CHAPTER XII

THE TROUBLESOME REIGN OF KING JOHN

S

HAKESPEARE'S King John closes with its most often quoted words:

This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,

But when it first did help to wound itself.

Now these her princes are come home again,

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true.

Holinshed's chronicle of England records that at the trial of Edward Campion for treason in 1581 it was argued:

This little Hand, God having so bountifullie bestowed his blessings upon it, that except it proove false within it selfe, no treason whatsoever can prevaile against it, and the pope being hereof verie well persuaded, by reason that all his attempts have prooved of no effect: he hath found out a meane, whereby he assureth himselfe to speed of his desire. Secret rebellion must be stirred here at home among our selves, the harts of the people must be obdurated against God and their prince; so that when a foren power shall on a sudden invade this realme, the subjects thus seduced must joine with these in armes, and so shall the pope atteine the sum of his wish.¹

The theme was one which the Tudors found it necessary to develop again and again, and from the time of Henry VIII it was developed in the story of King John.

It will be remembered that in 1533 Pope Clement VII excommunicated King Henry VIII for his defiance of the church consequent to his troubles over his divorce. In 1535 Clement's successor, Paul III, attempted to deprive Henry of his kingdom, sending couriers to all the courts of Europe to ask help in executing the decree. The defection of the English nobles under the influence of the Catholic church came to a climax in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but Henry's reign henceforth was never free from the internal threat of the Catholic clergy and the Catholic nobles, and it was free from foreign intervention in the execution of Paul's bull only because the princes of Europe were otherwise engaged. The Tudor habit of searching history for the mirroring of the present in the past led to finding in the troubles of King John an image of the continuing conflict between church and state, pope and king, which was seen in the troubles of Henry VIII. Politicians studied King John; in 1524 Simon Fish took occasion to offer him for consideration in his Supplication of Beggars,2 and in 1539, during the Christmas season, there was acted before the Archbishop of Canterbury “an enterlude concerning king John” which showed that “King John was as noble a prince as ever was in England, and . . . that he was the begynnyng of the puttyng down of the bishop of Rome.” An eighteen-year-old witness of the play affirmed that he thought it “a pity the bp. of Rome should reign any longer, for he would do with our King as he did with King John.”³ John and his troubles with the pope and with Catholic rebels at home could be patterned instructively, and they were.

The play presented before the archbishop in 1539 was undoubtedly the King Johan of John Bale, whose theories about history we have already briefly considered,⁴ and it offers a unique opportunity to consider a history play of the reign of Henry VIII fashioned from the same basic material that was used in the two plays of the Elizabethan period, The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England and the Shakespearean King John. Unfortunately we do not have Bale's play in its original form, and it is necessary in discussing it to remember the cumulative nature of the text which the editors of the Malone Society reprint have tentatively accounted for as follows:

At some unknown date, between his conversion to protestant views and the autumn of 1536, Bale wrote, among other dramatic experiments, a play in two parts in defense of King John. About 1537, when the violence of his religious opinions led to his expulsion from his living, he formed, under the patronage of Cromwell, a company of actors to perform plays in favour of the reformed religion. Four such pieces of his were ‘Compyled’ in 1538. The same year he conceived the idea of recasting his two-part play of King Johan into a single piece suitable for stage production. In doing so he introduced allusions to contemporary events, and produced the A-version, which was performed at the Archbishop's on 2 Jan. 1539. In 1540 Cromwell fell, and Bale's theatrical propaganda came to an end. Under Edward he seems to have revised the play, but it was probably the original two-part piece on which he worked . . . Then came Mary, and Bale's second exile. On his return, he saw a chance of producing his play before the new sovereign. Elizabeth was to visit Ipswich in Aug. 1561. Bale took up . . . the A-text, and set about revising it. . . .5

Though the play dealt with problems recurrent in the reigns of both Henry VIII and Elizabeth, and though it appears to have been revised during Elizabeth's reign, it was directed primarily at mirroring the troubles of Henry VIII with the pope and with the Catholics at home. There were many parallels between John and Henry that could have been noted—the divorce for conscience’ sake, for instance—but most of them are ignored be-because they are irrelevant to the great conflict which centers the interest. Arthur does not appear at all, for Henry VIII had no Arthur problem. What Bale, Reformer and historian, proposed as his subject is stated by the Interpreter at the end of the first act:

In thys present acte, we have to yow declared

As in a myrrour, the begynnynge of kynge Johan

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Thys noble kynge Johan, as a faythfull Moyses

withstode proude Pharao, for hys poore Israel

Myndynge to brynge it, out of the lande of Darknesse

But the Egyptanes, ded agaynst hym so rebell

That hys poore people, [must] ded styll in the desart dwell

Tyll that duke Josue, whych was our late kynge Henrye

Clerely brought us in, to the lande of mylke and honye.6

And the political teaching of the play is expounded by Veritas:

for Gods sake obeye, lyke as doth yow befall

for in hys owne realme, a kynge is judge over all

By Gods appoyntment, and none maye hym judge agayne

But the lorde hymself: In thys the scripture is playne

He that condempneth a kynge, condempneth God without dought

He that harmeth a kynge, to harme God goeth abought

He that a prince resisteth, doth dampne Gods ordynaunce

And resisteth God, in withdrawynge hys affyaunce

All subjectes offendynge, are undre the kynges judgement

A kynge is reserved, to the lorde omnypotent

He is a mynyster, immediate undre God

of hys ryghteousnesse, to execute the rod

I charge you therfor, as God hath charge me

To gyve to your kynge, hys due supremyte

And exyle the pope, thys realme for evermore.⁷

But it is the plot which discovers to us the way in which the story is made to reflect the situation under Henry VIII. King Johan, as the play opens, views with pity the poor widow, England, who has come to complain of the wrongs done her by the Catholic church, but Sedition enters, defiantly proclaiming the rights of the pope:

for his holy cawse, I maytayne traytours and Rebelles

that no prince can have, his peples obedyence

except yt doth stand, with the popes prehemynence…8

Johan warns Clergy, Nobility, and Civil Order against Sedition, coming to the crux of the problem as the Tudor sovereigns saw it:

but I put the case, that this false thefe sedycyon

shuld cum to yow thre, and call hymselfe Relygyon

myght he not under, the pretence of holynes

cawse yow to consent, to myche ungodlynes?⁹

Sedition, sent away temporarily while Clergy remains to argue with Nobility, is soon back again threatening the pope's bull, but the king is reported indifferent to papal action. Dissimulation then brings in Private Wealth, Private Wealth brings in Usurped Power, and Usurped Power brings back Sedition again. As they consult what to do with Johan, Sedition offers a plan:

suspend him. and curse hym, both with yowr word and wrytyng

yf that wyll not holpe, than Interdyght his land

with extrem cruellnes, and yf that wyll not stand

cause other prynces, to revenge the churchys wronge,

adding that

for clene remyssyon, one kyng wyll subdew another

yea the chyld sumtyme, wyll sle both father and mother.¹⁰

Sedition, clothed in the habit of Religion, is successful in securing the submission of the nobles to the church by promising remission of their sins, and he then releases them from obedience to their king. The clergy aid by preaching the danger of hell incurred by all the people through the interdicting of their land on the king's account, urging them to depose the king and to make sure that succeeding kings will not depart from the church. Johan, meanwhile, continues to defy the pope, contending that the power of princes is God-given, and that the office of the clergy is to give Christian counsel, not to bear the sword.

But the clergy, the lawyers, and the nobility are all traitors to their king, and Johan is unable to promise restitution to England and her poor blind son, Commonalty. Cardinal Pandulphus is, therefore, able to make the commons (Commonalty) also submit to the church. Threatened by the cardinal with the armies of the Scots on the north, the French on the south, the Spanish on the west, and the Danes and Norwegians on the east, the helpless king, in spite of the exhortations of England, submits in order to avoid the horrors of war and yields his crown. Five days later, after acceding to all the demands of the church, he receives his crown again from the cardinal. The play moves on to the death of Johan by poisoning and to the final admonitions by Veritas, Nobility, Civil Order, Clergy, and Imperial Majesty, all of which repeat the central lesson set forth by Veritas in the passage which I have already quoted.

Thus Bale's play, while presenting King Johan as the fore-runner of Henry VIII in freeing England from the dominion of the church, yet mirrors the central problem of the reign of Johan as being that which beset the Tudor reigns: the disaffection of Englishmen, particularly the clergy and the nobles, under the influence of the Catholic church, with sedition clothed in the garments of religion. The claim of the pope to act as God's agent in giving and withholding earthly crowns was also set forth at length. The use made of historical material was that which historians had agreed upon as the proper use of history. The plot was political. The personifications were political: i) political units—England, Nobility, Clergy, Commonalty, etc.— and 2) political virtues and vices—Sedition, Treason, Private Wealth, Usurped Power, Civil Order, etc. The historical characters, though much more like the universalized characters of the moralities, such as Everyman and Kindred, than like their historical counterparts, performed their accepted function in a historical play by acting as a mirror which could teach and warn those of the latter time.

