THE ARDEN editor of Shakespeare's Life of King Henry the Fifth, H. A. Evans, sums up the common view of the play when he says that “its interest is epic rather than dramatic; it is the nearest approach on the part of the author to a national epic.”1 The historical mirrors that Shakespeare held up to England before he wrote of Henry V were mirrors in which the Elizabethans could see their own national problems being acted out on the stage before them, and in which they could witness the eternal justice of God in the affairs of the body politic. They showed the conflicts of the age which endangered the state, threatening its peace and security. But in Henry V the English are mirrored triumphant in a righteous cause, achieving victory through the blessing of God. A mood of exultation pervades the play. Henry V stands as the ideal hero in contrast with the troubled John, the deposed Richard, the rebel Henry IV; for the traditional conception of Henry V was of a hero-king, and about his dominant figure Shakespeare chose to fashion a hero-play. The theme of the play is war, and the progress of the warrior-hero is the progress of the play. Thus the play becomes in form and content epic.
This traditional view of Henry V as the hero-king of England, Kingsford traces to the official biography by Tito Livio, written by that Italian historian at the suggestion of his English patron, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, brother of Henry V and protector during the minority of Henry VI.2 Tito Livio dedicated his work to the young king, offering it as a guide by which he might follow in his father's footsteps. Yet since it was, perforce, an account of Henry V's wars that he had written, he felt called upon to explain:
Not that I preferr and laude warr and discention, rather than tranquillitie and peace; but if thou maiest have none honest peace, that then thou shalt seeke peace and rest with victorie to both thie realmes by thy vertue and battaile, and by those feates by which thie Father attamed both his adversaries and thine.3
In 1513 or 1514 a translation of the work of Tito Livio was offered by an unnamed writer to King Henry VIII because he had “now of late entered into semblable warr against the Frenchmen.”4 The translator inserted moralizations throughout the course of the narrative, and Kingsford says of these insertions:
They are the endeavour of an historian to draw instruction from the past for the benefit of the present. Their didactic purpose was not purely moral; there is in them a deliberate design to apply the political lesson of the life of Henry V to the times of Henry VIII.5
It is thus evident that the life of Henry V was first written as a mirror of victorious deeds for his son, and that it grew into “the first English life of King Henry the Fifth” in order that it might serve as a mirror to Henry VIII in a “semblable warr.” Holinshed and Stow both consulted Tito Livio, Kingsford says, and Halle did not.6 But the theme of all the chroniclers was the same, for Halle took as the title for the section of his chronicle dealing with this hero-king “The victorious actes of kyng Henry the V.” The play upon which Shakespeare drew for a selection of incidents had likewise the title of The Famous Victories of Henry V.7 It was pre-determined that in writing about Henry V Shakespeare should write about war and victory in war, as it had been that in writing about Henry IV he should write about rebellion. In the midst of his wooing of the Princess Katherine of France, Henry V, indeed, explains his stern visage by the fact that his father “was thinking of civil wars when he got me.”8
The Elizabethan period was, by and large, a time of peace, for there were no wars with foreign invaders fought on English soil; yet the English fought in Scotland and in Ireland, in France on behalf of Henry IV, and in the Netherlands on behalf of the Lowlanders against Spain. Elizabeth had an army as well as a navy ready to meet invasion at the time of the Armada, and she continued to be troubled by fears of an invasion long afterward, especially during 1598, when Henry IV of France was making peace with Spain in spite of English protests, and in 1599, when Camden says an army was called up, ostensibly at least to meet a Spanish threat.9 Professor Dietz estimates that Elizabeth, up to 1588, spent for military purposes £1,517,351, and from that time on very much more. Between 1585 and 1596 she spent in aiding the Netherlands £1,186,119, and Henry IV of France was in her debt £445,125 when she tried to effect a settlement with him.10 If we consider the value of money at that time and the comparatively small population, we realize that such expenditures for war, added to the constant raising of forces to fight on land and on sea, must have kept war to the forefront of English interests throughout the reign, as indeed it did. The useful bibliography of English and continental books on military matters by Captain Cockle gives ample proof that England was not only reading but quarreling about the theories and the arts of war.11
When Shakespeare wrote Henry V, then, does not concern us if we regard it as simply a political play about war, war viewed from the Elizabethan point of view. But from Simpson12 onward there has been a tendency to associate the play with Essex. The facts are these. The first quarto, a “bad” quarto, was published in 1600. Meres failed to mention Henry V in his Palladis Tamia in 1598, and he did mention Henry IV. The chorus that precedes the fifth act of Henry V makes obvious reference to the expected victorious return of Essex from Ireland, where he had gone to quell rebellion in March, 1599, and must have been written after that date and before September of that year, when the harried earl made his very unvictorious appearance in England. But the choruses, certain scenes, and many passages of dialogue did not appear in the quartos, being first printed in the folio of 1623. Chambers thinks that the play, choruses and all, was probably written in 1599, but any conclusions that go beyond these facts must remain tentative.13 Those who regard Henry V as Essex, however, make two mistakes, it seems to me. In the first place, Shakespeare does not compare Essex to Henry V; what he compares is the greeting which would be given to Essex if he should return from Ireland, “Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,” to the greeting which Henry V received from the populace when he returned victorious from France. In the second place, even though Essex were compared to Henry V in the chorus, it would be a mistake to assume that he must therefore be Henry V throughout the play. It is the mistake which critics have made, who, finding Duessa certainly presenting the case of Mary Stuart in the trial scene of Book V of the Faerie Queene, try to make Duessa represent Mary Stuart throughout the whole poem. The result is confusion, for that is not the way of the artist who holds his mirror up to nature. Undoubtedly Shakespeare here as elsewhere had specific and contemporary situations in mind, but he does not simply label a contemporary character with an historical name. Even the situations and the roles of Mary and her son James of Scotland were merged in the picture of Arthur in King John, by far the most specific of the historical mirrors.
Henry V is apparently based on Holinshed and covers the period from Lent, 1414, to May, 1420. The character and the achievements of the king remain true to tradition, though both persons and times are frequently telescoped. During this period the dauphin of France was first Lewis, then John, then Charles. To Shakespeare he is merely the dauphin. Henry's war upon France is abridged and compressed. The Battle of Agincourt in 1415 is followed by the peacemaking at Troyes in 1420, only the chorus to Act V bridging the years. This chorus takes the king to London by way of Calais and boldly declares that the play omits “All the occurrences, whatever chanc'd,/ Till Harry's back-return again to France.” The great battles fought on his return to France in 1417 are, however, omitted, so that we are left to infer that the French made peace because of the victory at Agincourt. The peace parley at Troyes in 1420 is apparently telescoped with the meeting at Meulan in 1419, where Henry fell in love with the Princess Katherine.14 There is also much in the play that is not in the chronicles, but, as I have said, the general picture remains true to the pattern set by Tito Livio and continued in all the English chronicles.
The first act of the play is given over to the decision of Henry V to make war on France. Henry IV had advised his son “to busy giddy minds/With foreign quarrels;” but that advice is passed over in the new play, and both Shakespeare and Henry V are justifying the war on high moral grounds, instead of as a means of quieting rebels at home. In the opening scene the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely are discussing the new king and his reformation. It is perhaps worthy of note in passing that while Holinshed praised Henry V for commanding the clergy to preach the word of God and the laity to obey it, for appointing the men best learned in the laws to the “offices of justice,” Shakespeare represents the praise of the churchmen as bestowed on the king, not because of his wise choice of men for office but because of his own academic achievements. They praise him because he is able to reason in divinity like a prelate, to debate commonwealth aifairs as though they were his chief study, and to discourse so admirably of war
that, when he speaks,
The air, a charter'd libertine, is still,
And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears,
To steal his sweet and honey'd sentences;
So that the art and practic part of life
Must be the mistress to this theoric.
These are words which find parallels in comments on King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, and very often King James, but spoken of King Henry V they are as curious as praise given to an enthusiastic rooter in the bleachers for his football prowess. This praise of the king is, however, only incidental to the churchmen's discussion of a bill urged by Commons which would deprive the higher clergy of important revenue. The archbishop is certain that the king will take the part of the church, since he has offered from Convocation “a greater sum/Than ever at one time the clergy yet/Did to his predecessors part withal.” The sum has been offered in aid of the projected wars in France, but Shakespeare does not indicate, as does Holinshed, that the archbishop's purpose in the offer has been to turn Henry's mind to making war in France in order to get it off church revenues. Instead, Shakespeare makes the king the prime mover in the matter, representing him as seeking advice from the archbishop as his moral and spiritual mentor.
The second scene gets down to the real business of justifying Henry's war against France. Henry asks that the archbishop argue his right “justly and religiously.” He does not want to go to war without the assurance of justice on his side, for the horrors of war are too terrible to be risked in an unworthy cause. The archbishop then sets forth the exposition of the Salic law which is so wearying to the reader and so stimulating to the identifiers among the critics. There is no question that it was a law that drew the attention of Elizabethan writers, but critics who have found grounds in its genealogical intricacies for identifying Essex as Henry V ignore the fact that upon the right of the woman to inherit depended also the right of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor to the throne, the right of the Tudors to rule, and the right of Mary and James of Scotland to inherit.
