SOURCE: “Henry VIII: A Jacobean History,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 12, 1979, pp. 247-66.

[In the following essay, Baillie compares Henry VIII to other Shakespearean history plays, remarks on its realistic portrayal of Jacobean politics, and examines selected events and issues that occurred in the months immediately preceding the play's publication.]

On 29 June 1613 the first Globe Theater burned to the ground during one of the first performances of a “new” historical drama “representing some principal pieces of the Reign of Henry 8.”¹ That play, without question, is the Henry VIII placed last among the Histories in the Shakespeare First Folio. Despite continued debate about the authorship of the text, scholars agree generally that the basic design of the work is Shakespeare's and that the play originated at the very close of the dramatist's career.² Dating as it does from mid-1613, Henry VIII is a distinct theatrical anomaly. It is probably the only history play, based on English chronicles since the Conquest, to have been written for any professional acting troupe during the twelve years from 1607 to 1618.³ We may well ask: What led Shakespeare in retirement at Stratford to write a drama so unseasonable, of a kind so long out of use both by himself and by other dramatists? And just what kind of history play is Henry VIII?

The Prologue warns us that this is not the usual kind of stage history. This play, the Prologue declares, has none of the “fool and fight” that the still popular Henry IV plays had led audiences to expect in an English history play; the theme rather will be “sad, high, and working [i.e., evoking pity].” This play will appeal to three kinds of spectators, the Prologue explains: those who “come to see / Only a show or two” will be “richly” entertained; those “that can pity” will see “Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow”; and those who “give / Their money out of hope they may believe, / May here find truth too.” The Prologue goes on to insist twice more that the play represents the actors' “chosen truth,” that their purpose is “To make that only true we now intend [i.e., present].” The original title for the play, evidently, was “All is True.”⁴

In what way is this claim of “truth” to be interpreted? Scholars have noted that Henry VIII derives much more closely from its chronicle sources than does any other Shakespearean history and that the play has no largely invented main character such as Falstaff or Hotspur. However, several of the play's key incidents are, in fact, wholly invented, along with many of the most memorable speeches. “Truth” in the Prologue, then, does not mean “literal historicity.” Alternatively, the term may be interpreted legitimately as referring to the play's psychological realism in probing the personal motivations and conflicts underlying the English Reformation—probably the primary intended meaning. The realism consists in not schematizing or simplifying the causes of actions; characters' motives are obscured by conflicting reports and unresolved contradictions. As Lee Bliss comments in a penetrating recent analysis of the play, “Shakespeare has dramatized the essential limitations in our knowledge of ‘truth’ or human motivation through a proliferation of explanations within the play itself.”⁵ The play is “true” in showing that we cannot know the truth of motives.

There is, however, another probable significance of “truth” in the Prologue; the term points to the unmistakable ways in which the play's depiction of the court of Henry VIII mirrors the contemporary court of James I in 1613. In several respects which are immediately apparent Henry in the play resembles James as he was perceived by his subjects: both revel in splendor and extravagance, both are notably autocratic and manipulative while insisting upon the forms of law, both are theologically inclined and make important gestures toward championing anti-papal forces. Not only the two monarchs but also the situations and events of their courts show parallels. It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate that Jacobean issues and events of the months immediately preceding the play's premiere are reflected in basic features of the dramatic design; these topical motifs include the birth of a new Protestant optimism, the expansion of the monarch's personal authority in relation to the law, the sudden fall of a court favorite, and a divorce.

To take only the last of these for the moment, private newsletters of the months of May and June 1613 make it clear that the most prominent court gossip of the time concerned the divorce proceedings against the Earl of Essex by his young wife, Frances Howard, daughter of the Lord Chamberlain and known to be the lover of the King's favorite, Rochester. Though by hindsight this divorce, as it became enmeshed with the Overbury murder, appears even more sensational than it seemed to contemporaries, nonetheless the suit was perceived at the time as an extremely important case not only because of the status of the principals but, as well, because of the precedent-setting grounds of the annulment. It was generally expected in London that sentence would be given in the suit by the end of the ecclesiastical Trinity term, specifically on 1 July.⁶ The King's Men, then, staged a new historical drama featuring the most famous divorce of the sixteenth century just two days before the expected conclusion of the most important divorce case in the early seventeenth century. At the least, this concurrence was an extraordinary coincidence; much more may have been involved. After a discussion of more general topical motifs in the play, we will return to canvass the divorce parallels in detail. But first, we need to look briefly at the play's structure.

Henry VIII has a kind of triple dramatic frame. The Prologue and Epilogue, forming the outermost frame, both deal with the sort of audience who can respond to this unorthodox type of history play: spectators who can appreciate rich shows, pitiable falls, and unvarnished truth. The next frame, the opening and closing scenes of the drama itself, displays the glorious peace of England past (at the Field of the Cloth of Gold) and future (through Elizabeth and her successor). Within those aesthetic and nationalist frames comes a political one in the two scenes of the King's Council (I.ii, V.ii).⁷ In both Council scenes King Henry is very much in command of the proceedings; in the first, however, the King is shown as merely following in the tracks of Cardinal Wolsey (even, we may say, being used by Wolsey), while in the second session Henry's manipulation of the lords is absolute. Thus of the four important actions of the play, the first—the fall of Buckingham—and the last—the triumph of Cranmer—are both concerned with a struggle by lords of the Council to achieve their private ends with the King's sanction, the first time successfully, the second time not. These actions frame the body of the play in which the King's control of events is worked out in the two large interlocked actions of the falls of Wolsey and Queen Katherine, the two characters who are the only ones in the play to test and hence develop Henry's power to effect his will. The King's susceptibility to papist influence and direction gives way to complete independence in his actions, an autocracy at once full of “truth [and] terror” for even the highest of his subjects and strangely beneficent in its effects, working a Protestant “peace [and] plenty” (V.iv.47).