Because he fails to take into consideration the purpose of history as the Tudors saw it, Professor Dover Wilson is startled to discover that Bale was not alone in his treatment of King John as the Moses of the Reformation:

Nor is the point of view peculiar to Bale. We are not surprised to find it running as an undercurrent through the chapters on John in Foxe's Acts and Monuments. But it is rather remarkable that Holinshed, the greatest of Elizabethan historiographers, with the medieval chronicles before him and concerned to write history and not a Protestant homily, should go further out of his way to defend the ‘Moses’ of the Reformation than the martyrologist himself.11

As a matter of fact, Grafton had incorporated in his Chronicle practically intact the account of King John given by Foxe in the 1563 edition of his work. Holinshed, however, seems to have made a new study of the reign, reviewing the older chronicles and passing judgment upon them as well as upon John. But the point of view in regard to the Catholic church is the same.

It was apparently from Holinshed's chronicle that the anonymous author of The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England¹² selected the episodes which he rearranged and combined into a new chain of cause and effect. The play was in two parts, perhaps because Tamburlaine was in two parts, and the address “To the Gentlemen Readers” set forth the continuing conception of John as a Christian martyr:

You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow

Have entertained the Scythian Tamburlaine,

And given applause unto an Infidel:

Vouchsafe to welcome (with like curtesie)

A warlike Christian and your Countryman.

For Christs true faith indur'd he many a storme,

And set himselfe against the Man of Rome,

Untill base treason (by a damned wight)

Did all his former triumphs put to flight.

There is no evidence to show that Shakespeare knew Bale's King Johan, but it is generally agreed that he derived his play of King John, scene by scene, from The Troublesome Raigne, though he made it into a one-part play. King John is, indeed, so like The Troublesome Raigne that for our purpose it seems unnecessary to discuss the plays separately. Shakespeare omitted the scene in which Faulconbridge ransacks the monastery and convent, with its indecorous and irreverent comedy; he omitted the actual poisoning of King John; and he made minor charges in other episodes which have been listed by editors,13 but which do not change fundamentally the plot or the political significance of the play.

In order to understand, however, the way in which these Elizabethan plays retold the story of King John to make it a useful mirror, it is necessary to survey the story of that unhappy king as it was told by the Elizabethan chroniclers and particularly by Holinshed, who remains the accepted ultimate source. The Boswell-Stone arrangement of source material in Shakespeare's Holinshed, however useful, shows only the relation of individual episodes in the plays to their historical sources and befogs for those students of Shakespeare who do not go independently to the chronicles the importance of the changes in chronology and in the interrelation of events which were made by the dramatist. The story of King John was subjected to unusual distortion as it passed from chronicle to play, and I propose to rehearse, therefore, in their chronological order as given by Holinshed¹⁴ the most important of the events culled by the author of The Troublesome Raigne and adopted by Shakespeare. But I omit the events irrelevant to the story as told by the Elizabethan dramatists.

In the beginning of John's reign there was trouble over Arthur, At the time of Richard Coeur de Lion's death the matter of the succession was in dispute. Richard had willed the throne to his brother John, and Eleanor, the queen mother, supported John's claim against that of her grandson Arthur, the son of John's deceased elder brother, Geoffrey, and his wife Constance, a woman whom Eleanor much misliked. Constance entrusted Arthur to the protection of Philip, the French king. War between Philip and John during the year 1199, the first year of the reign, was concluded by the marriage of the dauphin to Blanche, niece to John, who resigned his claim to all the towns taken by the French except Angiers and was given some other territory. But by 1202 Philip was making demands in the name of Arthur which John refused, the peace was ended, and in the ensuing struggle Arthur was taken prisoner. Holinshed records:

It is said that king John caused his nephue Arthur to be brought before him at Falais, and there went about to persuade him all that he could to forsake his freendship and aliance with the French king, and to leane and sticke to him being his naturall uncle. But Arthur like one that wanted good counsell, and abounding too much in his own wilfull opinion, made a presumptuous answer, not onelie denieng so to doo, but also commanding king John to restore unto him the realme of England, with all those other lands and possessions which king Richard had in his hand at the houre of his death. For sith the same apperteined to him by right of inheritance, he assured him, except restitution were made the sooner, he should not long continue quiet. King John being sore mooved with such words thus uttered by his nephue, appointed … that he should be straitlie kept in prison, as first in Falais, and after at Roan within the new castell there.15

John caused himself to be again crowned king at this time, just as demands were being made for Arthur's release. Holinshed takes account of the various rumors as to Arthur's final disappearance, noting in particular the rumor that John had ordered Arthur's eyes to be put out, but that Hubert de Burgh, his custodian, had ventured to disobey, thinking that the king had issued the order in angry fury and would repent it. The false news of Arthur's death, according to this rumor, brought such a tempest of disapproval from the “Britains” that John was later glad to announce that he was alive. But after his removal to Rouen in 1203 Arthur disappeared, and it was only rumor that made John either accessory to or active as the agent of his death. Constance had taken a new husband, who claimed in her name Arthur's dukedom of Brittany, and later joined with John against the French king to fight for his right.

John's troubles concerning Arthur were thus over in 1203, but in 1205 began his great conflict with the pope, for in that year he entered into a dispute with the monks of Canterbury-over the election of a new archbishop. The matter was finally taken to the pope, who put aside the opposing candidates and demanded the election of a third person, Stephen Langton. The resulting quarrel led ultimately to the pope's excommunicating King John and interdicting his realm. Philip of France was called upon to execute the pope's bull. After a period of defiance and disaffection among his subjects John was forced in 1213 to yield his crown to the pope, and receiving it again at the hands of the papal legate, was forced to promise tribute for himself and his heirs. Peter the hermit had prophesied in January that at the feast of the Ascension John should be cast out of his kingdom, but the king had had the prophet cruelly executed. Now many saw his prophecy fulfilled.

But a third problem, that of internal conflict, arose for King John, newly reconciled to the church. In difficulty with his barons, he was aided by the pope, who proceeded to excommunicate those in rebellion against their king, his vassal. The barons appealed to the French king. Philip, having gladly prepared to execute the pope's bull against John, was equally ready to go to the aid of the rebelling barons. The dauphin, defying excommunication, set out for England, and the last year of John's reign saw the French invading England. The dying Frenchman, Melun, warned the disloyal nobles of the dauphin's intention to conquer England; but when John died, he left to his son a kingdom in which the French were still battling to an undetermined end. The peace was not made until 1218, after the battle of Lincoln and after the destruction of a French fleet which had been sent to the aid of the dauphin.

John's untimely death was variously explained, as Holinshed records, but according to the story which accounted for his death by poison administered by a monk, the monk was motivated (say Foxe, Grafton, and Holinshed) by his resentment at John's indifference to the welfare of his poor subjects.

The historical John thus had his troubles one at a time: first Arthur supported by France, then the pope supported by France, then the rebel barons of England aided by France. But while he met the rebellion of his barons, John was supported by the pope, and the great battles of his closing years were fought against the excommunicated nobles and the excommunicated dauphin who was to be their chosen king. The end of the conflict did not come until the second year after John's death, and it came in a tripartite reconciliation among England and France and the church.

But this is not the way in which Shakespeare, basing his play upon The Troublesome Raigne, tells the story. The Arden editor has listed the changes, noting

above all, the close weaving together of the Papal interference, the death of Arthur, the baronial revolt as if brought about by Arthur's supposed murder, and the French invasion . . .

He comments, however, that “all these are felt to be dramatic gains.”16 Perhaps the changes do make for dramatic gains, but if Shakespeare's play is considered as a history play, mirroring the great political problem of Elizabeth's reign, it is to the pattern of events in Elizabeth's reign rather than to dramatic genius that we must look for the explanation. It is then easy to see why we find, if I may paraphrase the summary,

above all, the close weaving together of the Papal interference, the imprisonment and death of Mary, the revolt of the nobles as if brought about by Mary's imprisonment and death, and the Spanish attempt at invasion,

for this was the actual pattern of events in the long conflict between Elizabeth and the Catholic church.

