Henry VI, Part 2

Summary

Henry VI, Part 2 is the play of Duke Humphrey's fall and Jack Cade's rebellion. It opens with Suffolk presenting Margaret of Anjou to Henry, along with a marriage treaty that gives away Anjou and Maine and brings no dowry. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the Lord Protector, cannot finish reading the articles aloud. From that moment the court divides into those who want Gloucester gone and those who simply want the crown: Cardinal Beaufort, Suffolk, Somerset, Buckingham and the new queen form a temporary alliance against the Protector, while Richard, Duke of York, watches, waits, and tells the audience that he will bide his time. Gloucester's enemies reach him through his wife. Eleanor, ambitious for her husband, hires a priest to bring her a witch and a conjurer; the spirit they raise gives riddling prophecies about the king, Suffolk and Somerset, and the ceremony is a trap set by her enemies, who arrest her in the act. She is sentenced to walk barefoot through London in penance and is banished. Gloucester resigns his staff of office, is charged with treason at the Parliament of Bury St Edmunds, and is murdered in his bed by men hired by Suffolk and the Cardinal. Warwick, reading the signs of strangulation on the body, accuses them. The commons demand Suffolk's banishment; he parts from Margaret in a passionate scene and is killed by pirates on the Kentish coast. The Cardinal dies raving that he sees Gloucester's ghost. The second half belongs to the commons. York, sent to Ireland with an army, has prepared a Kentish clothier named Jack Cade to rise under the name of Mortimer. Cade's rebellion is grotesque, comic and murderous by turns: his followers hang a clerk for being able to write, behead Lord Say for founding a grammar school, and propose to kill all the lawyers. The rebellion collapses when Clifford invokes the memory of Henry V, and Cade, starving after five days in hiding, is killed by a Kentish squire, Alexander Iden, in his own garden. York returns, demands Somerset's arrest, and openly claims the throne. At the first Battle of St Albans, York kills old Clifford, his son Richard kills Somerset, and the king flees to London. The play is larger and more varied than Part 1. It moves from the council chamber to the street and the battlefield, from formal verse to rough prose, and it gives ordinary people, an armourer and his apprentice, a lame beggar, a mob, a squire, a voice in the nation's ruin. Its center is the gap between Henry's personal piety and his failure to protect the innocent Gloucester. Henry recognizes the conspiracy, weeps, and lets it happen. The play asks whether goodness that does not act can still be called good in a king.

Plot or Argument

• Act 1: A costly queen and a duchess's dream

  Suffolk delivers Margaret and the treaty surrendering Anjou and Maine. Gloucester laments the loss of Henry V's conquests; once he leaves, Cardinal, Buckingham and Somerset plot against him, and York vows to wait for his chance. Eleanor tells her husband she dreamed of being crowned; he rebukes her, but she hires the priest John Hume to procure Margery Jourdain and Roger Bolingbroke. At court Margaret humiliates Eleanor, Somerset is preferred to York as regent of France, and the apprentice Peter accuses his master Horner of calling York the rightful king. The conjurers raise a spirit, which prophesies, and York and Buckingham arrest Eleanor.

• Act 2: A false miracle and a fallen duchess

  While the court hawks at St Albans, a man named Simpcox claims he was born blind and healed at Saint Alban's shrine; Gloucester exposes him by a simple test and has him whipped until he 'leaps' his lameness away. News of Eleanor's arrest arrives. In his garden York lays out his descent to Salisbury and Warwick, who kneel to him as king. Eleanor is sentenced and her accomplices condemned; Gloucester gives up his staff. Horner, drunk on his neighbours' toasts, is beaten by Peter in a trial by combat and confesses. Eleanor does penance in the street and warns her husband of the trap.

• Act 3: Murder at Bury

  At the Parliament of Bury St Edmunds, Margaret and the lords accuse Gloucester; he is arrested, and Henry leaves the room in grief rather than resist. York, given an army for Ireland, reveals in soliloquy that he has set Cade to stir up Kent. Gloucester is found dead in his bed; Henry swoons, Warwick reads murder in the corpse, and the commons force Suffolk's banishment. Suffolk and Margaret part. In a bedchamber the Cardinal dies in terror of Gloucester's ghost, and Henry forbids his lords to judge him.

