William Shakespeare and John Fletcher: King Henry VIII (All Is True). Prologue, Acts I-II. Gordon McMullen, ed. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2000.
“Prologue” speaks at the beginning of the play; he is a character, similar to “Chorus” in Henry V, the only other ‘history play’ that has a prologue. “Chorus” lauds the magnitude, indeed the grandeur of King Harry’s warring, but “Prologue” strikes a different key when introducing the rule of Henry VIII. A choric character or set of characters narrates with praise or blame. “Prologue” as a character personifies an abstraction, not unlike the characters in the medieval ‘morality plays,’ in which ‘Virtue’ and ‘Vice’ come before us. But Prologue himself embodies no moral standard, although he does provide one. The audience, perhaps a touch rowdy before the show begins, may expect a “merry, bawdy play” (Prologue.14), something along the lines of When You See Me, which the editor describes as “a comic history of Henry VIII’s reign” first staged in 1605 and revived the same year this play was first performed. Prologue wants no confusion of genres: “I come no more to make you laugh; things now / That bear a weighty and a serious brow, / Said, high and working, full of state and woe, / Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, / We now present.” (Prologue.1-5). The subject of this play deserves weeping and pity, not laughter. In terms of theater, this will be a tragic history; in terms of religion, one of the play’s central themes, one recalls Shakespeare’s contemporary, Thomas More, who noticed that Jesus as remembered in the Gospels wept “twice or thrice,” but never laughed.
Not only tears and pity but truth is at stake when considering the much-controverted rule of Henry VIII. “Such as give / Their money out of hope they may believe / May here find truth, too.” (Prologue.7-9). Sophist-influenced Pontius Pilate jestingly asked Jesus, “What is truth?”—not waiting for an answer from Him, the embodiment of truth, who stood before him. Those who come to see a show, to be entertained, “may pass,” inasmuch as they are the well-to-do, front-row-seat denizens who can afford to pay a shilling to watch, up close (Prologue.11). But those who come to hear a comedy “will be deceived” (Prologue.17). Seeing at its best is philosophy, at its lowest a taste for divertissement. Hearing at its best hearkens to religion, the spoken Word of God, the truth Jesus not only embodied but enunciated. At its lowest, well, “gentle hearers, know / To rank our chosen truth with such a show / As fool and fight is, besides forfeiting / Our own brains and the opinion that we bring / To make that only true we now intend / Will leave us never an understanding friend.” (Prologue. 17-22). Therefore —in philosophic logic and Christian Logos —”for goodness’ sake…be sad, as we would make ye” (Prologue.23-25). Suspend your disbelief, as religion urges, and think of these actors on stage as if those they portray are still living. “Think you see them great” and then “see / How soon this mightiness meets misery” (Prologue.29-30). That is, correct your thinking, your sight, your insight. If, having seen tragedy, “you can be merry then, I’ll say / A man may weep upon his wedding day” (Prologue.31-32). Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage, in joy not weeping. To weep at the end of a comedy would be as jarring as to laugh at a fall from greatness.
The sobered audience first sees and hears three English aristocrats: the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Norfolk, and Lord Abergavenny, Buckingham’s son-in-law. Norfolk has just returned from a showy meeting in France between King Henry and François I, a spectacle for the eye he describes in equally glowing words to Buckingham, who had remained in England with “an untimely ague” (I.1.4). These two kings, Norfolk exclaims, were worth any four others as “In their embracement they grew together” (I.i.10) in “earthly glory” (I.i.14). This was a marriage of “pomp” (I.i.15), with the French as golden as “heathen gods,” shining on the English and thereby making “Britain India”—India, land of rubies, where Elizabeth I, Henry’s future heir to the throne and contemporary King James I’s godmother, had authorized the British East India Company’s commercial ventures in 1600. Every night, the procession of ladies proved a “masque” that “was cried incomparable,” only to be made “a fool and a beggar” the next night by an even more superb show (I.i.26-28). The kings, “equal in lustre,” suns shining over all, would call the “noble spirits,” the aristocrats, to ceremonial combat, and these men “did perform / Beyond thought’s compass,” making the legendary story of the warrior Bevis of Hampton believable (I.i.35-36). For his part, Buckingham cannot bring himself to believe this (“O, you go far”), but Norfolk insists, “As I belong to worship and affect / In honour honesty…All was royal,” well-ordered, well-ruled, with each office performing “distinctly his full function” (I.i.38-44). The courtly show imitated the rightly ordered kingdom lauded by the political writers of Christendom, itself an imitation of God’s rightly ordered cosmos, where everything has a rightful place.