Analysis of the links between this dramatic structure and Jacobean history can begin usefully with the Protestant peace framing the play proper. Part of the reason that Henry VIII came to be written in 1613 was the current national political climate, which somewhat resembled that of twenty-five years earlier. It is a commonplace that the great age of the English history play, the decade beginning at about 1587, came in the period of a severe national crisis followed by a profound upwelling of nationalist and Protestant rejoicing. The Elizabethan fear of the menacing Spanish Armada, as well as of papist subversion within the realm, was strikingly allayed by the scattering of the Spanish fleet in a tempest, an unseasonal storm which was widely interpreted as providential and even miraculous. The aftermath was a spontaneous and prolonged national celebration accompanied by a new interest in the workings of providence and history. On the London public stages, these movements were reflected in the development of plays which both celebrate English nationhood and examine the meaning of its history.

The year 1613 saw the amassing of a new Spanish Armada and a parallel crisis atmosphere in England. Though this Armada never sailed, it was perceived by Englishmen in the early months of 1613 as a genuine threat. At the turn of the year reports circulated both in England and on the Continent that a Spanish invasion fleet was being prepared to sail in the spring against either England or Ireland.⁸ The parallel fleet of 1588, and the island's defiance then of Spain, were explicitly recalled in 1613, for example, in Latin verses published at Oxford which cry, “Let them [Spain] prepare an armada against this kingdom; let them spread their wiles; but remember the Armada of ’88.”⁹ Particularly feared at this time was the threat of papist treachery within England; rumors of assassination plots against the King, from as far away as Venice, fanned James's instinctive fears.¹⁰ Early in 1613 the government reacted strongly to these dangers. On 10 January a Council Order was issued for the disarming of all recusants, followed soon after by a special commission for examining abuses in the navy administration and on 10 February by an Order for General Musters in every shire and for refurbishing the coastal warning-beacon system.¹¹ These precautions, which continued through the spring and even into the fall of 1613, gave edge and weight to the alarms and rumors sweeping the countryside. In his newsletter of 28 January, John Chamberlain reported that “the world here growes suspicious and apprehends great daunger from [the papists], and many rumours are raised, as namely the last weeke that the earle of Huntington was slaine by them in his owne house; whereupon at Coventrie and Warwicke they shut theyre gates and mustered theyre souldiers, and at Banburie and those parts the people made barricados and all other manner of provision, as yf they looked presently to be assaulted.”¹² Among Catholic recusants in England, the panic was even greater; James Carre wrote from London on 20 January, “Here was a great terror among the Catholics from a report that the king was determined, in one night, to cut all the Papists' throats in England.”¹³ On the Protestant side, underlying the feelings of near-desperation was the lingering shock at the sudden death of the great hope for a new Protestant champion, Prince Henry. Sir Thomas Edmondes at Paris observed a new Spanish aggressiveness against England, “the Spaniards thinking that they may now be the more bold to attempt that enterprise since we have lost our hopeful prince, which also, as we find, hath made the spirits of our papists at home much to be swelled of late.”¹⁴ There was continuing worry also over the possibility of a Catholic marriage for Prince Charles; ambassadors from Spain, France, and Savoy all were treating for royal marriages which might ultimately put a Catholic heir on the throne of England.

This crisis atmosphere was gradually overborne by the general thanksgiving and joyfulness at the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, leader of the Protestant Union of German princes. The marriage was viewed both in England and on the Continent as harbinger of a strong Protestant advance in Europe. “I need not tell you,” wrote Chamberlain to Winwood, “how much this match is to the contentment of all well affected people, and what joy they take in yt, as beeing a firme foundation for the stablishing of religion. … But the Roman Catholikes maligne yt as much, and do what they can to disgrace yt as beeing the ruine of theyre hopes.”¹⁵

The wedding was celebrated with probably the most lavish and elaborate displays of finery and ceremony that ever had been seen in London. In the weeks just before and after the nuptials on 14 February, there were three days of mock battles in fireworks on the Thames, several glorious processions and state dinners, and no fewer than three sumptuous masques at Court, along with several plays. The King himself spent some £60,000 on the wedding and the following journey, while others laid out accordingly; Lord Montague, according to Chamberlain, “bestowed fifteen hundred pound in apparell for his two daughters.”¹⁶

In respect of its general political context, then, Henry VIII is like Shakespeare's earlier histories though it comes some two decades later. Like those plays, Henry VIII originated in a time of general rejoicing with a heavily Protestant and nationalistic undercurrent following upon a period of crisis provoked by a Spanish Armada.¹⁷ This general context may be, in part, the reason why Henry VIII appeared at all in an age unfavorable to dramas about English history. But there were other, more particular reasons as well, which may account for its peculiarities as a history play. For not only the date but various features of the dramatic design mark this play as unique among Shakespeare's Histories.

Henry VIII is the only Shakespearean history to contain no military combats at all. For the spectacle and excitement of onstage battles this play substitutes a very different kind of formalized public action, namely, great occasions of ceremony. Since the early military campaigns of Henry VIII are prominent in the chronicles, their absence from this play is at first somewhat puzzling. However, an emphasis on the chivalric aspects of King Henry would have been inappropriate in 1613 for two reasons: armed power struggles by great noblemen were by then a thing of the past (as they had not been in Elizabeth's reign), and the current monarch, James I, was famed as a man of peace both at home and abroad.

The late medieval notion of the great nobleman as a man of military might with a private army of mounted retainers, though still maintained in chivalric romances, was in reality practically dead in the Jacobean era. In The Crisis of the Aristocracy Lawrence Stone observes that “The Essex Revolt and the Main Plot two years later were the last occasions on which a disgruntled nobleman took up arms for no higher purpose than to secure what he judged to be his due. As a method of conducting party politics, armed rebellion was by now a thing of the past. Twenty-five years later Buckingham aroused hatreds far deeper and more widespread than those inspired by Cecil in 1600-03, but the mere idea of armed revolt against the favourite was now unthinkable.”¹⁸ The nobility were losing the technical capacity for leadership in war as well as the military capacity to challenge the sovereign. Increasingly the arena of their power struggles was the council chamber and the various courts. King James, taking personal credit for this societal transformation, prided himself on having established peace within his realms. His most cherished motto was drawn from the Beatitudes: Beati pacifici.