When the archbishop has finished his harangue, the king renews his urgent demand:
May I with right and conscience make this claim?
And the archbishop replies:
The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!
The Bishop of Ely and the noblemen present join him in urging war, and the king makes his decision even as the ambassadors from France enter. Warnings concerning the collaboration of the French and the Scotch and suggestions for the protection of the homeland while the king leads an army abroad are uttered.
The French ambassadors bring a scornful reply from the dauphin to Henry's demand for certain dukedoms by right of his descent from Edward III, and offer their prince's gift, a tun of tennis balls. Indignation and a more resolute decision for war are Henry's answer.
The chorus tells of the bribing of Richard Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scroop, and Sir Thomas Grey by the French as it gives new words to the theme which dominated King John:
O England! model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart,
What might'st thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural!
In Act II we hear of Falstaff's sickness, for “The king has killed his heart.” Then we see the king at Southampton, again executing justice. He orders freed one who has been taken up for railing against the king's person and hands out to the traitors Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey warrants for their arrest instead of the commissions they are expecting. It is a grim joke, not much to the modern taste, but Henry finds in the detection of the treason before the voyage is undertaken an omen of success. After hearing the tale of Falstaff's death, we are transported to the French king's palace, where the French leaders are discussing the coming of the English, and the dauphin is advising against underestimating the enemy. To them comes a messenger announcing the ambassadors from England, and Exeter treads upon the messenger's heels to make demands and formally declare the war that is their only alternative to granting these demands.
The chorus to the third act carries the king's forces to Harfleur and announces that Henry has spurned the offer of the hand of the Princess Katherine, with some petty dukedoms as her dower. Then we hear him addressing his troops before Harfleur, urging them to do their utmost. A comic scene intrudes before the governor of Harfleur is addressed by the English king, who makes formal demand for surrender, threatening the horrors of war. As the governor yields, Henry commands, “Use mercy to them all.” After meeting Katherine—and Shakespeare's French— we hear the French high command speaking of certain victory. King Henry, talking to his soldiers, is interrupted by Montjoy, coming from the French king to demand satisfaction for the wrongs of France and defy him to come further. Though his troops have suffered illness and arc decimated, Henry trusts to God and presses on. The French are then shown, despising the enemy, interested in effeminacies, and counting the enemy dead before they have killed them.
The chorus again serves to carry us to the English camp at Agincourt to let us watch the English king comforting his men the night before the battle. In the first scene we see him eavesdropping on their conversation, playing a joke upon an unsuspecting common soldier, philosophizing upon the cares of kingship, and praying his desperate prayer:
Not to-day, O Lord!
O! not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown.
The Constable of France addresses his soldiers, bidding them on, for their enemies are ready to be blown over with a breath. Henry makes his grand oration before the battle, and after he has refused new offers from the French to ransom himself, the battle is waged with alarums and excursions. They do well, the English, though the Duke of York and the Earl of Suffolk are slain. But a new alarum sounds, and Henry, aware of French reinforcements, orders every soldier to kill his prisoners. Montjoy asks permission to bury the French dead, and the victory is yielded to the English. The king plays out his joking wager with the soldier and then reckons the dead on both sides. Triumphant, he gives praise for victory to the God of battles.
The chorus before the last act bears the king to Calais, takes him to the English beaches crowded with the multitudes of anxious watchers, then to London, where the Emperor [Sigismund] comes on behalf of France, and returns him to France, omitting “All the occurrences, whatever chanc'd,” between times. After a scene with the comic characters, the great making of the peace at Troyes is presented on the stage, the Duke of Burgundy acting as the peacemaker. The king delegates the treaty making to five of the greatest among the English and turns his attention to wooing the French king's daughter.
The chorus returns to the scene of matchmaking and peacemaking with a somber note, reminding us of the great cycle of history of which this is but a part:
Small time, but in that small most greatly liv'd
This star of England: Fortune made his sword,
By which the world's best garden he achiev'd,
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed; …
As I have said, the first act of the play is taken up with the decision to make war on France, not as a means of busying giddy minds, but on the high moral grounds of righting wrongs and regaining lost rights. Holinshed records that Henry V on his deathbed
protested unto them, that neither the ambitious desire to inlarge his dominions, neither to purchase vaine renowme and worldlie fame, nor anie other consideration had mooved him to take the warres in hand; but onlie that in prosecuting his just title, he might in the end atteine to a perfect peace, and come to enjoie those peeces of his inheritance, which to him of right belonged: and that before the beginning of the same warres, he was fullie persuaded by men both wise and of great holinesse of life, that upon such intent he might and ought both begin the same warres, and follow them, till he had brought them to an end justlie and rightlie, and that without all danger of Gods displeasure or perill of soule.15
This apology provides the theme for the first act, and rightly so, for justifying war and justifying a particular war were matters of prime concern in the Tudor philosophy of war, as well as in Tudor practice.
The sixteenth century saw the development of a crisis in the conflict between the authority of the church and that of the state, between Catholics and Reformers, and between sect and sect. Fundamental problems arose to be argued: whether a Christian state might make war, whether it might war on another Christian state, and whether it might make war for religion's sake. Furthermore, the problem of who should be responsible for the waging of war was at issue, as well as the question of the individual soldier's responsibility in engaging in battle. The philosophy of war was rationalized to answer these and other questions on the basis of national needs and ambitions. One of the clearest and most comprehensive of these philosophic rationalizations is found in a translation by Walter Lynne dedicated to King Edward VI in 1549:
A Treatise or Sermon of Henry Bullynger, most fruitfull and necessarye for this tyme, concernynge magistrates and obedience of subjectes. Also concernyng the affayres of warre, and what scryptures make mension thereof. Whether christen powers may war against their enemies. And whither it be laufull for a christyan to beare the office of a magistrate, and of the duety of souldiers with many other holsom instructions for captaynes and souldiers both.
This “treatise or sermon” argues that Christians may make war: for Moses fought battles at God's command; John the Baptist, when soldiers came to him to be baptized, did not order them to lay down their arms; Christ commanded that those things which are Caesar's should be given unto Caesar and “therefore be tributs payd, whereby warres may be waged, and souldiers mainteined for necessities of war.”16
However, the causes of war must be just, for the evils of war are great, and Bullinger gives a typical list of the evils:
Fyrst by warre spryngeth dearth and utter scasety of al thynges. For the wayes be stopped, the corn trodden downe, townes set on fyre, vitalle distroied and wasted, all occupations and marchandise cease, both rich and poore decayeth. In warre the most valiante sonest destroyed, the cowards thei retyre and save themselves whyles greater afterclappes do fal upon them. The most vile ruffynes, most avaunted, which abuse men more lyke beastes than other. All is full of murning on everye syde. Wydowes bewayle: fatherles children lament and be destitute, Greate riches provided for nede to come, cleane spoyled, hole cities set afyre, vyrgynes and unmared maydens defyled: Al shame al honesty set asyde: no reverence to age. All maner of ryght all lawes unregarded: al holy religion and studies cleane under foote, vyle vacaboundes and desperate breuylles rule all the roste. And therefore in scripture warre is called the scourge of god.17
Thus war may be undertaken, but only for good cause. War for religion's sake is justified, war against a foreign state that despoils the citizens of another state is justified, and war in defence of “confederat frendes and ayders” is justified. But war may never be undertaken for private revenge, it must be directed to the execution of justice, and it may not be undertaken until “allmaner of wayes” of avoiding it have been tried.
The magistrate (or ruler) is the instrument of public vengeance. To him God gives the sword of his justice. The sword so given is to be used to punish trespassers and to destroy open enemies, foreign enemies as well as rebellious and seditious subjects, for the magistrate must not only execute justice upon thieves and murderers, but also upon those evil men who come as ravening wolves.
In 1598 Stephen Gosson preached before the mayor and aldermen of London at Paul's Cross a sermon entitled The Trumpet of Warre which shows as well as anything can the persistence of the fundamental ideas enunciated by Bullinger. War, Gosson says, is good and lawful in reason, in religion, and in the practice of the church. The calamities of war are so great that it should not be undertaken lightly, but only when the occasion is proportionable to the cost. He explains further:
As warre must have a just title to make it lawfull, so it must also be undertaken by lawfull authoritie… The reason of it is this, that as in a common weale it is requisite there should be an authoritie, to punish offences, and to keepe the same in order: so in the wide worlde, that all kingdomes and commonweales might be preserved, it is requisit there shuld be a power and authority to punish injuries, this power resting in no Prince in the world as superior to al other Princes, warre steppes in in the place of just vindicative judgement, and hath left no other meanes unto Princes to hie unto.18
The prince must, then, make war even on his own behalf, while the private person is forbidden private revenge, inasmuch as he may not be both judge and advocate in his own cause. But the authority of the prince is public and administered by a public council, “whereby the affections of Princes are easily restrained.” The common soldiers are instruments by which God punishes offenses. As to the “execution of war” Gosson repeats that in the beginning there must be counsel taken and deliberation to begin the weightiest of all human affairs. War must be undertaken to secure peace and not for the sake of pride, ambition, or any similar passion.19
Choosing almost at random from the very great number of writers who argue about war, we may look at three who present the widely different points of view of churchman, militarist, and theorist. Calvin, the great Genevan, took the same fundamental position that the magistrate is to be regarded as God's executioner, as the public avenger of wrongs. War must not be undertaken lightly or for private vengeance, but kings and peoples are justified in warring when public justice is to be executed. Guillaume du Bellay's Instructions for the Warres, translated by Paul Ive, the famous military engineer who has been mentioned as one of Marlowe's sources, discussed first the question “whether it be lawful for Christians to make warres, or not,” and came to the same conclusions. Bertrand de Loque's Discourses of Warre and Single Combat, translated in 1591, was particularly concerned with meeting the objections of the Anabaptists, but followed Bullinger's arguments and came to the same general position upon the justifications for war.