Buckingham remains skeptical, however. Behind all this fine display, “who did guide…this great sport together”? (I.45, 47). He doubts that the apparent rulers really ruled, ruled in truth. Norfolk knows: “All this was ordered by the good discretion / Of the right reverend Cardinal of York,” Thomas Wolsey (I.i.50-51). The incense-wafting Cardinal incenses Buckingham. “The devil speed him! No man’s pie is freed / From his ambitious finger.” (I.i.52-53). Such a keech, such a lump of congealed fat, could block the sun—whether the light of the sun-kings or that of the Son, King of kings. Norfolk attempts to explain if not to justify Wolsey. He is no aristocrat, “not propped by ancestry, whose grace / Chalks successors their way” (I.i.59-60). Aristocrats stay within legitimate bounds, bred and educated and habituated to their right place in the political regime. Wolsey is a Renaissance ‘new man,’ although evidently not the New Man of the Gospels. Nor did he rise to authority in Henry’s court by “high feats done to th’ crown” as, for example, a warrior or a navigator (I.i.61). Rather, “spider-like, / Out of his self-drawing web…The force of his own merit makes his way / A gift that heaven gives for him” (I.i.62-65). He is a man of Machiavellian virtù, a self-made man who relies on the gifts God gave him at birth. Young Abergavenny will have none of that, affirming the judgment of his father-in-law. “I cannot tell / What heaven hath given him…but I can see his pride / Peep through each part of him” (I.i.66-69). His gifts, if that is what they are, were hell-given, not heaven-sent, or else Wolsey “begins / A new hell in himself,” a blotch on the English political order and God’s (I.i.68-72).
Buckingham presents the evidence of Wolsey’s scheming. In planning the conference in France, the Cardinal arrogated the task to himself, pushing aside the aristocrats and clerics on the king’s Privy Council. At the same time, Abergavenny adds, he imposed the costs of the expensive display upon the aristocrats, “so sicken[ing] their estates that never / They shall abound as formerly” (I.i.83-84). Wolsey follows Machiavelli’s prescription for building the modern, centralized state by ruining the aristocrats who stand between the regime of that state—here as elsewhere in Europe, the monarch, but in England a monarch beguiled by a man grown so fat on money that he blocks the sun-king from his subjects’ view and the view of subjects from the king. Buckingham asks, rhetorically, what the result of this ruinous and vain diplomatic display was, and Norfolk admits, “The peace between the French and us not values / The cost that did conclude it” (I.i.87-88). Exactly so, my lord: a “hideous storm” followed the ceremonies, presaging France’s violation of the treaty when English merchants’ goods were seized at Bordeaux. God and nature protested.