Abroad, James' status as the leading Protestant sovereign and peacemaker rose markedly in the first half of 1613 because of three separate diplomatic successes. First was the successful arrangement of the marriage of Elizabeth and the Palatine despite two weighty restraints: the death of Prince Henry just after the Elector's arrival in England and the threat of impending Spanish invasion. The tying of Europe's most powerful non-Catholic monarch to the leader of the Union of German Protestant Princes was viewed throughout the continent as a strengthening of the Protestant cause and a major deterrent to Spanish-Austrian expansionist adventures. William Trumbull, English Resident at Brussels, reported on 2 March that there was hardly talk in that city “but of our happy Conjunction with the Palatinate” and that men there were enraged, fearing that the union was aimed at wresting the Empire out of Austria's hands.¹⁹ Second, hardly was the wedding over when news came that James's special ambassadors had been instrumental in negotiating a peace between the Protestant sovereigns of Sweden and Norway, “a peace for which the King of England alone has all the credit.”²⁰ As both those monarchs had agreed to join the Protestant League, this success too, King James felt, would “compel Spain and the Emperor to attend to their own business.”²¹ Third, in late April the English nobles attending the Elector and Elizabeth on their journey to Heidelberg were able to conclude at Amsterdam a mutual defense treaty between the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the German Princes, thus uniting most of northern Europe in a common Protestant front. We know now, of course, that this diplomatic maneuvering only paved the way for the Elector's misadventure as the “winter king” of Bohemia and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, but to Londoners in the late spring of 1613 James's diplomacy seemed to have assured a Protestant peace.

In this context it is not surprising to find that Henry VIII begins and ends in celebrations of English peace. The play opens in a recital of the bravery of the Field of the Cloth of Gold which had transmuted military confrontation between France and England to a rivalry in pomp and splendor, the very “view of earthly glory.” When the two kings first met in the vale of Andren, relates Norfolk, “they clung / In their embracement, as they grew together” (I.i.9-10). The conclusion of the play draws this theme of peace into mythic, millennial terms in Cranmer's prophecy of Elizabeth's reign when

                                                  … every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants, and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.

(V.iv.33-35)

“Nor shall this peace sleep with her,” continues Cranmer's prophecy, but Elizabeth shall leave “her blessedness” to James,

Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix'd [in] peace, plenty, love, truth, terror.

(V.iv.45-47)

This beginning in binational concord and concluding in universal blessedness is only the frame for a profound evocation of peace in the play. G. W. Knight has shown, in an eloquent essay in The Crown of Life, that peace suffuses the play, especially peace in a sense personal and internal. In each of the tragic falls—of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine—the movement is from self-assertion and conflict to renunciation of aspiration, forgiveness, and deep inner peace. Buckingham on the way to the scaffold is so settled in his mind that he can “forgive all”; “There cannot be,” he declares, “those numberless offences / 'Gainst me, that I cannot take peace with” (II.i.83-85). Wolsey, in his turn, counsels his faithful Cromwell to “fling away ambition” and caps a series of injunctions paraphrased from Christ's Beatitudes with an emblem drawn from regal iconography: “Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace” (III.ii.445). Katherine, finally, awakes from her divine vision calling out for the vanished angelic dancers under the name “Spirits of peace”; just before her death she enjoins Capucius to aid her servants “As you wish Christian peace to souls departed” (IV.ii.156). Knight shows that all the peace emphasis in the play culminates in the final scene and in the figure who dominates the play, King Henry. “Here, as in Shakespeare's wider universe, so throughout Henry VIII, pride and power-lust have been painfully expelled; but this new, royal, pride [expressed in Cranmer's prophecy] is itself born on the crest of a deep humility, whose recurring, bell-like, note is ‘peace.’”²² In the play's general tone and in its pacific-minded ruler at the center, Henry VIII reflects the mood of Jacobeans in mid-1613 and the established image of their King.

If the atmosphere of the play, however, is one of peaceful splendor and royal glory, the conduct of the action is largely by means of formal trials or informal inquests, either represented or reported. The play is intensively concerned with justice, especially with defining the King's role in various sorts of judicial inquiry and action. Four scenes exhibit King Henry as prosecutor or judge in quasi-legal hearings, in a formal trial, or simply in conversation. While investigating charges against the Duke of Buckingham, the King himself acts as inquisitor of the Duke's Surveyor, urging him on with repeated questions and exclamations. Henry commits Buckingham to trial afterward, and to certain condemnation, with the words, “If he may / Find mercy in the law, 'tis his; if none, / Let him not seek't of us” (I.ii.211-13). Buckingham admits later, “I had my trial, / And must needs say a noble one” (II.i.118-19) and assigns the blame to his disloyal servants, not to the King or the court. Similarly in Wolsey's fall Henry as justiciar is partly dependent on the lords' articles listing the Cardinal's malfeasance and on Wolsey's own blunders—the incautious letter to the Pope and the misdirected inventory of his wealth—but, once he perceives the truth, the King conducts his own kind of inquest early one morning, playing with Wolsey's pride and hypocrisy like a cat with a mouse. His absolute control of his ministers, even the greatest, is heavily underscored in his crushingly ironic exit line as he throws the incriminating papers at Wolsey's feet: “Read o'er this, / And after, this, and then to breakfast with / What appetite you have” (III.ii.201-03). At the divorce hearing earlier, Henry, though ostensibly himself the subject of the court's inquiry, is evidently in command throughout. Seated above the judges on his estate, he impatiently dispenses with the set forms of the hearing at the very outset: “What's the need?” he cries; when Katherine stalks out of the hearing room it is Henry who commands “Call her again”; at the very end of the scene his murmuring aside indicates again the King's assumption that his will is the law: “I may perceive / These cardinals trifle with me” (II.iv.233-34). Finally, when accusations are brought against Archbishop Cranmer the King deftly stages the prelate's hearing before the Council, playing puppet-master to all the leading lords of the realm, including Cranmer himself. He allows the Councillors to demean and intimidate Cranmer, then bursts in frowning and berates them all like schoolboys; the issue of Cranmer's guilt before the law is overborne by Henry's personal trust in his Archbishop.