Queen Elizabeth declared that “by the bond sealed to the people at the Coronation; every Prince covenants with the people, to defend them from all injuries, domesticke and forraigne,” and King James wrote to his son in 1599:
Ye have also to consider, that yee must not onely bee careful to keepe your subjects, from receiving anie wrong of others within; but also yee must be careful to keepe them from the wrong of any forraine Prince without: sen the sword is given you by God not onely to revenge upon your owne subjects, the wrongs committed amongst themselves; but further, to revenge and free them of forraine injuries done unto them: And therefore warres upon just quarrels are lawful: but above all, let not the wrong cause be on your side.20
However, the matter was anything but academic, especially in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign. In 1585, after twenty-seven years of at least technical peace, Elizabeth intervened openly against Spain on behalf of the Netherlands and sent troops under the Earl of Leicester to aid the Dutch. The venture was not undertaken without an attempt at securing moral and religious sanction for the undertaking. Strype, in his life of Archbishop Whitgift, gives a good deal of space to recounting events of this summer of 1585, and I think it is worth while to consider his account in connection with Henry V. His first sentences explain the situation:
A weighty motion was made this summer, about the month of July, to the Archbishop by the Earl of Leicester; namely, to declare what his judgment was for the Queen's assistance of the inhabitants of the Netherlands, so grievously now oppressed by Philip, King of Spain: … This great affair had been already concluded upon at Court by the great men about the Queen; though she herself was very tender of entering into this open breach with Spain. The lofty Earl expected this mighty addition to the rest of his honours and titles, to lead and govern her forces in those countries for their relief. But now, that the Queen might be fully fixed and determined, and that he might go with the greater glory and hope of success, he wanted the Archbishop's approbation of the lawfulness and expediency of this counsel, to be opened by him to the Queen;…21
The archbishop was discreet and made a wary answer. But, Strype says, Piers, Bishop of Sarum and the queen's almoner, had previously been consulted, the question being put as a question of divinity, not of policy, “Whether a prince may defend the subjects of another prince from being forced to commit idolatry.” He had replied that it might be right to do so, but that first all possible remedies must be tried, and that covetousness and ambition must not enter into the decision. In addition, Strype records an answer left in manuscript which he thought was written by the archbishop, and which dealt with the difficulties of aiding the Netherlander if they were really subjects of Spain, since England did not recognize the right of Spain to aid the Irish. However, he seemed to think that the Netherlanders might be helped if it could be decided that they were not Spanish subjects.22
Making King Henry V take the initiative in seeking advice from the Archbishop of Canterbury as to his moral justification for going to war is thus seen to have Elizabethan precedent. But in order to see the aptness of the picture of the archbishop's offering aid to Henry V for his wars in France, in confirmed expectation of Henry's saving the church from the difficulties of the bill urged by the Commons, it must be recalled that the years from 1584 onward were years of great difficulty for the established church of England. Parliament was threatening to concern itself with many ecclesiastical matters. George Paule in his life of Archbishop Whitgift waxed particularly indignant because these hecklings of the church reached their climax in the year of the Armada. But Strype in his life of Whitgift explains how the tactful churchman met the difficulties of the dangerous years:
This year, 1588, was the most dangerous year of the Queen's whole reign, both for her own and the kingdom's safety, and of the present Church of England. For a dreadful invasion or this land was now resolved upon, and vast preparations making for that purpose by the Pope, and the enraged proud King of Spain, and other Popish princes in league.
All the nation did their best for defense, and the archbishop determined that the church should not be behindhand. He wrote a circular letter to his bishops urging them to have the clergy find arms, assuring them that “their readiness herein would be a good means to stop the mouths of such, as did think those temporal blessings which God had in mercy bestowed upon them, [the Bishops and Clergy,] to be too much.” Strype adds that Whitgift said he acted for certain considerations, and that “some of them surely were, to preserve the liberty of ecclesiastical persons, who had the privilege of taxing themselves; and to hinder occasions of a melius inquirendum, and of racking the Clergy.”23 The Convocation of 1586 had granted a benevolence as well as a subsidy, but the Convocation of 1588 granted two subsidies. Strype records:
This was very well taken, and (for their readiness) got the ecclesiastics a reputation: the matter, no doubt, managed by the Archbishop's wisdom, industry, and influence with the Bishops and the rest of the Clergy. Sergeant Puckring, March the 17th, and the Attorney General, came from the Lords to the Lower House, and brought a bill from the Lords, for confirmation of this subsidy granted by the Clergy, … together with a bill likewise from the said Clergy, for horses, armour, and weapons: and gave a very special commendation of the same bills as things of very great importance.24
The story of the parliamentary and the Puritan attacks upon the established church is not in place here, but it should be noted that Convocation again granted a double subsidy in 1593, and the quid pro quo nature of the Convocation's generous contribution to war in Henry V must have seemed familiar to the Elizabethan.
When Henry asks the archbishop to argue his right “justly and religiously” since he does not want to go to war without the assurance of right and justice on his side, he speaks in the best Tudor tradition:
And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,
That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading,
Or nicely charge your understanding soul
With opening titles miscreate, whose right
Suits not in native colours with the truth;…
The horrors of war are too terrible, he continues, to be risked in an unworthy cause:
For God doth know how many now in health
Shall drop their blood in approbation
Of what your reverence shall incite us to.
Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war:
We charge you, in the name of God take heed;
For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood; whose guiltless drops
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint
’Gainst him whose wrongs give edge unto the swords
That make such waste in brief mortality.25
Again he presses his question:
May I with right and conscience make this claim?
And the archbishop replies:
The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!26
This model dramatization of the treatises on war is continued when the king addresses the French ambassadors who have asked whether they may speak their message from the dauphin plainly, for these treatises were insistent that the ruler must make war as the agent of public justice and not as passion's slave. Rightly Henry replies:
We are no tyrant, but a Christian king;
Unto whose grace our passion is as subject
As are our wretches fetter'd in our prisons:
Therefore with frank and with uncurbed plainness
Tell us the Dauphin's mind.27
To the consequent demands made by the ambassadors with their taunting gift of the tennis balls from the dauphin, he replies with his decision “to put forth/My rightful hand in a well-hallow'd cause.” The justification of the war against France is thus established, and the conviction that his is a righteous war should be fixed in the mind of every playgoer.
Though Canterbury might, in his ardor, exclaim, “The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!” the king could not so easily cast off his burden of responsibility, and it is the king who at the end of the first act ultimately decides for war. The king was the responsible agent of God's justice, and the whole Tudor philosophy of the state made such an assignment of power and responsibility inevitable. Thus Elizabeth in 1585 caused to be published A Declaration of the Causes Mooving the Queene of England to Give Aide to the Defence of the People Afflicted and Oppressed in the Lowe Countries, which began:
Although Kinges and Princes Soveraignes, owing their homage and service onely unto the Almightie God the king of al kings, are in that respect not bounde to yeeld account or render the reasons of their actions to any others but to God their only Soveraigne Lord: yet (though amongst the most ancient and Christian Monarches the same Lorde God having committed to us the Soveraignetie of this Realme of Englande and other our dominions, which wee holde immediately of the same Almightie Lord, and so thereby accountable onely to his divine Majestie) wee are notwithstanding this our prerogative at this time specially mooved ... to publish not onely to our owne naturall loving Subjectes, but also to all others our neighbours, … what our intention is at this time, and upon what just and reasonable grounds we are mooved to give aid to our Neighbours the naturall people of the lowe Countries,…
The necessity for the king's having such authority was variously rationalized. Sarpi's Free Schoole of Warre argued:
God hath together with the Majestie, given unto the Soveraigne alone, the authority to make peace, warre, leagues, and allyances, as hee shall conceive it necessary and convenient: neither can any but hee know the circumstances of opportunities and needs, as nothing can governe and actuate the body but the Soule which God and Nature hath given it.28
The translator of Chelidonius’ work Of the Institution and Firste
Beginning of Christian Princes developed the analogy implied in this passage from The Free Schoole of Warre:
The anciente Philosophers … have ben of opinion, that the natural bodie of Man with the offices and duties of the parts thereof joyned and united togythere to a common function, do represent the lyvely image and very figure of a good and perfect commonwealth …29
As the soul determines the movements of the body, so, he said, the king or prince must determine the movements of the parts of the commonwealth. It is a figure commonplace in the literature of the time, and it is the figure connoted in Exeter's advice to the king about Scotland:
While that the armed hand doth fight abroad
The advised head defends itself at home:
For government, though high and low and lower,
Put into parts, doth keep in one consent,
Congreeing in a full and natural close,
Like music.30
Canterbury further embroiders the theme by the long analogy between state and beehive, an analogy likewise developed by Chelidonius from Pliny in the work already instanced, as well as in the well-known passage in Lyly's Euphues:31 My sole interest in such analogies as present is, however, to show how they expressed the Tudor idea of the state in which the king was the sole responsible head and the sole responsible agent for making war.
