Justice for Gloucester’s murder is unusual in the world of 2 Henry VI in that it comes at all. It is also unusual in that it comes from below, originating with the commons in collaboration with Warwick and Salisbury. Although the commons initially rise up in anger at the news of the murder, Warwick restores calm with an appeal to due process, persuading them to “hear the order of his death” (3.2.133). The evidence, observed and reported by Warwick, offers convincing proof of death by strangulation—protruding eyeballs, dilated nostrils, hair stuck to sheets, and hands spread wide in signs of struggle. When the king fails to render judgment, or even to voice convincing outrage, the commons (now offstage) clamor for justice, sending “word” to the king that unless Suffolk is condemned to death or banishment, “They will by violence tear him from your palace / And torture him with grievous ling’ring death” (252, 255–56). It may be argued that the threat of violence qualifies the commons’ moral authority, particularly as it anticipates Cade’s bloody tactics. Yet the weight of forensic evidence, combined with the request itself, identifies their intentions as just, properly motivated by “love and loyalty” (259) rather than by lawless vengeance. Shakespeare is careful to keep the noisy commons offstage, mediating their words through Salisbury and thus avoiding the spectacle of the populace directly confronting the king. Further affirming the rightness of the common judgment, the king accedes to their demands, confiding that he himself did “purpose as they do entreat” (292). The commons thus provide the moral touchstone in this crucial scene. In the face of weak and corrupt nobles, justice in 2 Henry VI rests on the commons’ participation in due process, and the play seems to endorse their course of action both as judicious and effective and as a powerful affirmation of Gloucester’s own political ideals.

  This endorsement of participatory justice at the play’s center does not go uncontested, to be sure. As we have seen, opposing arguments come from the corrupt nobility, whose contempt for equity and justice is matched by their contempt for the so-called lower orders. But another, more troublesome, counterargument comes from the commons themselves, in the form of Cade’s revolt in Act 4. At first the rebels’ agenda seems cheerfully if not comically utopian, as Cade offers to right aristocratic wrongs through a fantastical program of social and economic leveling: “All the realm shall be in common. . . . There shall be no money; all shall eat . . . on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers” (4.2.67–74). Cade’s methods, however, make a mockery of his own ideals and the abuses of the ruling elite. His first official act—the ruling that sentences the Clerk of Chartham to hang simply because “he can write and read and cast account” (83–84)—stands as a travesty of English law in line with the play’s earlier trials. With the summary trial and execution of Lord Saye, who like Gloucester sought justice for the poor, the rebels become the horrific mirror image of the nobles they set out to reform. Unlike the contentious aristocrats, however, Cade makes no pretense to give a lawful “color” to his rulings but instead directs his radical reformation against judicial process itself, with particular animus against literacy and record keeping: “Burn all the records of the realm. My mouth shall be the Parliament of England” (4.7.13–14), he gleefully proclaims, setting himself up as sole judge and arbiter.

  How then to align the Cade episode with the sympathetic presentation of commoners earlier in the play? Does the disturbance demonstrate that the disenfranchised are incapable of sustaining the kind of participatory politics idealized at the play’s center and instead need to be governed with a strong hand? Or, as many critics argue, does it rather show the terrible costs of aristocratic misrule and the dangers of excluding the commons from political process? As York’s “substitute” (3.1.376), seduced by the duke “to make commotion” (363), the lowly Cade is both a pawn to be sacrificed in the dynastic power play and a clownish burlesque of his social betters. But the play’s bold staging of popular revolt is more than a parodic mirror of aristocratic injustices. It is also a provocative response to those injustices. Cade’s comrades see through his pretensions from the start, mocking his ambitions in pointed asides, yet they willingly fight for his platform and accept him as their spokesman. For though instigated by the ambitious York and led by the maniacal Cade, the uprising appears to gather its force and considerable following from genuine injustices and grievances. As critics point out, Cade’s articulation of popular grievances derives its authority in part from a tradition of egalitarian complaint extending back to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. But the immediate power of Cade’s complaints may stem from their particularity, from Shakespeare’s choice to embed specific contemporary grievances within the utopian appeal to a classless commonwealth. Complaints about enclosures, the causes and conditions of poverty, and the lack of redress for the disenfranchised—indeed, many of the same grievances voiced by the humble petitioners earlier in the play—all had a contemporary currency for Shakespeare’s audiences that would have resonated beyond their voicing by their discredited spokesman, and beyond the boundaries of the stage.