Throughout the play the fundamental issue is how King Henry's actions sort with law and justice. In this emphasis the play reflects, in general and in some particulars, its contemporary setting. The three-cornered relation of king, subjects, and law was by far the most important political question underlying events in England in the year 1613. The recurring problem of defining the royal prerogative was growing especially acute during the first half of the year. The issues raised and left unsettled in the Parliament of 1610-11 had only worsened in the interim; acrimony on both sides was building to the intransigence which paralyzed the fruitless “Addled Parliament” of 1614. In the first months of 1613 a series of royal actions and judicial proceedings seemed, to contemporary observers, to be extending royal privilege and power in startling new directions. The range of such issues and the popular reaction against the extension of royal peremptory authority are indicated by a verse squib which John Chamberlain included in a newsletter of 10 June. The “two lame hexameter verses,” reported Chamberlain, had recently turned up at Gray's Inn:

Curans, Lord Compton, Whitlocke, Overberie, Mansfeld:
Nevill, Starchamber, Sutton, Scot, Baylie, divorcement.(23)

“I know not what construction to make of them,” commented Chamberlain disingenuously, but in fact the verses can be adequately annotated from a careful reading of Chamberlain's extant letters from the preceding six months. Each of the items, and the whole lot together, had raised basic questions about King James's power to manipulate his subjects for his own ends, with or without recourse to the courts; the verses are almost a litany of grievances against recent abuses of royal prerogative. “Curans,” for example, at the head of the list, refers to popular discontent over commercial monopolies; the specific allusion is to the recent attempt to the Earls of Suffolk and Salisbury to make over to the King, for a good price, their widely hated patents for, respectively, currants and Venice gold, and silk. The Master of the Rolls, on behalf of the King, had firmly withstood the maneuver, objecting that in the next Parliament, which must shortly be called, these patents would be “specially complained of as principall greevances, so that yt wold be neither for the Kings honor or profit with redy money to buy theyre envie and transfer yt upon himself.”²⁴ The names “Whitlocke” and “Mansfeld” refer to the recent imprisonment of Sir Robert Mansell, Treasurer of the Navy, for questioning the legality of a special royal commission named to investigate abuses in the navy, and the accompanying imprisonment of his counsel in the matter, James Whitelocke, mainly for having given his opinion privately to Mansell that the commission might be illegal!²⁵ “Scot” and “Baylie” likewise are linked; both these preachers were haled before the authorities for injudicious statements in sermons, Lewis Bayly (Prince Henry's chaplain) for decrying Catholic influences at court and John Scot on a complaint of the crusty Earl of Northampton for having “glaunct at matters somwhat suspiciously” in a sermon before the King on Easter Tuesday.²⁶ None of these events is specifically paralleled in Henry VIII, but the general question each raises—the King's absolute authority in such areas as commerce, law, and religion—is the central concern of the play.

Two of the items in the verse squib, however, do have direct parallels in the play; those two were by far the most sensational events listed. The sudden and dramatic imprisonment of Sir Thomas Overbury on 21 April and the ongoing suit by Frances Howard for divorce from the Earl of Essex were more talked upon than any other occurrences of the late spring, if contemporary letter writers can be believed, even though the scandalous connection between these two occurrences was not understood at the time.

Sir Henry Wotton was one of the bystanders when Overbury, friend and genius behind the royal favorite, Rochester, was arrested and taken to the Tower. The “suddenness” of the arrest, Wotton wrote the next day, was “like a stroke of thunder,” especially since Overbury “but two hours before” had been boasting to Wotton that he never “esteemed better than at present of his own fortunes and ends.”²⁷ Indeed, Overbury's position as favorite's favorite seemed secure; even the King had heard the sneer that “Rochester ruled [the King] and Overburie ruled Rochester”—and some observers thought (correctly so, in part) that the King's determination to be free brought on Overbury's doom. The ostensible reason for his arrest was a slight to the royal prerogative in refusing to be sent away as an ambassador to Brussels or Russia, declining with the haughty remark that “he hoped that the King neither in law nor justice could compell him to leave his countrie.” The real reason, uncovered two years later, was Overbury's opposition to Rochester's liaison with Frances Howard. “So dangerous is it to soar too near unto the sun” commented one letter writer at the time, and another used the same figure: “by which [his fall] you may observe how soon such aspiring minds fall down scorched with the sun and their own weight.”²⁸ With ominous prescience Wotton concluded his account of the incident, “I dare pronounce of Sir Thomas Overbury that he shall return no more to this stage.”²⁹

To the stage of the court of King James he did not return, of course, but died miserably in the Tower in September when repeated poisonings finally succeeded. But just two months after his arrest the fall of a top-level courtier was twice enacted upon the stage of the “great Globe itself.” To be sure, neither Buckingham nor Wolsey as presented in Henry VIII bore any close resemblance to Overbury's pre-arrest position, and it is the merest truism in every age that the great and powerful will have a fall. On the other hand, among James's courtiers in the first decade of his reign, curiously enough, there had been no sensational fall from favor until Overbury's. Hence it seems quite likely that most playgoers watching Buckingham's fall at the Globe on 29 June would have been reminded of Overbury's recent arrest, likewise sudden and obviously engineered by the most powerful men next to the King. Again, when the chief contriver of Buckingham's downfall, the crafty Cardinal, was himself brought low, spectators also likely would have been put in mind of the rumors still circulating in London that Rochester himself was on the decline. Indeed, the play's audience had been prompted by the Prologue to make some such connections; after emphasizing the truth of the play's events the Prologue asked the audience to

                                                                                          Think ye see
The very persons of our noble story
As they were living: think you see them great,
And follow'd with the general throng, and sweat
Of thousand friends; then, in a moment, see
How soon this mightiness meets misery.

The phrase “as they were living” in context bears two constructions, both “as if these historical persons were still living” and “as if these characters were contemporary persons.”

