18 The Palace at Westminster. King Henry & the Prince of Wales: ‘O pardon me, my liege!’ [4.3.268]. Painted by Josiah Boydell; engraved by Robert Thew; published by J. & J. Boydell in 1798

  The scene following the King’s death provides the first public evidence of Harry’s ability to reform from a wild youth to a sober king, for the promise of reformation he made privately in Part One (1.2.198–207) is here reaffirmed to his brothers and other nobles, who fear that ‘all will be overturned’ (5.2.19) and riot enthroned. Harry moves quickly to allay their fears, reassuring them that ‘This is the English, not the Turkish, court: / Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, / But Harry, Harry’ (47–9). To convince them further, he draws from a biblical passage about shedding the old Adam and rising anew clad in ‘the whole armour of God’ (Ephesians, 6.13–16), vowing that he has become a new man, his youthful misrule buried with his father:

  My father is gone wild into his grave,

  For in his tomb lie my affections;

  And with his spirits sadly I survive

  To mock the expectation of the world,

  To frustrate prophecies and to raze out

  Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down

  After my seeming.

  (122–8)

  19 Prince Henry (Matthew Macfadyen) at the bedside of the King (David Bradley) in 4.3, in a production directed by Nicholas Hytner on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre, 2005

  Here the mocking of expectation that has characterized so much of the play’s chronicle history comes full circle: Harry apparently believes in a consensual transfer of wildness from the prodigal son to the usurping father which permits the ‘instantly reformed son to become the legitimate heir’ (Crewe, ‘Reforming’, 236). Harry and his father have exchanged personae: King Henry has assumed his son’s transgressions in death, and in Harry, his father’s sobriety lives on.

  The fate of the Lord Chief Justice becomes the litmus test for the sincerity of Harry’s conversion: whether, as King, he will be willing to overlook the Justice’s imprisoning him for a box on the ear or instead will exact revenge on him and elevate Falstaff as his chief counsellor. Having witnessed the Prince’s confession to his father in the deathbed scene, audiences should not be surprised by his about-face; but the fact that the others were not witness to that confession heightens the irony of their fears of him and makes his new humility all the more satisfying. Yet the old Harry who likes to toy with others and make them squirm resurfaces here, for although one may assume that a reformed Prince will deal magnanimously with the Justice, he in fact berates him, accuses him of disrespect and leaves everyone present doubting his capacity to be impartial. To the Justice’s claim that if he ‘be measured rightly, / Your majesty hath no just cause to hate me’ (5.2.65 – 6), the King replies,

  No? How might a prince of my great hopes forget

  So great indignities you laid upon me?

  What – rate, rebuke and roughly send to prison

  Th’immediate heir of England?

  (67–70)

  Whether Harry is simply playing a sadistic game with the Justice or genuinely entertains thoughts of retaliation is uncertain, but his accusation motivates a great speech in which the Justice insists on the inviolable rule of law – in contrast to the easy justice which holds sway in Gloucestershire – and ostensibly convinces the new King of his fitness for the job: ‘Therefore still bear the balance and the sword’ (102). By retaining the Lord Chief Justice as a surrogate ‘father to [his] youth’ (117), Harry in effect displaces forever the anarchy of Falstaff, an assurance that lends even deeper irony to Falstaff’s bravado in the following scene, when he boasts that ‘the laws of England are at [his] commandment’ (5.3.136 –7).

  The shaping of history: chronicles as sources

  By the late sixteenth century, folio chronicles, far too expensive for most buyers, had lost much of their appeal and were not being as widely read as they once had been.87 But history itself remained a popular subject in cheap abridgements; and another way in which it was disseminated was through history plays which drew on chronicles, of which at least 70 were written between 1588 and 1603, ten of them by Shakespeare. For the historical plot of Part Two, Shakespeare drew heavily from the revised 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, a work to which he turned for material in at least thirteen plays. The Chronicles are not, like the work of modern historians, narrated from a single authorial perspective; rather, they are a compendium of historical narratives written by earlier chroniclers who freely borrowed from one another – particularly, for the period covered in this play, Thomas of Walsingham, Abraham Fleming, Edward Hall, Robert Fabyan and John Stow – which Holinshed assembled and which sometimes offer differing, even contradictory accounts of the same event. Explaining the poly-vocality of his approach, Holinshed writes in his Preface that he has ‘rather chosen to shew the diversitie’ of opinion among his sources than ‘by over-ruling them … to frame them to agree to my liking’.88 Study of how Shakespeare used elements of these different accounts to shape his historical plot reveals a great deal about his attitude towards the reign of Henry IV, and his own biases and preoccupations.

