SOURCE: “When All Is True: Law, History and Problems of Knowledge in Henry VIII,” in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 52, 1999, pp. 166-82.

[In the essay that follows, Kreps studies Henry VIII, claiming that the play is preoccupied with issues of time, particularly with the retrospective glance of history and the anticipatory impact of law.]

In the last scene of The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight,¹ Cranmer's prophecy provides Elizabeth's father with knowledge of the future not available at the play's ostensible chronological cut-off point in 1533; nor, because of the legal arrangements Henry left, was this future imaginable when Henry died in 1547. The panegyric delivered from the perspective of 1613 is a utopian evaluation of the Elizabethan past and the Jacobean present which the stage Henry receives as an ‘oracle of comfort’ (5.4.66), and the obvious flattery requires Cranmer's prefatory affirmation that the words he utters are all ‘truth’ (15-16); less obvious in this context of apparently uncomplicated praise is that the prophecy builds on a series of real historical ironies and legal reversals that represented major defeats for Henry and his plans for the future. Henry learns here that Elizabeth will reign, but that she will die childless (thus extinguishing the direct line of succession with which he was obsessed); the second major piece of information Cranmer provides is buffered by linguistic evasions that neatly sidestep the problem of revealing the name of Elizabeth's Stuart successor and the ultimate triumph of the Scottish line that Henry had passed over when he laid out his dispositions for succession in his last will and testament. That Cranmer is presenting Henry with knowledge that later historical developments would turn out to defeat his will is a situation of de facto irony, but though the audience knew quite well before entering the theatre that Henry had laid out very different plans for ruling from the grave, it seems doubtful to me that this irony could have been easily recognized in performance. This raises a question pertinent to the domain of literary theory about the relationship between an audience's extra-theatrical knowledge and textual manipulation of that knowledge, but I will address this question only very briefly, and only insofar as I wish to point out links or analogies between the epistemology of performance and the issues of time, discrepant levels of knowledge, and problematized perceptions of ‘truth’ embedded within the script. These I see as coming not only from the specific questions of history and law that furnished plot material for the four ‘trials’ dramatized in the play, but also as influenced by other legal and historical examples that, after 1529, made for numerous areas of uncertainty in England. Henry VIII had intended to provide a non-contestable succession and hence a clear and—at least inside England's borders—peaceful future for his subjects, but his matrimonial politics left a record of historical ironies that created in turn a series of legal crises—some, but not all, of which were later rectified by the hindsight of awkward and quasi-apologetic statutory revisions.

Henry VIII is enormously preoccupied with time. Cranmer's prophecy is not the only point at which the future is either projected or hinted at, but I will come back to this later on; for the moment, I would like to consider Henry VIII's relation to the past. In addition to itself being a depiction of the past, the play is also very often about depicting the past: recounting, examining, interpreting it. And though the past is commonly considered a known or knowable fact, the play reveals again and again that the past is unsure, subject to different interpretations, and holds unknowable secrets.² The opening conversation between Norfolk and Buckingham about the Field of the Cloth of Gold begins innocently enough as an admiring account of its regal marvels and the ‘Order [that] gave each thing view’ (1.1.44), but gives way at half point to criticism of the violation of the old order represented by the upstart butcher's son Wolsey (‘a keech’ (55), ‘not propp’d by ancestry’ (59)) and his role in arranging the meeting between the courts of England and France. Within six lines the word ‘order’ thus turns into a heated linguistic fulcrum as it takes on its other English meaning for those nobles who resent being ‘order’d’ by ‘this butcher's cur’ (120): ‘All this was order’d by the good discretion / Of the right reverend Cardinal of York’ (50-1). Norfolk describes the glitter of the kings' encounter, ‘All was royal; / To the disposing of it nought rebell’d’ (42-3), but this is shortly revealed to be untrue: Buckingham contests it indeed since Wolsey, rather than Henry, was the organizer. Buckingham's outrage at the economic strain the nobles have been obliged to bear for the display of ‘these fierce vanities’ (54) is exacerbated by its political pointlessness since, even as they speak, the pact between France and England has already been violated. Buckingham reveals too that Charles V's recent trip to England, ostensibly to visit his aunt, in reality veiled his purpose of bribing Wolsey to undermine the Anglo-French peace treaty. This revelation of animosity between Buckingham and Wolsey quickly sketches in the picture of factionalism historically true of court circles under all the Tudors, but Buckingham's loyalty to Henry himself would seem proved by the rhetoric with which he expresses his indignation at Wolsey's ‘corrupt and treasonous’ (155) behaviour and its insult to the honour of ‘the king our master’ (164). None of the chronicles claims that Buckingham intended to denounce Wolsey for treason, so that the invention of such intent here adds decided irony to the arrival of the guards who have come to arrest the Duke for that very crime. But this show of loyalty to the King's interests is also theatrically perplexing since—if Buckingham is guilty³—the total lack of conspiratorial talk breaks the early modern stage convention that, either through soliloquy or through privileged fourth-wall eaves-dropping as plots were hatched and motivations explained, gave audiences access to fuller information than that available to most of the characters on stage. On the other hand, Buckingham's reaction contains the play's strongest indication that the accusations against him, which are later made to seem so weak, may indeed be founded, since the Duke already knows—without having been told—that the accusation has been made by his surveyor.

Metonymically linking the so-called ‘Amicable’ Grant with the question of Buckingham's treason, the second scene also recounts the recent past and makes clear that though someone knows the facts, a single version of them remains elusive. The metonymy also points to Henry's inconsistency in dealing with the question of treason, a consideration I will return to later. Buckingham's trial and execution took place in 1521, but Shakespeare went to Holinshed's entries for 1525 to retrieve the tax issue. The tax question has no plot significance after this scene; neither, obviously, did it have to be included from simple chronological necessity. Extracted from its historical sequence and having in the plot economy no consequence, Shakespeare's insertion of the Amicable Grant thus exposes the difficulties of arriving at supposedly objective facts or discovering truth in public forums, particularly when political questions are mediated by political experts. Henry does not seem at first to be one of these experts. If true, Henry's claims of complete ignorance about the tax are an admission of his administrative ineptitude, but the appearance of ignorance clears him from willing responsibility in a fiscal procedure which was without Parliamentary approval and therefore was not legal, shifting that responsibility squarely to the cardinal.⁴ Wolsey's defence that ‘others tell steps with me’ may or may not vaguely glance at Henry, but it elicits Katherine's heated retort which focuses entirely on Wolsey's culpable knowledge, without addressing that of the king:

                                        No, my lord,
You know no more than others; but you frame
Things that are known alike, which are not wholesome
To those which would not know them, and yet must
Perforce be their acquaintance.

(1.2.43-7)

After Henry orders that the tax be rescinded and pardon be sent to those who had not paid it, Wolsey's aside that the pardon should be ‘nois’d’ as coming through the cardinal's intercession is a theatrical demonstration of how knowledge of political truths can be distorted for the public's consumption, and through it the audience has been sent an obvious sign of Wolsey's deviousness; but though this is an unmistakable signal about Wolsey, it does not automatically exculpate Henry or dispel doubts about how much he really knows. If Henry is telling the truth, this scene shows through the interventions of Katherine, Norfolk, and Wolsey that the King is the only major figure at court who knows nothing of the tax. It is possible, but it strains credulity.

