SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Henry VIII and the Theme of Conscience,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. VII, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 38-53.

[In the following essay, Young examines the theme of conscience as exemplified by the character of King Henry, remarking that the historical events that inspired this play dramatized a fundamental difference between the Roman Catholic and Protestant points of view.]

Shakespeare's Henry VIII has been criticized for its lack of structural coherence; for its inconsistent presentation of characters; for its lack of sustained thematic unity; and for its linguistic deficiencies. Various theories, among them that Shakespeare wrote the play in collaboration with John Fletcher, have been argued in explanation (if not always in defence) of these supposed inadequacies. It has been suggested, for example, that the play's structure is epic rather than tragic and that the presentation of characters is consistent once that structure is understood.¹ It has also been suggested that readers and actors have in the past mistakenly substituted popular misconceptions about the historical Henry VIII for the character presented in the play,² and that, appearances to the contrary, the play is built around certain unifying themes, identified by R. A. Foakes as those of justice and injustice, and of patience in adversity.³

However, it has always seemed curious to me that the very obvious central theme of conscience has never been examined in any great detail. Paul Bertram offers the nearest approach to such an analysis (see note 2), but his article is principally concerned with analysing the character of Henry VIII and the political relationships of other characters to him. Although Bertram discusses conscience, the theme is not seen as the unifying concern of the play, nor is the topic discussed in relation to characters other than Henry. Jerome William Hogan also offers interesting comments on conscience in his discussion of the “Wild Sea” of conscience metaphor in the play, but, like Bertram, he does not explore the full significance of conscience in the play as a whole.⁴ Critics have in fact tended to deny either explicitly or implicitly the importance of the theme,⁵ and none, so far as I am aware, has identified it as central.

Historically the matter of conscience was the crucial issue that led to the annulment of Henry's marriage with Katherine of Aragon, and it was this issue, in the popular mind at least, which was thus largely responsible for England's Protestantism. Historically too, the issue dramatized a fundamental doctrinal difference dividing the Protestant and Roman points of view since it presented a classic example of conflict concerning the primacy or otherwise of the individual conscience as opposed to the authority of the Church and its priests. My intention here is to argue that, not only are these historic matters central in the play and would have been appreciated as such by Shakespeare's audience, but the theme of conscience, once its centrality is recognized, informs our understanding of the play's structure and character presentation.

In the play the word “conscience” occurs more frequently than in any other Shakespeare play, and, although the frequency of the word is not necessarily to be taken as an indication of its functional significance, the twenty-four occurrences of the term (together with the five occasions when “scruple” appears) nonetheless cannot be ignored. At first glance the question of conscience in Henry VIII appears to be restricted to matters relating to the title-character, and it is with him that I will be concerned initially. However, as I will show, the theme is far more pervasive than this and provides a context for the examination of all the other major characters as well.

Conscience is, of course, a theme that appears to have fascinated Shakespeare throughout his career. It is of particular significance in Macbeth, Hamlet, and to some extent several other plays, most notably The Tempest, but the closest parallel to Henry VIII is the much earlier Richard III. In this play, as in Henry VIII, a series of characters undergo miniature dramas of conscience, often prior to their suffering retribution for their sins—Clarence in I.iv, the Second Murderer in I.iv, Hastings in III.iv, Anne in IV.i, Forrest and Dighton as described by Tyrrel in IV.iii, Buckingham in V.i, and finally Richard himself in the dream sequence in V.iii.⁶ In both plays the title-character acts as an agent of retribution for those who fall, but with the essential difference that, whereas the evil Richard is essentially without scruple and late in the play still denies the promptings of his buried conscience, Henry, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, is portrayed as a virtuous man, who after acceding early in the play to the demands of his conscience ultimately emerges in Act V as blameless and morally and politically triumphant.⁷ In his late history Shakespeare thus appears to have returned to the structural and thematic model of one of his earliest histories. I shall in what follows, however, largely confine myself to a discussion of the later and lesser known play.

The first sign of the theme of conscience in Henry VIII in connection with its title-character occurs other than in the expected context of the marriage issue. In I.ii Shakespeare invents an episode in which Katherine petitions her husband concerning the unfair taxation of his subjects—a taxation engineered according to Holinshed, Shakespeare's chief source, by the envious Wolsey without Henry's knowledge. Henry rebuffs Wolsey, recognizing the justice of his wife's words:

                                                            Things done well
And with a care exempt themselves from fear;
Things done without example, in their issue
Are to be fear'd.

