Although holding a minority opinion, a surprising number of writers¹ have viewed Cardinal Pandulph, the papal legate, in a kindly light, and some have maintained that in comparison with the source-play² Shakespeare's King John shows a complete absence of anti-Catholic elements.³ A recent scholar offers a far more perceptive view of the Cardinal but then seems to miss his significance and stage value as the papal legate: “Pandulph is an evil genius—cocksure and skilled in having his own way—who happens to be a papal legate”; and concludes that he is a figure of some stature but only “for a few moments in the play.”⁴ But to say that he “happens to be a papal legate” is to defuse the play; it is like saying that Shylock is a usurer, who happens to be a Jew; or that Othello is a great military commander, who happens to be black. The Cardinal's influence is much more than momentary: he has a decisive effect on the action, and he is a major source of the evils that afflict England. Pandulph is the proud churchman, who functions here as the evil counselor, the catalyst, who makes possible the collision between England and her enemies. His damnation of King John affects the structure of the play, as each of his solemn curses comes to pass. The papal legate would quite naturally be identified with the Church he represents;⁵ indeed, to use Blanch's expression, the drama could be called “the curse of Rome” (III.i.207).⁶

In his initial appearance (III.i), making a strong entrance across the stage in his scarlet robe, Pandulph would easily become the center of attention. We might imagine the Pope's legate moving to the center of the stage, most likely with the English and French factions, beginning with the two kings, fanning out on either side of him. Such a grouping would make for an iconographic scene, as Pandulph takes control of the action and maneuvers a breach between the kings, who have just pledged themselves to friendship and peace. In his opening speech, the Pope's legate insists that King John answer for his opposition to Stephen Langton, the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury:

Hail, you anointed deputies of heaven!
To thee, King John, my holy errand is.
I Pandulph, of fair Milan cardinal,
And from Pope Innocent the legate here,
Do in his name religiously demand
Why thou against the Church, our holy mother,
So wilfully dost spurn; and force perforce
Keep Stephen Langton, chosen Archbishop
Of Canterbury, from that holy see.
This, in our foresaid holy father's name,
Pope Innocent, I do demand of thee.

(III.i.136-46)⁷

The tone is reminiscent of the French king's ultimatum to John (I.i.1-22), of his demanding an accounting of John's kingship (II.i.107-9), and, in fact, of the central action of the play, as one force after another opposes John and England. In Act II John is stymied in battle. The King compromises and, as part of the settlement with the French, hands over territories to the Dauphin as Blanch's dowry.⁸ But not now; John refuses to yield and defies both Pope and legate (III.i.147-60). In providing the pleasure of this confrontation, Shakespeare was exploiting an enduring psychological truth: “To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.”⁹ People in the Elizabethan playhouse would easily identify with John as he becomes something of a giant killer. How gratifying to the audience to join the attack on officials and an institution, once all powerful and beyond the protest of the common man. The King vigorously declares his supremacy, ridicules the very name of Pope, asserts his absolute control over Church revenues, and belittles the scheme of indulgences. And then, heedless of Philip's warning, John has his finest moment:

Though you and all the kings of Christendom
Are led so grossly by this meddling priest,
.....Yet I alone, alone do me oppose
Against the Pope, and count his friends my foes.

(162-71)¹⁰

Pandulph's response is immediate. At this distance, I believe it is almost impossible to comprehend the impact of his speech. Each of the Cardinal's sanctions would be a thunderbolt, as he curses and excommunicates the English king, blesses rebellion, and sanctifies the rebel who will kill the king.

Then, by the lawful power that I have,
Thou shalt stand cursed and excommunicate;
And blessèd shall he be that doth revolt
From his allegiance to an heretic;
And meritorious shall that hand be called,
Canonized and worshipped as a saint,
That takes away by any secret course
Thy hateful life.

(172-79)

In proclaiming “And blessèd shall he be that doth revolt” (174), the Pope's legate is inciting civil war, the principal horror deplored by Hall at the beginning of his chronicle:

What mischief hath insurged in realms by intestine division, what depopulation hath ensued in countries by civil dissension, what detestable murder hath been committed in cities by separate factions, and what calamity hath ensued in famous regions by domestical discord and unnatural controversy. …”¹¹

The scene is packed with dramatic and theatrical opportunities. When one thinks of the traditional instruments for solemn excommunication, namely, bell, book, and candle (referred to by the Bastard at III.iii.12), and their easy employment as small hand properties, the possibilities for staging are manifold. It is pleasant to imagine the effects that might be achieved by the use of the bell and the lighted candle, and the various impressions that could be created by the flame as it casts its glow over the face of the Italian Cardinal.