Elizabeth had been deprived, of course, as soon as she was born. Cardinal Allen, who hoped to be another Pandulphus, in his Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland wrote in 1588:

And first of all it is notorious to the whole worlde, that Henrie the supposed father to this pretensed Queene, besides the infinite quantety and enormeous qualety, of his most execrable wickednes, . . . was in fine, for his horrible sacriledges, murtheringe of Saintes, and rebellion against Gods Churche, lawfully excommunicated and deprived by Paulus tertius in the yeare 1535. and therewithall by name and in particuler all the issue that should procede of his incestuous copulation with Anne Bullen, was moste justly declared illegitimate and uncapable of succession to the croune of England: and that aswell by the sentence of the said Paule, and of his predecessor Clement the VII. in the yeare of our lorde 1533. (bothe which stande in their full force still) as by sundry actes of parliament made by Henry him self and never repealed legitimating her sister and declaring her to be base, she must nedes be adjudged by lawe and nature unable to inherite the croune.17

Henry VIII had, however, been empowered by Parliament, as Pollard says, “to entail his kingdom like a fee,” and he had named Elizabeth as the third heir, passing over the right of the Scotch line to succeed, if her heirs failed, in favor of the line of his younger sister.¹⁸ By reason of an unrepealed act of Parliament Elizabeth was still illegitimate when she succeeded, but Parliament acted swiftly to declare her “to bee, both by the Divine and Civill Law, and the Statutes of this Realme, . . . the lawfull, undoubted, and direct Queene of England, rightly and lawfully descending from the Royall Blood, according to the order of succession.¹⁹ Camden tells of the uncertainties of the time and notes:

there were some that drew against her Majestie most dangerous invectives and conclusions, in such manner as if she had not bin the lawfull Queene, although the Lawes of England many yeeres ago determined, … That the Crowne once possessed, cleareth and purifies all manner of defaults or imperfections.²⁰

Though Elizabeth's right to the crown was disputed in many quarters, the focus of the hopes of the Catholics both at home and abroad became more and more definitely Mary of Scotland, granddaughter of Henry's oldest sister and wife of the dauphin of France, who became king in 1559. Mary Tudor had played her Spanish husband's game and had involved England in a war with France which lost Calais, the last English continental stronghold. Elizabeth was firm in her determination to regain Calais, but the French king met this determination implacably. Philip of Spain was bound to stand with the English, whose city had been lost in his wars, and as long as he hoped to marry Elizabeth and continue his influence in England, he did so. But when Elizabeth made it clear that his hopes were groundless, he ceased to be firm with France. The result was that the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, concluded on April 2 and 3, 1559, left Calais in the possession of the French for a period of eight years, when it should revert to the English and a large sum be paid them.21 But Philip decided to marry Elizabeth, the daughter of the French king, in lieu of Elizabeth of England, good faith yielded to commodity, and the English were deprived of Calais forever. Professor Neale says of Mary Stuart and the English demand for Calais during these transactions:

Mary's claim had been mooted as a debating point during the peace negotiations. If we surrender Calais, the French said to the Spaniards, to whom shall we surrender it, for the Dauphin's wife is the rightful Queen of England?²²

And he adds that after the peace, “Mary openly quartered the arms of England on her coat of arms, and English ambassadors were invited to feast off plate that flaunted her claim.”

In 1560, however, the Treaty of Edinburgh was concluded, which recognized Elizabeth's right to the throne and bound the king and queen of France to abstain from her arms and title. But Mary found ways of procrastinating, her signature was not affixed, and she continued her claims. There followed the death of the French king, Mary's return to Scotland, and the series of swift-moving events in Scotland which ultimately led to her seeking refuge from her own people in England and to her spending the rest of her life as a prisoner in the country where she claimed the right to rule. The great test of her power in England came in the Northern Rebellion of 1569 and its aftermath.23

The putting down of the Northern Rebellion did not settle the conflict for the Catholics of England, however, and in February, 1570, Pope Pius V issued a bull of excommunication against Elizabeth which deprived her of her “pretended” title to her kingdom, released her subjects from their allegiance, and interdicted obedience to her laws and commands.²⁴ The bull was not “published” in England until May, and the pope did not succeed in securing the expected continental military support in executing it. The English Catholics were, therefore, placed in a difficult position. Pope Pius’ successor, Gregory XIII, did, however, send two expeditions to Ireland to be launched against England, one in 1578 and the other in 1579. Both were unsuccessful, though reinforcements, organized in Spain, were sent in 1580. In 1580 also a new kind of mission was sent to England from the pope, bent ostensibly on saving English souls by the missionary efforts of Jesuit priests, with the famous Robert Parsons and Edward Campion as their leaders. Neale summarizes the significance of these attempts:

The efforts of the Papacy to bring about the “Enterprise of England,” of which at this very time there was a pitiful manifestation in the Irish expedition, were unceasing. Those efforts always contemplated and relied upon support from a Catholic rising in England itself. Hence, the missionaries were in effect engaged in facilitating the destruction of Elizabeth.²⁵

By 1582, says Professor Meyer in his study of England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, Parsons advised Pope Gregory that the time for action had come and urged him to support the Duke of Guise's plan of invading England by renewing the excommunication. A new bull was drawn up bearing the date of September 24, 1583, and was to have been taken by William Allen when he should go with the invading army. But in 1583 a more dangerous Catholic plot, the Throckmorton plot, revolving about Mary as its center, revealed to Walsingham's spies the intrigues of the Spanish with many English gentlemen in collusion with the pope in what was known as “the Enterprise of England.”26 The progress of the Catholic plotting and of Walsingham's spying on the plotters is too complicated for recital here even if such a recital were desirable. It is only necessary to recall that the end was the inevitable elimination in 1587 of the central figure, Mary of Scotland, to Elizabeth's great grief (pretended or real).

In 1587, however, the execution of the pope's bull had finally been arranged for in an agreement between the pope and Spain, the terms of which provided:

The pope is willing to aid the king of Spain in his pious undertaking against England. If this is carried out in 1587 the pope will give one million gold ducats. The money will at once be placed in readiness. Payment of 500,000 ducats to be made as soon as the Spaniards have landed in England; the remainder in payments every two months. If England is conquered, the Spaniards to set up a good catholic sovereign, of whom the Holy See may approve, and who shall receive investiture from the pope.²⁷

The defeat of the Armada in 1588 made an end to this attempt to execute the pope's bull against Elizabeth, though there were later abortive Spanish undertakings for its accomplishment.

Meanwhile the papal blessing implicitly offered to anyone who should rid the world of the “pretensed” queen, Elizabeth, had not gone unheeded. There were many attempts on her life, but those which seem most to have roused the public were the plots of Dr. Parry in 1584; the Babington plot of 1586-87, which was the direct cause of Mary's execution; and the plot of the Jewish physician, Dr. Lopez, in 1594. The Babington plot planned the death of Elizabeth as the opening move in “the English Enterprise.” Dr. Lopez was proved to be in the service of Philip of Spain, but whether his deed was part of a larger plan is still dark. In the case of Dr. Lopez, the Calendar of State Papers gives an abstract of the evidence laid before the jury which may serve as a summary of events hitherto recounted:

As an induction, it was showed that the grounds of all the traitorous plots against Her Majesty and the realm was not for any offence or cause on her part, but for her constant defence of Christ's cause and His Holy Word against the Pope, etc., and for protecting her dominions against the ambition of the King of Spain. That hereupon the Pope and King of Spain conspired against her, the King, by his power and greatness, propping up the Pope's falling, rotten, chair, and the Pope, under pretext of religion, preparing the way for the King's ambition. This was the original motive of the cursed bull of Pius V. From this root sprung all the rebellions, treasons, and devilish practices since attempted.

This course continued until the year 1588 … then their invincible navy, as they called it, in the height of their pride, was sent to root out true religion, and destroy by fire and sword all true professors of it, and to make a bloody conquest of England; but it was defeated by God and Her Majesty's princely care and providence, and by the valiantness of her nobles and true subjects. The King and his priests, despairing of prevailing by valour, turn to cowardly treachery, and what they could not do by the cannon, they attempt by crowns. To achieve this, they put in practice three devilish attempts,—to burn the navy and ships with poisoned fireworks; to seduce some of the chief of the nobility to rebellion; and to take the blood of a virgin Queen, as whilst she lives they are hopeless; they have therefore plotted to murder her violently or by secret poison.28

It is apparent that Elizabeth's troubles with the Catholic church were for long centered about the person of Mary of Scotland. While Arthur, therefore, did not figure in Bale's play of King Johan, he was an essential figure in any mirroring of the problems of Elizabeth's reign in that of King John. And, as I have said, it is easy from this point of view to see why Shakespeare wove together with complete disregard for historical accuracy “the Papal interference, the death of Arthur, the baronial revolt as if brought about by Arthur's supposed murder, and the French invasion.” For Mary was the focusing point of the opposition of the Catholic church, of France and then of Spain, and of the English rebels. Likewise it will be understood that the omission of Magna Carta from Shakespeare's play of King John has nothing to do with Shakespeare's opinion of that venerable document, for there was no Magna Carta to bother Elizabeth, just as there had been no Arthur to add to the troubles of Henry VIII.

