Episodes in the King’s vexed relationship with his son are telescoped and reshaped throughout the play. Historically, the King was ill as early as 1405 and thus brought Prince Henry into public life as the head of the Privy Council. By 1411, however, at the urging of his uncle the Chancellor Thomas Beaufort, the Prince attempted to force his sick father’s abdication, as a result of which the King dismissed him from the Council and replaced him with his second son, Thomas, Duke of Clarence. Twice, in efforts to prevent the new Council from forging an alliance with the Armagnacs, the Prince led a band of armed followers to try to assert his political will, in effect presuming on his father’s weakness to stage a coup.89 Holinshed neglects to record this darkly sinister intrigue of the ambitious young Prince, preferring instead to promulgate stories of his youthful impetuosity. Indeed, the story recounted above of the Prince’s appearing at court with a group of his followers – which the King understandably fears is a threat – revises as a legend of filial piety the Prince’s attempt to wrest power from the King by a show of force. A father’s disappointment in his son’s prodigal ways, after all, was safer subject-matter than a king’s fear of a prince’s political ambition.

  Thomas of Clarence thus had a potentially adversarial relationship with his older brother; and as if to acknowledge that there may be more to the story than he relates, Holinshed adds that the King admonished Harry to be good to his brothers when he accedes to the throne. Other chroniclers address the situation more directly. In Stow’s Annales, for example, the dying King tells the Prince that he fears Clarence might oppose his succession, but the Prince’s sober and generous reply – ‘I shall honor & loue my brethren aboue all men, as long as they be to me true, faithfull and obedient’ (545) – prompts the King to praise his magnanimity. This passage in Stow probably inspired the speech in Part Two in which the King admonishes Clarence not to neglect his brother:

  He loves thee, and thou dost neglect him, Thomas.

  Thou hast a better place in his affection

  Than all thy brothers. Cherish it, my boy,

  And noble offices thou mayst effect

  Of mediation, after I am dead,

  Between his greatness and thy other brethren… .

  For he is gracious, if he be observed:

  He hath a tear for pity and a hand

  Open as day for meting charity.

  (4.3.21–32)

  The effect of this speech is to reveal the King’s sanguine view of the Prince’s potential for leadership without complicating the audience’s view of the Prince with a history of his attempt to wrest power from his father by force. The King’s speech to the Prince in Stow’s Annales, furthermore, reinforces themes of Godliness, justice and good government which may also have influenced Shakespeare’s shaping of their final conversation.

  If Holinshed provided material chiefly for the play’s political plot, Shakespeare was especially indebted to Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars in fleshing out the deathbed conversation between father and son.90 Daniel provides a poetic account of chronicle history which moves directly from the Battle of Shrewsbury (3.114) to the King’s apoplexy and his final advice to the Prince, omitting everything else that happened between these events.91 The King, diseased, despondent and wracked by a guilty conscience, suffers ‘intricate turmoils and sorrowes deepe’. Addressing the crown with grave doubt about its future – ‘And now how do I leave thee unto mine, / Which it is dread to keepe, death to resigne’ (120) – he falls into a trance, his ‘soule rapt wholly with … present horror’ (121). The Prince enters and takes the crown; but the King revives, intent on redressing his ‘wrong’ by returning the crown ‘to whom it seem’d to apperteine’ (122) – presumably the 5th Earl of March, whom Richard II designated his heir – and when he discovers that the Prince has removed it, he remonstrates with him in words that closely resemble Shakespeare’s: ‘O Sonne what needes thee make such speed / Unto that care, where feare exceeds thy right?’ (124). The Prince offers a brazenly unembarrassed reply, calculated to assure his father that lineal succession can trump the crime by which the crown was initially gained: ‘Time will appease them well that now complaine, / And ratefie our interest in the end; / What wrong hath not continuance quite outworne? / Yeares makes that right which never was so borne’ (125). Still repentant, the King admonishes the Prince to add virtue to his policy, for ‘vertuous deeds … well may prove our wrong to be our right: / And let the goodnes of the managing / Race out the blot of foule attayning quite’ (126). At issue here are matters undeveloped by Holinshed but prominent in Shakespeare: the King’s unquiet soul and contrition over an ill-gotten crown, a vexed debate over whether the Prince has a lineal right to the throne and, as in Stow, an emphasis on the importance of good governance to justify his keeping it. In a telling adjustment to his source material, however, Shakespeare’s King is less penitent and more politically circumspect about his own acquisition of the crown than Daniel’s; the Prince, more penitent and apologetic for having taken it, and less calculating in his vow to maintain it.