Ronald Bayne, J. Dover Wilson, and Stopford A. Brooke would seem to be correct in holding that the excommunication by Pandulph would bring to mind Pius V's excommunication of Elizabeth in Regnans in Excelsis (1570).¹² The tension mounts as Pandulph begins to tighten the pressure on John and orders the French king to forsake him:

Philip of France, on peril of a curse,
Let go the hand of that arch-heretic,
And raise the power of France upon his head,
Unless he do submit himself to Rome.

(III.i.191-94)

When the French king says that he is bewildered, the Cardinal intimidates him with the threat which had failed to daunt King John:

What canst thou say but will perplex thee more,
If thou stand excommunicate and cursed?

(222-23)

It is ironic that it is the French king, and not the churchman, who must plead the cause of peace (224-52), as Philip struggles to preserve the “deepsworn faith, peace, amity, true love” (231) but recently pledged. “Play fast and loose with faith?” (242) the King asks, but his efforts are useless. The Roman churchman is adamant and answers this ardent pleading with the brutal command for war against England, this time invoking the grotesque image of a “mother's curse” against the king:

All form is formless, order orderless,
Save what is opposite to England's love.
Therefore to arms! Be champion of our church.
Or let the church, our mother, breathe her curse,
A mother's curse, on her revolting son.

(253-57)

Pandulph succeeds in separating the two kings (262) whose hands had been clasped in harmony. In a lengthy, confusing exhortation (263-97), the legate then moves quickly to dissuade Philip from his oath of friendship, as he argues that “The truth is then most done not doing it” (273) and that “falsehood falsehood cures” (277). The Cardinal gambles, and, having promised “The peril of our curses” (295), at the moment he is about to “denounce a curse upon his head” (319), forces Philip away from John, causing him to repudiate his promise; “England, I will fall from thee” (320).

I find it difficult to accept Donald A. Stauffer's view of “Pandulph's morally unassailable arguments”¹³ (although he does recognize them as “special pleading”) and Mona P. Highley's assurance that “Scholastic pyrotechnics make the dissertation on vows delightful—at least to the Elizabethans.”¹⁴ E. A. J. Honigmann is more to the point, I feel, in noting that “Pandulph propounds the doctrine of equivocation, hated by Protestants” and in calling our attention to other illustrations of this doctrine in Hamlet and Macbeth.¹⁵ The peace has been destroyed and “religious strength” has intervened to shatter “sacred vows” (229); blood will be shed again.

If the Pope's legate is the last to leave the stage, all the better, for what the audience hears and sees next are Alarums, excursions (III.ii. o.s.d.), the signal that fighting has begun. Ann Shirley, in her study of Shakespeare's sound effects, stresses that “throughout an entire play, the sounds often join with every other aspect of the drama to emphasize mood, meaning, or character. … The sounds must always ultimately be thought of as integral parts of the play, heightening the atmosphere, influencing the action, adding to the sense of irony or contrast. …”¹⁶Alarums, excursions are the immediate consequence of the intervention of “the holy legate of the Pope” (135). Bell, book, and candle are followed swiftly by darkness, thunder, and storm, as the armies clash on the field of battle near Angiers.

The fourth scene, Act III, opens in the French camp, with Pandulph on stage with King Philip and the Dauphin Lewis, and, as Philip deplores the French losses, the Cardinal, who urged the attack on the English, boldly declares: “Courage and comfort! All shall yet go well (4).” During Constance's mad lament on death, he stands silent and offers meager comfort to thy grieving widow (43,90), who now mourns the loss of her son. At one point in her grief, in what may be meant as an echo of III.i, she cries out, “Preach some philosophy to make me mad, / And thou shall be canonized, cardinal” (51-52), reminding us of the Cardinal's promise that the assassin of King John would be “Canonized and worshipped as a saint (III.i.177). In contrast to the distraught woman, and, indeed, to the compassionate French King, the Cardinal is calm and reserved. With the departure of Constance and the King, who leaves to attend her, Pandulph shows what is really on his mind. His conversation with the Dauphin reveals how much it is to Pandulph's interest to have young Arthur dead. His indifference to human suffering, suggested by his aloofness to the agony of Constance, becomes evident as he discloses his scheme to conquer England. When the defeated Dauphin says, Macbeth-like (III.iv.107ff.). that life holds nothing “but shame and bitterness” (111), the Cardinal begins to manipulate the prince (112-16) and goes so far as to ask, “What have you lost by losing of this day?” (116). Oblivious of the French losses on land, of the ships destroyed at sea, and of Constance's son, captured by his enemies, Pandulph speaks of more death.