The play starts therefore with two consecutive scenes in which the possibilities of multivocal evaluations of ‘facts’ are revealed. From here on it is largely constructed on the process, implications and/or results of trials of major figures of Henry's time; but, though trials exist to establish an official version of truth, the play begins by exposing in non-judicial contexts how difficult it can be to arrive at ideas of truth about the past untinged by ambiguity or multiple interpretations.

Henry VIII's imaginative rescripting of the past leaves many critics uncomfortable with its status as a history play. Certainly the play challenges the idea that history can recover a reliable, unequivocal, or totally truthful narrative about the past. One reason for this, as Cranmer's prophecy partially illustrates, is that time removes closure from the narrative: subsequent events can alter the interpretation of earlier ones. In 1533 the birth of a girl, rather than a boy, represented personal disaster for her parents, and a political crisis for the country; by 1613, Elizabeth's birth had acquired a different significance. One of the points I wish to make in this essay is that the narrative distortions that have disturbed the play's position in the history genre seem to me to stem from the historical example of rethinking and rewriting the certainties of the past that was set by Henry himself, who—as long as he was alive—was quickly seconded by the legal acrobatics of Parliament as it passed the legislation necessary to accommodate his changes in heart and mind and turn his will into law. But it is also relevant that the play was written long after his death and after the death of the last direct heir of his body, ten years into the reign of a king whose line had been ignored by the provisions of Henry's will.

Henry VIII's determination to rewrite the history of his marriage to Katherine was made possible by passage of the Act of Appeals (March-April, 1533), which—at least in England—cleared the obstacle of Katherine's appeal to Rome from the legal path that finally led to the annulment decreed, in May 1533, by Cranmer's ecclesiastical court. Henry's marriage to Anne had already taken place before this annulment was procured, although exactly how long before was adjusted in the chronicles. In reality Henry and Anne were secretly married on 25 January 1533, but Holinshed discreetly fixed an earlier date:

And herewith vpon his returne, he married privilie the ladie Anne Bullongne the same daie, being the fourteenth daie of November, and the feast daie of saint Erkenwald; which marriage was kept so secret, that verie few knew it till Easter next insuing, when it was perceiued that she was with child. (p. 777)⁵

Given Elizabeth's birth in September 1533, the tactic served to make the legitimacy of the baby's conception a matter of historic record, in addition to making an honest woman of Anne. Whether in the months that passed between marriage to Anne and annulment from Katherine Henry was legally a bigamist or—since he claimed that the marriage had never been valid—a newly married bachelor is a point that passed in official silence. Parliament's role was to address the legitimacy of children from the Boleyn marriage and assure their right to succession, which it did in the First Act of Succession (1534):

And also be it enacted by auctoritie aforseid that all the issue hade and procreate, or hereafter to be had and p[ro]create, bytwene your Highnes and your seid moost dere and entyerly beloved wyfe Quene Anne, shalbe your lawfull childerne, and be inheritable and enherit accordyng to the course of inheritaunce and lawes of this Realme the ymperiall Crowne of the same. (25 Henry VIII. c.22)⁶

Two years later, Henry's ‘moost dere and entyerly beloved wyfe Quene Anne’ was found guilty of adultery and beheaded for treason. The law's sentence against her was, like a great deal of Parliament's most important legislation after 1530, an act of compliance with Henry's determined will. Anne had failed to produce the inheriting son expected of her, and Henry's passion for her had, after so many years of ardent desire and courtship, quickly burnt itself out once the legitimation of marriage was achieved. On 17 May 1536, Cranmer, in his ecclesiastical court, pronounced the nullity of the marriage, based on the impediment deriving from Henry's earlier liaison with Anne's sister Mary. As G. R. Elton points out, ‘Thus the stories, so hotly denied when they were used by Catherine's supporters to argue against the Boleyn marriage, were in the end allowed to serve the new situation’ (Reform and Reformation, p. 252). Elton also points out that the legal inconsistency of the charge of adultery, in a marriage adjudicated never to have been legal, disturbed no one. Thus Anne—judged in one court to be an adulteress and in another never to have been a legal wife—was beheaded on 19 May. Within twenty-four hours of her death Henry and Jane Seymour were formally betrothed, and their marriage was celebrated on 30 May. These developments in Henry's matrimonial history obviously changed the significance of the First Act of Succession: the act meant to assure England's future had become a potential danger, but to undo its earlier legislation Parliament apparently felt that it needed to find and put on record a legitimizing rationale. The rationale was perhaps that found by Cranmer's ecclesiastical court—the invalidity of the marriage on the basis of affinity caused by Henry's earlier liaison with Mary Boleyn—but the statue does not specify the logic at its base. The first paragraph of the statute 28 Henry VIII c. 7 simply finds objectionable ‘c[er]tayne articles and clauses concernyng the ratification of your said unlawfull mariage betwene your Highnes and the said Lady Anne and the lymitacion of your Succession to the issues of your body had by the said Lady Anne … which clauses and articles be nowe become of late so dishonorable and so far distaunte from the due course of your com[m]on lawes of your Realme, and also so moche ayenst good reason equitie and good consciens, that they cannot be tollerated to contynue and endure without great perill and dyvysion hereafter …’ (SR, III. 656). The same clause had already established that, in view of the ‘unlawfull mariage’, Elizabeth's succession would clearly be ‘ayenste all honour equite reason and good consciens if remedye shulde not be p[ro]vyded for the same’. Rewriting the legal past was a necessary step for smoothing over the present and mapping out the legal future. Parliament expressed its gratitude that Henry, ‘notwithstandyng the great and intollerable perilles and occasions which your Highnes hath suffred and susteyend’, had acquiesced in marrying again ‘at the moste humble peticion and intercession of us your Nobles of this Realme’ (p. 657). Jane, unlike Anne, was not pregnant at the time of her marriage to Henry, but ‘for her convenient yeres excellente beautie and pureness of flesh and blode is apte (God willyng) to conceyve issue by your Highnes’. This likelihood necessitated that neither Elizabeth nor Mary should be Henry's legal issue, so that the ‘remedye’ Parliament enacted was the bastardization of both. Mary's illegitimacy was not specifically addressed, though it was implicit in the Act of 1534, but in the Act of 1536 both she and Elizabeth were explicitly declared, in separate paragraphs but in parallel formulae, ‘illegittymate’. This act also conferred on Henry the right to name his successors ‘by your letters patentes under your great seale or ells by your laste Will made in wrytynge and signed with your moste gracious hande’ (p. 659).

In the Third Act of Succession (1543/4), Elizabeth was restored to a place in the line of succession after Edward and Mary, though the statutory illegitimacy of both of Henry's daughters remained. In paragraph 7 this act also excluded ‘forreyne Powers’ from succeeding (SR, III. 957), a provision that technically excluded Henry's Scottish relatives—who, in any case, remained unmentioned in Henry's last will and testament.⁷ Of the many ironies in Henry's personal and political life, certainly one of the major ones is that Henry, who was so anxious in the last twenty years of his life to ensure the legitimacy of his successors, should have been responsible for legal measures that, in different ways, clouded the legitimacy of three of them.⁸

Henry's pre-marital passion for Anne was intense and determined, but his purpose in seeking annulment from Katherine was beyond anything else dictated by his concern for England's political future based on his knowledge of England's recent political past. His own Lancastrian father had consolidated his claim to the throne through his marriage with Elizabeth of York, but the two separate challenges to the legitimacy of the first Tudor king mounted by Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck had demonstrated that fifteenth-century uncertainties over succession were not terminated either by Henry VII's accession or by his political marriage. Henry VIII meant to avert the renewal of such internal divisions in the country by providing England with a son. Henry eventually got his son, though not by Anne. But by then the Defender of the Faith had broken with the faith he had defended, and the split in the country the desired son presumably ought to have avoided was instead assured through religious differences that outlived all the Tudors.