  In his first recounting of what happened at Gaultree, for example, Holinshed draws explicitly on Walsingham – ‘Thus saith Walsingham’ (3.530) – whose Historia Anglicana was published in 1418, just a few years after the events it narrates. In Walsingham’s account, when the Archbishop of York and the Earl Marshal had assembled an army in York and posted articles of grievance against the King, the King cut short his campaign in Wales and sped north, joined by the Earl of Westmorland and Prince John of Lancaster, who with his army had been appointed to defend the Scottish border. Westmorland, perceiving the great strength of the rebel army, ‘subtille deuised how to quaile their purpose’ (3.529) and dispatched messengers to the Archbishop to learn the cause of his uprising. When the Archbishop offered his articles of grievance, Westmorland sent word that he ‘liked of the archbishops holie and vertuous intent and purpose’ and offered to meet with him. The Archbishop, ‘reioising thereat’, persuaded the Earl Marshal to go with him to ‘commune togither’ with Westmorland, who duly offered to do his best to effect a ‘reformation’. Westmorland, however, ‘vsing more policie’ than honesty, proposed that they ‘drinke togither in signe of agreement’ so that soldiers on both sides would witness their new league of amity, and he then urged that they dismiss their armies to ‘depart home to their woonted trades and occupations’. The Archbishop accordingly sent word to his troops, who laid down their arms and ‘brake vp their field and returned homewards’. Secretly, however, Westmorland had commanded an increase in his own numbers and, certain of the rebels’ vulnerability, proceeded to arrest the unsuspecting Archbishop, the Earl Marshal and ‘diuerse other’ for treason (3.530).

  Holinshed then reports that ‘others write somewhat otherwise of this matter’ and offers a rival account based on different sources. In it, briefly, Westmorland and the lord Rafe Eeuers persuaded the Archbishop and Earl Marshal to meet them ‘vpon a ground iust in the midwaie betwixt both the armies’, where Westmorland derided them for embarking on so ‘perilous an enterprise’ and instructed them to ‘submit themselues … vnto the kings mercie’, failing which John of Lancaster, whose army was present ‘with banners spread’, ‘was ready to trie the matter by dint of sword’. Cowed by this threat, the Archbishop and Earl Marshal surrendered to the King (in the person of Westmorland) and to Prince John (who was only sixteen at the time) ‘and returned not to their armie’, at which point their troops fled; ‘but, being pursued, manie were taken, manie slaine, and manie spoiled of that that they had about them’. The conclusion of both narratives is the same: the rebels were brought to the King at Pomfret and subsequently beheaded at York; and though ‘indemnitie were promised’ to some of the leaders, ‘yet was the same to none of them at anie hand performed’ (3.530).