In Act II Chatillion describes John's mother, Elinor, as “An Ate; stirring him to blood and strife” (II.i.63). Surely, if in Shakespeare's symmetrical structuring of the play she has her counterpart in the opposing camp, it is the Roman Cardinal who unleashes the French aggression and fosters in England “strong matter of revolt and wrath” (III.iv.167). But he seems even more, for red is associated with Mars and no other character in the play foments war and sedition as he does, as he spawns the invasion and the sufferings that would accompany it.

The Cardinal unfolds to the Dauphin a scheme as sinister as any an Elizabethan audience might ever be presented. He summons the attention of Lewis and of the spectators: “Now hear me speak with a prophetic spirit” (126) and traces out for Lewis a course that will carry “Thy foot to England's throne” (130). Pandulph is the real Ate, the bloody Mars, and now, as he betrays himself as the ruthless strategist, he is recognized as the most hated of all stage villains: the Machiavel. Repeatedly, Pandulph reminds one of the popular image of the Florentine, which Gentillet helped to spread.¹⁷ Certain of Machiavelli's maxims in Gentillet's Part II, “Of Policie,” are useful as touchstones in understanding the Cardinal, especially as he manages the French King (III.i) and the Dauphin (III.iv):

A prince neede not care to bee accounted cruel, if so bee that hee can make himselfe bee obeyed thereby.

It is better for a Prince to be feared than loved.

A prince ought not to feare to be periured, to deceive, and dissemble: for the deceiver alwaies findes some which are fit to bee deceived.

A prince ought to know how to winde and to turne mens mindes, that they [he] may deceive and circumvent them.

A prince, who (as it were constrained) useth Clemencie and Lenitie, advanceth his owne destruction.

A prince desirous to breake a peace, promised and sworne with his neighbor, ought to moove warre against his friend.¹⁸

In driving King Philip to break with John, Pandulph insists “falsehood falsehood cures” (III.i.277), and is always quick to invoke war to gain his objectives. The Pope's legate becomes the epitome of the evil counselor, and, in his handling of Philip of France and the Dauphin Lewis, he sounds like Machiavelli, who Protestants charged was responsible for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572.¹⁹

Pandulph correctly anticipates the outbreak of the disorder, which has been gathering since his cursing the English King. The Cardinal perceives John's fear of Arthur's claim to the throne and the alternatives open to John, and, as he goads Lewis to invade England, Pandulph is actually guaranteeing the death of Arthur:

O, sir, when he shall hear of your approach,
If that young Arthur be not gone already,
Even at that news he dies; …

(III.iv.162-64)

The indifference of the Italian Cardinal to the sorrow of Constance is understood when it becomes plain that Arthur will be sacrificed as a pawn in the Cardinal's project. What a marvelous moment for the actor, as Pandulph, the mighty papal emissary, works upon the youthful Dauphin and persuades him that certain success waits upon his strike against England. It is as if Lewis were bewitched by the overpowering presence of the Pope's legate and the intensity of his rhetoric: “Methinks I see this hurly all on foot” (169). When he damned the English King, Pandulph was implacable:

All form is formless, order orderless,
Save what is opposite to England's love.
Therefore to arms:

(III.i.253-55)

Again, with all the authority at his command, he solemnly invokes disorder. The Cardinal's prophecy of “strong matter of revolt and wrath” and “This hurly all on foot” (III.iv.167,169) seems to echo the homilists' familiar warnings about the horrors of domestic anarchy: “Thefts, robberies, and murthers, which of all sins are most loathed of most men, are in no men so much, nor so perniciously, as in rebels … Rebels are the cause of infinite robberies, and murthers of great multitudes.”²⁰

At the climax of his appeal Pandulph reveals what has been rankling most deeply within him:

And, O. what better matter breeds for you
Than I have named! The Bastard Faulconbridge
Is now in England ransacking the church,
Offending charity.

(ii.170-73)

His preoccupation erupts as though the subtextual motivation could no longer be kept submerged. And then, as if he perceives he may be carried away with what could appear an undue concern with the Church's material wealth, he deftly checks himself and concludes with—“Offending charity.” What makes the irony of the phrase so attractive is that this piety rises from the churchman who is bending every effort to launch an attack, and whose prayer is for sedition and assassination. An English audience would be stung by his final exhortation, “For England go; I will whet on the king” (181). There can be no mistaking the function of the Cardinal as the chief mischief-maker among the sworn enemies of England, for the scene ends with the words of the Dauphin, “If you say ay, the King will not say no” (183).

Cardinal Pandulph plays a major role in the woes that scourge the kingdom, for his function in the struggle is nothing less than the conjuring of chaos in the achieving of Rome's goals.