(I.ii.88-91)

He who acts in good conscience, then, needs fear nothing. Henry then redresses the injustices perpetrated in his name and overturns the Cardinal's argument that “What we oft do best, / By sick interpreters (once weak ones) is / Not ours or not allow'd” (I.ii.81-83). He thereby demonstrates the superiority of his moral conscience, showing at the same time that in the exercise of it he can act independently of even his most influential counsellor. Here, as well as earlier in the scene, in his generous and warm reception of Katherine's suit, and shortly after in his exercise of judicial authority (I.iii.210-13) Henry is portrayed as a model king, albeit one not immune temporarily to the wiles of a Wolsey.

In this brief pattern of events we may find an anticipatory parallel to what follows when Shakespeare presents the “great matter” of concern to Henry. The proposed annulment of his marriage is first mentioned in II.i during the conversation between the two Gentlemen who here act as a kind of Chorus, as they do later in the play (IV.i), conveying necessary information about events off-stage and interpreting them for the audience. When, for example, the “buzzing of a separation / Between the king and Katherine” is referred to, it is accompanied by a tentative explanation from the Second Gentleman, an explanation that fits what the audience has already seen of Wolsey:

                                                  Either the cardinal,
Or some about him near, have, out of malice
To the good queen, possess'd him [i.e., Henry] with a scruple
That will undo her.

(II.i.156-59)

This view of the situation is then confirmed and a more assertive explanation is offered—one that Shakespeare found in Holinshed—at the close of the scene by the First Gentleman:

                                                  'Tis the cardinal;
And merely to revenge him on the emperor,
For not bestowing on him at his asking
The archbishopric of Toledo, this is purpos'd.

(II.i.161-64)

Shakespeare, it would seem, is anxious initially to stress Wolsey's guile and lack of conscience and the influence he is believed to have over Henry, an influence so strong that it provides the apparent cause of Henry's thoughts of separation from Katherine and the cause of the virtuous Queen's fall.⁸ It is perhaps significant that Shakespeare re-writes history to make the first meeting of Henry and Anne occur beneath Wolsey's roof,⁹ and, although Henry's interest in Anne is not denied when we hear further about Henry's conscience, the responsibility is still placed firmly with Wolsey, while Henry is described sympathetically as a man “Full of sad thoughts and troubles”:

Norfolk
What's the cause?
Chamberlain
It seems the marriage with his brother's wife
Has crept too near his conscience.
Suffolk
[aside] No, his conscience
Has crept too near another lady.
Norfolk
'Tis so;
This is the cardinal's doing: the king-cardinal,
That blind priest, like the eldest son of fortune,
Turns what he list. The king will know him one day.
Suffolk
Pray God he do, he'll never know himself else.

(II.ii.15-22)

Norfolk and the Chamberlain then go on in the same vein stressing on the one hand Wolsey's evil motives, and on the other the virtues of Katherine, who “like a jewel has hung twenty years / About his [Henry's] neck, yet never lost her lustre,” who “loves him with that excellence / That angels love good men with” and who, it is rightly prophesied, “when the greatest stroke of fortune falls / Will bless the king” (II.ii.31-36). In contrast with Katherine the angel, Wolsey is the tempter who

                              dives into the king's soul, and there scatters
Dangers, doubts, wringing of the conscience,
Fears and despairs, and all these for his marriage.

(II.ii.26-28)

It is thus with ironic awareness that the audience perceives Henry's greeting to Wolsey a few lines later when the Cardinal interrupts his spiritual meditations:

                                                                      O my Wolsey,
The quiet of my wounded conscience;
Thou art a cure fit for a king.

(II.ii.73-75)¹⁰

Shakespeare surely intends us to see Henry as an almost saintly man, deeply and sincerely troubled in his conscience—Suffolk: “How sad he looks; sure he is much afflicted” (II.ii.62)—and betrayed by his most trusted counsellor, who, though not Henry's spiritual confessor, was nonetheless a cardinal, the Papal legate in England, and hence presumably a man of some authority in spiritual matters. What Shakespeare appears to be doing in II.ii is following Holinshed by taking note of contemporary belief (here represented by the gentlemen and by Norfolk) that John Langland, Bishop of Lincoln and Henry's confessor, or Wolsey first roused Henry's conscience. However, like Holinshed, Shakespeare later has Henry defend Wolsey from this charge and claim that the initiative was his alone and that the matter was first broached in private by him to Langland (II.iv.204-07). Thus by a rather deft manoeuvre Shakespeare in II.ii creates in his audience hostility to Wolsey while preserving for II.iv the key revelation that Henry's scruples actually came from within, a point that will be discussed in more detail below. As II.ii proceeds, Henry's virtue shows further in the manner in which he continues to express his concern for Katherine by making sure that she has the very best legal defence (II.ii.113-14), and the scene ends with what I take to be a statement of Henry's sincere and deeply-felt regret at what the necessary preeminence he is giving to his conscience is leading him towards:

                                                                                          O my lord,
Would it not grieve an able man to leave
So sweet a bedfellow? But conscience, conscience;
O 'tis a tender place, and I must leave her.