Perhaps uniquely among Shakespeare's English history plays, Henry VIII was not likely to have been, even for the most illiterate member of the audience, anyone's sole source of information about Henry's wilful temperament or many of the events during and after his reign—including, among other things, the variety of legal difficulties and ironic developments that, even before Henry died, complicated the history of the succession that Henry so fervently wished to direct. And thanks to the audience's knowledge and memory, Henry VIII occasionally suggests more than it strictly says. There are several points in which the play reminds the audience that the future would bring ironic surprises and tragic reversals. (Consider, for example, Anne's fearfulness at the end of 2.3 (‘it faints me / To think what follows’) and the repeated dangers felt for Anne's life in Act 5 as she is giving birth to the child that turns out to be a girl. There are a number of such arch reminders in 3.2: the repeated emphasis on Thomas Cromwell's future ‘safety’ as Henry's servant; the reminder of the importance of Thomas More's ‘conscience’, and the obvious double meaning in Henry's reproof of Wolsey: ‘I deem you an ill husband, and am glad / To have you therein my companion’ (142-3).) About religion, though, the play is noticeably circumspect. In Cranmer's prophecy eighty years of tumultuous religious change are quietly addressed in only half a line: ‘God shall be truly known’ (5.4.36). By changing the Privy Council's actions against Cranmer in the 1540s to 1533, and thereby ostensibly cutting off at Elizabeth's birth, the play operates in a selective time frame which theoretically blocks from view the historical bloodshed—much, though not all of it, for religious causes—that came later. I would suggest, though, that by choosing at all to dramatize Gardiner's plot against Cranmer the play manages to remind the audience, without apparently saying so, that Cranmer's difficulties with his Catholic enemies were not over. With Henry's dramatically drawn-out actions to save Cranmer the play officially demonstrates the power of Henry's will, as well as a unique instance of his mercy; but since Cranmer's martyrdom under Mary was one of the better known stories in Foxe's Actes and Monuments, the play also reminds the audience of Cranmer's on-going historical difficulties with his Catholic enemies—difficulties only temporarily laid to rest here by the force of Henry's will. The audience with access to the whole of Cranmer's story knew what awaited him in Mary's reign: liminally, then, the very act that dramatizes the overriding effect of Henry's will also suggests its legal and chronological limits.

Cranmer's ‘trial’ in the Privy Council only barely gets under way before it is truncated by Henry's partisanship for his useful friend, but the episode recalls the play's earlier depiction of the legal procedures against Buckingham in several ways. One of these is the obvious contrast between Henry's interest in Cranmer in Act V and his refusal, at the conclusion of his examination of Buckingham's surveyor in 1.2, to exercise the mercy of his royal prerogative in the Duke's favour:

                                        he is attach’d,
Call him to present trial; if he may
Find mercy in the law, ’tis his; if none,
Let him not seek’t of us. By day and night,
He’s traitor to th’ height.

(1.2.210-14)

This scene alters the pre-trial process recorded in Holinshed—who got his details from Polydore Vergil—where it is Wolsey alone who, ‘boiling in hatred against the duke of Buckingham, & thirsting for his bloud’ (p. 657), both procures the witness and examines him: ‘This Kneuet being had in examination before the cardinall, disclosed all the dukes life … The cardinall hauing thus taken the examination of Kneuet, went vnto the king, and declared vnto him, that his person was in danger by such traitorous purpose, as the duke of Buckingham had conceiued in his heart, and shewed how that now there is manifest tokens of his wicked pretense; wherefore, he exhorted the king to prouide for his owne suertie with speed. The king hearing the accusation, inforced to the vttermost by the cardinall, made this answer; If the duke haue deserued to be punished, let him haue according to his deserts' (pp. 657-8). On stage, as in historical fact, it was normal praxis for a king to examine informants, so the public would see nothing strange in Henry's role here. But Holinshed stresses Wolsey's maliciousness as well as Henry's reluctance in proceeding against the Duke (‘inforced to the vttermost by the cardinall’), so that the substitution of Henry for Wolsey alters the dynamics of the inquisition as it appears in Holinshed, and this choice is problematized by two other choices: (1) omission of Buckingham's incriminating letters and (2) the contrast between Henry's leniency in dealing with the rebellion in Kent and his harshness with Buckingham. In the chronicles, part of the numerous accusations contained in the indictment read against Buckingham involved letters the Duke had written to the monk, and these were produced as evidence against him at the trial: ‘Maister Ihon Delacourt … his owne hand writyng layde before hym to the accusement of the duke.’⁹ What remains of the chronicles in the play are unverifiable ‘words’ and ‘speech’ the surveyor claims to have overheard between the Duke and his son-in-law:

First, it was usual with him, every day
It would infect his speech, that if the king
Should without issue die, he’ll carry it so
To make the sceptre his. These very words
I’ve heard him utter to his son-in-law,
Lord Aberga’nny.

(1.2.132-7)

Shakespeare emphasizes throughout that the evidence against Buckingham consists entirely of reported words: ‘words of sovereignty’, ‘the duke said’, ‘certain words / Spoke by a holy monk’, ‘says he’, ‘what he spoke / My chaplain to no living creature but / To me should utter’.

Treason for words was a shadowy area when Buckingham was tried, and had a varied legal history throughout the 1500s. That words alone could constitute treason did not achieve statutory status until 1534, a provision repealed after Henry's death. But ‘words’ came and went and came again into the numerous treason statutes Parliament passed throughout the sixteenth century. The legal concept that words alone, without an overt deed, could constitute treason was unstable, and the legislation that at various times throughout the sixteenth century ratified this concept stands as a barometer of the government's fears of the political climate in the country each time it passed. Buckingham's trial preceded this series of changing treason statutes, however; he was tried under the 1352 act of treason (25 Edward III), and apparently argued in his defence that no overt act of treason stood in the charges against him (Bellamy, Tudor Law of Treason, p. 151). That act provided, among other things, that ‘to compass or imagine the death of the king, his queen or the royal heir’ was treason (Bellamy, Tudor Law of Treason, p. 9), and ‘imagine’ proved to be a slippery concept in the context of a treason charge. The nobles who comprised Stafford's jury were perplexed about how to act on evidence that was both reported and written but that did not point to an active plot against the king's life, and they asked Chief Justice Fineux for legal advice on the difference between felony and treason. His answer was that felony required an act, ‘but merely to intend the king's death was high treason and such intention was sufficiently proven by words alone. In such cases no overt deed was needed beyond … the traitorous statement which revealed the intent in the mind’ (Bellamy, Tudor Law of Treason, p. 32). Once the peers have decided that Knevet's allegations are true, therefore, Shakespeare's Duke is simply referring realistically to the law: ‘The law […] has done upon the premisses but justice’ (2.1.62-3).