Long before Shakespeare's play, however, both Catholics and Protestants were arguing the conflicts of Elizabeth and the Catholic church in terms of the conflicts of John's reign. It was no less a person than John Leslie, Bishop of Ross and Mary's most persistent supporter, who, in 1569, argued Mary's right to succeed in terms of Arthur. His argument, ostensibly directed to urging that she be allowed to succeed rather than to supplant Elizabeth, considered at length the rejection of the Scotch line from the succession and proved from Arthur's case that it is weak ground “to make the place, of the nativitie of an inheritour to a kingdom a sufficient barre against the right of his bloude.” He contended that since Richard I had named Arthur—born in Brittany and not son of a king—heir apparent, John was considered an usurper for excluding him and a murderer for imprisoning and making away with him. He added:

For the whiche facte the Frenche kinge seased upon all the goodlie contries in France belonginge to the kinge of Englande, as forfeited to him being the chiefe lorde. By this owtragious deede of kinge John we lost Normandie with all, and our possibilities to the inheritaunce of all Britanie …29

Furthermore, he pointed out that the English nobles rebelling against John gave allegiance to the French king, Philip, in the right of his wife Blanche (who had been born in Spain and hence outside England), and to their son Lewis. In 1584 Leslie included Mary's son James in arguing for her right and her son's right to succeed, and he still used Arthur as a basis for his long exposition of the issues at stake.30

But King John was also made a case in point in 1571 when, after the Northern Rebellion, there was published the famous Homilie against Disobedience and Wylfull Rebellion, appointed to be read in all the churches, and thus made familiar to all Englishmen. The argument concerning John is very long, and I shall quote only a part, but it is important as representing the official acceptance of John as a proper mirror for Elizabethan England:

And to use one example of our owne countrey: The Byshop of Rome dyd pyke a quarell to kyng John of Englande, about the election of Steven Langton to the bishoprike of Canterburie, wherein the kyng had auncient ryght, … the Byshop of Rome having no right, but had begun then to usurpe upon the kynges of Englande, and all other Christian kinges, as they had before done against their soveraigne lords the Emperours: proceedyng even by the same wayes and meanes, and likewise cursing kyng John, and discharging his subjects of their othe of fidelitie unto their soveraigne lorde. Nowe had Englishmen at that tyme knowen their dutie to their prince set foorth in Gods worde, woulde a great meanie of the nobles, and other Englishmen, naturall subjectes, for this soveraigne and unnatural usurper his curse of the kyng, and for his fayned discharging of them of their othe of fidelitie to their naturall lorde, … have rebelled against their soveraigne lord the kyng? Woulde Englishe subjects have taken part against the kyng of Englande, and against Englishmen, with the Frenche king and Frenchmen, being incensed against this Realme by the byshop of Rome? … would they have driven their naturall Soveraigne Lorde the king of Englande to such extremitie, that he was inforced to submit him selfe unto that forraine false usurper, the byshop of Rome …?

The homily joins “unto the reportes of histories, matters of later memorie,” chiefly the current matter of the Bishop of Rome's connection with the Northern Rebellion.31 King James later, in 1615, in his Defence of the Rights of Kings chose to go back to John in offering a lengthy exposition of the rights of kings in relation to the church.³²

But even in the matter of rebellion the Catholics too were willing to argue the case of John, as is seen in Cardinal Allen's Defence of Sir William Stanley's Surrender, for he wrote:

what disgrace, or shame was it, for al the chiefe Lordes of our countrie, to revolt from King John, in his dayes? and absolutely to denie him ayde, and assistance, even in his lawfull warres, until he returned againe to the obedience of the Sea Apostolike, and were absolved from the censures of the same, which he had justly incurred?³³

It is no wonder, then, that Shakespeare, like the author of The Troublesome Raigne, should have chosen to mirror the conflict of England and the Catholic church in the troubles of John. The major political problems of concern whenever “the things that be Caesar's” are to be determined in relation to “the things that be God's” will best be considered separately. But in order to demonstrate how Shakespeare (following The Troublesome Raigne) used the story of John to reflect the particular aspects of the general problem as they presented themselves in his own time, it is necessary to note some of the departures from history and some particular adaptations of history which appear when the plot of King John is reviewed against the background of the historical account of the reign of that much troubled king.

The opening scene of Shakespeare's play reveals Chatillon, newly arrived to present the French king's support of Arthur's claims in defiance of John's “borrowed majesty,” sent back to his master with angry words from the English king. Turning to his mother as she bewails the necessity for war, John declaims,

Our strong possession and our right for us.

To which Elinor answers:

Your strong possession much more than your right,

Or else it must go wrong with you and me: …

Boswell-Stone notes that “There is no historical authority for Chatillon's embassage; nor did Philip demand that England and Ireland should be yielded to Arthur,”34 but he might have added that for Mary of Scotland, the wife of the dauphin, such demands were made and were supported by the French. To these demands Elizabeth offered her strong possession much more than her right, and previous commentators have noted that these words, amplified from a passage in The Troublesome Raigne, and having no historical authority, were, in fact, put there to echo the situation of Elizabeth rather than John.³⁵

The second act begins with Austria and his forces, Philip of France and the dauphin, Arthur and his mother, and the French forces gathering before Angiers. Chatillon enters, returning from England, and almost at the same time King John and his mother, Faulconbridge, and the English forces appear. The kings of France and England exchange accusations and offer counter-claims. Elinor asserts

I can produce

A will that bars the title of thy son.

And Constance replies:

Ay, who doubts that? a will! a wicked will;

which exchange, though possible between the mothers of John and Arthur, would certainly ring familiarly in the ears of the generation which had heard the long debate over the much-disputed will of Henry VIII, with its passing over of the rights of the Scotch line.36

King Philip proposes to let the men of Angiers decide the title by choosing to whom they will submit; but the men of Angiers refuse to open their gates to either force, not being able to decide who is the real king of England, even though John again advances his chief argument,

Doth not the crown of England prove the king?

There is no such uncertainty expressed by the men of Angiers in the chronicles, but it will be remembered that in the negotiations preceding the 1559 treaty of Cateau-Cambresis the citizens of Calais were said to have quibbled in exactly this fashion.³⁷ The reconciliation effected in the play between the kings of France and England through a marriage between the Dauphin Lewis and Blanche, niece of King John and daughter of the King of Castile, ignores the claims of Arthur, for whom Philip had gone to war. It is upon this occasion that Faulconbridge makes his great speech upon commodity, concluding,

Since kings break faith upon commodity,

Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee.

It is a perfect comment on the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis and on Philip of Spain's perfidy in regard to Calais, but there is nothing in Holinshed to justify such an interpretation of the French Philip's treatment of Arthur.

As Constance bewails to Arthur the woes resulting from this match-making treaty, Cardinal Pandulph as agent of the pope arrives to chide John for his attitude toward the appointment of Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury. John as king defies the pope, and as an Englishman defies the foreign priest. His message goes further:

But as we, under heaven, are supreme head,

So under Him that great supremacy,

Where we do reign, we will alone uphold,

Without the assistance of a mortal hand:

So tell the pope, all reverence set apart

To him and his usurp'd authority.

Of course, the historic John never claimed the title of supreme head, and it is a definite anachronism appearing at any time previous to the reign of Henry VIII. I shall have more to say on this point later, but it should be noted here in passing. Upon this challenge Pandulph excommunicates John in the name of the pope and blesses his murderer. Then releasing King Philip from his newly-sworn oath of amity to the English king, he urges him to become the champion of the church in executing the pope's bull, as King Philip of Spain was asked to become the champion of the church in executing the papal bull against Elizabeth.

Since there is no account in Shakespeare's play of the intervening wars and of the capture of Arthur, as there is in The Troublesome Raigne, it is something of a surprise to find, after alarums and excursions, that Arthur is now in the power of King John, who entrusts him to Hubert de Burgh with ominous muttered commands of “Death,” and “A grave,” even as he quite casually authorizes Faulconbridge to ransack the monasteries.

In the midst of the mad grief of Constance for her son and the discouraged sorrowing of King Philip and the dauphin for the French armado wrecked by a tempest, Pandulph appears to counsel patience and offer hope. He assures Lewis that John will surely not suffer Arthur to live for long, and that as the husband of Blanche, the dauphin will be recognized as the next heir and acclaimed by the people when they hear of Arthur's death. Critics have seen in this advice of Pandulph a reference to similar advice given to Philip of Spain when he was counseled to await the death of Mary Stuart in the expectation of papal support for his cause. Very recently it has come to light that Robert Parsons was, apparently without the knowledge of the pope, making such suggestions to the Spanish king just before Mary's death.38 At any rate, it is a scene impossible historically, for Arthur had vanished three years before John's troubles with the church, as has already been pointed out.

Hubert is now shown, about to carry out the royal command to put out Arthur's eyes but relenting at the crucial moment, while a younger, wiser, and humbler Arthur than is shown in the chronicles interprets John's position, “He is afraid of me and I of him.” It is an interpretation which explains perfectly the relation between Elizabeth and Alary through the long years of Mary's confinement in England.

King John, demanding and receiving a second coronation with the nobles renewing their oaths of fealty, promises them a boon, and they demand Arthur's freedom as the promised boon. Hubert makes an untimely entrance to announce the death of Arthur, and the angry nobles leave the presence of the king, while he sorrows for his sins:

They burn in indignation. I repent:

There is no sure foundation set on blood,

No certain life achieved by others’ death.