(II.ii.140-43)

As must be apparent, such an interpretation of Henry's character runs counter to the traditional stage image of the fat, lascivious, wife-killing king whose concern for conscience is mere hypocrisy, an occasion in the lines just quoted for a private joke with Wolsey who is portrayed as fully aware of Henry's motivations.¹¹ It may be argued, of course, that acceptance of Henry at face value is too simplistic, but it is my contention that what follows in the play fully supports such a view. Furthermore, such an interpretation seems more appropriate in view of Shakespeare's apparently serious intentions as suggested by the Prologue (lines 13-17) and by the alternative title the play appears to have had, All Is True, a title which implies that Shakespeare was anxious to set the record straight after Samuel Rowley's rambling and unhistorical play about Henry was reissued in 1613 and probably revived on the stage by the Prince's Men.¹² An interpretation of Henry as Shakespeare's laudatory portrait of a man of sincere conscience who was to become England's first Protestant monarch is additionally appropriate if, as many scholars have suggested, Henry VIII was written to coincide with the marriage on 14 February 1613 of James I's daughter Elizabeth to Prince Frederick the Elector Palatine, a marriage which, it was hoped, would forge a Protestant alliance between Britain and the Protestant Union in Germany at a time when Popish threats seemed unduly strong.¹³ One remembers too that James I, who is specifically complimented by Shakespeare in the play (V.iv.47), was, like Henry VIII, a descendant of Henry VII, that he owed his kingship of Great Britain to that ancestry and that like Henry he was a writer of Protestant polemic and took very seriously his role as “Defender of the Faith.”¹⁴ To think that Shakespeare presented the crucial issue of Henry's conscience as a mere hypocritical disguise for lascivious passion would be out of keeping with the context in which the play was created regardless of the internal evidence of the text itself to which I now return.

Henry's next appearance following II.ii occurs in the trial scene of Katherine in II.iv. Here he makes his most important statement about his conscience while making clear that the purpose of the occasion is to place his problem before “all the reverend fathers of the land / And doctors learn'd” (lines 203-04). He maintains that his conscience first began to trouble him after doubt had been cast upon the legitimacy of Princess Mary. Most important of all, he insists that Wolsey and the Bishop of Lincoln both be cleared of any blame for initiating his thoughts about an annulment (lines 153-55, 204-07).¹⁵ We are told that Henry's fundamental concern is that Heaven has punished him and his kingdom by denying a male heir (lines 184-94) but that in all this the virtues of Katherine in his view are not in question:

For no dislike i'th'world against the person
Of the good Queen, but the sharp thorny points
Of my alleged reasons drives this forward:
Prove but our marriage lawful, by my life
And kingly dignity, we are contented
To wear our mortal state to come with her
(Katherine our Queen) before the primest creature
That's paragon'd o'th'world.

(II.iv.221-28)

The warm personal feeling of this last statement matches that of Henry's earlier response when Katherine leaves the court, a response that includes a catalogue of her virtues expanded beyond anything in the equivalent passages in either Hall or Holinshed. Henry's behaviour is thus impeccable, and our sympathy is engaged by his description of the inner torment he has suffered as a result of his conscience, for he has experienced “Many a groaning throe” while “hulling in / The wild sea of my conscience” (lines 197-98).

Here, as earlier in my argument, I am naturally aware that actors and critics have customarily interpreted Henry's statements as mere public utterances that in this instance have nothing in common with his actual motives (see above, note 11). It is worth noting, however, that usually in such situations Shakespeare makes matters clear to his audience by allowing the character in question an aside or soliloquy that will clearly reveal his inner purposes. In Henry VIII with regard to the title character this device is never employed, my suggestion being that Shakespeare wanted Henry's words to be taken at face value and that he did not anticipate that his audience would do otherwise.¹⁶

In sympathetically portraying Henry's willingness to submit to the dictates of his inner conscience, however painful the process, Shakespeare is enunciating a commonplace of Protestant thought and one that King James had discussed in his widely-read Basilikon Doron, a work that outlines his ideals of kingly behaviour:

And as for Conscience (which I called the conseruer of Religion) It is nothing els but the light of knowledge that God hath planted in man; which choppeth him with a feeling that hee hath done wrong, when euer he committeth any sinne: & surely, although this Conscience be a greate torture to the wicked, yet it is as great a comfort to the godlie.