Norfolk worries for his friends’ safety. “The state takes notice of the private difference / Betwixt you and the Cardinal.” (I.i.101-102). Your enemy is not only powerful; his “nature” is “revengeful” and “his sword / Hath a sharp edge” (I.i.108-110). Don’t talk so much. Starting now, since here he comes, “that rock / That I advise your shunning” (I.i.113-114). In the Bible, the solid rock is Jesus, offering refuge in the storm; this rock of the Church offers shipwreck. Upon seeing Buckingham, Wolsey “fixeth his eye” upon him, “full of disdain”; Buckingham returns the stare (I.i., stage direction). This is no Christlike man of charity and forgiveness. Wolsey comes with guards and secretaries carrying papers, which he indicates are records of testimony from Buckingham’s surveyor, the man who establishes the crucial boundaries between one aristocrat’s property and another’s, demarcating the proper places of things. Buckingham is under investigation. After he passes by, Buckingham, who suspects that the Cardinal is taking whatever prejudicial evidence he has to the king, wants to “follow and out-stare him” at court (I.i.129). Norfolk tries to talk him out of it with Senecan advice: “let your reason with your choler question / What ’tis you go about”; “be to yourself / As you would to your friend”—applying the Golden Rule to yourself (I.i. 130-131, 135-136). Buckingham resists, citing the difference between an aristocrat and a commoner from provincial Ipswich: “From a mouth of honour” the aristocrat intends to “quite cry down” Wolsey’s “insolence,” which implies “There’s no difference in persons” (I.i.137-139). Knowingly or not, he resists the policy of modern statesmen, recommended by Machiavelli, to centralize political authority by degrading the authority of the aristocracy that stands in the way of the monarch and the people. Buckingham wants his case to be adjudicated on the basis of who and what he is, as distinguished from who and what Wolsey is—aristocrat versus commoner, “this top-proud fellow” (I.i.151). (Fellow being a term of denigration in the mouth of an aristocrat.) Norfolk persists in his Senecanism. “Be advised: / Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot / That it do singe yourself” and “There is no English soul / More stronger to direct you than yourself, / If with the sap of reason you would quench / Or but allay the fire of passion.” (I.i.140-141, 146-149). The moral stance fortified by the philosopher of pagan antiquity, which defends the soul with the rule of reason over the passions, has formed part of the aristocrats’ education. Can it defeat the ‘modern’?
Buckingham relents, but only temporarily. Seeing corruption and treason in the person of the Cardinal (“Say not ‘treasonous,'” worried Norfolk gasps), Buckingham calls him a “holy fox, / Or wolf, or both” (I.i.158-159). Machiavelli tells his prince to be lion and fox, both; Professor McMullen cites Matthew 7.15, where Jesus warns against false prophets, ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing. Wolsey is indeed a Machiavellian fox, but he has nothing of the lion’s awe-inspiring fearsomeness; he is a canny devourer, only. Here in England, he counseled the king to undertake “this last costly treaty” (I.i.165). But when approached abroad by the Holy Roman Emperor, his fellow Roman Catholic, who feared the alliance of England and France, Wolsey accepted a bribe to persuade the king to break the peace treaty. That is why the French seized British goods at Bordeaux; they retaliated against a treaty breach. “Thus the Cardinal / Does buy and sell his honour as he pleases / And for his own advantage.” (I.i.191-193).
While the aristocratic gentlemen talk, the Machiavellian Cardinal acts, having induced Henry to have Buckingham and Abergavenny arrested for “high treason” (I.i.201). Buckingham submits to his arrest with Pauline Christian grace: “The will of heaven / Be done in this and all things: I obey.” (I.i.209-210). The king has ordered him to be imprisoned in the Tower of London, along with his son-in-law, who also submits. And others of Buckingham’s circle have warrants against them, including a Carthusian monk, whose “austere, contemplative order” (note to l.221) doubtless offends fat, ravening Wolsey. That is, the real power in England’s modernizing state has moved to eliminate his rivals in both the secular and the clerical aristocracies. Buckingham sees that his surveyor has been bought off with gold, the corrupt Cardinal having corrupted another man to betray his rightful lord. “My life is spanned already,” Buckingham also sees (I.i.223).
This first scene of Henry VIII recalls the political condition brought on by the state-building Tudors, who replaced the Plantagenets (and understandably so, given the cataclysmic tyranny of Richard III, killed on the battlefield of civil war by the future Henry VII). In the feudal state that had prevailed for centuries, the two aristocracies, the landed, warlike aristocrats and propertyless, spiritual-warrior clerics, had balanced one another. This balance supported but also limited the power of monarchs, as they limited one another. This was a system of ‘checks and balances’ embedded in civil society. Machiavelli’s modern state destroys that balance. Because it does, a priest who whispers policy to a king can effectively tyrannize the country while laying up his treasure not in Heaven but on earth. If the mighty leviathan, the modern state, is to be balanced, not tyrannical, it must follow Locke into a social contract and Montesquieu into statist institutions of balanced powers. England won’t have such institutions for many decades.