To return once more to the hexameters found at Gray's Inn, the list's last item—significantly—is simply and abstractly “divorcement.” In lawyers' London in June 1613 this term would have reference only to the Essex divorce suit. Several newsletters of May and June mention the divorce prominently and include specific and intimate details from the various private depositions in the case.³⁰ The divorce involved much more than the welfare of an aristocratic young woman trapped in a desperately unhappy marriage. Not only was the Earl of Essex one of the nation's ranking noblemen, but the rumors had it that Lady Essex was already “as she presumes provided of a second” husband, the chief courtier in the land, Rochester. Their liaison, which had been conducted in secret for some time, was the real motive behind the divorce, not only for the passions involved but for politics: Frances Howard's family saw a chance to wean the King's favorite from the Puritan faction supported by his mentor Overbury and to tie Rochester firmly to their pro-Catholic party. Frances Howard's father was the Earl of Suffolk, Lord Chamberlain; her great-uncle Henry, Earl of Northampton, was Lord Privy Seal; another Howard was Lord High Admiral; all three men were leading voices in the Privy Council. Proposals and appointees favored by the Howards, however, had often been thwarted by an opposing faction with which Rochester was loosely identified; the vicious infighting between the two groups over appointments to replace Salisbury as Lord Treasurer and chief Secretary had led to a complete standoff: a year after Salisbury's death the offices remained unfilled and government was stagnant.³¹ Thus a great deal was at stake when Lady Essex' father and her great-uncle devised the plan to push for an annulment through a special commission, succeeded in enlisting Rochester in their support, and ended by “making the king a party in this bawdy business.”³² The political significance of the divorce was apparent to such court followers as Chamberlain, who wrote that he “shold never have suspected” the liaison of Lady Essex and Rochester “but that I know he was with her three howres together within these two dayes, which makes me somwhat to stagger and to thincke that great folkes to compasse theyre owne ends have neither respect to frends nor followers.”³³ As the hearings before the special commission of bishops and civilians progressed in May and June and became matter for public comment, two further consequences emerged. First, the King was seen to be arbitrarily bypassing the laws of the realm to indulge his leading courtiers; Bishop Neile told his fellow commissioners that “the world looketh on us what we do; and there were not more eyes upon the earl's father losing his head, than there be upon the earl now losing his wife.”³⁴ Second, various observers feared for the institution of marriage should the annulment go through. Archbishop Abbot, the commission head, warned the others, “as soon as this cause is sentenced, every man who is discontented with his wife, and every woman discontented with her husband, which can have any reasonable pretence, will repair to me for such nullities.”³⁵ It was just at this juncture in the case that Henry VIII was first performed.

Was the play written and performed in direct response to the intense public interest in the divorce? Several particular circumstances centering in the figure of Frances Howard's father suggest that the answer may be affirmative. The surviving records of the divorce proceedings, especially Abbot's detailed “Memorials,” make it evident that the Earl of Suffolk, not his daughter, was the real plaintiff in the case and the actual force behind the whole proceedings (leaving aside the related poisoning of Overbury, which seems to have been mainly the daughter's mischief). Throughout the records Suffolk is seen in methodical prearrangement of a supposedly independent inquiry, applying relentless pressure on friend and opponent alike. His evident care to anticipate and head off possible trouble areas makes it likely enough that he foresaw the general indignant murmuring which in the event did develop when the divorce proceedings became public knowledge.

As Lord Chamberlain, one of Suffolk's responsibilities was to oversee the provision of entertainment for the court. This duty had been unprecedentedly heavy during the winter and spring of 1612-13 in the prolonged festivities relating to the Palatine's presence in England. Among the entertainments provided for the court during this season were no fewer than twenty dramatic performances by the King's Men—near the record for plays at court by a single company in any year of James's reign.³⁶ It is well known that the players, who were growing increasingly dependent on court patronage, had been developing since James's accession an increasing responsiveness to the perceived courtly likes and dislikes in dramatic styles and subjects. As regular attenders at court during the early months of 1613, the leading members of the King's Company could hardly have failed to become aware of Suffolk's driving concern in the Essex divorce and of the political implications of the case. Evidently they came to recognize that a play touching on the question of divorce—of which Henry VIII's first nullity was the capital instance—would appeal both to the general public and to the special power centers at court upon whom the company's still rising fortunes most closely depended. It is probable, indeed, given two later developments in the affair, that the actors received an indirect suggestion on the matter from Suffolk's dependents. For one, Suffolk was throughout the divorce business sensitive to public response to the case and to how his reputation might suffer in it. When the proceedings were hanging fire, the commission of ten evenly split, Abbot heard that “my lord chamberlain, or his followers, gave out … that they expected that his majesty [having let the cause begin] should see it effected.”³⁷ When the doubtful commissioners explained their cavils to the King, Sir Daniel Dunne (Suffolk's creature) standing by exclaimed, “What a disgrace will this be to my lord chamberlain and his daughter [in that order!], if it should not now go forward!”³⁸ Second, in the arguments before the commission itself one of the two precedents brought forward for a nullity was that of Henry VIII; the case cited was, curiously enough, not his first but his second divorce, from Anne of Cleves. When Abbot objected that that annulment had hinged not on impotence [as in the Essex case] but on a precontract, Dunne replied, “King Henry the 8th was a strange prince in that kind: He put himself into many marriages”—a comment which is not really responsive to Abbot's objection but shows that Suffolk's man on the commission was determined to find a parallel between Henry VIII and the Essex divorce.

If then the King's Men discovered in the spring of 1613 that a divorce play could tend to their profit, what would they have done in such a ticklish political situation? One obvious answer is that they would take their difficulty to their long-time premier playwright, one who had proven himself several times in handling dangerous historical material with finesse. As early as 1592 Shakespeare's talent in this area had been recognized by an earlier company when he was brought in to try to save the play of Sir Thomas More from the censor's keen blade. Early in James's reign Shakespeare had managed to bring a Scottish regicide successfully within the compass of a paean to James's ancestral line in Macbeth. To whom else would the King's Men turn?