(1599 edition, sig. D1^a-b)

Likewise, in submitting himself to the authority of “all the reverend fathers of the land / And doctors learn'd,” Henry's behaviour further parallels James's advice to his son that “when any of the spiritual office-bearers in the Church, speaketh vnto you any thing that is well warranded by the worde, reuerence and obeye them as the Heraulds of the most high God” (sig. D4^b). Significantly, however, James warns elsewhere against believing “(with the Papistes) The Churches authoritie, better nor your owne knowledge” (sig. D4^a). Whether Shakespeare had James's book in mind we cannot know, but certainly his presentation of the deportment of James's great uncle in this scene should have been doubly flattering to James if he recognized Henry as a portrait of his own expressed ideals in the matter of private conscience. It is also clear that in the case of those particular ecclesiastical authorities presented in the early part of the play, Henry's own conscience is to be considered superior, for in Henry's aside at the end of the scene Shakespeare has the king show his awareness of the “dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome,”¹⁷ an anti-Papist sentiment that any Jacobean audience would have approved of and one that allows the playwright to develop further his presentation of a corrupt and decaying Papal dominance and the advent of a new and joyous national Protestantism that is to be the subject of Act V and that is represented in the person of Thomas Cranmer for whose return Henry significantly expresses his longing at the end of II.iv.¹⁸

During Act III Henry barely appears except in the short scene where he exposes Wolsey's duplicity, and in Act IV he does not appear at all. In the course of these two acts we see Katherine's attitude towards him change from belief that he hates her (III.i.118-20) to an all-forgiving stance in which she promises, even as she is dying, to bless the king (IV.ii.163-64). We are told how Cardinal Campeius “Is stolen away to Rome” to second Wolsey's plot, how Cranmer “is return'd with welcome” and installed as Archbishop of Canterbury (III.ii.401), and how he has persuaded Henry in favour of an annulment “Together with all famous colleges / Almost in Christendom” (III.ii.66-67). We hear how, following a council conducted by Cranmer and “other / Learned and reverend fathers of his order” (V.i.25-26), the annulment has occurred and been followed by Henry's secret marriage to Anne, an event warmly welcomed in prophetic anticipation of the birth of Elizabeth (III.ii.50-52), the climactic event of Act V. In Act IV we then witness part of the pageantry of Anne's coronation during which the Second Gentleman offers the warmest of tributes to her:

                                                                                                    Heaven bless thee!
Thou hast the sweetest face I ever look'd on.
Sir, as I have a soul, she is an angel.

(IV.i.42-44)

Further to this the Third Gentleman, in describing the ceremony itself, refers to Anne's noble bearing and “saintlike” qualities. Shakespeare's intention in all this is plain. He wishes to portray Henry's scruple as genuine and his decision to separate from Katherine as justified. The subsequent marriage to Anne, he wants to suggest, is also justified, something implied by the laudatory descriptions of her virtues and the prophetic anticipation of the subsequent blessings to be gained from Protestantism and the wonderful reign of her daughter Elizabeth.

Act V does not, as one might expect, touch on the matter of Henry's conscience, since the basic issues are taken as resolved. Even so, as I shall show in a moment, the central theme of conscience is not forgotten in this final act, since here as elsewhere in the play it is kept before us in relation to another character who undergoes his own crisis of conscience. It is this character (Cranmer) and the others who are touched by similar concerns elsewhere whom I now wish to discuss. That the play is in part structured around the rise and fall of three major characters (Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey) and the rise and averted fall of a fourth (Cranmer) has often been noted. To these I would add Anne. Her rise in fortune is obvious, and her future fall would be well known to the audience. Significantly, however, within the bounds of the play itself she is presented entirely as a figure of virtue. No hint is given of her future end, and it is concern for her well-being that appropriately occupies Henry in the final lines of the play. Like Cranmer, she is in fact protected from her enemies by the king. All of these characters (Buckingham, Katherine, Wolsey, Cranmer, and Anne) offer important examples of conscience in action. Recognition of this aspect of their function within the structure of the play, the hub of which is Henry's struggle with his “great matter,” is helpful, I would argue, in perceiving the coherence of the structure and the patterned consistency with which Shakespeare's characters are fashioned. In what follows I do not think it necessary to give a detailed analysis of each character. I shall merely point out the ways in which Shakespeare portrays the theme of conscience in relation to each.

Buckingham appears in Act I first as the enemy of the treacherous Wolsey (“this top-proud fellow” I.i.151) and then as his victim when brought to trial for treason. In presenting Buckingham, Shakespeare alters considerably his sources, for in Holinshed the Duke is clearly guilty.¹⁹ Shakespeare, however, presents him as an innocent man, wrongfully accused, and betrayed by false witnesses. According to the law Henry has no choice but to condemn him, and so a parallel with Christ's trial is set in motion that later in the play is to be referred to explicitly (V.i.136-37) in connection with Cranmer. Repeatedly it is made clear that Buckingham's conscience is free, as is apparent, for example, when he addresses the people on his journey to the Tower:

I have this day receiv'd a traitor's judgement,
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.