• Act 4: Cade's commonwealth

  Suffolk is captured at sea and beheaded by Walter Whitmore, fulfilling the spirit's warning about water. Cade, claiming to be a Mortimer, rallies Kentish men at Blackheath, kills the Stafford brothers, enters London, strikes his staff on London Stone and has Lord Say beheaded. Margaret mourns over Suffolk's severed head. Old Clifford and Buckingham turn the rebels with the name of Henry V and the offer of pardon. Cade flees, starves, and is killed by Alexander Iden in his Kentish garden.

• Act 5: The claim declared and the first battle

  York returns from Ireland at the head of an army, demanding Somerset's arrest; finding Somerset free, he declares himself king and calls in his sons. Salisbury and Warwick join him, while the Cliffords stand for Henry. At St Albans, York kills old Clifford; Young Clifford, finding his father's body, vows to spare no Yorkist child; Richard kills Somerset beneath the sign of the Castle inn. Margaret hurries the king away to London, and the Yorkists resolve to follow.

Characters

• Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Lord Protector

  Henry V's last surviving brother: patriotic, just in judgment, shrewd enough to expose a false miracle, but trusting the law to protect him. His murder removes the realm's last restraint.

• King Henry VI, King of England

  Now a grown man, devout and merciful, quick to praise God and slow to act. He sees Gloucester's innocence and laments it, but leaves him to his enemies.

• Queen Margaret, Henry's queen

  Proud, intelligent and impatient with her husband's mildness; she joins the plot against Gloucester and loves Suffolk openly enough to carry his head.

• Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, Gloucester's wife

  Ambitious for the crown, she dabbles in sorcery and is caught; her penance and warning to her husband are among the play's most humane moments.

• Duke of Suffolk (William de la Pole), queen's favourite

  Architect of the marriage and of Gloucester's murder; eloquent and arrogant to the last, he dies at the hands of a sea captain who lists his crimes.

• Cardinal Beaufort, great-uncle of the king

  Gloucester's old enemy, a worldly prelate who conspires in his murder and dies in terror, unable to make a sign of hope.

• Richard, Duke of York, claimant to the throne

  Patient, calculating and capable; he plants Cade's rising, waits for his enemies to destroy one another, and then claims the crown by arms.

• Jack Cade, rebel leader

  A Kentish clothier posing as John Mortimer; part clown, part tyrant, he promises cheap bread and common property and kills anyone who can read.

• Earl of Warwick, Yorkist noble

  Kneels to York in Act 2 and examines Gloucester's body in Act 3; his alliance will make and unmake kings in Part 3.

• Lord Say, lord treasurer

  Defends himself before Cade by pointing to his justice and his gifts to learning; he is beheaded anyway.

• Alexander Iden, Kentish squire

  A man content with his small inheritance, who kills the starving Cade in his garden and is knighted for it.

• Simpcox and his wife, beggars at St Albans

  Pretenders to a miraculous cure, exposed by Gloucester's questions and a beadle's whip.

• Young Clifford, Lancastrian noble

  His speech over his slain father turns grief into a vow of indiscriminate revenge that he carries out in Part 3.

• Richard (later Duke of Gloucester), York's son

  Appears in Act 5, mocked by Clifford for his deformity, and kills Somerset; his villainy is still only a promise.

Lessons

• Innocence is not a shield

  Gloucester's defence rests on his record: 'I must offend before I be attainted.' He is right in law and wrong in fact. The play shows that justice depends on men willing to uphold it, and that a king who will not risk himself for an innocent subject, as Henry will not at Bury, hands him to the butcher. Henry's own image of the calf led to slaughter condemns his passivity even as he speaks it.

  • What evidence does Gloucester give for his innocence in Act 3, Scene 1, and why does it not save him?
  • Henry compares himself to the calf's mother lowing after it. Is that a fair comparison for a king?
  • When does patience in a ruler become a failure of duty?