At first hearing, this conjecture strikes us as grossly improbable. Shakespeare, we know well, was too much the independent artist to let himself be dragged into such a nakedly political and potentially dangerous undertaking as staging a divorce play to support powerful courtiers. But we are left with a nagging question: Why did the aging dramatist, in comfortable retirement at Stratford, set himself at this late date to write a history play and to center the story in a divorce and its consequence?³⁹

The only reason previously proposed is that the play was intended for performance at the time of Princess Elizabeth's nuptials in mid-February; the concluding christening scene points the parallel of a Princess Elizabeth of great hope, daughter to a Queen Anne. A great deal of evidence has been adduced to argue this connection, notably by R. A. Foakes in the New Arden edition.⁴⁰ This impressive internal evidence, however, is opposed by two items of external evidence to the contrary. Of crucial significance is Wotton's report labeling the play as “new” on 29 June; Foakes cannot explain away this label but is “inclined not to accept [it] literally” (p. xxxv). The other problem is that an extant record in the Chamber Accounts explicitly names the plays performed at court in 1612-13 by the King's Men, and Henry VIII is not among them. “The play may not have been acted at court,” Foakes suggests, “or it may possibly have been that play which raised expectation on 16 February” but was cancelled in favor of a masque (p. xxxiv). Perhaps so, but as a drama intended specifically to honor a royal marriage, Henry VIII seems an oddity. To be sure, there is in the play a royal consort's coronation procession, much splendor and ceremoniousness, and talk of Protestant hope. However, other features of the action seem highly unsuitable for celebrating a royal wedding: multiple court intrigues, falls and executions of great courtiers, a stealthy royal wedding, and a prominent royal divorce. That the play reflects Elizabeth's marriage celebrations is unarguable; that it was intended specifically to be performed at court in February seems highly doubtful. The play's date of composition does not have to be set as early as February for the evident relations to the marriage to be still appropriate; the married couple remained in England until April amidst continual general rejoicing. Geoffrey Bullough allows that the play “was probably composed during the first four or five months of 1613.”⁴¹ The latter part of this span—late April and May—fits all of the evidence precisely: the play's central events and apparent themes correspond closely to political events in these months which were of consuming interest to contemporary Englishmen.

Whatever the truth of the origin of the play and its connection with the Essex divorce, the drama as we have it does not take a simplistic attitude toward King Henry's divorce. The dramatist has portrayed the King's first and all-important divorce as a muddle of conflicting gossip and mixed motives such that the real cause of the divorce cannot be ascertained; the only certainty throughout is that Katherine has been wronged. The divorce question is first introduced in the play immediately after the final exit of Buckingham when a Second Gentleman confides an “inkling / Of an ensuing evil” greater than the Duke's fall even “If [he] be guiltless”; the Cardinal, this gossip guesses, “out of malice / To the good queen” has “possess'd” the King with “a scruple”; he concludes, “is't not cruel / That she [Katherine] should feel the smart of this?” (II.i). Just a few lines later, at the beginning of scene ii, Suffolk suggests that it is not Henry's late-blooming conscience which is in question but rather “his conscience / Has crept too near another lady”; again, the Cardinal gets the blame. In the Blackfriars trial scene Henry specifically absolves Wolsey and presents the issue to the assembled court as a genuine case of conscience on his own part, started inadvertently by a French ambassador's questioning of Princess Mary's legitimacy. Henry's hearty praise of Katherine just after she has defiantly stalked out of the court can hardly be wholly hypocritical; he truly loves and admires her, from which fact it follows that his motives in the divorce are, in a sense, “pure.” Nonetheless, he obviously expects the divorce to go through and is annoyed at what he sees as the Cardinal's delay. More important in terms of our attitudes, the dramatist has placed immediately preceding the trial, unhistorically, the scene in which Anne Boleyn learns of her preferment; the significance of the unexpected bounty is not lost on her: almost her final words in the scene are “it faints me / To think what follows” (II.iii.103-04). We are left quite unable to decide upon Henry's real feelings and motivations in the matter.

What is undeniable, and emphasized from first to last in the divorce, is that the Queen has suffered a great wrong and deserves tears and pity. The divorce is an occasion of state in which no true justice is possible; the Queen's wrongs finally dissolve in the audience's tears and are rarefied beyond justice in Katherine's vision. As Professor Bullough remarks, “The garland-dance which she sees in her Vision indicates her saintliness—a remarkable thing for a Jacobean dramatist to admit in a Spanish Catholic.”⁴² The play insists repeatedly on both Katherine's sufferings and the providential effects of the King's second marriage. The divorce leads directly to the birth of that future glorious Queen who would bring her realm “a thousand thousand blessings”; in that final prophetic light we as spectators are led to accept for ourselves the Second Gentleman's earlier verdict on Henry's conduct in the divorce: “I cannot blame his conscience” (IV.i.47). Nonetheless, we are not allowed to forget the suffering of the innocent party; even after Cranmer's ebullient prediction about Anne Boleyn's child, the Epilogue acknowledges that the play's reception rests with the “good women” among the spectators, “For such a one we show'd 'em”—alluding not to the infant Elizabeth or her mother but to the saintly Queen Katherine.⁴³

If we ask what kind of “comment” playgoers of 1613 would have seen in the play relative to the Essex divorce, the answer is not simple or single. It is undeniable and fundamental that the play shows a famous English precedent in which a state divorce on questionable grounds was finalized in spite of (or because of) its involving a substantial realignment of political power in the court. Under the strictly limiting marital laws of the time, the play suggests, irregular divorces will occur when, to quote John Chamberlain's comment on the Essex case, “great folkes” work “to compasse theyre owne ends.” It is evident, too, that the personal motives and marital feelings of the parties in such a legal action may be extremely complicated, with no one clearly at fault, though one spouse may suffer a great deal more than the other. Further, the play provides a striking instance in which the power struggle behind the divorce brought an important ultimate benefit to the nation. By tying Katherine's downfall to the elimination of the rapacious and papist Cardinal Wolsey and, conversely, linking the preferment of Anne Boleyn to the advancement and sustaining of Cranmer, the play emphasizes strongly the nationalistic and Protestant victory embodied in the divorce and remarriage. But it is just on this point that the play most obviously contrasts with the contemporary Jacobean political situation, for the losers in the Essex case were the strongly Protestant faction, while the winners were the Catholic-leaning Howard family. It is impossible to guess whether the Earl of Suffolk would have viewed the play, with its enthusiastic acceptance of a state divorce, as an important propaganda weapon for his side or would have been aghast at the play's strongly Protestant bias.