The matter of the king's responsibility was of practical as well as theoretical importance in Elizabethan England, for it answered one of the most controversial questions of the day, the question of the soldier's responsibility for the justice of the cause in which he fought. This answer is given explicitly and at length by Shakespeare later on in the play, but it must be discussed here in connection with the king's responsibility. It was the principle at issue in 1587 when Sir William Stanley surrendered the town of Deventer to the Spanish. The case became a cause célèbre. I quote Martin Haile's account of the event:
Appointed governor on the 24th November, 1586, Stanley seems to have lost little time in entering into communication with J. B. de Tassis, the former Spanish ambassador in Paris, and through him with the Duke of Parma. His explanation, as given in the presence of Tassis to the assembled townspeople in the marketplace of Deventer, being that he did not hold the town for the Queen of England, but for the States, whom he knew in his conscience to be rebels to their king, and that therefore, he felt bound to “render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's,” and to deliver up the town to the King of Spain.32
Cardinal Allen at once proceeded to defend Stanley in a book published in Antwerp in 1587 as The Copie of a Letter Written by M. Doctor Allen: Concerning the Yeelding Up, of the Citie of Daventrie, unto his Catholic Majestie, by Sir William Stanley, Knight. It sermonized on the text of Stanley's own defense. Allen accepted the traditional concepts. The causes of war must be just. War is the prince's responsibility. The subject must obey his king, though any actions other than military actions are his private responsibility, and he must account for them to God. He has no right to surrender himself or the king's property. But, the Catholic spokesman argued, these principles are not here in question. The present war of England in the Low Countries is not just; it is not being fought in defense of England. A subject is not bound to obey his king in opposition to his God. The soldier may die at any moment and must be ready to answer for the justice of his cause. Ever since the publication of Queen Elizabeth's excommunication and deprivation by the pope no war could be proclaimed by her, however just, because war must be proclaimed by one with supreme power to do so. He turned to England for examples of those who had refused to obey their nominal rulers from King John to Jane Grey. In regard to King John he asked:
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 assistence, even in his lawful warres, until he returned againe to the obedience of the Sea Apostolike, and were absolved from the censures of the same, which he justly incurred?33
The important conclusion at which Cardinal Allen arrived is succinctly stated:
For that to revolt, is of itselfe, lawful or unlawful, honorable or otherwise, according to the justice, or injustice of the cause, or difference of the person, from or to whom the revolt is made.34
Furthermore, he asserted that whatever is unjustly obtained must be returned to its rightful owner, and Spain was the rightful ruler of the Low Countries. Therefore in returning Deventer to Spain, Stanley had been acting justly. Ultimately he thus made the pope the arbiter over the nation's rulers and made the individual soldier the supreme judge of the cause in which he fought.
The most direct answer to Cardinal Allen was made in A Briefe Discoverie of Doctor Allen's Seditious Drifts, Concerning the Yeelding Up of the Towne of Deventer, the address to the reader of which was signed “G.D.” The author argued that Sir William Stanley and his fellows did not obtain Deventer from the King of Spain. Moreover, he continued:
howsoever the towne and fortes were obteined, yet the subject being tyed to his Prince by allegeance and oth, and having upon that othe received from his Prince, or her lawfull deputy, any place of charge to keepe and hold to her use, is not to enquire into her right, how justly or unjustly she hath gotten or keepeth it, but to looke into his owne charge and othe, whereof he is bound to give account. Yea suppose the Queenes Majestie had by violence, fraude, or injustice entred upon those places, and so deteined them from the k. of Spaine: yet the same justice, which giveth unto every man his owne, and in such case tyeth her to restitution of whatsoever she wrongfully withholdeth, yet the same justice (I say) giveth her subjectes no such authoritie over her, as to be judges of her just or unjust dealing, much lesse to make themselves correctors, or executors of justice against her upon their owne judgement, and at their owne pleasure.35
The author answered the points made by Cardinal Allen, one by one, but this quotation gives the bases of his argument.
Now in the first scene of Act IV of Henry V Shakespeare represents the king, unrecognized, mingling with his common soldiers and exploring with them this fundamental problem raised by the dispute over the surrender of Deventer. Simpson in 1874 said that this conversation of the king with his soldiers “casuistically refuted” the scruples which Cardinal Allen had striven to sow about fighting Catholic enemies in an unjust war and made a distinction between political and religious obligation by laying down the principle that “Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own.” He then went on to poiht out that the historical Henry had not been noted for his religious tolerance as this Henry of Shakespeare's creation might have been. But actually the problem that both Allen and Shakespeare's Henry V discussed had nothing to do with religious tolerance. Nor does Shakespeare answer in this play Allen's basic contention that the queen had no authority to make war because she had been excommunicated and deprived by the pope. What Shakespeare's Henry V discusses is the general problem of the king's responsibility for deciding to make war and the subject's duty to obey his king. Thus we hear:
KING HENRY. … methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king's company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable.
WILLIAMS. That's more than we know.
BATES. Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough if we know we are the king's subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.
WILLIAMS. But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all “We died at such a place”; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.36
So far the argument has served but to emphasize the Tudor position, a position which opposed that of Allen. The responsibility is the king's; the duty of the subject is to his king.
But Shakespeare represents Williams as posing a further question when he continues:
I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.37
King Henry replies by making clear the distinction between the private and the military crimes of soldiers. Perhaps the simplest statement of this distinction was made by Sir William Segar in his famous work on Honor, Military and Civill, where he said:
First it is to be knowen, that some crimes be common, and punishable in all men: and some are proper to men of war onely: of the first are forgeries, adulterie, publique and private violence, sedition, manslaughter, burning of houses, treason, sacrilege and other enormities: for whosoever committeth any such offence, whether he be a man of warre or not, the punishment due is all one. Crimes proper to souldiers, are such only as are committed contrarie to discipline Militarie,… whereby men are made obedient, and instructed in all such qualities as are required in a souldier.38
Segar listed cowardice, treason, and disobedience as military crimes but reserved special condemnation for going over to the enemy or yielding a stronghold to the enemy.
There is, therefore, no religious tolerance in question in King Henry's words when he concludes that “Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.” He is merely stating the difference between the soldier as a man responsible to God and as a soldier responsible only for obedience to his king. The king's argument in the play makes clear his meaning:
the king is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services. Besides there is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers. Some, peradventure, have on them the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder; some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury; some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robbery.
He continues his philosophizing by showing God as eternally taking vengeance for sin:
Now, if these men have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God: war is his beadle, war is his vengeance; so that here men are punished for before-breach of the king's laws in now the king's quarrels:…
After his long exposition of the nature of private sin, for which each man is responsible to God, he then concludes:
Then, if they die unprovided, no more is the king guilty of their damnation than he was before guilty of those impieties for the which they are now visited. Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.39
The king then introduces another matter discussed by Cardinal Allen, the need for the soldier to be prepared to meet death and to see that his conscience is washed clean. Cardinal Allen had made this necessity an excuse for advocating the subject's right to judge his king and the cause for which he fought. Shakespeare does not let any such idea intrude, going back rather to the warning that was common in the books dealing with the philosophy of war, the warning to the soldier to be ready to meet his God:
Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained: and in him that escapes, it were not sin to think that, making God so free an offer, he let him outlive that day to see his greatness, and to teach others how they should prepare.40
Williams shows that he has been a good pupil, and it is to be hoped that the reader has by this time already learned the lesson that Shakespeare through King Henry took so much time and pains to teach, for Williams summarizes: “’Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head; the king is not to answer it.”41 The soldier is thus responsible to the king as a soldier, but as a man he is responsible to God. Conversely, the king is responsible for the cause in which he orders his soldiers to fight, but he is not responsible for their sins as private persons.
The horrors of war make the king's responsibility for waging war a heavy one, and his chief concern must be the righteousness of his cause, for God determines the outcome. Geoffrey Gates in his Defence of Militarie Profession gave long consideration to this matter, affirming that “it is he onely that beareth the sword of vengeance, that striketh in the battell, and giveth the victory to himselfe.”42 De Loque asserted that victory “dependeth not of the multitude of fighting men, but of the grace and favour of God.”43 It was a commonplace in the military books of the Elizabethan period, this assertion that the king proposes war, but God gives the victory, not to numbers of soldiers but to the righteous cause. War is the scourge of God, they quoted over and over again. It is no wonder, then, that Shakespeare's Henry V out-Henries the historical Henry in his recognition of his dependence upon God as the giver of victory. At times his references to God seem a little out of place in the context. For instance, as he returns taunt for taunt to the dauphin anent the tennis balls, the cynical and angry speech closes with a reference that could only apply to a personally vindictive God:
many a thousand widows
Shall his mock mock out of their dear husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn.
