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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.