• So bad a death: judging a dying man

  The Cardinal dies raving about Gloucester's ghost and cannot lift a hand as a sign of hope. Warwick draws the obvious conclusion, that so bad a death argues a monstrous life. Henry answers, 'Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.' The scene sets the observer's moral reasoning against Christian humility before God's judgment, and it lets the audience feel the force of both.

  • What does the Cardinal reveal in his delirium that he concealed in health?
  • Is Warwick wrong, or only out of place? What is the difference?
  • How does Henry's response in Act 3, Scene 3 compare with his conduct toward Gloucester in Act 3, Scene 1?

• Testing a miracle without mocking faith

  Henry greets Simpcox's cure with immediate praise to God. Gloucester asks questions: how long blind, which leg is lame, what colour is this cloak? A man born blind could not name colours at sight, so the fraud is exposed. The episode, which Shakespeare took from an anecdote told by Thomas More, shows that faith and careful reasoning are allies: credulity dishonours true miracles by making room for false ones.

  • Trace Gloucester's questions in Act 2, Scene 1. What is the logic of his test?
  • Why does the Cardinal sneer that Gloucester 'has done a miracle today'?
  • How should a believer respond to claims of the miraculous, then and now?

• Cade's kingdom: grievance, flattery and the hatred of learning

  Cade's followers have real grievances, the loss of France and heavy taxation among them, but Cade answers them with impossible promises and murder of the literate. Lord Say's defence, that ignorance is the curse of God and knowledge the wing to heaven, means nothing to the mob, which then changes sides at the sound of Henry V's name. Shakespeare shows a crowd ruled by slogans, not reasons, while reminding us that the nobles above them were no better.

  • List Cade's promises in Act 4, Scene 2. Which appeal to real wants, and which are absurd?
  • Why does the clerk of Chatham die for being able to write his name?
  • What does Iden's garden in Act 4, Scene 10 offer as an alternative to both court and rebellion?

Context

The play covers about ten years, from Margaret's arrival in England in 1445 to the first Battle of St Albans in 1455, with some rearrangement: Eleanor Cobham's trial for sorcery took place in 1441, before Margaret came, and Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort both died in 1447, within weeks of one another. Suffolk was killed at sea in 1450 and Cade's rising followed that summer. Shakespeare drew on Hall and Holinshed, and for Cade's hostility to literacy and the law he borrowed details from chronicle accounts of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt. Elizabethan audiences heard the play against official teaching on obedience, such as the Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570), and against the unsettled question of who would follow the childless Elizabeth.

Composition

A shorter version was printed in quarto in 1594 as The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster; the longer Folio text of 1623 is titled The Second Part of Henry the Sixth. Scholars have long debated whether the quarto is an early draft, a reported or memorial text, or an acting version. The play was probably written around 1590-91, and many scholars think other writers may have had a hand in it.

Reception

The play was popular enough to be printed early and reprinted, and its Cade scenes have long been staged and quoted on their own; Dick the butcher's line about lawyers became proverbial. After a long period of neglect, twentieth-century cycle productions restored it as a powerful political drama, and critics have taken increasing interest in its crowd scenes and its range of social voices.

Comparisons

• Henry VI, Part 1

  Part 1 ends with Suffolk's boast that he will rule Margaret, the king and the realm; Part 2 shows him trying and dying for it. The Gloucester-Winchester feud that was only noisy in Part 1 becomes deadly here.

• Henry VI, Part 3

  Part 3 begins straight after St Albans with York seated on the throne. Young Clifford's vow over his father's corpse in Part 2 is fulfilled when he kills York's child Rutland in Part 3.

• Julius Caesar

  Both plays put a fickle crowd at the center of politics. Cade's mob, swung by the name of Henry V, anticipates the Roman plebeians swung by Brutus and then Antony, and both scenes show eloquence outweighing evidence.