But this lies all within the will of God, …44
Before the battle of Agincourt we hear him taking the name of God in vain as he speaks greedily of honor:
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me,
For the best hope I have.45
Yet after the battle his gloating becomes a Jubilate. Ten thousand Frenchmen slain, one hundred and twenty-six princes and nobles dead; eight thousand and four hundred knights, esquires, and gentlemen killed. He recites the names of the greatest. And of the English only four “of name” slain. Then he chants the response:
O God! thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to thy arm alone,
Ascribe we all.
Again he gloats:
When, without stratagem,
But in plain shock and even play of battle,
Was ever known so great and little loss
On one part and the other?
And again comes the response:
Take it, God,
For it is none but thine!
But the final triumph of piety comes as the king proclaims death to anyone who would steal the honor from God:
And be it death proclaimed through our host
To boast of this or take that praise from God
Which is his only.46
The drastic order is given without benefit of Holinshed, but Henry's ordering the Non nobis and the Te deum after battle is recorded in the chronicle, as is his insistence upon his return to England that the people give thanks only to God. This emphasis upon God as the God of battles, the justicer among nations, was the basic premise in the philosophy of war which made a just cause the best hope of victory.
But the consideration of war must inevitably bring also a consideration of peace. “The Lord will bless his people with peace” was a promise as comforting to the Elizabethans as to other Godfearing peoples. Peace builds and war destroys. Peace conserves and war corrupts. Peace brings plenty and war dearth. Peace is the nurse of arts and sciences; war leads to brutishness. Peace brings happiness; war mourning and misery. The tale is old; the reality ever new. Always the blessings of peace are more prized as the horrors of war become more imminent. I could quote almost innumerable passages to illustrate the praises of peace written or read in sixteenth-century England, but an inclusive description quoted from the translation of Chelidonius’ “Treatise of Peace and Warre” will serve to represent them:
Being as it were the spring and fountaine of all humaine felicitie, governer and nursse of all that the universall worlde containeth. Peace I say giveth being and strengthe to all things: shee keepeth and conserveth them in suche sorte, as without hir aide and helpe in one instante they would be overthrowne, destroyed and spoyled: for by hir aide the lande is tilled, the fieldes made flourishing and greene, the beastes feede quietly, Cities be edified, things ruinate be repaired, antiquities be augmented, lawes be in their force, the common wealth flourisheth, religion is maintained, equitie is regarded, humanitie is embraced, handie craftes men be set a woorke, the poore live at ease, the riche men prosper, learning and sciences be taught, with all libertie, youthe learne vertue, olde men take their rest, virgines be happely married, Cities and Townes be peopled, and the world is multiplied.47
In a play about war it was inevitable that Shakespeare too should hymn the praise of peace, and it was fitting that to the peacemaker of the play, the Duke of Burgundy, the part should be given. Of the kings of England and France he demands:
Why that the naked, poor, and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Peace has long been chased from France, he mourns:
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned dies; . . . . . . . . . .
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country,
But grow like savages, as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood,
To swearing and stern looks, defus'd attire
And every thing that seems unnatural.48
But no matter how excellent the beauties of peace, the Elizabethan realist recognized that peace at any price was not to be desired. Barnabe Riche might have been writing in 1938 rather than in 1604 when he admonished:
This olde Canticle, Da pacem in diebus nostris, hath sometimes bene too much imbraced, and the bare motion and sound of Peace, is so sweete and pleasing to the feareful and faint harted, that to patch and peece it up, they neglect and set aside all occasions, giving an enemie those advantages, that many times are not to be redeemed. …
I will not say but in the time of Parlies, perswasion may doe much, but it is best then to perswade, when there is force to command: for in the time of Parlies and Treaties of peace, the Conquerour and he that is of greatest power, doth rather give than receive conditions.49
And Riche's Allarme to England had pointed out in 1578 the corroding and corrupting power of long-continued peace.
This realist's view of peace was shared by most of the writers on the military art, but it was also pointed out that God used peace as well as war as the instrument of his avenging justice. Geoffrey Gates warned:
When the Lord meaneth to plague a wicked nation for sinne and to translate them to the power and scepter of another nation: then he filleth them with the fatnesse of the earth, and geeveth them peace that they may rotten in idlenesse, and become of dulle wittes, slowe of courage, weak handed, and feeble kneed: …50
And we remember Sidney's description of Helen, Queen of Corinth, who so remarkably resembled Queen Elizabeth:
she using so straunge, and yet so well-succeeding a temper, that she made her people by peace, warlike; her courtiers by sports, learned, her Ladies by Love, chast. For by continuall martiall exercises without bloud, she made them perfect in that bloudy art.51
Ironically Shakespeare makes the dauphin the spokesman for the canonical doctrine:
It is most meet we arm us ’gainst the foe;
For peace itself should not so dull a kingdom,
Though war nor no known quarrel were in question,
But that defences, musters, preparations,
Should be maintain'd, assembled, and collected,
As were a war in expectation.52
It is the dauphin too who advises:
In cases of defence ’tis best to weigh
The enemy more mighty than he seems: …53
And it is the dauphin who whines out the truth:
By faith and honour,
Our madams mock at us, and plainly say
Our mettle is bred out; and they will give
Their bodies to the lust of English youth
To new-store France with bastard warriors.54
The seventh scene of the third act, the pre-battle scene among the French, where we hear the dauphin praising his horse and desiring to recite the sonnet he once made in honor of that favored darling, gives us, however, a revealing picture of the weakness and effeminacy of the French, of their too great concern with the frivolities of peace, and of their consequent degeneration. And the constable exhorting his armies makes light of their task, despising the English, and contradicting in every word the principle expounded by the dauphin of not under-estimating the enemy:
Do but behold yon poor and starved band,
And your fair show shall suck away their souls,
Leaving them but the shales and husks of men.
There is not work enough for all our hands;
Scarce blood enough in all their sickly veins
To give each naked curtle-axe a stain, …55
To the righteous cause God gives the victory. He had indeed plagued a wicked nation by filling them with the fatness of the land until they waxed rotten in idleness, dull of wit, slow of courage, weak-handed, and feeble-kneed. The French did ill to despise their hungry and disease-ridden enemies; they did ill to neglect the arts of war for the enticements of peace. For their sins God translated them to the power and sceptre of another nation. Shakespeare's Henry V acts out the thesis of Geoffrey Gates and the other Elizabethan expounders of war.
But as a war play, Henry V, while developing in plot and dialogue the Elizabethan philosophy of war, also makes conspicuous use of the formal procedures of war. However just the war, nearly all writers insisted upon one formality as essential to the right conduct of war; this was the formal “denouncing” or declaration of war. Alexander Leighton went so far as to insist that a war might be lawful in itself and yet be unlawfully undertaken if the warring power failed I) to declare the causes of the war, 2) to demand reparation for wrongs, and 3) to denounce the war.56 Queen Elizabeth, it should be noted, conformed to this prescribed course of action. On October 1, 1585, she caused to be published A Declaration of the Causes Mooving the Queene of England to Give Aide to the Defence of the People Afflicted and Oppressed in the Lowe Countries in which all the machinations of the Scots and the Guises and the continuous plotting of the Spanish were recounted, together with the history of the attempts of the queen to keep the peace, even though she prefaced this declaration by insisting that she was responsible to God alone, as I have already pointed out. Likewise in 1596 there was published A Declaration of the Causes Moving the Queenes Majestie of England, to Prepare and Send a Navy to the Seas, for the Defence of Her Realmes against the King of Spaines Forces, though in this case Lord Howard and the Earl of Essex spoke jointly for the queen.
Halle had given credit to Henry V for adhering to this formality of denouncing the war, saying:
The kyng like a wise prince and pollitique governor, entendyng to observe the auncient ordres of famous kynges and renoumed potentates used aswel among Paynimes as Christians, whiche is, not to invade another mannes territory without open war and the cause of the same to hym published and declared, dispatched into Fraunce his uncle the duke of Excester, …57
Holinshed represents the king as sending Antelope, his pursuivant at arms, to the French king to demand restitution of his rights and to announce his determination to fight for his rights, though he asks that the French king save the shedding of blood by yielding to his demands. Shakespeare follows Halle rather than Holinshed by making Exeter the messenger who demands that the French king divest himself of
The borrow'd glories that by gift of heaven,
By law of nature and of nations, longs
To him and to his heirs; …58
Presenting a manuscript pedigree to substantiate the English claims, Exeter then proclaims the determination of King Henry, even as he pleads that the horrors of war may be avoided
And bids you, in the bowels of the Lord,
Deliver up the crown, and to take mercy
On the poor souls for whom this hungry war
Opens his vasty jaws; and on your head
Turning the widows’ tears, the orphans’ cries,
The dead men's blood, the pining maidens’ groans,
For husbands, fathers, and betrothed lovers,
That shall be swallow'd in this controversy.59
To make sure that the formalities have been observed and the war denounced Exeter concludes:
This is his claim, his threat'ning, and my message.