  By adhering more closely to Walsingham’s account, Shakespeare puts a sinister gloss on the events at Gaultree. He thereby emphasizes first, the political cunning of Westmorland in pretending to accept the articles of grievance in order to manipulate the Archbishop; second, the naive political idealism of the Archbishop in trusting him; third, the skilful ploy by which Westmorland arranges a show of amity among the leaders in order to prompt the rebel army to disband; and finally, the duplicity with which Westmorland draws a dubious distinction between the grievances and the aggrieved when he agrees to redress the causes for rebellion but then arrests the rebels. Westmorland in the second account is far less treacherous; yet to heighten the drama, Shakespeare alters details in the first account by borrowing from the second. Most notably, he increases the prominence of Prince John, who plays an insignificant role in the first but stands at the ready with his army in the second, and makes him the ultimate royal authority for the ruse. Westmorland may have manipulated events behind the scenes, but in the play John appears as a calculating Machiavel, a ‘sober-blooded boy’ who, according to Falstaff, ‘drinks no wine’ (4.2.85 –8), though he pledges his faith to the rebels by making a show of drinking in front of the troops. Furthermore, by choosing the second version’s account of how the rebels meet with Prince John and Westmorland midway between both armies, Shakespeare not only creates a more theatrical confrontation, but foregrounds the treacherous ploy, reported by Walsingham, by which the armies are instructed to disband. The royal army will not move until Prince John himself gives the order, whereas the rebel army scatters in disarray, as described in the second version. In the alarums and skirmishes that follow, Shakespeare dramatizes the mayhem reported in the second version. Finally, where Walsingham reveals the duplicity of Westmorland’s strategy before the rebels succumb to it, Shakespeare does not, so that the outcome of Gaultree takes the audience unawares. The double-crossing of the rebels is designed to have maximum theatrical impact: the audience finds itself in the same position as – and thus may be inclined to sympathize with – the unsuspecting Archbishop and Earl Marshal.

  Throughout Part Two, Shakespeare conflates the history narrated in Holinshed, compressing time and anticipating events with such slick causality that, as Bullough observes, ten years of Henry’s reign are telescoped into only a few weeks (4.253). Using Hall’s Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548) as his source, Holinshed reports that following the defeat of the rebels at Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403, the King moved his army against the Earl of Northumberland (3.524), who was conspiring ‘with Richard Scrope Archbishop of York, Thomas Mowbraie Earl Marshal … and diuerse others’ (3.529). He summoned Northumberland to York and ‘dissembled’ to make peace with him because he apparently did not dare to punish him, Northumberland having armies to support him in his castles at ‘Berwike … Alnewike, Warkewoorth’ and elsewhere. The King and Prince Harry then returned to the Welsh border to pursue Owen Glendower, who ‘caessed not to doo much mischeefe’ (3.529). Meanwhile Northumberland, who was to have provided the military might for the Archbishop’s uprising, was thwarted in his intent because the Archbishop moved too speedily and precipitously for Northumberland to muster his forces; and ‘hearing that … his confederats [were] brought to confusion through too much hast of the archbishop’, he ‘with three hundred horse got him to Berwicke’, then ‘fled with the lord Berdolfe in Scotland’ (3.530). Shakespeare alters this account to reverse the chronology, turning a consequence of the defeat of the rebels by Prince John in 1405 – Northumberland’s fleeing to Scotland – into an ignominious cause of that defeat. Thereafter, according to Holinshed, Northumberland and Lord Bardolph joined forces with the Welsh; and when Glendower was eventually routed by the King’s forces in 1406, they fled to France to seek aid. Returning to Scotland, Northumberland recruited a considerable army to wage war against the King anew, retook several of his own castles in the north, but was finally defeated and ‘slaine outright’ at the Battle of Bramham Moor in 1408 (3.534).

  Shakespeare’s recasting of historical events insists on a tight organization of cause and effect. All the events which in Holinshed occur up to Northumberland’s death play out in Shakespeare as a direct and immediate result of the death of Hotspur at Shrewsbury. In the opening scene, as Northumberland hears conflicting rumours of what transpired there, Morton reports that the king has sent a ‘speedy power’ (1.1.133) led by Westmorland and Prince John to encounter him – a shrewd conflation of two accounts in Holinshed, the King’s pursuit of Northumberland following the Battle of Shrewsbury and his march north to quell the Prelate’s Rebellion two years later. In that same scene, Northumberland receives word that the Archbishop is already up in arms in York (189 –90): the Prelate’s Rebellion in 1405 is thereby made simultaneous with the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, as had been anticipated in Part One (5.5.34 –8).