• Richard II

  Richard II's deposition is the original wrong the Yorkists cite in their claim: York's genealogy in Act 2, Scene 2 traces his right back past Bolingbroke's seizure of the crown. Both plays weigh a lawful but weak king against an able claimant.

• Edward the Second

  Marlowe's play, written in the same years, also centers on a king ruled by a favourite and a queen who turns against her husband's enemies. Suffolk and Margaret invite comparison with Gaveston and Isabella.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Part 2 offers several scenes of interest to a psychiatry or history-of-medicine reader. Warwick's examination of Gloucester's corpse is an early stage example of forensic reasoning, contrasting the bloodless face of a natural death, explained in the period's physiology of blood withdrawing to the heart, with the congested face of strangulation. The Cardinal's deathbed shows guilt surfacing as delirium and hallucination; it is best read as a dramatic and moral portrait, not a clinical case. The Simpcox episode tests a claimed miraculous cure of blindness and lameness, and the play twice uses 'bedlam' (from Bethlem hospital) as a word for madness. Cade dies of hunger as much as of Iden's sword.

• Act 2, Scene 1

  Simpcox claims to have been born blind and cured at Saint Alban's shrine and to be lame from a fall; Gloucester's questions about colours expose the blindness as false, and the beadle's whip cures the lameness.

  Quackery Charlatans Disability Deformity
• Act 2, Scene 3

  Horner's neighbours ply him with sack, charneco and double beer before his trial by combat; he fights drunk, is beaten by his apprentice, and confesses as he dies.

  Alcohol Death Dying
• Act 3, Scene 1

  Suffolk calls Eleanor the 'bedlam brain-sick Duchess,' using the name of London's Bethlem hospital as a term for madness.

  Asylum Institution Madness Psychosis
• Act 3, Scene 2

  The king swoons at the news of Gloucester's death; Warwick then examines the body, describing settled blood, protruding eyes, upreared hair and grasping hands as signs of violent death.

  Death Dying Humoral Medicine
• Act 3, Scene 3

  Cardinal Beaufort, dying, speaks to an unseen Gloucester, asks for drink and for the apothecary's poison he bought, and dies without the sign of hope Henry asks for.

  Death Dying Madness Psychosis
• Act 4, Scene 10

  Cade, hidden for five days without food, climbs into Iden's garden to eat herbs; dying, he says famine, not valour, has beaten him.

  Starvation Nutrition Death Dying
• Act 5, Scene 1

  Clifford calls York mad and fit for Bedlam; Henry agrees that 'a bedlam and ambitious humour' drives him, linking madness and ambition in the language of humours.

  Asylum Institution Humoral Medicine
• Act 5, Scene 2

  Young Clifford finds his aged father's body on the field and his grief turns at once into a vow of pitiless revenge.

  Grief

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Eleanor and Gloucester that the play implies but does not show: the night before her arrest, when she decides to send for Hume.

• Essay

  Was Henry right to forbid judgment of the Cardinal? Write an argued essay using Act 3, Scene 3 and at least one passage of Scripture he seems to recall.

• Fiction

  Tell the story of the clerk of Chatham's last morning, before he meets Cade, as a short story in prose.

• Classroom

  Reenact Gloucester's questioning of Simpcox in Act 2, Scene 1, then have students design their own test for a different claimed cure.

Further Reading

• The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster (1594 quarto), William Shakespeare (attributed)

  The shorter early printing, useful for comparing scenes with the Folio text.

• The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, Edward Hall

  The chronicle source for Gloucester's fall, Suffolk's death and Cade's rising.

• Acts and Monuments, John Foxe

  Foxe retold the St Albans false-miracle story, which also appears in Thomas More; compare it with Act 2, Scene 1.

• An Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion, Church of England

  The 1570 sermon read in English churches, which frames how Elizabethans were taught to view rebellions like Cade's.

• Shakespeare's English Kings, Peter Saccio

  Separates the history of 1445-55 from Shakespeare's compression of it.

• Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Jan Kott

  Kott's essay on the histories as a 'Grand Mechanism' of power is a strong counterpoint to providential readings.