John's sorrows press upon him. A messenger reports his mother's death, just three days after the death of Arthur's mother.³⁹ There is news of the hermit's prophecy that John will yield his throne before Ascension Day. When word is also brought that the French have arrived, and that the nobles have gone to seek the grave of Arthur, the much-troubled king implores,

O, let me have no subject enemies,

When adverse foreigners affright my towns

With dreadful pomp of stout invasion!

But the omen of five moons seen in the sky makes the people murmur, and John chides the faithful Hubert for having obeyed his command for Arthur's death. Hubert's admission that Arthur still breathes brings short-lived joy, for Arthur, despairing, has killed himself while trying to escape, and the nobles, finding his body, are determined to seek revenge for what they deem his murder.

Now there is in the Elizabethan chronicles no indication that John mourned the death of Arthur, for there is no record of his ever having admitted that Arthur was dead. But there is ample evidence of Elizabeth's grief over the death of Mary and of her blaming her counsellors for having executed her command. And the whole history of the almost twenty years of Mary's stay in England tells the tale of the support given her by the Catholic nobles and of their constant threat of rebellion on her behalf. But of all this more will be said a little later.

John in desperation yields his crown to Pandulph and receives it from him again as from the pope. Thereafter the pope supports the king, but the nobles, angered by Arthur's death, plot with the dauphin, who refuses to drop his claims at the cardinal's command, protesting,

                                       What penny hath Rome borne,

What men provided, what munition sent,

as Spain might well have protested after having undertaken the English Enterprise with the promised financial support of the Catholic church.

The great armado of the French is wrecked as was the Spanish Armada in 1588. The play hurries to its end. John appears, stricken with illness. The dying Melun betrays the real French design on England,40 the nobles become again loyal Englishmen, and the dauphin is forced to leave England. John is poisoned by a monk, and Prince Henry is recognized as his successor when peace is restored between France and England. The theme of the play is sounded as a finale:

This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,

But when it first did help to wound itself.

The concluding words41 which I have quoted from the summary of the evidence placed before the jury when Dr. Lopez, in the pay of Spain, had tried to poison Elizabeth are here in point, for after the defeat of the Armada, Spain had indeed tried by golden crowns “to seduce some of the chief nobility to rebellion,” and to murder Elizabeth “violently or by secret poison.” Nor was it forgotten in Elizabethan England that in 1589 Henry III of France had been poisoned by a monk.

But such indications of the ways in which the historical narrative were altered in order to make the mirroring of the contemporary situation more effective fail to suggest the full significance of the history play as a political play. In order to grasp that significance we must see also the use that is made of dialogue and situation to set forth the great political problems involved. Of these there were four, it seems to me: 1) the right of Elizabeth to the throne; 2) the right of the pope to deprive a ruler of his crown; 3) the right of subjects to rebel; and 4) the right of a king to be answerable for his sins to God alone. All four of these problems are discussed in King John, and all four were stated explicitly in the sentence upon Elizabeth pronounced in the papal bull of 1570.

As to the first of these problems, the papal bull refers to Elizabeth as “the pretended Queene of England,” and I have already pointed out that she had been deprived as soon as she was born. It was upon the will of Henry VIII and the ratification by Parliament of the succession there ordered that Elizabeth depended for her claim to the throne. In case of the failure of Elizabeth's heirs, the will passed over the Scotch line descending from Henry's elder sister Margaret in favor of the heirs of his younger sister Mary. I have earlier quoted Camden's statement that the laws of England had long since determined “That the Crown once possessed, cleareth and purifies all manner of defaults or imperfections,” and it was upon this point of law that Elizabeth stood, even as John was represented as standing. The episodes in which the matter is discussed in the play have already been enumerated and need not be reviewed here.

The second problem, the alleged right of the pope to deprive a king, was, of course, of tremendous concern during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. The bull explained the grounds of the papal authority:

Hee that rules in the Heavens above, and to whom all power is given both in Heaven and Earth, gave unto one onely upon Earth, viz. to Peter, … and to the Pope of Rome, Peters Successor, a holy, Catholique and Apostolique Church, … to governe it in the fulnesse of power. And this he ordayned as chiefe above all Nations and Kingdomes, to pull downe, destroy, dissever, cast off, plant, and erect:…42

William Allen as “Cardinal of England,” coming to act as papal legate and to restore the English church to Rome as Pandulph had done earlier, wrote that among the reasons why Elizabeth could not be considered queen, the one above all, was

that she never had consente nor any approbation of the See Apostolike, without which, she nor any other can be lawfull Kinge or Quene of Englande, by reason of the auncyent Acorde, made betwene Alexander the .III. the yere 1171. and Henry the II.… This accorde afterwardes beinge renewed, aboute the yere 1210. by Kinge John, who confirmed the same by othe to Pandulphus the Pope his legate…⁴³

Foxe and after him Grafton had given a full account of the Council of the Lateran in which Pope Innocent III

made this Act, and established it by publique decree, that the Pope shoulde have from thence foorth the correction of all Christian Princes, and that no Emperour should be admitted, except he were sworne before, and were also crowned of him.44

Even when James came to the throne in 1603, succeeding Elizabeth, this was the main difficulty, for as Godfrey Davies says,

If the Pope would relinquish his claim to the power of deposition and would not insist on his precedence over monarchs, James seems to have believed that reconciliation with Rome was possible.⁴⁵

James indeed pleaded for tolerance in religious matters, but decried the Catholic priests:

Their point of doctrine is that arrogant and ambitious Supremacie of their Head the Pope, whereby he not onely claimes to bee Spirituall head of all Christians, but also to have an Imperiall civill power over all Kings and Emperors, dethroning and decrowning Princes with his foot as pleaseth him, and dispensing and disposing of all Kingdomes and Empires at his appetite. The other point which they observe in continuall practise, is the assassinates and murthers of Kings, thinking it no sinne, but rather a matter of salvation, to doe all actions of rebellion and hostilitie against their naturall Soveraigne Lord, if he be once cursed, his subjects discharged of their fidelitie, and his Kingdome given a prey by that three crowned Monarch, or rather Monster their Head.⁴⁶

Since papal bulls had attempted to deprive two of the Tudors of their crowns and had interdicted their land, to both Elizabeth and James the question of the pope's supremacy over kings was of even more importance than was the king's supremacy over a national church. But it was the latter problem that brought the clash between the pope and King Henry VIII as well as between the pope and King John. Nor does the papal bull directed against Elizabeth neglect this aspect of the problem:

It is She, who after shee had possessed the Kingdome, usurping (monster-like) the place of the chiefe Soveraigne of the Church in England, and the principall jurisdiction and authoritie thereof, hath throwne into miserable ruine the whole Kingdome, …

and it lists among her sins the fact that she has

displaced the Bishops, Rectors, and Catholique Priests from their Churches and Benefices, and disposed of them to Heretiques, and is bold to take upon her to judge and determine Ecclesiastical affaires; . . . inforced divers to . . . acknowledge her the onely Soveraigne over temporall and spirituall things…47

It was the pope's refusal to accept John's candidate for archbishop of Canterbury and the king's refusal to accept the pope's nomination that ultimately brought about the excommunication of the king and his deprivation. Though to Elizabeth and to her successor the matter of pre-eminent importance was the pope's right to give and take away kingly crowns, yet the right of the king to be supreme head of the church was the concave of the convex of the problem. Elizabeth declared by proclamation, says Camden,

That she attributed no more unto her selfe, then what did of long time belong to the Crowne of England; which was, that next under God, she had supreme Soveraignetie and power over all the States of England, whether Ecclesiasticall or Laye, and that no other Forraigne Power, had, or could have any Jurisdiction or authority over them.⁴⁸

In the growing nationalism of Elizabethan England the matter of national versus foreign supremacy over the national church was also, it should be noted, a potent factor in forming opinion.⁴⁹

It is against this background of conflict between pope and queen that we must then listen to Shakespeare's Pandulph challenging John in the name of the pope:

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: …

And we must hear John, in the voice of Elizabeth, reply:

What earthy name to interrogatories

Can task the free breath of a sacred king?

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Tell him this tale; and from the mouth of England

Add thus much more, that no Italian priest

Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;

But as we, under heaven, are supreme head,

So under Him that great supremacy,

Where we do reign, we will alone uphold,

Without the assistance of a mortal hand:

So tell the pope, all reverence set apart

To him and his usurp'd authority.50

There has been some tendency on the part of Catholic writers to quibble about the meaning of supreme head in John's speech,⁵¹ inasmuch as Elizabeth did not use her father's title but that of supreme governour, but the pope's bull makes it clear that he did not quibble over it, and Cardinal Allen said that “we speak no untrewth … nor abuse not the world when we say she is called and taken for the Supreme head of the Church of England.”⁵² The anachronism in making John appropriate the title so much in dispute can hardly have been accidental.