Again, before Harfleur, the demand for surrender follows the formal denouncing of war as King Henry discharges himself of all responsibility and appeals to the men of Harfleur to submit:
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls;
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
Against these pictures of the horrors of war, he demands:
What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid?
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?60
It may be noted that the men of Harfleur yielded to a mercy which was not recorded of Henry V, but which was much praised in the behavior of the Earl of Essex toward the people of Cadiz in 1596.
Another formal procedure much admired in the records of Thucydides and other historians and generally recommended by the military theorists was the oration addressed by the general to his troops on the eve of battle. It was not, of course, considered legally and morally necessary, as was the “denouncing” of war, but it was generally thought to be the best way to keep up what we should call the morale of the troops. In his Path-way to Military Practise, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth in 1587, Barnabe Riche, discussing devices to keep troops advancing, ranked the general's oration even higher than burning the ships behind them. His encomium is descriptive of the ideal oration:
it kindleth the mind and humaine passions of a man, it taketh away feare, it ingendreth obstinacie to fight, it discovereth deceiptes, it showeth perrilles and the way to avoide them, it prayeth, it promiseth rewardes, it reprehendeth, it threateneth, it incourageth the mindes eyther of hope, eyther else of dispaire.61
The French Academie, discussing the requisites for a good general, said:
there is no doubt but that in a matter of great importaunce, the grave exhortations of a Generall, grounded upon good reasons and examples greatlie encourage and hearten a whole armie, in so much that it will make them as hardie as Lions, that before were as fearfull as sheepe.62
Richard Crompton dedicated his Mansion of Magnanimity to the Earl of Essex in 1599 with special praise for the achievements of the earl in his late valiant service at Cadiz, opening his work with “an oration to be made by the general to the whole armie afore the battel.”
Shakespeare uses this device of the oration of the general to his troops before battle to emphasize the rightness of the English cause and the valor of the English armies in contrast with the over-confidence of the French, which is but a cloak to hide their weakness. King Henry delivers two formal orations in the play, the first before the final attack on Harfleur, the second before the battle of Agincourt. A whole scene is given to the speech before Harfleur, in which the king encourages, inspires, and exhorts his soldiers:
Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
. . . . . . . On, on, you noblest English!
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof;
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought,
. . . . . . . . . . . .The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit; and upon this charge
Cry, “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”63
Before Agincourt the king's oration is ostensibly addressed to Westmoreland, who is commanded to speak the king's message to the troops:
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
Old men will yearly recall their feats to their neighbors; the names of the leaders will be freshly remembered. Till the end of the world the day shall be remembered. Today all those fighting are fighting as brothers:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; …
Those at home will feel deprived and humble when any speak who fought in this battle. It is a great speech to rouse men to prowess, and at the end Henry says farewell:
You know your places: God be with you all!64
In sharp contrast is the speech of the Constable of France to his men before the battle. He despises the enemy and belittles the task before his troops. There is nothing in what he says to make them lions:
To horse, you gallant princes! straight to horse!
Do but behold yon poor and starved band,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
There is not work enough for all our hands;
Scarce blood enough in all their sickly veins
To give each naked curtle-axe a stain,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A very little little let us do, . . . . . . . . .
And all is done.65
And Grandpré continues the disdainful oration which contradicts all the requirements of the approved exhortation to the troops:
Why do you stay so long, my lords of France?
Yon island carrions, desperate of their bones,
III-favour’ dly become the morning field: …66
Shakespeare, as was his custom, has here used the prescribed vehicle to make clear the characters of those who tread his stage. He has, incidentally, it may be said, incorporated into these orations the descriptions of conditions as Holinshed wrote of them.
It is, of course, as general of his armies and not as king that Henry addresses his troops, though it is as king that he declares war. The distinction should be kept in mind as we consider the next aspect of war dealt with in Henry V, army discipline. In addressing the governor of Harfleur, Henry speaks of himself as a soldier, “A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,” and wooing the French princess in proud humility, he says, “I speak to thee plain soldier.” Shakespeare describes him in the fourth prologue mingling with his soldiers:
For forth he goes and visits all his host,
Bids them good-morrow with a modest smile,
And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen.
But nevertheless Henry V is far from democratic in the modern sense of the word. He reckons the losses of the French as high at Agincourt because, of the ten thousand men lost, only sixteen hundred are mercenaries:
The rest are princes, barons, lords, knights, squires,
And gentlemen of blood and quality.67
He reckons the English losses as light because only four “of name” have been slain and “of all other men/But five and twenty.” Nor is his much-quoted speech before Agincourt democratic in the modern sense:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition;68
for it is not a declaration of the brotherhood of man, but of the brotherhood of soldiers. It does, however, recognize that brotherhood and accepts the mingled blood of great and small on the battlefield as a common offering.
This picture of the soldier king is the more impressive by contrast with the picture of the leaders of the French armies. The Constable of France despises his common soldiers. Addressing the peers before Agincourt he comments that
’Tis positive ’gainst all exceptions, lords,
That our superfluous lackeys and our peasants,
Who in unnecessary action swarm
About our squares of battle, were enow
To purge this field of such a hilding foe, …69
And Montjoy, come to ask leave to bury the French dead, desires with the same arrogance
To sort our nobles from our common men;
For many of our princes—woe the while!—
Lie drown'd and soak'd in mercenary blood;
So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs
In blood of princes; …70
It is a far cry from Henry's “he to-day that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother;” and it must have been written to mark the sharp contrast.
However kindly Henry's mingling with his soldiers, he is presented as a stern disciplinarian. We first see him in this role when, on the eve of his departure for France, he is called upon to deal with treason, the greatest of military sins. Shakespeare represents the three traitors—the Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scroop, and Sir Thomas Grey—as having accepted pay from France to kill their king. As a matter of fact, the Earl of Cambridge seems to have been led by his hopes of securing the succession to his own heirs rather than by avarice, but Shakespeare has him say merely:
For me, the gold of France did not seduce,
Although I did admit it as a motive
The sooner to effect what I intended: …
Henry's grim humor in handing the traitors warrants instead of commissions seems like something out of the Spanish Tragedy, but he is quite in the best tradition when he disavows private vengeance as a motive:
Touching our person seek we no revenge;
But we our kingdom's safety must so tender,
Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws
We do deliver you.
The articles of war which have come down to us from different times and different nations are remarkably alike. Leicester's preamble to the Lawes and Ordinances established in 1586 for the government of his forces in the Low Countries announced realistically the reasons underlying all such regulations:
seeing that martial discipline above all things (proper to men of warre) is by us at this time most to be followed, as well for the advancement of Gods glorie, as honourablie to governe this Armie in good order: And least the evil inclined (pleading simplicitie) should cover any wicked facte by ignorance: Therefore these martiall Ordinances and Lawes following are established and published.71
Henry V's army in France was governed by articles of war which Shakespeare probably knew. But because soldiers are much the same in every generation and the “evil inclined” commit the same wicked deeds, the soldiers of Henry V were very like Elizabethan soldiers, and the articles of war are very like Elizabethan articles of war. What is most interesting in the play of Henry V as a war play, however, is the use of the violations of the articles of war to round out the careers of Prince Hal's merry men. Shakespeare allowed Falstaff to go to Arthur's bosom like any “christom child,” but he was not so kind to the others. There is tenderness in the comedy of Falstaff's death, but no pity tempers the comedy of Bardolph and Pistol and Nym.
The camp boy introduces them as military characters;
For Bardolph, he is white-livered and red-faced; by the means whereof a’ faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol, he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword; … For Nym,... a’ never broke any man's head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk. They will steal anything and call it purchase. Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three half-pence. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching, and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel; …72
They are, in the words of Gower, “slanders of the age.”73
The articles of war generally give first consideration to the spiritual welfare of the soldier and to the preservation of churches and other religious institutions. The first of Henry's laws for his army was unusually specific, however, decreeing that anyone removing without the permission of the constable of the army any church goods was to be hanged, and the stolen goods returned to the church. A special provision was added:
we moreover ordain, that no one, under pain of death, shall dare irreverently to touch the sacrament of the Eucharist, nor the pyx or box in which the said sacrament is contained.74
It is Bardolph who is chosen to add to the gayety of war by stealing the pix, and he is hanged for it. Pistol described the stolen object as a pax or packs, but editors have identified it properly and described it just as it was described in Henry V's articles of war, though no one seems to have investigated the articles of war as a source.
Like most articles of war, those of Henry V also tried to legislate temptation into keeping its distance. Whores must stay away —a league at least—said Henry. Nevertheless Bardolph was said to be “a bawd, a cut-purse.”75
Failing to turn over his prisoner was also a crime in the England of Henry V as well as in that of Elizabeth. Shakespeare gives a whole scene to Pistol's compounding with his French prisoner and pocketing the redemption money.76 In commenting on this scene the camp boy gives us word of the third of the old trio:
Bardolph and Nym ... are both hanged; and so would this be if he durst steal any thing adventurously.77
Actually Pistol escapes hanging and steals away to England to do some more stealing, he hopes.