The second scene of Act I begins with a symbolic first entrance of King Henry, who leans his own bulk on the bulky Cardinal’s shoulder as he seats himself on the throne. They are accompanied by Thomas Lovell, constable of the Tower. Henry fulsomely states his gratitude to the Cardinal. “My life itself, and the best heart of it”—heart being the core of a human being, according to the Bible—”Thanks you for this great care” (I.ii.1-2). You have “choked” a “full-charged confederacy” against me. He will now hear the testimony of Buckingham’s surveyor (I.ii.3-4). Queen Katherine then arrives, along with Norfolk and the Duke of Suffolk, an aristocrat in the old feudal and chivalric manner. After Henry assures her that she wields “half our power” (I.i.11), Katherine petitions Henry regarding a “great grievance” in his loyal subjects, who are at the point of rebellion (I.ii.20). “Not almost,” Norfolk immediately adds; many of the people are “all in uproar / And danger serves among them” (I.i. 29-30, 36-37). And with just cause: the clothiers have been taxed heavily, upon the “pretense” of paying for “your wars in France,” which we have already learned that Wolsey had precipitated (I.ii.59-60), forcing them to lay off many of those who work for them. “Their curses now / Live where their prayers did” (I.ii.63-64). Henry knows nothing about it, and when he asks Wolsey, the Cardinal admits that he has had a part in it, but only one part, the Privy Council having concurred. But in fact, as Katherine immediately replies, Wolsey had usurped the authority of the Council in imposing the tax and is now trying to deflect the blame. Both Wolsey and Katherine serve as intermediaries. Wolsey stands between the king and his Privy Council, blocking him from knowing the truth. Katherine and Norfolk stand between the king and the people, reporting truthfully on their condition. Both Wolsey and Katherine are Catholics in name, only Katherine is Catholic in spirit.
When Henry expresses his disapproval of the tax (it is “against my pleasure,” the inveterate pleasure-lover intones), Wolsey goes a bit further, saying that the thing would never have “passed me but / By learned approbation of the judges” on the Council (I.ii.68-71). He even draws a moral lesson from the affair, lamenting that “‘Tis but the fate of place and the rough brake / That virtue must go through” (I.ii.75-76), proving that, like Norfolk, he can invoke Christian Stoicism. But only when it might serve to strengthen his bond with the king, namely, the weighty burden they share as public servants. We must soldier on, he continues, since if “we shall stand still / In fear our motion will be mocked or carped at, / We should take root here where we sit, / Or sit state-statues only.” (I.ii.85-88).
Henry is no Machiavellian, however. He does not rise to the Cardinal’s bait, this time. He doubts that there is any legal precedent for this tax. “We must not rend our subjects from our laws / And stick them in our will” (I.ii.93-95). That is, the rule of English common law, not tyrannical rule, shall prevail. He orders that the tax be rescinded and those who have refused to pay it be pardoned. Adroit Wolsey whispers to his secretary that the written declaration should be supplemented with the rumor that he had interceded with the king to arrange this.
This business properly disposed, with both Henry’s justice and Wolsey’s injustice duly confirmed, the main purpose of the king’s court now proceeds with the entrance of Buckingham’s corrupted surveyor. Katherine expresses her regret that the Duke “is run to your displeasure” (I.ii.110). Henry too regrets it. Buckingham is a learned man, a fine speaker, his “nature” and his “training” both so fine “that he may furnish and instruct great teachers / And never seek for aid out of himself.” (I.ii.111-114). And yet it is just such a nature, “once corrupt,” that will “turn to vicious forms, ten times more ugly / Than ever they were fair” (I.ii. 116-118). The king’s mind, prepared by Wolsey, already judges the surveyor’s coming testimony against Buckingham to be true. The surveyor falsely reports that Buckingham has spoken of murdering Henry and revenging himself upon Wolsey, basing his ambition on the false prophecy of that Carthusian monk, the Duke’s confessor, “who fed him every minute / With words of sovereignty” (I.ii.149-150). This, the surveyor heard from his lord’s own mouth.