With nice irony Shakespeare portrays Lewis as also defying the pope's supreme power to make and unmake kings when, after John's submission to Rome, Cardinal Pandulph orders the dauphin to wind up his “threatening colours,” and put away his threats of war against England:

Am I Rome's slave? What penny hath Rome borne,

What men provided, what munition sent,

To underprop this action?   .   .   .  .   .   .

Have I not heard these islanders shout out

“Vive le roi!” as I have bank'd their towns?

Have I not here the best cards for the game,

To win this easy match play'd for a crown?

And shall I now give o'er the yielded seat?

No, no, on my soul, it never shall be said.53

The third of the problems was of much broader scope than the phase which is presented in connection with the Catholic conflict, for in both Protestant and Catholic circles there was a bitter fight as to the right of a subject to rebel. The basis of the Catholic rebellions throughout the reign of Elizabeth was constantly affirmed to be, as I have already indicated, the papal bull which decreed:

Being then supported by His Authoritie, who hath placed Us upon this Soveraigne Throne of Justice, … doe pronounce and declare the said ELIZABETH an Heretique, and favourer of Heretiques, and those who adhere unto her in the foresaid things, have incurred the Sentence of Anathema, and are cut off from the unitie of the bodie of Christ. That shee is deprived of the righte which shee pretends to the foresaid Kingdome, and of all and every Seigniorie, Royaltie, and privilege thereof: and the Peeres, Subjects, and People of the sayde Kingdome, and all others upon what terms soever sworne unto her, freed from their Oath, and from all manner of dutie, fidelitie, and obedience: As Wee doe free them by the authoritie of these Presents, and exclude the said ELIZABETH from the right which she pretendeth to the said Kingdome, and the rest before mentioned. Commanding moreover, and enjoyning all, and every the Nobles, as Subjects, people, and others whatsoever, that they shall not once dare to obey her, or any her directions, Lawes, or Commandements, binding under the same Curse, those who doe any thing to the contrary.54

The official pronouncement of the Tudors “against disobedience and wylfull rebellion” was made in the homilies of 1547 and 1571, the latter of which, I have already pointed out, discusses at length the case of King John. The king, according to the doctrine here enunciated, is vice-gerent to God, a god under God, accountable only to God. A subject may not judge his king, however evil, but must leave his punishment to God. Rebellion against a king is rebellion against the King of kings, the God of gods, and will surely call forth God's vengeance. But during the troubled years when the ideas of the Reformers were in ferment, and when both Catholics and Reformers were forced to rationalize their desires, there were many questions raised corollary to the fundamental and generally accepted position. In the first place, there arose the question already discussed, whether the natural heir or the de facto ruler should be regarded as God's vice-gerent. Second, there was the burning question of whether the subject should obey man rather than God if the ruler was in opposition to God; and whether resistance, if offered, should be merely passive, or might be active as rebellion. Finally, there was the question of whether a king once crowned might be deposed and his subjects released from their oaths of allegiance.

The Tudors upheld the principle that “the Crown once possessed, cleareth and purifies all manner of defaults or imperfections.” They had to. They also insisted that under no circumstances was a subject permitted to judge his king or to undertake to execute judgment upon him by rebelling. But Cardinal Allen was arguing with much support from facts when he wrote in his Defence of English Catholiques:

that to resist the Magistrat, defend themselves in cases of conscience, and to fight against the superiour for religion, is a cleere and ruled case; and no treasonable opinion at al against the Prince, if we wil be judged by Protestants: … The question therefore is not … of the Princes lauful creation or consecration: but whether a Prince laufullie invested and annointed, may be for anie cause, namelie for matter of Religion, resisted by his subjects? We say the Protestants of al sectes doe both holde and practize it, England it selfe speciallie allowing of the same … But it is sufficient for us, that with these men (if we may beleeve either their words or deeds) it is no treason to resist the Soveraigne, for defence of Religion; nor no treasonable assertion to hould that a lauful Prince may be deposed in case of revolt from God. And so say also on the other side al Catholique men and schooles in the Christian world concerning this point.55

Allen distinguished Catholic rebels from Protestant rebels in that they did not make individual decisions in regard to their duty to their king, but submitted to the decision of the Christian church in the matter. And he listed examples of heretics excommunicated and deprived, not forgetting John:

For great injuries also done to holie Church, and for persecution of Bishops and religious, was John one of our kinges of England with his whole land interdicted, and brought (after long strugling against God and the Sea Apostolique) to yeeld his Croune to the courtesie of the Popes Legate, and to make both his realmes of England and Ireland, tributaries. The authentical instrument whereof John Bodin saith he hath seen.⁵⁶

Yet Shakespeare does not make his English rebels so much obedient to the church as determined to revenge Arthur's wrongs. Of Arthur as warring against John before he was captured, Shakespeare says nothing. It is Arthur as prisoner who is presented, for it was Mary as prisoner who received the support of the English nobles. Holinshed makes no mention of John's nobles taking any interest in the captive, but the Catholic nobles under Elizabeth instigated the Northern Rebellion and the struggles of the next years, the Duke of Norfolk was executed for his efforts in Mary's behalf and his alleged plan to marry her, and there was no time during her stay in England when certain of the nobility were not interested in securing her freedom. It is, therefore, fitting that the pleas so often heard by Elizabeth should be offered to John on behalf of the nobles by the Earl of Pembroke as they

                           heartily request

The enfranchisement of Arthur; whose restraint

Doth move the murmuring lips of discontent

To break into this dangerous argument,—

If what in rest you have in right you hold,

Why then your fears, which as they say, attend

The steps of wrong, should move you to mew up

Your tender kinsman, and to choke his days

With barbarous ignorance, and deny his youth

The rich advantage of good exercise.57

Discovering the body of Arthur, and believing him to have been murdered by Hubert at the king's command, the nobles forswear obedience to the king and vow revenge.

But rebellion in John's England was, as in Elizabeth's England, linked with foreign intervention, for the nobles turn to an alien leader in their struggle against the king. Faulconbridge sums up the result:

Now powers from home and discontents at home

Meet in one line; and vast confusion waits, …⁵⁸

The state in 1581 argued against Campion, as I have said earlier:

Secret rebellion must be stirred here at home among ourselves, the harts of the people must be obdurated against God and their prince; so that when a foren power shall on a sudden invade this realme, the subjects thus seduced must joine with these in armes, and so shall the pope atteine the sum of his wish.⁵⁹

Historically Pandulph and the pope did not participate in John's quarrel with Arthur, but telescoping the various troubles of John as he does, Shakespeare makes the Pandulph in his play plot to use the murder of Arthur as a means to rebellion even before it happens:

John hath seized Arthur; and it cannot be

That, whiles warm life plays in that infant's veins,

The misplaced John should entertain an hour,

One minute, nay, one quiet breath of rest.

A sceptre snatch'd with an unruly hand

Must be as boisterously maintain'd as gain'd;

And he that stands upon a slippery place

Makes nice of no vile hold to stay him up:

That John may stand, then Arthur needs must fall; …60

Then, he says,

This act so evilly born shall cool the hearts

Of all his people and freeze up their zeal, …⁶¹

That will be the opportune moment for Lewis and the French invasion, for

                     the hearts

Of all his people shall revolt from him,

And kiss the lips of unacquainted change,

And pick strong matter of revolt and wrath

Out of the bloody fingers’ ends of John.

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    . ’tis wonderful

What may be wrought out of their discontent,

Now that their souls are topful of offence.⁶²

Even so did the Pandulph of Elizabethan England plot with Philip of Spain before and after the death of Mary.⁶³

The nobles in King John, moved to revolt by their desire for vengeance on the murderer of Arthur, are yet grieved that rebellion is their lot and sad at heart as they advance the fortunes of the dauphin. Salisbury speaks for them:

But such is the infection of the time,

That, for the health and physic of our right,

We cannot deal but with the very hand

Of stern injustice and confused wrong.