The justice thus historically reserved for Buckingham through Fineaux's construction of the terminology of the 1352 treason statute is contrasted in 1.2 with Henry's treatment of the tax protest in Kent, which the text itself insists must be treated with the legally loaded word ‘rebellion’. Katherine states, with the mildness typical of her, that the protest of the clothiers ‘almost appears / In loud rebellion’, but Norfolk corrects her, calling a spade a spade: ‘Not almost appears, / It doth appear’ (28-30). Popular disorders were another area in which definitions could be a matter of life and death, since the linguistic difference between ‘rebellion’ on the one hand and ‘riot’ on the other marked out for the government the boundaries between actions to be considered treasonable and those which were not. Bringing the charge of treason against the tax rebels was in fact debated in 1525—Wolsey apparently favouring the treason charge—but in the end the king's counsel and judges concurred that the insurrection was to be dealt with as ‘only riot and unlawful assembly’ (Bellamy, Tudor Law of Treason, p. 21). By the time Henry VIII was written, however, legal interpretation of popular protest was decidedly less lenient. In 1595 the London apprentices rioted against the Lord Mayor, and in 1596 there was an abortive insurrection against enclosure in Oxfordshire,¹⁰ and though neither action was directed against the queen's person, the leaders of both were charged with compassing to levy war and tried for treason: ‘Rebellion of all types was thenceforth a traitorous act and that very word which in earlier times had been associated with the withdrawal by peasants from their legal obligations and with assemblies of a riotous nature became synonymous with treason’ (Bellamy, Tudor Law of Treason, p. 81).

The writings deleted from the chronicle sources and the contrast with the rebellious masses in Kent are part of the design favouring Buckingham that finds its most obvious expression and most immediate theatrical impact in Katherine's generous defence of the Duke. This is not found in Holinshed; what is found there is the difficulty of accepting the surveyor's charges which lies behind Katherine's arguments in the play. It was not Katherine, however, but the chronicler who made this point. In Holinshed, the narrating voice of the historian departed (copying Vergil) from an external account of the fact of accusation to an internal account of its motivation, entering the informer's mind, and interpreting for the reader Knevet's action against Buckingham as inspired by two base motives that had nothing to do with loyalty to the king: he was ‘partlie prouoked with desire to be reuenged and partlie mooued with hope of reward’ (p. 658).¹¹ Katherine appropriates Holinshed's omniscient narrative in her addresses to Wolsey and the surveyor: interrupting the cardinal, she ironically reminds him that it would become his religious role better to ‘Deliver all with charity’ (1.2.143), while to Buckingham's former servant she delivers the solemn warning that with his dubious accusations he risks eternal damnation: ‘You were the duke's surveyor, and lost your office / On the complaint o’th’ tenants; take good heed / You charge not in your spleen a noble person / And spoil your nobler soul’ (1.2.172-5). Henry ignores this observation of the surveyor's unsavoury reputation in Act 1, but in Act 5 he recalls how corrupt knaves can serve corrupt masters, and here Shakespeare ironically assigns to the king himself the play's most cynical evaluation of the fallibility always possible in legal procedures ideally meant to discover and guarantee the truth:

                                        not ever
The justice and the truth o’th’question carries
The due o’th’ verdict with it: at what ease
Might corrupt minds procure knaves as corrupt
To swear against you? Such things have been done.

(5.1.129-33)

Katherine's partisanship plays an important role in the text's recovery of Buckingham from history's official opprobrium, since both her character and her arguments operate strongly in his favour; and though the two never meet on stage, the link established between them in this scene is a recurring textual association that carries mutual reflexes on their legal situations. In 2.1, Buckingham's plight explicitly suggests to the Second Gentleman comparison with that awaiting Katherine:

                                        If the duke be guiltless,
’Tis full of woe: yet I can give you inkling
Of an ensuing evil, if it fall,
Greater than this. […]
[…] a separation
Between the king and Katherine.

(2.1.139-49)

2.1 thus links Buckingham's fate, already decided, with gossip of the uncertainties now gathering around Katherine, and the following scene shows that the gossip is true. The association made between Buckingham and Katherine in these scenes is reinforced by the echoes in the descriptions of their trials. Buckingham concedes that, in having a trial at all, he is ‘A little happier than my wretched father’ (2.1.120), who had been attainted in Parliament and so ‘without trial fell’ (2.1.111); but he avoids pronouncement on the justice of his trial by granting simply that it was formally correct: ‘I had my trial, / And must needs say a noble one’ (2.1.118-19). Wolsey, projecting the clerical trial in England (where Katherine's defeat seems more probable than in Rome), repeats Buckingham's adjective ‘noble’, adding as well the adjective ‘just’ which the Duke had refrained from using, when he points to the importance of observing legal form: ‘The Spaniard tied by blood and favour to her / Must now confess, if they have any goodness, / The trial just and noble’ (2.2.89-91)—though Katherine herself will shortly disappoint Wolsey's expectations, when she contests the possibility of getting a fair trial in England. As in Act 2, the first two scenes of Act 3 also juxtapose the two plot interests. Following the cardinals' visit to Katherine in 3.1, the next scene opens (eight years after Buckingham's death) with the nobles' complaints about Wolsey and with Surrey's ‘Remembrance of my father-in-law, the duke’ (3.2.8) which gives him personal reasons to seek revenge against the cardinal, and memory of Buckingham's trial returns at greater length in the argument between Wolsey and Surrey in lines 254-69. The intersection of the fates of Katherine and Buckingham also appears in two crossed metaphors: proclaiming his innocence to the end, Buckingham goes to a death which for him is ‘that long divorce of steel’ (2.1.76), while the divorced Katherine receives the news of Henry's belated solicitousness for her welfare as appropriate to one who has already been condemned and executed: ‘O my good lord, that comfort comes too late: / ’Tis like a pardon after execution’ (4.2.120-1).

Despite the passage of time, the play refuses to forget Buckingham, and he is explicitly named again in 4.1, this time in connection with Anne, as the two Gentlemen who meet to describe her coronation (in 1533) recall for the audience that ‘At our last encounter / The Duke of Buckingham came from his trial’ (4.1.4-5). Harking back self-consciously to 1521, this appears to be simply fatuous court gossip, but the chronological dislocation—together with that of the third Gentleman's reference to ‘York Place’ rather than ‘Whitehall’ (as if Wolsey's fall from power in 1529 were too recent to avoid the linguistic confusion (’tis so lately altered that the old name / Is fresh about me’)—is a reminder of changing legal and political fortunes in Henry's reign, and it is strategically inserted into this high-point of Anne's career. The play avoids showing Anne's subsequent fall, but the audiences of 1613 already knew the trajectory of her story, and some at least must have reflected, even as they watched the splendour of the coronation ceremony, that her moment of glory would not last long, and perceived the ironies of imminent change that placed her in the same lengthening list with Wolsey, Buckingham, Katherine, and others.