It is an unkind end that Shakespeare gives to these former boon companions of the king, and there is no indication that the king acknowledges them in any way as old acquaintances.
Striking an officer is another offence reckoned with in the articles of war, and Shakespeare makes more comedy about the violation of this law as the king talks unrecognized with the soldier Williams and then exchanges glove for glove with him to be redeemed at a future encounter. The king does not let Williams meet the fate which the disciplinarian Fluellen would prescribe, for to Fluellen “if there is any martial law in the world,” Williams should answer with his life for having struck that worthy captain while he wore the king's glove in his cap at the king's command. This practical joke at poor Williams’ expense does not amuse the modern reader much more than the king's handing out warrants instead of commissions to the traitor nobles, but the king evidently feels that filling a glove with crowns is ample repayment for having put a man in jeopardy. Williams does not join the king in his hilarious laughter, however.78 And incidentally, I would point out that the king's action is not democratic. The unbloodied Williams has not yet entered the brotherhood of those who shed their blood in a common cause.
Other extra-historical scenes introduced by Shakespeare are those relating to wordy battles between the captains of divers nationalities—Irish, Scotch, Welsh, English. I agree with the Arden editor that it is not likely that these gentlemen were introduced “to symbolize the union of the component parts of the United Kingdom.” They certainly are not united, and they much better illustrate the condition which Leicester spoke of in his articles of war, though he was not referring to the same nations. Leicester ordered that
whereas sundrie nations are to serve with us in these warres, so as through diversitie of languages occasion of many controversies may arise or happen to growe:
therefore all private revenge was expressly prohibited, and all complaints ordered to be referred to the captain for settlement.79
But having made the violations of the articles of war the occasion for comic interludes which rid Henry V of the companions who were with him when he himself was a part of the comic interludes of Henry IV, Shakespeare also builds a set of comic episodes to present a parody of the battle of the books which was being waged over “the school of war.” Even in the 1590’s the fight between the defenders of the long-bow and the admirers of the weapons brought into being by the introduction of gunpowder was not yet a thing of the past. And there were new quarrels over new issues, most notably the dispute as to whether the ancients or the moderns were the better authorities on military affairs, and the dispute as to whether theory or practice was to be preferred as a school of war. Generally speaking, the advocates of the long-bow and classical authority favored the study of theory as a preparation for the military man, while the defenders of weapons which used gunpowder and knowledge of current Spanish and French military practice urged experience as the best teacher in war. There was some crossing of the line, but in general the opposing ranks were aligned in this fashion. Shakespeare did not bring up the matter of gunpowder for discussion in the supposed time of Henry V, but the other two issues are the subject of much discourse, and it was Fluellen against the field.
To understand the battle waged by Fluellen, however, it is necessary to digress to the consideration of the conflicting thinking about war in Elizabethan England. The ancient historians, as I have stated in an earlier chapter, were studied for their practical usefulness from the very beginning of the Revival of Learning. But there were also ancient writers on military matters who were given recognition as professionals, and whose works were carefully studied and often interpreted by drawings and diagrams. Three such works may be mentioned as particularly influential. The earliest of these to be translated was Frontinus’ Stratagems, Sleyghtes, and Policies of War, dedicated to Henry VIII in 1539, a work familiar to architects and engineers in Latin also. To this translation were appended the general rules of war taken from Vegetius. The second to be translated was Onosander's Of the General Captain, and of His Office, a comprehensive but generally philosophic treatment of the art of war, dedicated by the translator to the Duke of Norfolk in 1563. This work commented interestingly upon the Turks’ rapid rise to power and noted that there was no nation with which they warred that “so much resembleth, and imitateth the famous antiquitie,” as did the Turks. The last of these great authorities to be mentioned here was Vegetius, whose Foure Bookes of Martiall Policye was translated by John Sadler and published in 1572. The translator claimed that Vegetius was “the chiefest writer of war,” and it is probably true that he was so regarded. I have already noted that his general rules were appended to the translation of Frontinus, and Lathrop says that the mediaeval work of Christine du Castel, published by Caxton as The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye contained long passages from Vegetius as well as extracts from Frontinus.80
There were great wars waged during the sixteenth century, however, that inevitably produced books which made the study of war something more than an antiquarian pursuit. Oman's introduction to Cockle's Bibliography of English Military Books up to 1642 says:
The men who wrote in the age of Elizabeth had seen all their service in Flanders and France, and were set on teaching their fellow-countrymen the Art of War that had been developed by Spanish and Italian captains since the commencement of the great struggle between Charles V, and Francis I. The military books of the period ... are very largely compilations from the continental authors. When they are original compositions, they are still mainly inspired by foreign experience and foreign necessities ... It is natural, therefore, that all our early English military books, with very few exceptions, are echoes from the great wars of the continent.
This bibliography appends to the list of English books a list of foreign works for the same period, and the indebtedness of the English to the continental works is amply demonstrated by the comparison of the two lists. Many of the English works are professed translations, such as Nicholas Lichefield's translation from the Spanish of the work of Gutierrez de la Vega, De re militari, which was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney in 1582; or Guillaume du Bellay's Instructions for the Wanes, translated from the French by Paule Ive, the famous military engineer, and dedicated to Secretary Davison, who Ive says delivered it to him with his own hands to be translated. One of the rare original works also shows the inevitable indebtedness of such works to foreign instruction in its very title, The Arte of Warre: Beeing the onely rare booke of the myllitarie profesion: Drawn out of all our late and forraine services, by William Garrard Gentleman, who served the King of Spayne in his warres fourteene yeeres and died Anno Domini 1587. This work was dedicated by Thomas Garrard to the Earl of Essex. As I have said, allegiance was divided between such works as these and the works of ancient and long-recognized authorities.
But there was a concurrent struggle between those who thought that an hour in the field taught a soldier more about war than a year in the study, and those who considered it necessary that experience should at least be supplemented by the study of military theory. Professor Francis R. Johnson has shown the growing desire in England before 1588 for the establishment “of some kind of scientific school or lectureship backed by government support” in London, where many scholars were then coming to be “in closer contact with artisans, technicians, and instrument-makers” who could give them better advantages for experimental investigation. It was desired to give a better scientific education to these craftsmen. Professor Johnson says:
The crisis was the arrival of the Spanish Armada off the coast of England in the summer of 1588. In great haste a militia was organized for the defense of London, and even after the defeat of the Armada these troops remained in training for fear of another Spanish attack. Then it was that a final victory was quickly won by the new plea that the effective defense of the capital required providing instruction in mathematics for the untrained leaders of the volunteer forces. Urged by Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council, a group of London merchants and the city authorities raised the funds for creating the first public lectureship in the mathematical sciences in London.81
The plea for the “learned soldier,” later to be voiced by Dudley Digges, was in fact urged by all those who saw that the new weapons of warfare and the old problems of strategy and tactics could be better handled by leaders with a greater knowledge of mathematics as well as history and geography.
Perhaps the best statement of the general position was given in the work begun by Leonard Digges but completed by Thomas Digges as An Arithmeticall Militate Treatise Named Stratioticos which applied mathematical methods to problems of military fortification and ballistics. Thomas Digges dedicated the work to the Earl of Leicester in 1579. He argued:
as in all other Artes and Sciences we ayde ourselves with Precedents from Antiquitie, so in this Arte of Discipline Militare, so corrupted, or rather utterly extinguished, we should repaire to those Fountaines of perfection, and accomodate them to the service of our time.82
But just as he had met with a lack of interest in many “masters and mariners” when he had tried to show them by mathematical computation the imperfection in navigation, so he found most military men
if they had been in a few skirmishes, or taken any degree in Fielde, they thought it so great a disgrace, that any thing should be desired in a Souldiour that wanted in themselves, that presentlie they would give their Definitive Sentence, that the Time was chaunged, the Warres were altered,... As though the Heavens and Elementes had chaunged their Natures, or Men and Weapons so altered, as no humaine reason might attaine to consider the difference.83
Professor Leslie Hotson has suggested that before writing Henry V “Shakespeare had observed Digges’ peculiarities and had also glanced over his military treatise,” which was reprinted in 1590 by Richard Field. Thomas Digges had been muster-master general under Leicester and had peculiarities which Hotson thinks may have been in Shakespeare's mind when he drew his picture of Fluellen. It is certainly quite possible that Shakespeare did know his book—and many others. The issue was a live issue in London in the nineties.84
The bitterest if not the most important quarrel was taking place, however, between Sir John Smythe and Sir Roger Williams. Sir Roger is or was in 1912 Professor Dover Wilson's candidate for Fluellen,85 with what disregard of that noble soldier's attitude will be evident. Sir John Smythe was a son of a sister of Jane Seymour and hence a cousin of Edward the Sixth. He had received some favors from the crown, and had performed ambassadorial services for the crown. But his interest was in war. He had served in foreign wars, and Sidney Lee says he was noticed by the Emperor Maximilian II for his fighting in Hungary against the Turks in 1566.86 He was given some soldiers to train for service in 1588 when the Earl of Leicester was lieutenant general of the armies brought into being to repel the expected Spanish invasion. When he expressed his opinion about the state of the army Leicester was assembling, the lieutenant general was displeased, though he himself was expressing much the same dissatisfaction at the same time. In 1596 Smythe made a treasonable appeal to the militia training near Colchester to desert to “mr Seymour” of royal blood and have Smythe as captain. As a result he was committed to the Tower and later detained in his own house, where, he said, he wrote about the military profession for the benefit of the nation. In 1590 this turbulent gentleman had published Certaine Discourses … Concerning the formes and effects of divers sorts of weapons, and other verie important matters militarie, with a proem to the nobility which explained his attitude as well as justified his own right to speak with authority. He argued that the greatest of moderns had been content to recognize the superiority of the ancients and to learn from them, but that the young men of the last twenty years were so vain as to think themselves wiser in the arts and sciences, especially in the military art, than the greatest of the ancients and even the older living men who had seen service “in the well ordered warres of Emperours or Kings.” Who are these young men? Are they newly fallen from heaven to bring us the military art? he asked. And he answered his own question scornfully, saying that they were merely the children we have known, children grown young men who argue hotly but improperly, with no recourse to reason and example. What wars have they served in to know so much?