In any case, Henry VIII evidences unmistakably its author's awareness of the leading political questions of his time and his insight into the complexities of the human motivations behind such issues. However many weeks or months prior to 29 June the play was written, the author shows an uncanny prescience about upcoming political events, including some which occurred after that date. One striking instance is worth relating. In the play's final scenes Archbishop Cranmer is the head of the Council—in V.ii his place is conspicuously vacant above the Chancellor's “at the upper end of the table”—yet he is humbled and demeaned by a Catholic-leaning faction of the Council. In the preceding scene, on the night before the Council scene, the Archbishop is summoned before the King at the palace; confronted with his monarch's “frowns” and “aspect of terror,” he learns that the King has “of late / Heard many grievous … / Grievous complaints of” him (V.i.97-99). Quailing before the sovereign, the Primate of the realm kneels, begs the King to protect his innocence, and soon breaks into tears.

Some two generations later, in 1613, Cranmer's sixth successor in the See was likewise the highest-ranking lord of the Council. Identified as a staunch Calvinist, Archbishop Abbot was strongly opposed on many policy matters by a Council faction headed by a triumvirate of Howard earls known for their Catholic sympathies; especially did he earn their displeasure by his stubborn resistance to granting an unorthodox annulment.⁴⁴ Summoned before the King in late June, he was told in petulant tones about courtiers' accusations that he was deliberately thwarting the divorce by delays. The King complained directly that various persons “who wished not well to the business” were consulting with the Archbishop.⁴⁵ A few days later the King summoned the whole divorce commission to find out for himself “where things stood” among them in the cause. When the earnestness of the King to have the divorce go through became apparent, Abbot related later, “I fell down on my knee, and with tears in mine eyes, I said, ‘I beseech your majesty, if ever I have done you any service, whom I do serve with a faithful heart, or may do you any service, rid me of this business.’”⁴⁶ The date was 1 July—two days after the aborted performance of Henry VIII. How many times in Tudor and Stuart history did an Archbishop of Canterbury kneel and weep before the King at the royal palace?

Nor do the parallels between these two stories, dramatic and historical, end with that. When King James's special commission could not come to agreement on the divorce, the King put off the decision until September. In the interim he packed the membership with two compliant bishops and changed the voting rules so as to make the outcome certain. As a final gesture, the day before the next commission meeting the King sent Abbot detailed arguments answering Abbot's objections to the annulment, along with a sharply worded personal letter which concluded, “the best thankfulness that you that are so far my creature, can use towards me, is, to reverence and follow my judgment.”⁴⁷ Abbot, in a long and prayerful night, was reminded “that some of my predecessors, as archbishop Cranmer [!], and my lord Grindal, had given good examples of these sufferings.” The next morning when he first came to London he was met with news of Sir Thomas Overbury's death in the Tower “and the sound of some fearful apprehensions thereupon bruited about the city.” Expecting that he might himself be headed for the Tower, Abbot the next day took care to “settle some courses, if any trouble should befal unto me.”⁴⁸

We need not suppose that the playwright penning Henry VIII before these events occurred had the faculty of precognition or that Act V of the play was written later than the rest. We need only recognize (1) that the author understood thoroughly the ways of a peremptory and high-minded autocrat in a court which fed on innuendo, backstabbing, and flattery, and in which a good and innocent person could hardly survive, and (2) that the author knew well the principal kinds of political struggles in King James's court in the spring of 1613. If we are to understand the structure and the political meaning of Henry VIII, we too must pay attention to the play's contemporary political context. Lord Suffolk in 1613 saw the parallel of his daughter's nullity suit to King Henry's divorces; Archbishop Abbot perceived that his own situation was like his predecessor Cranmer's. We can hardly suppose that the Globe audience would have been entirely unaware of such parallels between current events and the episodes of Henry VIII's reign reenacted in the play. Nor can we any longer assume that the playwright composed in a vacuum, ignorant of the political implications of the story he was shaping. For, in this special Jacobean history, “All is True.”

Notes

1. Sir Henry Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon, 2 July 1613, quoted in R. A. Foakes, ed., King Henry VIII, 3rd Arden ed., corr. (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 180 (cited hereafter as Arden Henry VIII; all quotations of the play are from this edition). The probable meaning of Wotton's term “new” is discussed later in this paper.

2. The present essay assumes throughout that Shakespeare is sole author, but the central argument would not be fundamentally altered if this assumption were untrue. For an extensive annotated bibliography on the authorship question see David V. Erdman and Ephim G. Fogel, eds., Evidence for Authorship (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 457-78.

3. Based on listings in Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975-1700, 2nd ed., rev. Samuel Schoenbaum (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). Nothing is known of the Richard II listed under 1611; most likely it was an old play revived.

4. So titled in Wotton to Bacon, 2 July 1613, quoted in Arden Henry VIII, p. 180; Foakes terms this an “alternative” or “second” title (pp. xxviii-xxix), but it is more likely that the Folio title is the secondary one, bringing the nomenclature into accord with the other Folio Histories.

5. “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth,” ELH, 42 (1975), 3.

6. John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, 23 June 1613, Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman E. McClure, American Philosophical Society Memoirs, 12, Pt. 1 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), I, 461 (hereafter cited as Chamberlain Letters).

7. For the political significance of the Council scenes, see George W. Keeton, Shakespeare's Legal and Political Background (London: Pitman & Sons, 1967), pp. 336-45.