Six years separated Buckingham's death for treason in 1521 from the first rumours (which Henry angrily denied as untrue) of problems in the marriage between Katherine and the king, reported in the chronicles for 1527. The chronological gap obscures—and contemporary historical narratives did not point out—the common causality behind Henry's antagonism to Buckingham and Katherine. Modern historians have long agreed that by the early 1520s Henry had come to see in each of them a major threat to the continuation of his dynasty: Katherine's non-production of a male heir was linked to Henry's fear of any of Edward III's male descendants who might contest the succession of Mary, whose sex weakened her claim to rule. But this is an evaluation that, even had they wanted to, Elizabethan chroniclers could hardly make, and between the temporally disjunctive fates of Buckingham and Katherine they wove no such political thread. In their accounts they chronicled events that stayed within the boundaries of the regime's official truths, and in this version Henry systematically eliminated potential problem-makers descending from Edward III because they were traitors and he sought annulment from Katherine because the marriage was against God's law. By choosing to start with Buckingham's trial for treason and linking him to Katherine, Shakespeare makes an association not easily visible in his chronicle sources. And yet, despite the various artistic means by which their two fates are so evidently joined, the play backs away from underlining the dynastic logic that historians now find so easily identifiable. In 1.2 Henry puts an obvious question to Buckingham's Surveyor: ‘How grounded he his title to the crown / Upon our fail? To this point hast thou heard him / At any time speak aught?’ (1.2.144-6). But the Surveyor's answer points to necromancy, not ancestry: ‘He was brought to this / By a vain prophecy of Nicholas Henton’ (146-7). Holinshed did not call attention to the dynastic logic that linked Katherine to Buckingham, but he did report the Duke's dangerous closeness to the throne, through the surveyor's account of Buckingham's treasonous statement that ‘if ought but good come to the king, the duke of Buckingham should be next in bloud to succeed to the crowne’ (p. 659). Shakespeare suppresses this: about Buckingham's royal blood the play remains completely silent. Not present either is Buckingham's trial which occupies several pages in the chronicles. Henry has already publicly pronounced his own certainty of the duke's guilt, however, so that the verdict surprises no one:

second gentleman Pray speak
what has happen’d.
first gentleman You may guess quickly
what.
second gentleman Is he found guilty?
first gentleman Yes truly is he,
and condemn’d upon’t.

(2.1.6-8)

This is the only instance in any of the history plays in which conspiracy and the guilt of treason are left in doubt. In place of the gallows confession which would justify the state's version of truth are Buckingham's obstinate affirmations of loyalty, his equivocal evaluation of the course of justice, and his pardon for those responsible for his death:

I have this day receiv’d a traitor's judgment,
And by that name must die; yet heaven bear witness,
And if I have a conscience, let it sink me,
Even as the axe falls, if I be not faithful.
The law I bear no malice for my death,
’T has done upon the premisses but justice:
But those that sought it I could wish more Christians:
Be what they will, I heartily forgive ’em.

(2.1.58-65)

The theory of the law's verdicts, as the word's two Latin roots suggest, is that they pronounce truth, but the audience has been supplied with none of the usual theatrical evidence that nails down guilt, and Buckingham is sent to his death, in a text which signals various reasons to doubt that justice has been wrought. Having Katherine as his chief defender is an enormous boost to Buckingham's reputation; but the doubts Shakespeare creates in his case also have reflexes that are pertinent to Katherine—in part by illustrating how non-conflicting evidence and uniformity of opinion about the events of the past are difficult to achieve, but principally by suggesting that—despite ideal theories of the law's independence—the reality of law in Henry's reign made both of them victims of partisan injustice serving Henry's obvious power to bend legal process in the direction determined by his will.

If Shakespeare made the questions surrounding Buckingham more opaque than he found them, he greatly simplified the welter of legal problems that followed the belated awakening of Henry's conscience about his marriage to his brother's widow. Contradictions in the jurisdictions of law, in the legal past, and in legal procedure (not to mention the contradictions in Henry's professed beliefs about the Pope's power to dispense) emerged at every stage of the historical struggle between Henry and Katherine, and though Henry persistently opposed the Pope's ecclesiastical power to dispense his marriage to Katherine with the superior authority of God's law enunciated in Leviticus, the Bible itself contained conflicting laws about marriage to a dead brother's wife. (Leviticus xx, 21 affirms that ‘If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless’, but Deuteronomy xxv, 5, enjoins a deceased man's brother to marry the widow. Anne Boleyn's sister Mary had been Henry's mistress, thus creating impediment for marriage with Anne—for which Henry asked the Pope for dispensation—but Henry opted for Leviticus and a strictly to-the-letter construction of ‘brother's wife’ that ignored any problems of affinity in ‘wife's sister’ when he decided to challenge the 1503 bull of dispensation that had permitted Katherine and Henry to marry in 1509.) The legal moves and countermoves over seven years of litigation were intricate, but in the end both Henry and Katherine averred, though from different sides, that the basic question was whether or not the marriage between Katherine and Arthur had been consummated. And this is precisely the question that Henry VIII ignores.

Katherine always maintained that she had been a virgin when she married Henry; in 1527-8, Henry began to gather witnesses he would later use to affirm that she was not.¹² The bull of dispensation which had permitted them to marry did not clarify this point for either side, since it had slipped the strange word ‘perhaps’ into the preamble: ‘forsan consummatum’.¹³ After this uncertain opening description of marital relations between Katherine and Arthur, Julius's bull goes on to dispense the impediment of affinity between Henry and Katherine. But affinity depended on consummation. Without affinity, the impediment was that incurred by the act of formal betrothal, ‘the justice of public honesty’, which—precisely because there was no affinity produced by coitus—required specific dispensation. If the marriage with Arthur had not been consummated, therefore, Julius had dispensed the wrong impediment. Henry's awareness of the legal loophole open to him through public honesty is clear from the letter that was part of the documents dispatched to his agents in Rome in 1532: ‘For in the bull is expressed that the pope dispensed [upon affinity], which springeth not without carnal [copulation], and no mention is made of … justice of public honesty … And so his bull was nothing worth, and consequently for lack of a sufficient dispensation, the marriage was not good, the impediment of justice and of public honesty letting the same’ (quoted in Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, p. 154). But for Henry to avail himself of the defect of public honesty perforce necessitated his admission of the queen's virginity at marriage. Unwilling to give up his argument that in divine law non-dispensable affinity existed between him and Katherine and gamble on the less heinous irregularity committed in ecclesiastical law, Henry relinquished the argument of public honesty that did in fact technically impugn the legality of his marriage, and to the end encouraged the public belief that Katherine's relationship with Arthur had been consummated.¹⁴

The comparison of two texts which are nearly identical except for the crucial question of Katherine's virginity illuminates the sensitivity of Tudor chroniclers to political issues and exposes the weight of censorship (whether official or self-imposed) to which their texts were exposed.¹⁵ Here is an excerpt from Katherine's self-defence at Blackfriars in the version John Stow published in 1592:¹⁶

I haue beene your wife these twentie yeeres or mo, and you haue had by me diuers children, and when yee had me at the first, I take God to be my iudge, that I was a verie maid, and whether it be true or no, I put it to your conscience. If there be anie iust cause that you can alledge against me either of dishonestie or in matter lawfull to put me from you, I am content to depart to my shame and rebuke: and if there be none, then I praie you to let me haue iustice at your hand.¹⁷

Holinshed's version is almost identical—except for the absence of the line I have emphasized above:

I haue beene your wife these twentie yeares and more & you haue had by me diuerse children. If there be anie iust cause that you can alleage against me, either of dishonestie, or matter lawfull to put me from you; I am content to depart to my shame and rebuke: and if there be none, then I praie you to let me haue iustice at your hand. (p. 737)

The missing line would have been, after all, an inconvenient statement in a history that so often affirmed as historical fact that Katherine's marriage to Arthur had been consummated.