Katherine intervenes, remarking that the surveyor had been fired by Buckingham, “on the complaint o’ th’ tenants,” who had complained of the man’s corruption (I.i.173). She warns him not to let his anger against his former employer ruin his soul, inasmuch as bearing false witness is a sin not only against man but against God. The audience now sees that the surveyor corrupted by the Cardinal already had acted corruptly in the course of his duties, well before Wolsey plied him. He is a little Wolsey. Henry, however, wants the testimony to continue, despite this new evidence. The surveyor, ignoring the queen’s pious warning, swears that “On my soul, I’ll speak but truth” (I.i.177). According to him, the truth is that he had warned his lord that the monk might be deceived “by th’ devil’s illusions,” but that Buckingham persisted in his murderous intentions (I.ii.179-180). The king is convinced by this testimony, calling Buckingham “a giant traitor” (I.ii.199). Ever alert to a chance to put a rival down, Wolsey asks the queen if she now believes that Henry can “live in freedom” if Buckingham is freed from the Tower, to which Katherine can only answer, “God mend all,” prudently evading the question (I.ii.200-201). A cardinal of the Church might be expected to concur, but Wolsey remains silent and the king judges Buckingham a “traitor to th’ height!” (I.ii.214). The commoner-cardinal has suborned the commoner-surveyor to ruin an aristocrat, furthering both centralizing statism and the tyrannical regime of the commoner-cardinal. For his part, Henry, a one-man supreme court, has prejudged a case in the Cardinal’s favor, brushing aside the evidence against the false witness his wife, whom he said shared power with him, had so clearly presented.
The trial scene, in which Katherine in effect acts as Buckingham’s necessarily helpless attorney, thus turns on the stated theme of the play: truth. A monarchic regime in a modern state wields immense power: legislative (as seen in Wolsey’s tax, vetoed by the king), judicial (they testify before Henry in the king’s court), and executive (quite literally to the point of a power to ‘execute,’ to capitally punish, accused traitors). In that state and regime, the political and religious authorities have become fused, even as the kings of England and France had seemed one person during their moment of amity. The same prelate who arranged the peace and inspired the war that followed in order further to enrich himself has nearly divorced the king from the commoners and has succeeded in divorcing him from important aristocrats, landed and clerical. Henry is not himself a tyrant, a tyrant by nature, but he acts tyrannically because he has ‘married’ himself to churchman of genuinely tyrannical nature; politically, he is more ‘married’ to the Cardinal than he is to his virtuous wife. All is true, with respect to the play itself, which testifies that all is not true in religio-political relations, that it is exceedingly difficult to find the truth, whether in framing laws or in judging cases under the laws.
The play now shifts to a conversation between the Lord Chamberlain, a member of the king’s household who oversees his household finances and schedule, and Lord Sandys, who are soon joined by Sir Thomas Lovell. The Lord Chamberlain and Sandys complain of the young who have succumbed to “the spells of France,” the “new customs,” quite “unmanly,” that they have brought back from their time at the French court (I.iii.1-4). If Wolsey is one of the ‘new men,’ the commoners who have risen to positions of authority either by displays of virtue or by deceptive virtù, the scions of the old aristocracy have become new, unmanly men, weakening their own authority. The Lord Chamberlain gruffly laments, “As far as I can see, all the good our English / Have got by the late voyage [to France] is but merely / A fit or two o’th’ face”—some pretentious facial expressions aping those of the self-conceited French courtiers. McMullen cites a passage from the contemporary writer, Thomas Dekker, who made an important connection: “Deceipt,” he observed, “studies Machiavell, and hath a French face” (note to I.iii.7). And further, “their clothes are after such a pagan cut to’it, / That sure they’ve worn out Christendom” (I.iii.13-14).
Lovell arrives, announcing another novelty, a “new proclamation / That’s clapped upon the Court Gate”—rather as Luther had clapped his 96 Theses on the church door. Sure enough, Christianity having been “worn out,” the proclamation aims at reformation, in this case “the reformation of our travelled gallants / That fill the court with quarrels, talk, and tailors” (I.iii.19-20). The Lord Chamberlain responds with rightful piety: “Now I pray our monsieurs / To think an English courtier may be wise / And never see the Louvre.” (I.iii.21-23). English wisdom is prudential, common-sense wisdom, needing no refinements, no “foreign wisdom” learned in France, as Lovell says; perhaps now they will “understand again like honest men” (I.iii.29, 32). French moeurs foster “lewdness,” giving young English aristocrats new ways to “lay down ladies” (I.iii.35, 40)—a telling criticism, given what we will soon see of King Henry’s proclivities, and indeed of the proclivities of the older aristocrats themselves.