And is't not pity, O my grieved friends,

That we, the sons and children of this isle,

Were born to see so sad an hour as this;

Wherein we step after a stranger, march

Upon her gentle bosom, and fill up

Her enemies’ ranks,—I must withdraw and weep

Upon the spot of this enforced cause,—64

And when the dying Frenchman, Melun, warns them that Lewis will be unfaithful to his promises to them and urges them to “Unthread the rude eye of rebellion,” Salisbury is again the spokesman, joyous now, who promises,

We will untread the steps of damned flight, …⁶⁵

It is the great wonder of Elizabeth's reign that in the year after Mary's execution, in the great year of the Armada, Englishmen answered the prayer which Shakespeare gives to John:

O, let me have no subject enemies,

When adverse foreigners affright my towns

With dreadful pomp of stout invasion!⁶⁶

Associated with this problem of rebellion is the fourth of the Elizabethan problems I have listed, the divine right of a king to be judged by God alone. All the Tudors had to deal with “disobedience and wylfull rebellion,” and all agreed that a subject may not judge his king. But Elizabeth had a harder problem to decide, whether a king may judge another king. Certainly there is no indication in the chronicles that John was ever troubled over his right to do as he would and could with Arthur, but in the treatment of Arthur's death Shakespeare clearly mirrors Elizabeth's dilemma in regard to the Scottish queen. Holinshed allows the reader to decide for himself which of the rumors concerning Arthur's death he will believe. Shakespeare chose to represent John as having commanded the execution of Arthur,67 but his actual death he represented as accident. Since John never seems to have admitted that Arthur was dead, it does not need saying that he gave no evidence of sorrow over having killed him. But Shakespeare portrays John's sore repentance and his furious reproaching of Hubert when he believes him to have executed the royal command.⁶⁸

Elizabeth's dilemma was real. Parliament and the privy council had long demanded that she accede to their desire to rid England of the menace to the throne and the nation which they felt Mary to be. On the other hand, Elizabeth did not want to kill a king. Deep in her heart she always understood the truth incorporated in the Latin epitaph set up near Mary's tomb soon after her death but quickly removed, according to Camden, from the English translation of whose work I quote part of the closing sentences:

by one and the same wicked sentence is both Mary Queene of Scots doomed to a naturall death, and all surviving Kings, being made as common people, are subjected to a civill death. A new and unexampled kinde of tombe is heere extant, wherein the living are included with the dead: for know, that with the sacred herse of Saint Mary here lieth violate and prostrate the majestie of all Kings and Princes:…⁶⁹

When Elizabeth did finally consent to a trial, and when Mary was convicted and sentence given, Elizabeth was still loath to sign the death warrant. Neale says:

In signing the death warrant Elizabeth had gone as far as she was prepared to go. She expected someone else to take the responsibility and the blame for dispatching it; and the wretched Davison, perceiving that it might fall to him to be made the scapegoat, spread the responsibility to Burghley and other councillors. They quietly sent the warrant off.70

Henry III of France and James VI of Scotland, as friend and son of Mary, had to acknowledge the popular clamor in their countries over Mary's death by protesting it. But the English were apparently almost hysterical with joy. However, says Neale,

Elizabeth in contrast was grief-stricken. She could neither eat nor sleep. … Her position was not unlike that of Catherine de Medici after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew: she had to resort to miserable subterfuges to turn the infamy of the deed from her—or turn it sufficiently to maintain her alliances with other sovereigns. “I never saw a thing more hated by little, great, old, young and of all religions,” the English ambassador in France wrote, “than the Queen of Scot's death, and especially the manner of it. I would to God it had not been in this time.” In Scotland the people were terribly incensed, and many cried for war. Libels were set up in the streets against James and his Anglophil ministers, and odious epigrams on “Jezebel, that English whore.” … Elizabeth had probably foreseen this and prepared for it by leaving the dispatch of the death warrant to others. She now declared that she had never meant to send it, that Davison had acted improperly in showing it to other councillors, and they in dispatching it.⁷¹

There had to be a scapegoat, and the victim was Secretary Davison, who was fined and sentenced to imprisonment during the queen's pleasure, his release coming just after the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

What Shakespeare records as a dialogue between King John and Hubert, totally out of character and inconsistent with the story of King John as told in the chronicle, is a dialogue that in essence did take place between Queen Elizabeth and Secretary Davison:

K. John. Why seek'st thou to possess me with these fears!

Why urgest thou so oft young Arthur's death?

Thy hand hath murder'd him: I had a mighty cause

To wish him dead, but thou hadst none to kill him.

Hub. No had, my lord! why, did you not provoke me?

K. John. It is the curse of kings to be attended

By slaves that take their humours for a warrant

To break within the bloody house of life,

And on the winking of authority

To understand a law, to know the meaning

Of dangerous majesty, when perchance it frowns

More upon humour than advised respect.

Hub. Here is your hand and seal for what I did.

K. John. O, when the last account ’twixt heaven and earth

Is to be made, then shall this hand and seal

Witness against us to damnation!

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds

Make deeds ill done! Hadst not thou been by,

A fellow by the hand of nature mark'd,

Quoted and sign'd to do a deed of shame,

This murder had not come into my mind:

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

And thou, to be endeared to a king,

Make it no conscience to destroy a prince.

Hub. My lord,—

K. John. Hadst thou but shook thy head or made a pause

When I spake darkly what I purposed,

Or turn'd an eye of doubt upon my face,

As bid me tell my tale in express words,

Deep shame had struck me dumb, made me break off,

And those thy fears might have wrought fears in me:

But thou didst understand me by my signs

And didst in signs again parley with sin:

Yea, without stop, didst let thy heart consent,

And consequently thy rude hand to act

The deed, which both our tongues held vile to name.

Out of my sight, and never see me more!

My nobles leave me; and my state is braved,

Even at my gates, with ranks of foreign powers:

Nay, in the body of this fleshly land,

This kingdom, this confine of blood and breath,

Hostility and civil tumult reigns

Between my conscience and my cousin's death.72

The Bastard, too, might well have been speaking of Elizabethan England when he spoke his elegiac lines over Arthur:

From forth this morsel of dead royalty,

The life, the right and truth of all this realm

Is fled to heaven; and England now is left

To tug and scamble and to part by the teeth

The unowed interest of proud-swelling state.⁷³

It is easy to see that the aspect of the problem of regicide which interested Shakespeare in King John was the aspect presented by the problem of the refugee queen, Mary of Scotland. He gave little time and attention to the murder of King John at the end of the play, the poisoning being merely reported instead of shown as in The Troublesome Raigne. Indeed, there are few tears shed for John on the stage, and the play hurries to its end with no time wasted in damning the monk or even explaining his motive. Yet Shakespeare had represented the anathema pronounced upon John as not only excommunicating him and commanding his subjects to cease their obedience to him, but also as sanctioning and promising to reward his secret murder:

Then, by the lawful power that I have,

Thou shalt stand cursed and excommunicate:

And blessed shall be he that doth revolt

From his allegiance to an heretic;

And meritorious shall that hand be call'd,

Canonised and worshipp'd as a saint,

That takes away by any secret course

Thy hateful life.74

The bull against Elizabeth had not been explicit in regard to her murder, but that the sanction of the deed was implicit in it is proved by the famous letter of the Cardinal of Como, dated December 12, 1580, which says in part:

Since that guilty woman of England rules over two such noble kingdoms of Christendom and is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith, and loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing God service, not only does not sin but gains merit, especially having regard to the sentence pronounced against her by Pius V of holy memory. And so, if those English nobles decide actually to undertake so glorious a work, your Lordship can assure them that they do not commit any sin.⁷⁵

Though the attempts of the Catholic partisans of Mary and of Spain to merit the promised papal blessing were well known, and though the attempt by Dr. Lopez was a popular scandal at the time when the play was probably written, yet Shakespeare makes nothing of the poisoning of the King. The play is concerned, not with mirroring the whole conflict of Elizabeth and the Catholic church, but with reflecting that part of the conflict which centered about Mary. Therefore, Shakespeare weaves together the troubles of King John with Arthur and his troubles with the church and his troubles with the rebel nobles in support of a foreign power in the pattern familiar to his contemporaries, slighting other aspects of the long contest.

Events crowd the stage in the last scenes to hurry the play-to its end. The armado intended to supply the French is wrecked, even as was the Spanish Armada, the nobles are returned to their allegiance by the warning of Melun, rule passes to Prince Henry as John dies, poisoned. Peace is once more in sight as Faulconbridge utters the famous words quoted at the beginning of this chapter as the theme of the play:

This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,

But when it first did help to wound itself.

Now these her princes are come home again,

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true.

It is fitting that Faulconbridge should thus sum up the significance of the play, for it is he who acts as chorus to the play. Many students, bothered by the unheroic hero, have, like Professor Dover Wilson, tried to set up Faulconbridge as hero. With admirable consistency some of the same critics would make Falstaff the hero of the Henry IV plays. It is true that Faulconbridge is, like Falstaff, generally considered the most interesting character of the play, and that, unlike Falstaff, he is certainly the most heroic. But King John with Faulconbridge as hero is a play without form and void, signifying nothing. He is outside the structure of the play as he is outside it historically. He avenges his father's death. He acts as a foil to the king in his more unkingly moments. He loots the monasteries—off stage. But he is remembered chiefly because, as chorus, he says some of the most admirable things in the play. It should be noted, however, that his comments are in the nature of political comments. Our familiar quotations from the play are from his words of political wisdom on the nature of political opportunism and treachery, on the political significance of Arthur's death, on the true secret of England's weakness and strength. In the plot he is only important as was the vice in the old moralities, in pricking others on to action.

The truth of the matter is that the history play was not often privileged to reflect a hero in its mirror, for that was not the mission of the history play. That Shakespeare was able to depict King John in his conflict with the church as speaking his eloquent defiance of the pope and the foreign priest without making him the great Christian warrior reflects the greatness of Shakespeare and of his understanding of the genre in which he was writing.