Like Holinshed, the play also suppresses any mention of Katherine's virginity; unlike Holinshed, however, it takes no stand at all regarding the consummation of her first marriage. Henry's ‘conscience’ is frequently—and by people out of Henry's ear-shot, ironically—alluded to, but even in Henry's longest public explanation, the real nature of the legal problem behind his ‘scruple’ is kept vague:

My conscience first receiv’d a tenderness,
Scruple and prick, on certain speeches utter’d
By th’ Bishop of Bayonne, then French ambassador,
Who had been hither sent on the debating
A marriage ’twixt the Duke of Orleans and
Our daughter Mary: i’th’ progress of this business,
Ere a determinate resolution, he
(I mean the Bishop) did require a respite,
Wherein he might the king his lord advertise
Whether our daughter were legitimate
Respecting this our marriage with the dowager,
Sometimes our brother's wife.

(2.4.168-79)

And so it is with Katherine at Blackfriars in 2.4. In her defence she recalls her obedience as a wife, and fidelity in ‘My bond to wedlock’ ever since marriage to Henry. She has been sexually faithful to Henry, but the real issue, which concerned her sex life with Arthur, is skirted.

The delicacy about consummation with Arthur is noteworthy, particularly since her sexual activity with Arthur had been turned into such public material—a matter of prolonged international scrutiny, legislated on by Parliament and inscribed in the rolls of public statute, a subject for jokes in the chronicles about Arthur's thirst when he rose in the morning after spending a hot night in the middle of Spain. But Shakespeare maintains silence about what happened privately between Katherine and Arthur, while he is not so delicate about Anne. Sands' sexual badinage and his immediate physical familiarity with Anne in 1.4 create a problematic introduction to her, and the tone set there continues. In addition to the scabrous dialogue in 2.3 in which Anne and the Old Lady argue the economics of maidenhead (e.g., ‘for little England / You’d venture an emballing’), we also hear that Henry's conscience ‘Has crept too near another lady’ (2.2.18); ‘Our king has all the Indies in his arms, / And more and richer, when he strains that lady / I cannot blame his conscience’ (4.1.45-7); ‘Believe me sir, she is the goodliest woman / That ever lay by man’ (4.1.69-70); it is ‘not wholesome to / Our cause, that she should lie i’th’ bosom of / Our hard-rul’d king’(3.2.99-101)—with a double meaning of ‘hard-rul’d’ certainly intended; at her coronation procession ‘Great-bellied women, / That had not a week to go, like rams / In the old time of war, would shake the press’ (4.1.76-8). In short, Katherine's sexual conduct—which Henry, Parliament, and the Tudor chronicles turned into the central issue of debate in the litigation—is muted in the play, whereas Anne's sexuality clearly is not.

Neither Henry nor Katherine was present when the legatine court first met on 31 May 1529, and received from Henry's confessor, the Bishop of Lincoln, the pope's commission to the legates. On the next day the royal couple received their summonses to appear on 18 June, the day on which the public trial opened at Blackfriars (Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, pp. 75-8). Henry was represented by proxy, but Katherine appeared together with her legal counsel to announce her intention of appealing to Rome. On 21 June, the court reconvened. It is this session which is reported in such detail by Hall, Holinshed, Cavendish, and Stow, and dramatized by Shakespeare in 2.4.

The stage directions of the First Folio name four bishops—Lincoln, Ely, Rochester, St Asaph—as among those crowding the stage in the trial scene, but of these only one—the Bishop of Lincoln—gets to speak. Lincoln was, as indicated above, of the king's party; the silent bishops of Ely, Rochester, and St. Asaph were of the queen's. In historical fact, John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, was known to have been courageously outspoken in the queen's defence, and in Cavendish's account of the events after Katherine's departure from court on 21 June, Fisher publicly contradicted Henry's public announcement (compliantly backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury) that all the bishops had subscribed a document allowing their doubt of the marriage, and his protest contains a clear accusation of forgery:

‘No, Sir, not I’, quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘ye have not my consent thereto.’ ‘No! Ha’the!’ quoth the king, ‘look here upon this, is not this your hand and seal?’ and showed him the instrument with seals. “No forsooth, Sire’, quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘it is not my hand nor seal!’ To that quoth the king to my Lord of Canterbury: ‘Sir, how say ye, is it not his hand and seal?’ ‘Yes, Sir’ quoth my Lord of Canterbury. ‘That is not so’, quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘for you were in hand with me to have both my hand and seal, as other lords had already done; but then I said to you, that I would never consent to no such act, for it were much against my conscience; nor my hand and seal should never be seen at any such instrument, God willing, with much more matter touching the same communication between us.’ ‘You say truth’, quoth the Bishop of Canterbury, ‘such words ye said unto me; but at the last ye were fully persuaded that I should for you subscribe your name, and put to a seal myself, and ye would allow the same.’ ‘All which words and matter’, quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘under your correction, my lord, and supportation of this noble audience, there is no thing more untrue.’¹⁸

Rochester's was a highly visible role in Katherine's defence; in the years after Blackfriars, until he was executed for treason in 1535, he published seven tracts in defence of the marriage, was convicted of misprision in connection with the Holy Maid of Kent affair (see Hall, The Vnion, fol. ccxxiii[v] and Holinshed, Third Volume of Chronicles, p. 791), defied the terms of the First Act of Succession, and refused to subscribe to the oath of the Act of Supremacy (see Holinshed, Third Volume of Chronicles, p. 792). In view of Fisher's defence of her cause, Katherine's protest to Wolsey that she is ‘Shipwrack’d upon a kingdom where no pity, / No friends, no hope, no kindred weep for me’ (3.1.149-50) is not accurate; but without naming names, Shakespeare accommodated the truth elsewhere in the understanding of realpolitik expressed in Katherine's rhetorical question:

                                        can you think lords,
That any Englishman dare give me counsel?
Or be a known friend ’gainst his highness’ pleasure
(Though he be grown so desperate to be honest)
And live a subject?

(3.1.83-7)

The elderly bishop who appeared on the scaffold erected on Tower Hill in 1535 was neither the first nor the last of Katherine's defenders who provided the obvious answer to what it meant to operate ‘’gainst his highness’ pleasure’.

Katherine's majestic exit from the tribunal at Blackfriars was not entirely the dramatic surprise it appears in the chronicles and in the play. By the end of April 1529 agents for Katherine's nephew Charles V had already lodged a petition that the cause be revoked to Rome, and in her appearance at Blackfriars on 18 June Katherine had requested that her refusal of the papal legation's jurisdiction in England, together with her intention of appealing directly to the Pope, be recorded and notarized. The tribunal of 21 June began with the announcement that her request was overruled,¹⁹ and it is after this point of order that Hall and Holinshed begin their descriptions of the day's events—a beginning altered in turn by the play, with Henry's order to dispense with the reading of the commission from Rome:

                                        What’s the need?
It hath already publicly been read,
And on all sides th’ authority allow’d;
You may then spare that time.