(II.i.58-61)²⁰

In character with his Christ-like role, Buckingham accepts his fate as “The will of heav'n” (I.i.209), forgives his accusers (II.i.65, 82-83) and is the pattern of patience (II.i.36). What his behaviour demonstrates is the superiority of a clear conscience which banishes the fear of death (II.i.37) and permits Buckingham to proclaim as he walks to his execution: “Yet I am richer than my base accusers, / That never knew what truth meant” (II.i.104-05).

Though not a precise parallel to Buckingham, Queen Katherine is also presented as an innocent victim who in the end patiently accepts adversity (III.i.137). Initially, as already pointed out, Shakespeare generates sympathy for her by presenting her, like Buckingham (and immediately following this latter's fall) as the victim of Wolsey's evil ambitions—“The cardinal / Will have his will, and she must fall” (II.i.166-67). Throughout Henry is greatly concerned for her well-being as is Anne (II.iii.2-5), and at her trial it is made clear that she has been an exemplary wife to him (II.iv.20-42) as he himself confirms. In this her conscience is clear, and later, when interrogated by Wolsey and Campeius, she again stresses her innocence:

There's nothing I have done yet o' my conscience
Deserves a corner; would all other women
Could speak this with as free a soul as I do.

(III.i.30-32)

Though angry at first, she ultimately accepts her fate in patient submission to her king—“Pray do my service to his majesty; / He has my heart yet, and shall have my prayers” (III.i.178-79). Finally in IV.ii, accompanied by her maid (significantly named Patience), she is offered in her vision an invitation to Heaven just prior to her death. She who swept from her trial at Blackfriars exclaiming “They vex me past my patience” (II.iv.128) is accompanied by Patience at her end. She is a tragic figure in part because she is an innocent victim of a situation that she never fully comprehends and in part because of her great patience and faith which are demonstrated when she remains loyal to Henry while submitting herself to the judgment of God. Audience sympathy for her is understandably very strong,²¹ and it is hardly surprising that a number of great actresses have made her role the central focus of the play.²² Sympathy for Katherine, however, is not, I suggest, created by Shakespeare to be at Henry's expense. Why else should he go so out of his way to display the king's continual concern for her (see, for example, IV.ii.115-19)? Had she not been so virtuous a figure, the drama of Henry's inner choice and the purity of his eventual decision in “the great matter” would have had much less impact, an impact already endangered, one has to admit, by the necessity for Shakespeare to admit to Henry's interest in Anne. Whether the play fully succeeds in presenting Katherine as a model of the clear conscience without at the same time throwing doubt on the purity of Henry's is debatable, but that this was its design I have no doubt.²³

To Shakespeare's Protestant contemporaries Wolsey was the supreme villain of the reign of Henry VIII. His vicious private life and his treacherous political deceptions provided a model of the presumed decadence of the Roman church in action. Shakespeare found such a picture in Holinshed and Foxe and initially builds a portrait of Wolsey as the complete hypocrite and man without conscience. He makes clear that Wolsey's interest in Henry's separation has nothing to do with the spiritual well-being of the King (II.i.156-59; II.ii.23-30), and he presents Wolsey as ambitious (I.i.53), proud (I.i.54, 68; II.ii.54), vengeful (I.i.109; II.i.161-64), lecherous (III.ii.295-96) and ultimately treasonous (III.ii.30-36). As Buckingham perceives, the Cardinal is one of those “base accusers, / That never knew what truth meant” (II.i.104-05), and as Katherine recognizes all too well, he is a master of deceit (II.iv.105-13; III.i.102-05, 145). Later, after reciting all his evils, Surrey concludes with one final accusation alluding to Wolsey's conscience:

Then, that you have sent innumerable substance
(By what means got, I leave to your own conscience)
To furnish Rome and to prepare the ways
You have for dignities, to the mere undoing
Of all the kingdom.

(III.ii.326-30)

This immediately precedes Wolsey's complete change—“I feel my heart new open'd” (III.ii.365)—and his admission of wrong-doing and recognition of his fallen state. Divested of temporal power and hopes, he discovers a new inner spiritual wealth which he describes in terms of the state of his conscience. In response to Cromwell's question “How does your grace?” Wolsey replies:

                                                                                Why well;
Never so truly happy, my good Cromwell;
I know myself now, and I feel within me
A peace above all earthly dignities,
A still and quiet conscience.

(III.ii.376-80)

Like Buckingham and Katherine, he achieves a state of patience

                              I am able now, methinks,
(Out of a fortitude of soul I feel)
To endure more miseries, and greater far
Than my weak-hearted enemies dare offer.

(III.ii.386-89)

and Shakespeare further stresses the importance of truth and conscience as he has Wolsey prophetically anticipate the fate of his successor, Thomas More:

                                                                                May he continue
Long in his highness' favour, and do justice
For truth's sake, and his conscience.