1Holinshed (1587 ed.), III, 1323.

²The date of the Supplication is disputed, but it was given as 1524 on the title page when it was reprinted in 1546 with A Supplication of the Poore Commons. The Preface to the Pickering reprint of 1845 offers evidence supporting the date. The comment on King John was answered by Sir Thomas More in his reply to Fish's work, The Supply cation of Soules (entered, 1529).

³See Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, XIV, Pt. 1, pp. 22-23, for the full account, part of which is quoted in the Malone Society reprint of King Johan, ed. J. H. P. Pafford and W. W. Greg (1931), pp. xvii-xviii.

⁴See above, pp. 62-64. For Bale's comment on Polydore Vergil's ill report of King John, see p. 108 of the Malone Society edition, to which edition I refer throughout this book.

⁵Pp. xxii-xxiii.

⁶P. 52.

⁷P. 116.

⁸P. 12.

⁹P. 26.

¹⁰P. 48.

¹¹King John (Cambridge, 1936), Introduction, pp. xiii-xiv.

¹²Published in 1591.

¹³Ivor B. John, the editor of the English Arden edition (London, 1907 and 1925), has given a carefully compiled list in his Introduction.

¹⁴I have used the 1587 edition of Holinshed as the one generally accepted as Shakespeare's source in writing his histories. It is also the edition presumably used by the author of The Troublesome Raigne.

¹⁵Holinshed, III, 165.

¹⁶Ivor B. John, p. xxvii.

¹⁷Op. cit., pp. viii-ix.

¹⁸On the whole matter of the will of Henry VIII see A. F. Pollard, England under Protector Somerset (London, 1900), pp. 2-7.

¹⁹William Camden, Annates (London, 1625), Bk. I, p. 14.

²⁰Ibid.

²¹The modern standard account is Alphonse de Ruble, Le Traité de Cateau-Cambrésis (Paris, 1889). Among earlier sources Camden is particularly helpful (Annates, I, 18-25).

²²J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1936), p. 84.

²³See the chapter on Henry IV for a discussion of the Northern Rebellion as reflected in that play.

²⁴The bull was translated in Camden, Annales, II, 245-48.

²⁵Neale, p. 249.

²⁶A. O. Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, trans. J. R. McKee (London, 1916), pp. 285-86.

²⁷lbid., p. 520 (Appendix, Document XX). See also p. 323 for a discussion of the so-called bull issued by Sixtus V.

²⁸Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1591-1594, pp. 445-46. The Catholic explanation of these events is well presented by J. H. Pollen, “The Politics of English Catholics during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,” Month, LXXXXIX (1902), 43-60.

²⁹John Leslie, A Defence of the Right Highe, Mightye and Noble Princesse Marie Queene of Scotland and Dowager of France (London, 1569), fols. 77-79.

³⁰In A Treatise Towching the Right, Title, and Interest of the Most Excellent Princesse Marie, Queene of Scotland, and of the Most Noble King James, Her Graces Sonne, to the Succession of the Crowne of England. See especially fols. 34-36.

³¹Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies, writes of the book of homilies as “A New Shakespearean Source-Book,” but he does not mention the passage on King John.

³²The Political Works of James I, ed. C. H. Mcllwain (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), pp. 259-62.

³³Op. cit., ed. Thomas Heywood (Chetham Society Publication XXV; 1851), p. 26. The original title was The Copie of a Letter … Concerninge the Yeelding up, of the Citie of Daventrie … by Sir William Stanley, Knight.

³⁴W. G. Boswell-Stone, Shakspere's Holinshed (New York, 1896), p. 47.

³⁵See Richard Simpson, “The Politics of Shakespere's Historical Plays” in New Shakespere Society Transactions, I (1874), 399.

³⁶Noted by Simpson, p. 400.

³⁷Noted by Simpson, pp. 400-401.

³⁸Tentatively suggested by Simpson, p. 401. Under date of March 18, 1587, Parsons wrote the reasons that made it inadvisable to make known to the pope the interest that Philip of Spain had in “the Enterprise.” He thought that when the whole of Elizabeth's kingdom and the neighboring islands were in the King of Spain's hands the time would be more propitious “for then the Queen of Scotland will be either dead or alive: if she is dead—and it is probable that the heretics having her in their power and being under the impression that the expedition is being made in support of her cause, will put her to death— there will be no other Catholic prince alive who can compete with His Majesty.” If she were still alive, he said, the claims of Lancastrian descent could be urged. Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Parsons, S.J., ed. L. Hicks, S.J. (Catholic Record Society Publications, XXXIX: London, 1942), I, 292-94.

³⁹Not historically correct. Constance died in 1201, Elinor in 1204.

⁴⁰Simpson suggested (p. 402) a parallel with Medina Sidonia. The authority is William Watson, Important Considerations (1601), p. 25. Watson's book is interesting because it sets forth the position of the English Catholics who are loyal to Elizabeth and opposed to the foreign-inspired activities of the pope, Spain, and the Jesuits.

⁴¹See p. 141.

⁴²Camden, Annates, II, 245.

⁴³An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland concerninge the Warres Made for the Execution of His Holines Sentence, by the highe and mightie King Catholike of Spaine. By the Cardinal of Englande (1588), pp. 9-10.

⁴⁴Grafton, Chronicle, Pt. II, p. 110. The account is taken from John Foxe, Actes and Monumentes (London, 1563), p. 66.

⁴⁵Godfrey Davies, “The Character of James VI and I,” Huntington Library Quarterly, V (1941), 51.

⁴⁶In a speech delivered in 1603. McIlwain, op. cit., p. 275. For Elizabethan attacks on this papal pretense to authority see Thomas Bilson, The True Difference betweene Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (Oxford, 1585), p. 529; and William Cecil, The Execution of Justice in England (London, 1583), fol. A3.

⁴⁷Camden, Annates, II, 246-47.

⁴⁸Op. cit., I, 34. “Supreme soveraignetie” was not an appeasing phrase.

⁴⁹The act (Jan. 1 of the first parliament in the first year) is “An acte restoringe to the crowne the ancient jurisdiction over the state ecclesiastical and spirytuall, and abolyshynge all forrayne power repugnant to the same.” It mentions repeatedly “usurped and forrayne power.”

⁵⁰III, i, 141-60.

⁵¹See, for instance, G. M. Greenewald, Shakespeare's Attitude Towards the Catholic Church in “King John” (Washington, D.C., 1938), p. 67.

⁵²The words in the bull were supremi Ecclesiae capitis locum. Cf. William Allen, A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholiques [Ingolstadt, 1584], p. 9. Allen's Admonition to the Nobility (p. 11) said “She usurpeth by Luciferian pride, the title of supreme ecclesiasticall government.”

⁵³V, ii, 97-108.

⁵⁴Camden, Annates, II, 247-48.

⁵⁵Allen's Defence of English Catholiques (pp. 80, 81, 84) answers The Execution of Justice.

⁵⁶Ibi., p. 111.

⁵⁷IV, ii, 51-60.

⁵⁸IV, iii, 151-52.

⁵⁹See the opening of this chapter.

⁶⁰III, iv, 131-36.

⁶¹III, iv, 149-50.

⁶²III, iv, 164-80.

⁶³Martin Haile, An Elizabethan Cardinal (London, 1914), gives a full account of Cardinal Allen's relations with King Philip and notes the delay of the king in making war on England until after Mary's death. See especially pp. 300-301.

⁶⁴V, ii, 20-30.

⁶⁵V, iv, 52.

⁶⁶IV, ii, 171-73.

⁶⁷The apparent confusion between the command to murder Arthur in III, iii, and the frustrated attempt to blind rather than murder him in IV, i, is explained by Dover Wilson as due to Shakespeare's misunderstanding of The Troublesome Raigne (Intro. to King John, xxii-xxiii).

⁶⁸Simpson, op. cit., p. 400, briefly noted the resemblance to the situation between Elizabeth and Secretary Davison. Evelyn M. Albright revived the comparison in her paper on “Shakespeare's Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy,” PMLA, XLII (1927), 686.

⁶⁹The Latin version is retained in the 1625 translation (Bk. III, p. 208) but is put into English in the 1635 edition, Bk. III, p. 344.

⁷⁰Neale, op, cit., p. 277.

⁷¹Ibid., p. 279. See also Camden, Annates (1625), Bk. III, pp. 209-19, Nicholas Nicolas, Life of William Davison (London, 1823), pp. 77-200, and A. F. Pollard, History of England, 1547-1603, p. 396.

⁷²IV, ii, 203-48. It must be noted that this conversation takes place just before Hubert tells the king Arthur is still alive. There is no account of John's reception of the news of Arthur's actual death.

⁷³IV, iii, 143-47.

⁷⁴III, i, 171-78.

⁷⁵A. O. Meyer, op. cit., pp. 269-71, 490-91; Greenewald, op. cit., pp. 98-99.