  While the Archbishop clearly counts on reinforcements from Northumberland, who is not far away at Warkworth, the Earl, still smarting over the loss of his son at Shrewsbury, bows to the wishes of his wife and daughter-in-law who, shaming him with the memory of Hotspur, urge him to forsake his honour and flee to Scotland, not to muster forces, as in Holinshed, but to await the outcome of the Archbishop’s revolt. Shakespeare thus attributes more complicated motives to Northumberland than Holinshed does, with the death of Hotspur becoming a direct cause of Northumberland’s failure to support the Archbishop at Gaultree. Only passing reference is made to the death of Northumberland late in the play, and no mention is made of the protracted warfare which, in Holinshed’s account, occurred between 1405 and 1408. In this way Shakespeare causally and sequentially links the episodes of Part Two with those in Part One, forging a historical unity between the two plays that conceals a much more fragmented chronology.

  Episodes within the court of Henry IV, particularly those involving the King’s illness and his relationship with Prince Harry, are similarly compressed and reshaped. The second and final appearance of King Henry in this play is, in effect, a deathbed scene. Its compression of history hastens a process that in fact took years. Here, on the day of his death, 20 March 1413, Henry receives reports of Prince John’s capture of the rebels at Gaultree (1405) and the defeat of Northumberland and Lord Bardolph at Bramham Moor (1408), in both of which events, historically, the King himself was involved. Such compression pays off dramatically. The King’s confronting Prince Harry immediately following Prince John’s victory at Gaultree highlights the problem of royal succession: Henry is not at all sure that Harry will have the support of his brothers, two of whom are introduced for the first time. Furthermore, the imminence of the King’s death adds a radical political instability to a confrontation that otherwise parallels a similar scene in Part One (3.2) wherein the King chastises his son for bad behaviour and Harry promises his father to reform. In this play, as so often, that promise is undercut with irony.

  Holinshed reports that the King’s deteriorating health was first noticed in 1411, whereas in the play, both the Prince (2.2.38–9) and the Earl of Warwick (3.1.104 – 6) allude to the King’s illness prior to the defeat of the rebels at Gaultree, which, as indicated above, follows hard on the heels of the Battle of Shrewsbury; and the King’s death, which occurred two years later in 1413, is dramatized shortly after Prince John brings him word of that defeat – therefore, in the play’s logic, moving his death forward by eight years to 1405, although Henry himself has earlier lamented that ‘It is but eight years since / This Percy was the man nearest my soul’ (3.1.60 –1) – i.e. in 1399, the year in which Northumberland helped Henry to usurp the throne – suggesting that the scene of his death occurs in 1407. Thus Shakespeare employs a kind of double time scheme, dramatizing an onward rush of events that drives the historical narrative and confines it to a matter of weeks, yet at times allowing the course of history to seem more protracted, even if not fully in accordance with Holinshed’s chronology.

  Holinshed also provides the narrative frame for the play’s great scene of confrontation between father and son (4.3). In Holinshed, the King asks for his crown to be set beside him on a pillow and then suddenly falls into a coma so death-like that those about him ‘covered his face with a linnen cloth’. Being told of his father’s death, the Prince enters the chamber and takes the crown. The King awakes, calls for his son, and demands an explanation. What follows is brief and unemotional: Harry excuses himself by claiming that since to ‘all mens iudgements you seemed dead in this world’, he took the crown as heir apparent, ‘as mine owne, and not as yours’. In response, the King expresses a passing doubt about the legitimacy of his own possession of the crown (‘what right I had to it, God knoweth’), but Harry vows to keep it ‘with the sword against all mine enimies’, at which point the King dies, committing all to God (3.541). If this account provided a framework for the scene in the play, Shakespeare also drew on an earlier exchange between the King and Prince in Holinshed that had served as the source for 3.2 in Part One. In it the Prince, alarmed that his political enemies were slandering him for his riotous life and causing the King to suspect that he might try to usurp the throne, comes to court with ‘a great traine’ of followers to kneel before his bedridden father, swear true allegiance, and offer a dagger so that the King might dispatch him and thus rid himself of suspicion, ‘adding … that his life was not so deare to him, that he wished to liue one daie with his displeasure’. The King, overcome by this show of filial piety, embraces his son and ‘restore[s him] to his fauour’ (3.538).