8. S. R. Gardiner, History of England 1603-1642 (1904-09; rpt. New York: AMS, 1965), II, 164-65 (hereafter cited as History); William Trumbull to Sir Ralph Winwood, 5 January 1613, ptd. in Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State (London: T. Ward, 1725), III, 420 (hereafter cited as Memorials); Foscarini to the Doge, 29 December 1612 and 11 January 1613, Calendar of State Papers, Venice and Northern Italy, 1610-1613 (London: HMSO, 1906), pp. 163-64, 167 (hereafter cited as CSP Venetian 1610-13); Giovanni Biondi to Carleton, 7 January 1613, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1611-1618 (London: HMSO, 1858), p. 167 (hereafter cited as CSP Domestic 1611-18); Thomas Albery to Trumbull, 14 January 1613, Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire, Historical Manuscripts Commission Reports, No. 75, IV (London: HMSO, 1940), 14 (hereafter cited as Downshire MSS); Thomas Viscount Fenton to John Earl of Mar, 27 January 1613, Manuscripts of the Earl of Mar & Kellie, HMC Reports, No. 60, Supp. (London: HMSO, 1930), p. 48 (hereafter cited as Mar & Kellie MSS).

9. Foscarini to the Doge, 22 March 1613, CSP Venetian 1610-13, p. 512.

10. Foscarini to the Doge, 8 and 15 March 1613, CSP Venetian 1610-13, pp. 505-07.

11. Council Orders of 10 January and 10 February, Manuscripts of the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry, HMC Reports, No. 45, III (London: HMSO, 1926), 148-49 (hereafter cited as Buccleuch & Queensberry MSS), and CSP Domestic 1611-18, p. 169. The musters were ordered to be completed and certificates returned to the Council by April 1, but most counties failed to meet that deadline; see CSP Domestic 1611-18, pp. 177-91, and for Northamptonshire, Buccleuch & Queensberry MSS, III, 163-71.

12. Chamberlain to Carleton, Chamberlain Letters, I, 410.

13. Carre to Trumbull, Downshire MSS, IV, 20.

14. Edmondes to Trumbull, 28 January 1613, Downshire MSS, IV, 27.

15. 23 February 1613, Chamberlain Letters, I, 427.

16. Gardiner, History, II, 162; Chamberlain to Alice Carleton, 18 February 1613, Chamberlain Letters, I, 425.

17. See the comparison, with differing emphasis, in the Arden Henry VIII, pp. xxx-xxxv.

18. The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 255.

19. Trumbull to Winwood, Memorials, III, 439.

20. Foscarini to the Doge, 15 March 1613, CSP Venetian 1610-13, p. 509.

21. Foscarini to the Doge, 8 March 1613, CSP Venetian 1610-13, p. 505.

22. G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 334.

23. Chamberlain to Winwood, Chamberlain Letters, I, 459.

24. Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, 25 March 1613, Chamberlain Letters, I, 441.

25. Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Thomas B. Howell, II (London: R. Bagshaw, 1809), col. 93 (hereafter cited as State Trials); Gardiner History, II, 187-91; Wotton to Bacon, 27 May and 18 June 1613, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan P. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), II, 28, 30 (hereafter cited as Life and Letters); a concise summary of the case is provided by James Spedding in his Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, IV (London: Longmans, 1868), 346-47.

26. Chamberlain to Carleton, 19 November and 17 December 1612, 13 May 1613, Chamberlain Letters, I, 392, 396, 453.

27. Wotton to Bacon, 22 April 1613, Life and Letters, II, 19.

28. Sir William Tate to Sir Edward Montague, 27 April 1613, Buccleuch & Queensberry MSS, III, 162; Samuel Calvert to Trumbull, 4 June 1613, Downshire MSS, IV, 125.

29. Wotton to Bacon, 22 April 1613, Life and Letters, II, 19; cf. Fenton's report to Mar, 2 May 1613, that the arrest “is fakt [fact, deed] of his Majesties owin, and soe weill and judiciouslye caried that … I think he shall never be more a courteoure” (Mar & Kellie MSS, II, 50).

30. Chamberlain to Winwood, 6 May and 10 June 1613, and to Carleton, 23 June 1613, Chamberlain Letters, I, 447, 458, 461; Sir John Throckmorton to Trumbull, 27 May and 21 June 1613, Downshire MSS, IV, 117, 152; Sir Henry Neville to Winwood, 18 June 1613, Memorials, III, 463.

31. Cf. Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, 24 June 1613, in Robert F. Williams, The Court and Times of James the First (London: Colburn, 1848), I, 248: “The manifest faction which is between the family of the Howards on one side, and the Earl of Southampton and Viscount Rochester on the other, is supposed to be the cause [that the ‘great places’ at court remain unfilled]”; see also Fenton to Mar, 20 May 1613, and n.d. [between 12 and 30 June], Mar & Kellie MSS, II, 51-52.

32. The words are Anthony Weldon's in The Court and Character of King James (1650), in Sir Walter Scott, ed., Secret History of the Court of James the First (Edinburgh: J. Ballantyne, 1811), I, 386.

33. Chamberlain to Winwood, 10 June 1613, Chamberlain Letters, I, 458.

34. State Trials, II, col. 807.

35. Ibid., II, col. 811.

36. The only season with a higher total is 1611-12, but the records for that year contain manifest inaccuracies; see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), IV, 168-83, and G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 94-96.

37. State Trials, II, col. 819.

38. Ibid., II, col. 813.

39. Professor Bullough argued that a revival in 1612-13 of Samuel Rowley's play on the reign of Henry VIII, When You See Me You Know Me (1603-05), may have provided the impetus for the new play, but he noted also that in Rowley's treatment of King Henry the divorce of Katherine and the marriage with Anne Boleyn “are ignored” (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, IV [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962], 438).

40. Arden Henry VIII, pp. xxx-xxxv.

41. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, IV, 437.

42. Ibid., IV, 447.

43. Cf. Clifford Leech, “The Structure of the Last Plays,” Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958), 29.

44. For evidence of earlier animosity between Abbot and the Howards see Chamberlain to Carleton, 26 November 1612, Chamberlain Letters, I, 394, and John Chandler to Trumbull, 26 January 1613, Downshire MSS, IV, 17.

45. State Trials, II, col. 808.

46. Ibid., II, col. 813.

47. Ibid., II, col. 821.

48. Ibid., II, cols. 821-22.