  In the end, the rebellious commons relent in the face of the king’s offer of mercy, abandoning Cade’s platform for Clifford’s shameless invocation of Henry V and a battlefield camaraderie that might “gentle [their] condition” (Henry V 4.3.65). “Is Cade the son of Henry the Fifth,” he asks; “Will [Cade] conduct you through the heart of France / And make the meanest of you earls and dukes?” (4.8.35, 37–38). Clifford’s burnished rhetoric restores order with the empty promise to return to a heroic past, to recover England’s losses and manhood on foreign fields. It also sets the tone for the play’s final act, dominated by York’s own fondness for heroic discourse and for the widening gulf between rhetoric and reality opened up by the bad faith of civil war. According to plan, York returns with his army from Ireland “to claim his right / And pluck the crown from feeble Henry’s head” (5.1.1–2). And unlike feeble Henry, whose hand is suited more to “a palmer’s staff” than to “an awful princely scepter” (98–99), York comes fully armed, reprising the role of warrior prince as if he and not Henry VI were the true inheritor to Henry V. York also dusts off the complaint about the royal marriage, deftly turning the gendered discourse of English patriotism against the Lancastrian queen. “O, blood-bespotted Neapolitan, / Outcast of Naples, England’s bloody scourge!” (5.1.119–20), he exclaims to Margaret, as if to shore up the legitimacy of his claim by naming the queen as the outsider—female and foreign and barbaric—responsible for all the bloodshed to come. In the ensuing battle at St. Albans, the Yorkists win the day. And Warwick, flush with victory, closes the play by sounding notes of heroic greatness, brimming with promise for a glorious future:

  Saint Albans battle won by famous York

  Shall be eternized in all age to come.—

  Sound drum and trumpets, and to London all;

  And more such days as these to us befall!

  (5.3.31–34)

  But the war has only just begun, and as Gloucester foretold before his death, “thousands more, that yet suspect no peril, / Will not conclude their plotted tragedy” (3.1.153–54). The only battlefield Cade’s followers will ever see is the blood-soaked ground of England’s civil war.

  That 2 Henry VI ends with a beginning full of possibility and dread is in part a sequel effect: Shakespeare will, after all, continue the story of the Wars of the Roses in Henry VI, Part 3. But the play’s open-endedness also suggests something about staging history—about the difficulty of confining a sprawling and contentious past within a tidy dramatic pattern, and about the inconclusiveness of historical narrative itself. On Shakespeare’s stage, English history becomes an ongoing story, played before audiences asked to witness the trauma of a past that is part of their present.

  * * *

  1. Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548), in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 3:103.

  2. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell (1592), in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 4:238.

  3. Historians usually associate this new form of political history with the influence of the Italian historians Machiavelli and Guicciardini; see F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), pp. 237–85, and Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 44–46.

  4. The practice of enclosure—landlords appropriating common arable lands for pasture—was frequently blamed for rising poverty and social unrest in sixteenth-century England. See the discussions of enclosure and 2 Henry VI in James R. Siemon, “Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation,” and William C. Carroll, “ ‘The Nursery of Beggary’: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” both in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 17–33, 34–47.

  5. Even as dramatists such as Shakespeare and Marlowe freely adopted a machiavellian tradition of political history, they also registered fears about its negative consequences through the popular figure of the ruthlessly ambitious stage-Machiavel, represented here by Richard, duke of York.

  6. For a fuller discussion of this complex scene, see the editors’ longer note for 2.3.96 SD, They fight, and Peter strikes him down.

  Further Reading

  In addition to the following books and articles, see www.folger.edu/shakespeare and www.folger.edu/online-resources.

  Henry VI, Part 2

  Abbreviations: The Contention = The First Part

  of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous

  Houses of York and Lancaster; H5 = Henry V;

  1H6 = Henry VI, Part 1; 2H6 = Henry VI, Part 2;

  3H6 = Henry VI, Part 3; John = King John;

  R2 = Richard II; R3 = Richard III; RSC =

  Royal Shakespeare Company; Union = The Union

  of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of

  Lancastre and Yorke

  Bernthal, Craig A. “Treason in the Family: The Trial of Thumpe v. Horner.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 44–54.

  Bernthal analyzes the Thump versus Horner story in 1.3 and 2.3 in light of Tudor doctrines of order and obedience essential to political and family structures of the period. Each year, thousands of boys came to London to become apprentices, thereby entering into “new micropolitical units: the families of their masters,” to whom, for all intents and purposes, they swore a loyalty oath. A contextual understanding of the patriarchal nature of the master-apprentice relationship reveals that the Thump v. Horner episode “tugs the audience in opposite directions: toward satisfaction about the victory of a loyal subject over a treasonous one, and toward dis-ease that such a victory is achieved by a servant against his master.” On the surface, the episode replays the David vs. Goliath story, Thump’s “ideological function” being to prove Henry VI’s divinely sanctioned kingship. On a deeper level, however, the apprentice’s victory dramatizes “Tudor England’s prevailing social nightmare—betrayal to the authorities by friends, servants, family.” By demonstrating loyalty to the crown, Thump’s exposure of his master clearly contains subversive activity but at the expense of loyalty to the patriarchal family, the “fundamental political building block of the ideal commonwealth.”

  Berry, Edward I. “2 Henry VI: Justice and Law.” In Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare’s Early Histories, pp. 29–52. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.