  Daniel’s King is not entirely devoid of policy on his deathbed, however, for he concludes his advice to the Prince with a rather unethical expedient: ‘To thee is left to finish my intent’, he tells his son, ‘Who to be safe must never idly stand; / But some great actions entertaine thou still / To hold their mindes who else will practise ill’ (127). The great action the King has in mind is the ‘sacred warre’ (127) that he himself was never able to wage; and here, he recommends it to the Prince as a tactic to divert the energies of those nobles who ‘are inur’d to mutinie’ (129). This cynical strategy, whose self-serving motive undermines the ostensibly religious purpose – atonement – for which the King would have undertaken his crusade, directly influenced Shakespeare’s wily King who, on his deathbed, admits to having had an ulterior motive for planning to ‘lead out many to the Holy Land, / Lest rest and lying still might make them look / Too near unto my state’ (4.3.339 – 41). His subsequent advice to the Prince ‘to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels’ (342–3) thus sounds unabashedly machiavellian. Holinshed, in contrast, attributes a more earnest religious zeal to the King’s preparations to embark on a voyage to the Holy Land. In his account, the King shortly before his death ordered ships and galleys to be built for his trip ‘to recover the citie of Jerusalem from the Infidels. For it greeved him to consider the great malice of christian princes, that were bent upon a mischeefous purpose to destroie one another, to the perill of their owne soules, rather than to make war against the enimies of the christian faith’ (3.540). Shakespeare’s Henry for the most part seems to have a similar faith and purpose. He initially plans a crusade against the infidels to atone for the murder of King Richard – ‘I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood from off my guilty hand’ (R2 5.6.49 –50) – and while it is postponed by civil unrest in Part One (1.1.47–8), in Part Two he reiterates his penitential desire to go to the Holy Land (3.1.107–8) and later indicates that the necessary preparations have been made (4.3.1–7). In his advice to the Prince shortly thereafter, however, undertaking a crusade has become a political strategy that casts suspicion on his earlier protestations of penitence.

  In this cynical light, his dying wish to be carried to the Jerusalem Chamber, too, can be seen as a politically contrived substitution for the holy war he never undertook. Indeed, his crediting the prophecy that he was to die in Jerusalem, as Shakespeare has him profess (4.3.364 –8), is something that even Holinshed doubts: ‘Whether this was true that so he spake, as one that gave too much credit to foolish prohesies & vaine tales, or whether it was fained … we leave it to the advised reader to judge’ (3.540). There is a tradition of such ironic prophecies (see 4.3.360 –8n.), and Shakespeare’s Henry, ever the realist, no doubt appreciates the irony of his situation. Yet even on his deathbed, the anguished King is not beyond using prophecy to political advantage in a last attempt to fashion his own legacy as a divinely sanctioned ruler. One’s final response to the King, then, is appropriately mixed. He is a complicated figure, politically skilled, personally remote, morally compromised and, in death, not entirely sympathetic.

  The shaping of history: Famous Victories as source

  The scene of the King’s confrontation with his son may have come to Shakespeare most directly from The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this source; for crude as it is dramaturgically, its portrayal of events in Prince Henry’s life seems to have directly inspired Shakespeare, offering a shape and even a language for scenes in his Henry IV and Henry V plays. Two such scenes in Famous Victories – the first likely to have been fashioned from material in Holinshed’s Chronicles, the second from Hall’s Union – involve tense meetings between father and son. In the first, the Prince is summoned to the court but has scant concern for his father’s illness: ‘the breath shall be no sooner out of his mouth but I will clap the crown on my head’ (5.34 –5), he tartly tells his companions. When the Prince enters his father’s presence ‘with a dagger in his hand’ (6.0), the sick King thinks that he intends to kill him; but suddenly stricken with compunction, the Prince assures him, ‘’Tis not the crown that I come for, sweet father, because I am unworthy’ (20 –1), and, lamenting his sinful life, he exits; but his father calls him back, pardons him and pleads with him to become God’s servant, at which the Prince, relieved, pledges conversion in a line adapted from Holinshed, ‘I am born new again’ (37–8).