(III.ii.395-97)

Wolsey's repentance, his new “integrity to heaven” and his patience (III.ii.453, 458) form, apart from Katherine's strictures in IV.ii, our final impression of the Cardinal. Though they are features hinted at in Shakespeare's sources, they constitute in the warmth of sympathy they create a contribution from Shakespeare which seems designed to portray Wolsey as a figure of patience and redeemed conscience sharing an end parallel to those of Buckingham and Katherine. In the case of all three characters, as with the central figure of Henry, what Shakespeare wishes to stress is the prime importance of the state of a person's inner conscience: the value of spiritual integrity ultimately outweighs all temporal injustices, errors and past evil behaviour.

In the case of both Anne and Cranmer, Shakespeare is at great pains to stress the virtues of each. One is the future mother of Queen Elizabeth, a member of a “Lutheran” party (III.ii.99) hostile to Wolsey, and England's first Protestant queen, while the other is a father of the Anglican Church and a Protestant martyr. Anne first makes an appearance in the play at Wolsey's banquet but she says little and, apart from her obvious attractiveness to Henry, little else about her is revealed. Our first real insight regarding her character does not occur until II.iii, a scene entirely of Shakespeare's invention and one certainly concerned with conscience. The scene begins with Anne expressing to the Old Lady her concern and pity for Queen Katherine's plight. Then comes her assertion, complete with unconscious double entendre, that “By my troth and maidenhead, / I would not be a queen” (II.iii.23-24). Repeating the same comic interplay between innocence and experience that he had exploited so tellingly in the scene between Desdemona and Emilia in IV.iv of Othello,²⁴ Shakespeare has the Old Lady reply:

                                                            Beshrew me, I would,
And venture maidenhead for't, and so would you,
For all this spice of your hypocrisy:
You that have so fair parts of woman on you,
Have too a woman's heart, which ever yet
Affected eminence, wealth, sovereignty;
Which, to say sooth, are blessings; and which gifts
(Saving your mincing) the capacity
Of your soft cheveril conscience would receive,
If you might please to stretch it.

(II.iii.24-33)

In one sense the scene raises the question of whether Anne possesses the proverbial “cheveril conscience,”²⁵ which, in spite of her initial protestations, stretches to allow her to accept first the title of Marchioness of Pembroke and later that of Queen. However, the real purpose of the scene, it seems to me, is to stress the very opposite, by displaying Anne's innocence of the world,²⁶ her gracious and humble acceptance of honour when it comes (lines 65-73), and her continued concern for the Queen:

                                                                      Good lady,
Make yourself mirth with your particular fancy,
And leave me out on't. Would I had no being
If this salute my blood a jot; it faints me
To think what follows.
The queen is comfortless, and we forgetful
In our long absence.

(Lines 100-06)

Hypocrisy is totally absent here in the face of Anne's virtues, and Shakespeare carefully guides his audience's responses by having the Chamberlain comment in an aside on these virtues and prophetically intimate at the divine and justifying purpose which is at work:

                                                            I have perus'd her well;
Beauty and honour in her are so mingled
That they have caught the king: and who knows yet
But from this lady may proceed a gem
To lighten all this isle.

(Lines 75-79)²⁷

Later we see Anne passing to her coronation, and she is described as “an angel” (IV.i.44), as “the goodliest woman / That ever lay by man” (69-70), as “saintlike” (83), and as having “all the royal makings of a queen” (87). Even Sir Thomas Lovell, who has no great cause to wish her well, says at the opening of Act V:

                                                  and yet my conscience says
She's a good creature, and, sweet lady, does
Deserve our better wishes.

(V.i.24-26)

No blame, then, is to be attached to this virtuous creature within the boundaries of Shakespeare's play (whatever else she may have later been in history). Her clearness of conscience, a sign of her innocent virtue, is important in Shakespeare's scheme of things, since it affects our view of Henry. Had Anne been portrayed as an ambitious, unscrupulous seductress, our approval of Henry's decision in the matter of his conscience would have been seriously undermined.

Finally it is necessary to consider Cranmer to see how Shakespeare's presentation of conscience extends through to the final act of the play. Cranmer represents innocence of a different sort from that of Anne. The intended victim of his guileful enemies he is, unlike Buckingham, protected by the King, who is no longer, as he was in Wolsey's time, a victim of the deceptions of others. Initial references to Cranmer stress his virtues (e.g., IV.i.104, 110). In carefully contrived contrast with Wolsey he is humble and sincere in his relationship with Henry, and his conscience is genuinely free of taint:

                                                                      Most dread liege,
The good I stand on is my truth and honesty:
If they shall fail, I with mine enemies
Will triumph o'er my person, which I weigh not,
Being of those virtues vacant. I fear nothing
What can be said against me.