  Whereas 1H6 explores the death of chivalry and ceremony in medieval England, 2H6 centers on the death of the rule of law. Appropriately, the play begins with the interrupted reading of a legal agreement, a marriage contract; the subsequent dramatic action involves such legal terms and procedures as the right of petition exercised by the commoners before Suffolk and Queen Margaret; a trial by combat; the trial and punishment of Eleanor, the Duchess of Gloucester; an “ad hoc adjudication” of the St. Albans “miracle”; preparations for Gloucester’s trial as Lord Protector; and an insurrection designed to overthrow all law. Like Talbot, who embodies the virtue of chivalry in Part 1, Humphrey of Gloucester personifies the law in Part 2; both men die as martyrs for a principle abandoned by the rest of society. Two contrasting views of the law contribute to a growing sense of social and political dissolution: Henry’s belief that law is, above all else, “the law of God, executed directly and unambiguously by the king in earthly judgments” and York’s belief in the rights of natural superiority over those of hierarchy and primogeniture. After Cade’s rebellion, which symbolically extends the anarchy York implicitly sanctions, the play ends with lawlessness “achiev[ing] its apotheosis in civil war.” As part of the first tetralogy, 2H6 depicts the second stage in a process of decay that begins with the death of Henry V and continues through the breakdown of the family in 3H6 and of the self in R3.

  Blanpied, John W. “Henry VI, Part 2: ‘Undoing all as all had never been.’ ” In Time and the Artist in Shakespeare’s English Histories, pp. 42–63. Newark: University of Delaware Press; Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1983. (The chapter incorporates “The Henry VI Plays: In Pursuit of the Ground,” Susquehanna University Studies 10 [1978]: 197–209.)

  Viewed from a metatheatrical perspective, 2H6 “enacts a cultural collapse,” which Blanpied analyzes by focusing on three characters: the mirror figures of the “self-absenting” Henry and the “self-aggrandizing York,” and the tragic figure in the middle, Gloucester, whose rigidity in bodying forth the law is “both his strength and weakness.” As the first scene flows from “Henry’s static ceremony, through Gloucester’s reckless passion, and into York’s compacted monologue,” its structure “adumbrates the course of the play itself by demonstrating how power will be transferred from King to Protector to Usurper.” While this three-way relationship provides an “elegant structure” that appears to subdue the “weight and diffusion” of the text’s various characters, episodes, speaking styles, and on- and offstage rhythms, the result is one of “emotional incoherence.” Gloucester’s line “Undoing all, as all had never been” (1.1.108) holds the key to the “disintegrative energies” that affect characterization and overall design. Henry increasingly manifests a self-conscious desire to be absent; Gloucester’s character emerges as being the product of Henry’s “own self-evasion”; and York’s various improvisations anticipate their own dissolution in his belief in an all-consuming role as “England’s lawful king.” In Act 4, as Cade’s rebellion gets under way and the anarchic surrogate becomes a monster that his creator cannot control, the design itself begins to dissolve. Finally, in the tableaux-like scenes of Act 5, the violence proceeds without audience involvement, the main characters “dwindle . . . to puppetry,” and new characters with no interior life suddenly appear (e.g., Richard and Young Clifford). The author contends that Shakespeare allows the play to disintegrate “in hopes of finding out the sources of disintegration”; the downside of this choice is an abandonment of the artist’s role “of making chaos humanly intelligible.” In 2H6, Shakespeare “looked for sources of corruptibility in human experience and found himself looking at the corruptibility of his medium.”

  Cartelli, Thomas. “Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in Henry VI, Part 2.” In Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, pp. 48–67. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

  Cartelli’s essay addresses the issue of agricultural enclosure in early modern England by examining Cade’s invasion of Alexander Iden’s garden, a scene that “memorably stages claims for and against property.” Although both men sound the pastoral note as the scene begins, Cade’s “utilitarian” version of pastoral contrasts with Iden’s idyllic construction of his garden state: Cade believes that “the lord of the soil” has walked forth for the sole purpose of “seiz[ing] me for a stray, for entering his fee-simple without leave” (4.10.25–27); Iden, on the other hand, thinks of his walk in the garden as a demonstration of a peaceful life “neatly balanced between private pleasure and social obligation.” Cade’s “legalistic and oppositional estimate” of his meeting with Iden derives from “a thoroughly class-conscious and class-stratified position”: namely, that Iden’s garden is “enclosed private property, not in any sense . . . a public or common domain.” As the scene turns violent, Cade’s “obstreperousness” reveals the extent to which Iden’s notion of the garden—a place where rich and poor can meet on common ground—is “a deeply privileged ideological construction.” By contesting the garden’s “ideological hold . . . over all concerned parties, Cade effectively unlocks its actual status as a space intersected by mutually exclusive and competing class interests.” The author finds a “politically motivated class consciousness” central to the play’s discourse and contends that Jack Cade constitutes “the most realized example” in Shakespeare of a character “who is able to transform his political subjection into something amounting to our modern sense of class-based resistance.”