(2.4.2-5)

This is a brief, but remarkable, addition to the sources. It is certainly a sign of Henry's eroded patience, but it is also a sign immediately readable in the theatre that Henry is directing proceedings in this ecclesiastical court. I would also suggest that the addition holds somewhat more subtle criticisms of Henry's legal position as well, since two points are to be noted in the king's affirmation that the commission's authority is ‘on all sides … allow’d’: one is the historically known untruth of that affirmation as far as Katherine's ‘side’ is concerned, a repudiation the court's of authority she repeats twice in this scene; the other is the ironic postscript added to the trial a few months later, when on 9 October the charge of praemunire—the illegal exercise of foreign jurisdiction on English soil—was brought against Wolsey in the King's Bench. The legal pretext was furnished by Wolsey's operating in England as Rome's legate a latere, an office he had exercised in England—obviously with Henry's consent—since 1521. But the real reason underlying this charge was his loss of Henry's support when he failed to procure Henry's divorce either in Rome or through the legatine court over which he had presided in England—a court whose ‘authority’, only a few months earlier, had clearly been ‘allow’d’. The play tinkers with the sources making graft and corruption, rather than failure to free Henry from Katherine, appear as the principal reason for Wolsey's fall, but the historical importance of praemunire is recalled two scenes after the divorce trial:

Lord cardinal, the king's further pleasure is,
Because all those things you have done of late
By your power legative within this kingdom
Fall into th’ compass of a praemunire;
That therefore such a writ be sued against you,
To forfeit all your goods, lands, tenements,
Chattels and whatsoever, and to be
Out of the king's protection. This is my charge.

(3.2.336-44)

Praemunire was a legal weapon of uncertain scope and definition, which was part of its terror and efficacy, and Henry used it to cow not only Wolsey. With legal actions initiated in 1530, Henry found in praemunire the legal instrument by which he forced the entire English clergy into submission, an action that was an important preliminary to the revolutionary legislation that separated the church in England from that of Rome in 1534. The accusation started out as an indictment of the church for having accepted Wolsey's ‘illegal’ legateship, but by 1531, when Parliament enacted its Pardon of the Clergy, the charge had become more comprehensive: the church was—after paying a hefty price—being pardoned for having exercised the Pope's jurisdiction in the ecclesiastical courts. Giving Henry the affirmation that Rome's commission to the legatine court is ‘on all sides … allow’d’ strikes me therefore as another of the play's telegraphic reminders of Henry's talent for adjusting legal ‘facts’ to his convenience.

Katherine never meant her cause to become what it did become, a case testing the legal limits of international church versus national state authority. But Katherine stymied Henry and Wolsey by pushing her right to have her cause heard under international ecclesiastical law. So Henry shed his chancellor and blocked Katherine's possibility of defence by changing England's relation to the internationalism of ecclesiastical law. It was a revolution, but the king and Parliament declared that they were simply resuscitating old rights that had lain buried under centuries of Rome's oppressive yoke: England had always been sovereign—it was Rome that had introduced novelty, and England was now only reasserting what had always been its ancient right.

Because of its chronological limits on Henry's reign and its final flattering leap forward into James's, Henry VIII eliminates from view decades of traumatic change and uncertainty in English history, delicate material that might have had difficulty getting past the censor; yet if the play thereby avoids any direct dealing with the most terrifying aspects of Henry's reign, it nonetheless holds out brief reminders that what happened later was already known. And it is through this area of the ‘already known’ that the text suggests ironic comparison with the version of history being represented, inviting at times a double vision of events through the different optics of the past being represented on stage and the future extending beyond it—a future known, when the play was first presented in 1613, to have held unsuspected reversals for many: Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer—and in the end, Henry himself. Henry removed a number of long-standing certainties from his subjects, but he did so within the forms of law: Henry waited years for his divorce before he seized on the fact that the laws which bound him to the past and dictated the present could not only be interpreted, but could also be—less expensively and more immediately—re-written or invented. Henry used the law to redefine the past and to attempt to direct the future: his operations on the past were largely successful, but it was the future—and the intensity of his interest in the future was, after all, the principal reason Henry struggled so tenaciously against the past—that time and again escaped Henry's script. By 1613 it was obvious that Henry's reign had brought important legal and religious change to England; but it was also obvious that his personal dynastic hopes and plans, which were largely responsible for these coming into being, had failed. Henry's complicated matrimonial history, though referred to by politicians and law-makers at the time of his divorce from Katherine as the king's ‘private matter’, produced numerous areas of uncertainty for the nation at large. Elizabeth's very different brand of marital politics also created national uncertainty: almost all of the spectators watching Henry VIII in 1613 were old enough to remember the anxiety caused by the old Queen's refusal to name her successor until she lay dying, and although James was not an unexpected choice once the death of his Catholic mother obviated the religious problem, his accession was, as Alan G. R. Smith points out, ‘an explicit breach of Henry VIII's will and thus, by implication of the statute on which it was founded’.²⁰ Like the relationship between church and state, or Katherine's virginity, or the number of months perceived to elapse between Anne's marriage to Henry and the birth of Elizabeth, or the validity of Henry's marriages and the legitimacy of his children, Henry's will proved to be yet another ‘fact’ of legal history subject to second thoughts and revision. Cranmer's prophecy over Elizabeth in the play's final scene constructs the theatrical illusion of a non-problematic—and patriarchally sponsored—genealogy that, however James privately felt about Henry's memory, was politically useful to the first Stuart King of England. But if the genealogical links between Henry and James are made to seem smoother than they were in fact, other aspects of Henry's relationship to the law are shown for much of the play to be ambiguous, unstable, or untrustworthy. While he lived, the historical Henry found the law a useful instrument for implementing his will, and the play mirrors this truth. With the help of his cooperative Parliaments, Henry succeeded in covering the changes in his private thoughts and affections by rewriting the legal interpretation of the past, but his attempt to write the future failed: and the accession of the Stuart line was—literally—the crowning irony in the history of Henry's dynastic obsession. Only later history, well beyond the knowledge available to the audiences of 1613, would reveal the unsuspected failure of the males in the Stuart line as well.

Notes

1. The play's title in the First Folio. Henry Wotton's reference to the play as All is True in his letter describing the fire at the Globe has given rise to perplexity about the title; the title reported by Wotton has taken firm root as a result of the decision made by the 1986 Oxford Shakespeare editorial team (Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, William Montgomery) to use it in place of the Folio title in their William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford, 1986). References in this essay are to the Arden King Henry VIII, ed. R. A. Foakes (London and New York 1964; reprinted 1991).

   The last scene may have been written by Fletcher rather than Shakespeare: 5.4 is one of the six scenes (scenes 3 and 4 of Act 1; 3.1; scenes 2,3,4 of Act 5) about which Cyrus Hoy produces the most convincing arguments to date concerning the possibility of Fletcher's part in the play's authorship. (See his ‘The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon’, Studies in Bibliography, 15 (1962), 71-88.) There is still no clear consensus among Shakespeare scholars about either single authorship or collaboration, however, and my own essay has nothing to add to that debate. The point I wish to make here is that, if Fletcher did indeed write the final scene, the prophecy represents an epistemological manoeuvre on history that I shall be considering along with others in the play where Shakespeare's authorship is considered much surer. Given the lingering uncertainties of authorship and my own emphasis here on legal history and audience reception, I usually refer to ‘the play’ rather than to its author (or authors).

2. Pierre Sahel calls attention to the frequency of indirect discourse and the importance of rumour and reporting in the play. See his ‘The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), 145-51.