(V.i.121-26)

In even stronger terms than either Buckingham or Katherine, he is presented as a Christ-figure. Henry says to him:

                                                                      Ween you of better luck,
I mean in perjur'd witness, than your master,
Whose minister you are, whiles here he liv'd
Upon this naughty earth?

(V.i.135-38)

His patience (referred to at V.ii.18) is demonstrated by the manner in which he accepts his disgraceful treatment outside the council chamber door, and shortly after he once more declaims upon the integrity of his conscience:

                                                                      nor is there living
(I speak it with a single heart, my lords)
A man that more detests, more stirs against,
Both in his private conscience and his place,
Defacers of a public peace than I do:
.....                                                                      I shall clear myself,
Lay all the weight ye can upon my patience,
I make as little doubt as you do conscience
In doing daily wrongs.

(V.ii.71-75, 99-102)

Significantly, when Henry intervenes, he comments on this lack of conscience in Cranmer's accusers:

                                                  there's some of ye, I see,
More out of malice than integrity
Would try him to the utmost, had ye mean.

(V.ii.178-80)

Because of Henry's protection of the virtuous, Christ-like Cranmer, Henry takes on an almost god-like status. In this final act he becomes a near-divine arbiter of conscience where initially in the play he himself underwent a painful and difficult struggle with conscience. The play's concern with Cranmer's conscience is thus, once again, a means of directing our attention towards the central theme. The celebratory nature of V.iv in which Elizabeth is baptized and blessed by Cranmer is thus a prophetic intimation of Protestant England's future (the reigns of Elizabeth, then James) and as such the triumphant historical working out of the divine pattern to which Henry submitted himself when he first began to give heed to his inner conscience.

Notes

1. G. Wilson Knight, “A Note on Henry VIII,” Criterion (January 1936), pp. 228-36; King Henry VIII, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. xlix ff. All quotations from the play will be from this edition.

2. Paul Bertram, “Henry VIII: The Conscience of the King,” in In Defense of Reading: A Reader's Approach to Literary Criticism, ed. Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier (New York: Dutton, 1962), pp. 154 ff.

3. Henry VIII, p. lviii.

4. Jerome William Hogan, “The Rod and the Candle: Conscience in the English Morality Plays, Shakespeare's Macbeth and Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy,” Diss. The City University of New York, 1974.

5. G. Wilson Knight, for example, when arguing that Henry acts out of a “blend of conscientious scruple and practical expediency,” denies that the play is concerned, or “even interested, in subtle apportioning of blame” (The Crown of Life [1947; rpt. London: Methuen, 1965], p. 310); and S. Schoenbaum in his introduction to the Signet edition of the play, while suggesting that Henry's professions of scruple are ambiguous, also argues that the play is not concerned with the “buried lives” of its personages but rather with their public conduct (The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth [Toronto: The New American Library of Canada, 1967], pp. xxxvii-viii and xxxii).

6. For some recent discussion of the theme of conscience in Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet, see W. H. Toppen, Conscience in Shakespeare's Macbeth (Groningen: Wolters, 1962); Daniel E. Hughes, “The ‘Worm of Conscience’ in Richard III and Macbeth,” EJ, 55 (1966), 845-52; E. A. J. Honigmann (ed.), King Richard the Third (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 31-32; Harold Skulsky, “Revenge, Honor, and Conscience in Hamlet,” PMLA, 85 (1970), 78-87; Alan Hobson, Full Circle: Shakespeare and Moral Development (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), pp. 99-149; A. L. and M. K. Kistner, “Macbeth: A Treatise of Conscience,” Thoth, 13, no. 2 (1973), 27-43; Geoffrey Hughes, “The Tragedy of a Revenger's Loss of Conscience: A Study of Hamlet,” ES, 57 (1976), 395-409.

7. Henry's relationship to the fall of Katherine is, however, a complicated exception to this pattern as will be shown later. Robert Ornstein, a fierce detractor of the play, points out another parallel when he argues that Fletcher, who he believes wrote most of the play, “found the inspiration for Cranmer's vision in the prayer by Richmond that concludes Richard III,” and similarly linked “the historical past … with the Elizabethan present” (A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972], pp. 204, 219). G. Wilson Knight notes the correspondence in pageant, group-work, and theatrical formalism between the two plays (The Crown of Life, p. 257).

8. Later in the play the Chamberlain remarks of Wolsey that “he hath a witchcraft / Over the king in's tongue” (III.ii.18-19), but significantly this view that dominated the early part of the play can now be contradicted by Norfolk: “O fear him not, / His spell in that is out” (III.ii.19-20).

9. Shakespeare probably took the idea from George Cavendish's The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey in which Wolsey, having discerned the amorous relationship between Henry and Anne, “prepared great banquets and solemn feasts to entertain them both at his house” (eds. R. S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding in Two Early Tudor Lives [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962], p. 39). The meeting in Wolsey's house in Henry VIII is further ironic since in Wolsey's scheme there was never intended to be any place for Anne (see Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, The King's Great Matter [London: Longmans, 1967], p. 19). Hence later the Cardinal finds himself having to oppose the annulment (III.ii.32-36).