Certainlie, all men knowe, that the chiefest warres that they ever served in, where they have learned anie experience, hath bene in the disordered and tumultuarie warres of the Lowe Countries under the States, or (peradventure) some little divers yeres past, in the intestine and licentious warres of France.87
Those who have known but hell think there is no other heaven, but these wars which have been their schools “have beene altogether without anie formed Milicia and discipline militarie, and therefore farre different from the well ordered wars that have bin in former times, betwixt Emperors, Kings, and formed common wealthes.” Peace and civil war are the two great destroyers of a state, Smythe asserted. Bad conditions brought about disorder in the wars in France and the Low Countries, he thought, and he chose to show them up. He made drastic charges also concerning the English armies under Leicester, accusing their leaders of incompetency, fraud, waste of soldiers’ lives, and other sins. His book was promptly suppressed.
But in 1590 there was also published A Briefe Discourse of Warre by Sir Roger Williams, dedicated to the Earl of Essex. Sir Roger was a great soldier and many times a thorn in the flesh of Leicester. Cockle says the book “succeeded in establishing a case for the new system of warfare against that advocated in England by the elder generation of military men, headed by Sir John Smythe.” It attacked many of the men and actions in the Dutch wars, explained the superior discipline and organization of the Spanish army, though made up of inferior men, and stressed the importance of experience as a teacher for leaders in military undertakings. In spite of its critical attitude the book was not suppressed, and Sir John Smythe wanted to know why. He wrote to Burghley to ask.
Humphrey Barwick, “Gentleman, Souldier, Captaine,” undertook in A Briefe Discourse to adjudicate the affair of Smythe versus Williams but really proceeded to refute Smythe's arguments for the long-bow. The book was suppressed also but was reprinted in 1594, when, according to the author, it had been found not to contain such matter as was supposed.
The battle over the school of war was much more extensive than I have been able to indicate in so short a space, but the issues were always the same: weapons, discipline, methods of training. The long-bow versus the new guns and cannon; the ancient military discipline versus the modern; historical and theoretical training versus experience—these were the grounds of personal feuds and much spilling of ink as well. When Fluellen wages battle, therefore, on the subject of the authority of the ancients and is insistent upon the “disciplines” of the Romans, he is taking sides in a quarrel raging in Elizabeth's day but not in Henry V's, and he is taking the side espoused by Sir John Smythe against Sir Roger Williams.
In the second scene of Act III Fluellen is dissatisfied with the mines as “not according to the disciplines of war,” and he blames Captain Macmorris:
he has no more directions in the true disciplines of the wars, look you, of the Roman disciplines, than is a puppy-dog.
But of Captain Jamy he speaks well as a great arguer from ancient authority:
Captain Jamy is a marvellous falorous gentleman, that is certain; and of great expedition and knowledge in th’ aunchient wars, upon my particular knowledge of his directions: by Cheshu, he will maintain his argument as well as any military man in the world, in the disciplines of the pristine wars of the Romans.
What Fluellen wants is a chance to debate the question, preferably with the Irishman as an opponent:
Captain Macmorris, I beseech you now, will you voutsafe me, look you, a few disputations with you, as partly touching or concerning the disciplines of the war, the Roman wars, in the way of argument, look you, and friendly communication; partly to satisfy my opinion, and partly for the satisfaction, look you, of my mind, as touching the direction of the military discipline: that is the point.
Captain Jamy is interested in the project, but Captain Macmorris does not consider the time apt for discourse on the theory of war:
The town is beseeched, and the trumpet call us to the breach; and we talk, and, be Chrish, do nothing: ’tis shame for us all; …
Captain Jamy vows good service before he sleeps, but he would have liked to have heard some discourse between the two. Macmorris is readier to fight than argue theory, and Gower has to step in, but Fluellen goes off with his unspent words, muttering:
Captain Macmorris, when there is more better opportunity to be required, look you, I will be so bold as to tell you I know the disciplines of war; and there is an end.
In the first scene of Act IV, Fluellen is again at it, this time with Gower, who calls his name too loudly for the Welshman's sense of decorum, and he bids him speak lower, giving his authority:
It is the greatest admiration in the universal world, when the true and aunchient prerogatifes and laws of the wars is not kept. If you would take the pains but to examine the wars of Pompey the Great, you shall find, I warrant you, that there is no tiddle taddle nor pibble pabble in Pompey's camp; I warrant you, you shall find the ceremonies of the wars, and the cares of it, and the forms of it, and the sobriety of it, and the modesty of it, to be otherwise.
King Henry, listening to this authoritarian, passes judgment:
Though it appear a little out of fashion,
There is much care and valour in this Welshman.
But it is Fluellen's estimate of Gower which best evaluates the speaker, “Gower is a good captain, and is good knowledge, and literatured in the wars.”88
Fluellen remains the stickler for observing the laws of war, and he consistently judges the moderns by reference to the ancients. The Duke of Exeter is as magnanimous as Agamemnon. Pistol is as valiant as Mark Antony—for a moment—but Pistol's interceding for Bardolph is fruitless, “for discipline ought to be used.” The French action in killing the boys and the lackeys guarding the luggage is horrible because “’tis expressly against the law of arms,” but the action of King Henry in ordering every English soldier to cut his French prisoner's throat brings only a comparison of the king with Alexander the Great. Alexander was born at Macedon; Henry at Monmouth. Macedon is on a river, and Monmouth is on the River Wye. Alexander killed his best friend Cleitus, and Henry—Gower may interrupt to protest that the king never killed any of his friends, but Fluellen presses the point:
as Alexander killed his friend Cleitus, being in his ales and his cups, so also Henry Monmouth, being in his right wits and his good judgments, turned away the fat knight with the great-belly doublet; …89
Sir John Falstaff, it was. Thus the comparison becomes two-edged. Modern critics seem to have missed the allusion, but let anyone read the popular Tudor translation of The Historie of Quintus Curcius, Conteyning the Actes of the Greate Alexander90 or the derivative accounts, and he will find that the killing of Cleitus was the act of Alexander the Great which turned many of his friends and followers against him and gave him cause for repentance. Fluellen speaks “but in the figures and comparisons of it,” but the flaw in Henry V's conduct which every reader has tried to rationalize is exposed by the king's fellow-Welshman who belonged to those “literatured in the wars.”
This weaving of the comic episodes into the texture of the play by making them all contribute to the development of the theme of war makes Henry V a much more unified play than Henry IV. Discussing the philosophy of war, picturing the accepted procedures of war, building comic scenes about the violations of the articles of war and the current Elizabethan dispute over the preferred “school of war,” it is a great war play, but there is little of the shock of battle on the stage. The horrors of war are talked about, but they are not there to confound the senses as they are in Henry VI. War is here a victorious progress of a hero whose cause God has blessed, but in his supreme moment before Agin-court the king shows that he knows his father's sins must yet be paid for. Praying that the Lord will not that day “think upon the fault/My father made in compassing the crown,” reciting his attempts to atone for that fault by interring anew the body of the murdered Richard, keeping in his pay five hundred of the poor to ask heaven daily “to pardon blood,” and building two chantries where the priests sing for Richard's soul, he is yet aware that the guilt is not washed away:
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.91
The Lord is good to Henry the Fifth, and he dies victorious, but his “penitence comes after all” and is “nothing worth” in averting the judgment which finally descends upon his house. The chorus at the end of Shakespeare's play reminds us of the record of that judgment in the plays of Henry VI that had been written earlier, but were indeed the end of the story and the record of the final fulfillment of the forces set at work by the seizing of the crown from Richard II. In them the cycle ends, for the wheel has come at last the full round.
11M. J. D. Cockle, A Bibliography of English Military Books up to 1642 and of Contemporary Foreign Works (London, 1900).