3. On this and other uncertainties and contradictions, see Lee Bliss, ‘The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth’, ELH, 42 (1975), 1-25.

4. For varying interpretations of Henry's part in the Amicable Grant, see G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation (London and Melbourne, 1977), pp. 90-1; J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley and Los Angeles), pp. 138-9; Neville Williams, Henry VIII and his Court (New York, 1971), p. 97; D. M. Loades, Politics and the Nation, 4th edn. (London, 1992), pp. 158-60; John A. F. Thomson, The Transformation of Medieval England (London and New York, 1983), pp. 38, 249-51; John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 86-8.

5. Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles … Now Newlie Recognised, Augmented, and Continued …, reprint 1807-8 edn. (New York, 1965).

6. Statutes of the Realm (1817), vol. 3, p. 473. Hereafter referred to as SR.

7. For a series of reasons, Henry's relations with Scotland deteriorated throughout the early 1540s; war between the two countries was declared in 1542, with the Scots being routed at Solway Moss in November. The English made brutal incursions again in 1544 and 1545—partially because of Scottish resistance to Henry's plans to marry his son Edward with the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. The marriage plans thwarted, Henry avoided any mention of the Stuarts in his will, skipping over their precedence by representative primogeniture, naming instead his younger sister Mary's descendants as next after his three children, should these die without heirs of their body. See Mortimer Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems 1460-1571 (London, 1973), pp. 72-5.

8. One result was the muddle created at the death of Edward VI with the Dudleys' attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. From the pulpit of Paul's Cross, Nicholas Ridley preached on 9 July 1553, that neither Mary nor Elizabeth could succeed, since the Acts of Parliament that had bastardized them had never been repealed. Though the Protestant congregation heard him out without enthusiasm, Lady Jane was not without support, and as Loades points out, ‘research has only recently uncovered the tracks which they were so quickly forced to hide’ (see Loades, Politics, pp. 239-40). One of the first Acts of Mary's Parliament in 1553 was to repeal the Henrician legislation that had denied the lawfulness of her parents' marriage (SR IV. 201). Unlike Mary, Elizabeth never addressed the question of bastardy. On various problematic aspects of the will's legitimacy and its implications for the Stuarts, see Loades, Politics, pp. 204-34, 287-91; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 488-94; Guy, Tudor England, pp. 196-9; Elton, Reform, pp. 331-2, and also his England Under the Tudors (London, 1955, rev. 1965), pp. 269-70, 280-4, 370-1, 474; Mortimer Levine, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question 1558-1568 (Stanford, 1966), pp. 99-162.

9. Edward Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke … (London, 1550), fol. lxxxvi. John Bellamy refers to the role of Buckingham's letters at his trial in The Tudor Law of Treason (London, 1979), p. 149.

10. See John Walter, ‘A “Rising of the People”? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, Past and Present, 107 (May 1985), 90-143.

11. The phrase originates with Vergil: ‘Tum ille partim ulciscendi se cupiditate incensus, partim praemio ductus …’ which Denys Hay translates ‘Partly fired by a desire for revenge, partly led on by bribes’. See Polydore Vergil, The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil: A. D. 1485-1537, ed. and trans. Denys Hay, Camden Series, vol. 74 (London, 1950), p. 271. Hall and Stow, unlike Vergil and Holinshed, did not mention Wolsey as having any role in bringing Buckingham to trial, and in their simpler versions they expressed no doubts that Buckingham was guilty. Vergil, however, had been imprisoned in the Tower, thanks to Wolsey, and his resulting hatred of the cardinal everywhere colours his reportage. His Anglica Historia was published during Henry's reign, so of course Buckingham's guilt was not to be questioned but, because of his own experience, Vergil could not avoid leaving an ambiguous account which accuses Wolsey of malice and personal vindictiveness in setting a trap for Buckingham by suborning Knevet to testify against the duke. Holinshed relied heavily on Vergil as he wrote his section on Buckingham, and calls attention to his own addition:

    These were the speciall articles and points comprised in the indictment, and laid to his charge: but how trulie, or in what sort prooued, I haue not further to say, either in accusing him or excusing him, other than I find in Hall and Polydor, whose words in effect, I haue thought to impart to the reader, and without anie parciall wresting of the same either to or fro.

    Sauing that (I trust) I maie without offense saie, that (as the rumour then went) the cardinall chieflie procured the death of this noble man, no lesse fauoured of the people of this realm in that season, than the cardinall himselfe was hated and enuied. Which thing caused the dukes fall to be pitied and lamented, sith he was the man of all other, that chieflie went about to crosse the cardinall in his lordlie demeanor, & headie proceedings (p. 661).

12. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 189.

13. Though Bishop Fisher argued that the doubt had been added by Henry VII, Henry Ansgar Kelly suggests that ‘forsan’ had been inserted at the insistence of Katherine's mother Isabella, ‘because in her view the statement of consummation was not true’. See his The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII (Stanford, 1976), p. 97. Scarisbrick discusses the importance of ‘forsan’ in the argument about the impediment of public honesty incurred by the promise to marry, as opposed to the carnal affinity of marriage, on pp. 187-96, and Kelly responds to this on pp. 30-7 and passim.

14. Chapuys wrote to Charles V in 1529 of Henry's taunting Katherine in private that her virginity did not matter, ‘You are not my wife for all that, since the bull did not dispense super impedimento publicae honestatis’. As Kelly points out, once the trial was under way, ‘This is the closest that Henry would come to admitting the queen's virginity’ (pp. 129-30).

15. Betty Travitsky's excellent article ‘Reprinting Tudor History: The Case of Catherine of Aragon’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997), 164-72, compares the textual changes that throughout the sixteenth century overtook the frequent reprintings of Vives's Instruction of a Christen Woman; she shows how these reflect the dangers felt in dealing with Katherine's political fortunes after the divorce, and then demonstrates how textual alterations and re-admissions at the end of the century rehabilitate Katherine, signalling that she was no longer felt to be a dangerous topic.

    Phyllis Rackin's observations on the relationship between ‘historiographic writing’ and truth are pertinent: ‘Historiographic writing no longer had a direct, unequivocal relation with historical truth. Alternative accounts of historical events and opposed interpretations of their causes and significance now threatened each other's credibility …’ (Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, 1990), p. 13).

16. Judith Anderson presents evidence in Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven and London, 1984) that Shakespeare seems to have read the 1592 edition of Stow (see pp. 136-42).

17. John Stow, The Annales of England faithfully collected … (London, 1592), p. 913 (emphasis mine). Cavendish's account slightly differs from Stow in wording, but not about Katherine's clear assertion of her virginity prior to marriage with Henry.

18. George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Henry Morley (London, n.d.), pp. 101-2.

19. On these events see Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, pp. 59-86; Scarisbrick, pp. 222-5.

20. The Emergence of a Nation State (London and New York, 1984), p. 380. On the legality/illegality of the succession see F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge, 1968): ‘if statutes on such a matter had any validity, the succession was probably illegal’ (pp. 281-2); and Sir David Lindsay Keir, The Constitutional History of Modern Britain Since 1485 (London, 9th edn. 1969): ‘Henry VIII's will, statutory though its force was, had little effect either on the governmental system of Edward VI or on the succession to the throne’ (p. 103).