mercy. They must work, labour in the vineyard in the heat of the day, for that is a condition of existence, but in the end it is God's mercy that will save or not. The prince, as God's vice-gerent, needs that mercy too, but is also in peculiar need of the quality of mercifulness. This is the attribute of power that validates all the others; it is in this that a king may be called, as with unconscious irony the Duchess of York calls Bolingbroke, ‘a god on earth’:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest,
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes,
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice …
… in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

(The Merchant of Venice, IV.i.180ff.)

Notes

1. This threefold division is a medieval and Renaissance cliché. The interdependence of these qualities is well demonstrated in Titian's ‘Allegory of Prudence’.

2. Pistol's dramatic ancestors include the miles gloriosus (‘boastful soldier’) of Roman comedy, a stock figure who appeared regularly on the Elizabethan stage. The number of quotations from Marlowe Shakespeare buries in his speech suggests he was less than impressed by the hyperbolic heroics Marlowe gives his royal figures, particularly Tamburlaine, to speak.

3. For example, cf. King Lear. Sometimes, as in Henry V, Shakespeare uses what are marked in the text as separate scenes to build up this structure (cf. Julius Caesar, I.i, I.ii; and Hamlet, I.i, I.ii).

4. We ought not to let our perfectly proper horror of war blind us to the fact that our ancestors saw it as potentially glorious, an activity that called for nobility and self-sacrifice, and an art utterly desirable for the true ruler to possess.

5. This reference to Alexander's ‘unloosing’ the Gordian knot, of which it is prophesied that he who undid it would rule the world, is quite important, and anticipates Fluellen's linking—comic in expression, but to be taken quite seriously—of Henry to Alexander. The link cannot be openly made without overstatement, but it can be suggested with force; and Alexander was one of those Nine Worthies who set up a standard for all other military men. These were the three Jews (Joshua, Gideon and Judas Maccabaeus), three pagans (Hector, Alexander and Julius Caesar) and three Christians (Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey de Bouillon who captured Jerusalem from the Saracens in 1099).

6. Which raises the issue of the Just War. The theology of this idea ultimately derives from Augustine. In the thirteenth century St Thomas Aquinas laid down three conditions in which arms may be taken up: it must be on the authority of the sovereign, the cause must be just, the belligerents must have a rightful intention—for example, to prevent a greater evil. (Some thinkers also added that it was a good idea to make sure you had a good chance of winning.) Henry's war is made out to be just on these terms; and likewise the French, resisting their lawful sovereign, are fighting an unjust one. The issue is a topical one, in which the Elizabethans were much interested.

7. The imagery is of lions. We recall Henry's own call before Harfleur to ‘imitate the action of the tiger’—a royal and noble beast, but violent and destructive. Note the imagery below—the Scots are doggy, wolfish, weasels, mice; the English eagles, lions, cats.

8. The imagery is extremely complex in lines 13-14. We think of death as a reaper of all flesh, which, as the Bible says, is grass; but superimposed on this is a strange and grotesque mixture of sexuality (death was often at this time pictured as a grotesque lover) and springlike growth unnaturally destroyed. Indeed, once again Virgilian agricultural images come into play, but Virgil never achieved this astonishing denseness of reference.

9. A stained glass in St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, shows this scene from the cycle of plays. Dolls would be used, of course, which could be made to jerk realistically by shaking the sword.

10. In III.vi.104-7 we saw Henry putting it into practice when he condemned Bardolph for behaving as soldiers all too often do: ‘We would have all such offenders so cut off: and we give express charge, that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for …’ Bardolph receives the same impartial justice as the traitors. War is no suspension of the moral imperatives.

11. Henry in his victory gave the glory to God, and was glad his army was so small: the risk to his country was so much less (IV.iii.18ff.).

12. Shakespeare has neatly avoided a tricky problem here. He has to have an opponent to Henry who will contrast with him in almost every way—in attitude to honour, humility, relations with his fellows, lack of policy, and so on. And we have to dislike him. But he could not portray King Charles like this, as he needed to keep him reasonably credible as a future party to the peace and father-in-law of Henry. So he carefully keeps Charles in the background and pushes the Dauphin forward.

13. The speech looks forward to a future that is the Elizabethan past, where Agincourt is a legend of a monarch and people united in a common and glorious purpose.

14. This issue is too complex to go into in detail, but the evidence for this assertion is manifold. It can be found in quotations from the Bible, especially the Psalms, in prints like that of the defeat of the Armada, in Christian names (particularly of Puritans), and in the literary use of biblical history as a cover for discussion of English affairs, for example in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel or Milton's Samson Agonistes. One specific example of the Puritan vision of England's troubles must suffice: in 1646, John Hancock published a print entitled ‘Englands [sic] Miraculous Preservation Emblematically Described’, where the Civil War is seen in terms of the successful weathering of a storm by an Ark—an Ark, doubtless, of the Solemn League and Covenant!—in which, with unconscious comedy, are the House of Commons, the Lords, and the Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Various royal and royalist figures float in the waves.

15. Lines 29ff. refer to what was hoped of Essex; the topicality might extend a good deal—and dangerously—further.

16. Notice how his feelings almost get the better of him in IV.vii.90ff. Henry's replies to him are very gentle, and the little vignette heightens the emotions felt in the moment of success by, as it were, defusing them.

17. The word has changed its meaning. A perspective could mean a distorted picture that, viewed from a different angle, suddenly became lifelike. There are many Renaissance examples—the famous portrait of Edward VI, for example, or the skull in Holbein's ‘The Ambassadors’, that was designed to be seen from the side and above. (The painting was meant to hang at the foot of a staircase.)