10. The incident in which Henry is interrupted is modelled on a scene in When You See Me You Know Me in which the “sad and passionate” Henry, suffering from “inward greefe” after the death of Jane Seymour is interrupted by Wolsey (scene IV). However, where in Rowley's play Henry pours abuse upon Wolsey, calling him a “Presumptuous priest” and a “proud prelate” (line 640), in Shakespeare's play the incident serves to show that Henry as yet does not perceive Wolsey's hypocrisy (Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966], IV, 490-91).

11. Attacks on Henry's sincerity in Shakespeare criticism are generally the rule rather than the exception. They are at their most extreme in such nineteenth-century criticism as William Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespear's Plays, ed. A. R. Waller in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (London: Dent, 1902), II, 305, and James Spedding's “Who Wrote Shakespeare's Henry VIII?” Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 34 (1850), 116. Later criticism has tended to be more moderate but has willingly admitted a degree of hypocrisy in Henry. Such criticism includes A. A. Parker's “Henry VIII in Shakespeare and Calderón,” MLR, 43 (1948), 331; Frank Kermode, “What is Shakespeare's Henry VIII About?” The Durham University Journal, 9 (1948), 51; Schoenbaum (ed.), Henry the Eighth, pp. xxxvii-viii; Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage, p. 211. Defences of Henry's sincerity are by contrast rare. That by Bertram in “Henry VIII: The Conscience of the King” (see especially p. 162) is the least qualified. More characteristic is R. A. Foakes, who, though he compares Henry to Prospero, also maintains that there is a degree of ambiguity regarding Henry's motives (p. lxii). To these may be added G. Wilson Knight's contention that Henry does not deliberately deceive others and is motivated by “a convincing blend of conscientious scruple and practical expediency” (The Crown of Life, pp. 309-10); John Wasson's statement that Henry is “unquestionably religious” in “In Defence of King Henry VIII,” Research Studies, 34 (1964), 270; and Howard Felperin's backhanded defence that Shakespeare is engaged in an “orthodox whitewashing of Henry” in “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: History as Myth,” SEL, 6 (1966), 245.

12. Henry VIII, ed. Foakes, pp. xxviii-xxix.

13. Ibid., pp. xxx-xxxi.

14. For a comment on the favourable manner in which Henry VIII was regarded by Shakespeare's contemporaries, see Hardin Craig's An Interpretation of Shakespeare (New York: Dryden Press, 1948), p. 363.

15. Prior to the 1950 Stratford production the bulk of Henry's speech (lines 170-220) was customarily cut. Clearly the matter of Henry's conscience was not traditionally a major concern in theatrical productions. On this point see Muriel St. Clare Byrne's “A Stratford Production: Henry VIII,” ShS, 3 (1950), 125.

16. Of Henry's possible aside at the end of II.iv. I shall have something to say in a moment.

17. Henry's aside has, of course, often been interpreted as a revelation of his hypocrisy. On this last point see J. C. Maxwell (ed.), King Henry the Eighth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. xxxv-vi.

18. Cranmer was of strong Lutheran tendencies, and it was he who declared Henry's marriage to be null and void. Eventually he became a champion of Protestantism and was virtually a founding father of the Anglican Church. He was martyred, as Shakespeare's audience certainly knew, by Queen Mary.

19. See Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: “Alas that ever the grace of truth was withdrawne from so noble a man, that he was not to his king in allegiance as he ought to have beene! Such is the end of ambition, the end of false prophecies, the end of evill life, and evill counsell” (IV, 463).

20. Cf. II.i.68, 104-06, 139-40; III.ii.254-56.

21. Dr. Johnson was clearly profoundly moved by this scene and considered it “above any other part of Shakespeare's tragedies, and perhaps above any scene of any other poet” (Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. [New York: Hill and Wang, 1960], p. 93).

22. Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, Isabella Glyn, Charlotte Cushman, Fanny Kemble, and Flora Robson are among the most famous actresses to have played the part. For a detailed account of the stage history of Henry VIII, see C. B. Young's note in the Cambridge edition of the play, ed. J. C. Maxwell, pp. xxxviii-l.

23. On this point, see J. C. Maxwell (ed.), Henry VIII, p. xxxvi.

24. In Othello the interchange between the two women also begins with a reference to “conscience.”

25. See Foakes's note on this, p. 71, n. 32.

26. Shakespeare also makes clear that her virginity is still intact (lines 23, 25) and apparently accepts Holinshed as authority that Elizabeth was conceived in wedlock.

27. Cf. Suffolk's prophetic utterance later in III.ii.50-52.