Notes

1. See Henry S. Bowden, Religion of Shakespeare (London: Burns & Oates, 1899), p. 127; Gerard M. Greenewald, O. M. Cap, Shakespeare's Attitude Towards the Catholic Church in “King John” (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 1938), pp. 152, 179-80 et passim; John H. de Groot, The Shakespeares and “The Old Faith” (New York: King's Crown Press, 1946), p. 216; Heinrich Mutschmann and Karl Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952), p. 301; Mona P. Highley, “Shakespeare's Poetic and Dramatic Treatment of Six Religious Characters,” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1965, p. 257 et passim.

2. The problems of dating King John and its connection with the anonymous The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, are still debated. For a brief statement of the question and a conclusion, see Herschel Baker, ed., King John, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), p. 765, where he concludes that “most scholars still prefer to think that Shakespeare wrote King John, as E. K. Chambers said, with a copy of The Troublesome Reign at hand” and that “1594-95 would seem to be the safest guess.”

3. See, for instance, Gerard M. Greenewald, pp. 152, 179, 181; John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (1945; rpt. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1952), p. 331.

4. John T. Onuska, Jr., “Imperial Grooms: The Prelate in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1966, pp. 111, 120.

5. In estimating the probable audience reaction to Pandulph's behavior, it is helpful to remember that during Elizabeth's reign treatises were being written advocating deposition, renunciation of allegiance, and the right of subjects to rebel and that these were regarded as treasonous documents. Tudor preachers taught that obedience is the root of all virtues and all felicity, that to threaten the king is to threaten the commonwealth, that subjects manifest unnatural conduct who rebel, and that the result of such disorder is foreign invasion (see Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies [1934; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1970], pp. 38, 44, 52, 55 et passim). But official insistence on such doctrines was itself an implicit admission of real dangers. Writing of the Elizabethan preachers, Helen C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (1944; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1965), p. 189, notes that “The Controversy with Rome was certainly a live one, and the Roman menace never far from their thoughts into the nineties, one may safely say.” I have tried to touch on the principles and the personalities involved in the debate over Catholicism in “Shakespeare's Major Clerical Characters: A Study of Their Dramatic Function,” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1977, pp. 66-68, n. 3.

6. All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).

7. E. A. J. Honigmann, the New Arden editor, says: “The ‘holy father Pope, holy mother Church’ jargon was detested by Protestants” (The Arden Shakespeare: King John, 4th ed. [London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1954], III.i.63-71 [137-45] and note).

8. Herschel Baker, the Riverside editor of King John, notes: “In this scene, as elsewhere in the play, chronology is violently distorted. The betrothal of Lewis and Blanch and Pandulph's protest about John's intransigence, which are represented as almost simultaneous events, occurred respectively in 1200 and 1211” (The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974], III.i.138-46 and note.)

9. George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 2: Reason in Society (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905). pp. 81-82.

10. Peter Saccio, Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 204, says John “is no hero in Shakespeare, but he does express heroic resistance to Pandulph” and that the “speeches in which he does so are couched in specifically Reformation terms. …”

11. Edward Hall, Hall's Chronicle (1809; rpt. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965), p. 1.

12. Ronald Bayne, “Religion,” Shakespeare's England, ed. Sidney Lee and C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), I, 52-53; J. Dover Wilson, ed., “Introduction,” The New Cambridge Shakespeare: King John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. lviii; Stopford A. Brooke, Ten More Plays of Shakespeare (1913; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1963), pp. 230-31.

13. Donald A. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images: The Development of His Moral Ideas (1949; rpt. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 85.

14. Highley, p. 49.

15. E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., The Arden Shakespeare: King John, III.i.189-223 and note.

16. Ann Shirley, Shakespeare's Use of Off-Stage Sounds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. xii, 122.

17. Irving Ribner, “The Significance of Gentillet's Contre-Machiavel,” Modern Language Quarterly, X (1949), 153-57, pointed out that both “The Prince and The Discourses had been widely translated into English before 1600.” Ribner argues that “All of these manuscripts were evidently widely circulated” and that “the Contre-Machiavel was merely one of the many church attacks upon Machiavelli which helped foster an already existent misconception” (pp. 154, 157).

18. Innocent Gentillet, A Discourse Upon the Meanes of Vvel Governing, trans. Simon Patericke (1602; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1969), pp. 199, 216, 246, 250, 252, 293.

19. According to Bihlmeyer-Tüchle, “The Holy See had nothing whatsoever to do with the massacre” and “Gregory XIII (pope since May 13, 1572) certainly knew nothing of the plot” (Karl Bihlmeyer, Church History, rev. Hermann Tüchle, trans. from the 17th German ed. by Victor E. Mills and Francis J. Muller [Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1966], III, 173). Nevertheless, that “there was rejoicing in Rome (Te Deum, procession, a Bull of Jubilee and a memorial medal) at the message from the French court. …” (ibid.) could only intensify antipathy in the Protestant North toward the Pope and the Church.

20. Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies (1934; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1970), p. 51.