  Shortly thereafter, the Prince returns to visit his sleeping father for a second time and, thinking him dead, chastises himself for dereliction, vows to ‘weep day and night’ (8.20), and exits with the crown. The scene that ensues when the King awakes is echoed distinctly and repeatedly by Shakespeare in Part Two. The King reproaches the Prince for not having the patience to wait for him to die – ‘dost thou think the time so long that thou wouldst have it before the breath be out of my mouth?’ (37–8); and in response the Prince falls to his knees to excuse himself with words similar to those spoken by Shakespeare’s Prince: ‘finding you … past all recovery, and dead, to my thinking … what should I do, but with weeping tears lament the death of you, my father?’ (40 –3). The King, pleased with this answer, commands his son to stand up and puts him in possession of the crown, ‘that none deprive thee of it after my death’ (51–2), after which, following Holinshed, he confesses, ‘God knows, my son, how hardly I came by it, and how hardly I have maintained it’ (56 –7), lines which Shakespeare develops at length. The Prince in turn reassures his father, ‘he that seeks to take the crown from my head, let him look that his armour be thicker then mine, or I will pierce him to the heart’ (59 – 61).

  Famous Victories also dramatizes the legendary episode in which the Prince is imprisoned for boxing the Lord Chief Justice on the ear. Shakespeare alludes to this episode twice in Part Two: first as reported by Falstaff’s Page – ‘Sir, here comes the nobleman that committed the Prince for striking him about Bardolph’ (1.2.56 –7) – and later as confirmed by the Lord Chief Justice, who reminds the new King,

  Your highness pleased to forget my place, …

  And struck me in my very seat of judgement,

  Whereon, as an offender to your father,

  I gave bold way to my authority

  And did commit you [to a term in prison].

  (5.2.76 –82)

  This is the reason the Justice fears for his life once the Prince inherits the throne from his father. As the new King asks, ‘How might a prince of my great hopes forget / So great indignities you laid upon me?’ (67–8). The legend itself was widely recorded, most notably by Elyot in The Boke Named the Gouernour in 1531 (2.6) and later by Stow in Annales (547–8), who follows Elyot nearly verbatim. In this account, the Prince appears before the bar furious that one of the ‘servantes whom he well favoured’ – only Shakespeare identifies him as Bardolph – has been arraigned for felony.92 The Prince commands that his servant be set at liberty; but when the Lord Chief Justice refuses, the Prince, ‘all in a fury’, approaches the bench and physically threatens the judge. Unmoved, the Lord Chief Justice reminds the Prince that he represents the person of the King, reprimands him for his ‘contempte and disobedience’ of that office, and commits him to ‘the prison of the kings bench’. When told of this judgement, the King expresses gratitude to have not only so impartial a judge as the Lord Chief Justice, but ‘also a sonne who can suffre semblably and obey justice’. Holinshed, who recalls this episode only briefly, borrows from an alternate version written by Robert Redmayne c. 1540 (Wilson, ‘Origins’, 7) in which the Prince commits physical assault – ‘how once to hie offense of the king his father, [the Prince] had with his fist striken the cheefe justice’ (3.543) – for which the King expels him from his Privy Council and replaces him with his brother, Thomas of Clarence. Famous Victories borrows from Holinshed the detail of Harry’s assaulting the Chief Justice – ‘He giveth him a box on the ear’ (4.69) – and Shakespeare follows suit.

  More strikingly, however, Famous Victories expands the role of the Lord Chief Justice. After the coronation, the new King summons the Lord Chief Justice, who fears the worst, and, ‘for revengement’ of being committed to the Fleet, chooses him ‘to be my Protector over my realm’ while he is in France, explaining that he values the impartiality of his judgement: ‘for you, that would not spare me, I think will not spare another’ (9.144 –50). Shakespeare moves this scene prior to the coronation and alters it so that Harry first challenges the Chief Justice to defend his decision to ‘rate, rebuke and roughly send to prison / Th’immediate heir of England’ (5.2.69 –70) and then, as if persuaded by the Justice’s argument, rewards him by retaining him in office. This is a typically Shakespearean transformation of source material. By making the Justice squirm in fear of retaliation, Harry enjoys a kind of revenge for past injuries even though he has apparently already decided to keep him in office. He has staged the scene to disorient those present by surprising them with his magnanimity, evidence that the madcap Prince still finds refuge in the reformed King. Furthermore, Shakespeare transfers to Harry sentiments that in Elyot and Stow are spoken by his father, allowing the new King to moralize for the Justice his own response to being committed to prison and thereby to fashion a role for himself that insists on the fundamental honour of the Prince he used to be:

  I do wish your honours may increase

  Till you do live to see a son of mine

  Offend you and obey you as I did;

  So shall I live to speak my father’s words:

  ‘Happy am I that have a man so bold

  That dares do justice on my proper son,

  And not less happy having such a son

  That would deliver up his greatness so.’

  (5.2.103–10)

  The young King thus determines how his own history will be glossed: he is, as ever, the master of self-fashioning. His embrace of the Justice as his chief counsellor and ‘father to [his] youth’ (117), however, is unhistorical. Although Stow (Annales, 547–8) makes much of the Prince’s submission to the Lord Chief Justice at the time of his arrest, he reports no further meeting between the two; and Holinshed, who observes that Henry V ‘elected the best learned men in the lawes of the realme, to the offices of iustice’ (3.543), makes no specific mention of the Lord Chief Justice. Shakespeare’s only source for their meeting is Famous Victories.

  The new King’s rejection of Falstaff and his tavern companions also had its seeds in the brief scene in Famous Victories in which Oldcastle and Ned, prototypes for Falstaff and Ned Poins, interrupt the coronation procession by reminding the King of his promises to them. They note with alarm that he looks ‘very much changed’ (9.34), and he, pausing soberly, concurs: ‘so I am indeed, and so must thou be … or else I must cause thee to be changed’ (39 – 41). The King admonishes them, ‘mend thy manners, and be more modester in thy terms; for my unfeigned grief is not to be ruled by thy flattering and dissembling talk’ (37–9). Declaring that he will ‘abandon and abolish [their] company for ever’, he commands them ‘not upon pain of death to approach my presence by ten miles’ space. Then, if I hear well of you, it may be I will do somewhat for you’ (45 –8).93 The details of the King’s judicious dealing with his erstwhile companions are recorded in Hall, Holinshed and Stow, but only Famous Victories offers a scene in which the King confronts those old familiars who have dared to interrupt his coronation procession, advertises his own reformation, and publicly banishes them. Without this model, Shakespeare might never have written the great scene in which the King rejects Falstaff.

  Famous Victories, then, provided the most immediate source for Shakespeare’s shaping of chronicle history. Primarily, its alternation of low comic scenes involving the Prince and his companions with scenes of royal history offered a hybrid structural model for both parts of Henry IV. Stories of the Prince’s riotous youth had become the stuff of folklore and were promulgated early in sources such as Tito Livio’s Vita Henrici Quinti (1437), William Caxton’s revision of the Brut Chronicle (1482) and Robert Fabyan’s The New Chronicles of England and France (1516). As revealed in the permutations of the dagger episode discussed above, these stories domesticated the Prince’s serious political offences against his father as something more forgivably jejune – a young man’s rebelling against the expectations of his place, the actual danger of his actions to the realm occluded by a more benign focus on his youthful impetuosity. The early scenes in Famous Victories, in which officials from the King’s treasury are robbed by the Prince, Ned, Tom and Sir John Oldcastle, are more pertinent to Part One, although Oldcastle is but a sketch of the fat knight he would become in Shakespeare. Nevertheless, when word of the King’s death is received, Oldcastle rejoices that ‘we shall all be kings’, and Ned proclaims, ‘I shall be Lord Chief Justice of England’ (9.7–8) – a clear anticipation of Falstaff’s boast in Part Two, ‘Blessed are they that have been my friends, and woe to my Lord Chief Justice!’ (5.3.137–8). Falstaff’s recruitment of soldiers in Gloucestershire may owe a debt to a brief episode in Famous Victories, sc. 10, in which a captain conscripts two clowns for the wars in France, one of whom, John Cobbler, like Mouldy in Part Two, begs to be allowed to stay at home to do his husbandry, while the other, Derick, like Feeble, is willing to do his patriotic duty. But Shakespeare’s recruitment scene really has no identifiable source, just as Falstaff himself ultimately transcends all attempts to discover sources for his greatness. He is an original.