Because we immediately learn that these mature aristocrats have been corrupted, too. Their complaints against the younger aristocrats are hypocritical. They are off to a dinner sponsored by none other than Cardinal Wolsey, whose “bounteous mind,” as Lovell calls it, guides “a hand as fruitful as the land that feeds us” (I.iii.55-56). He is truly “noble,” the Lord Chamberlain says (I.iii.57). Sandys can only agree, adding that “In him,” a Churchman, “sparing would show a worse sin than ill doctrine” since men of his way should be most liberal,” have been “set here for examples” (I.iii.59-62). With this confusion of aristocratic nobility and Christian charity with generously offered corruption, they hasten off to the dinner, where, to the tune of secular music, the master of ceremonies announces the rather Epicurean moral principle of the evening: “Good company, good wine, good welcome / Can make good people” (I.iv.6-7). No good reformation, and no Protestant Reformation, this. Among the “sweet society of fair ones,” as Sandys exclaims, is one Anne Bullen, a Protestant beauty and attendant to the queen. Sandys engages in some flirtatious courtly banter with her—evidently, he needs no sojourn to France so to do—and Wolsey arrives, greeting his company by saying that any “noble lady / Or gentleman that is not freely merry / Is not my friend” (I.iv.35-37). Then, a party of masquers arrives, pretending to be Frenchmen who cannot speak English and dressed as shepherds; they include the king. They will prove good shepherds—by Wolseyan standards. The king chooses Anne as his dancing partner, self-seduced: “O Beauty, / Till now I never knew thee” (I.iv.75-76). Wolsey quickly recognizes the king beneath the disguise, and Henry cheerfully unmasks, not only literally but then morally, asking the Lord Chamberlain who that “fair lady” is, with whom he danced (I.iv.91). She is the daughter of the Viscount Rochford, “one of her highness’ women” (I.iv.93). “Sweet partner,” he tells her, “I must not forsake you,” as indeed he will not (I.iv.103-104).
The king has the virtue of justice. When he is acting as king, he intends to act fairly and, in the case of the unjust taxation, succeeds in doing so. His tragic flaw is in the way he hears and sees: hearing false testimony and soft music, but above all seeing outward beauty and allowing it to turn him away from a marriage to a virtuous woman. The highest-ranking clergyman, the highest-ranking political man, the aristocracy that should be guided by Christian principles and animated as well by classical virtues have all become Machiavellians aiming at political domination and physical pleasure or Epicureans vulnerable to Machiavellian manipulation. This may be the moral and political product of the decades of civil war that culminated in Richard III’s vile tyranny.
The first Act of Henry VIII reveals the character of the king, his virtuous Catholic queen, his pretended-religious corrupt chief counsellor, and the English aristocrats, old and young. All except falsely accused, genuinely noble Buckingham and the still nearly unknown Anne Bullen are at the height of their authority, although the fall of the silly young aristocrats is evidently in the works. King Henry has the virtue of justice, handicapped in its exercise by the difficulty of ascertaining truth in a royal court corrupted by the deceiving, Machiavellian Cardinal. What he can see clearly is beauty in the person of a woman who is not his wife. He seems ready to ‘convert’ from Catholic Katherine to Protestant Anne, with momentous consequences for his regime. Is Miss Bullen a woman of virtue? And is Protestantism a better form of Christianity?
Act II begins with a conversation between two gentlemen, who discuss the guilty verdict handed down in the case of Lord Buckingham. The first gentleman, who attended the trial, presided over by Lord Norfolk, recounts that Buckingham “spoke, and learnedly, for life, but all / Was either pitied in him or forgotten” by the jury of aristocrats, his peers (II.i.28-29). Throughout, Buckingham exhibited “a most noble patience” (quite in contrast to Wolsey’s sham nobility, on display at the dinner), being “never so womanish” as to fear death (II.i.36, 37). The gentlemen agree that this is all the Cardinal’s doing, forming part of a systematic strategy of exiling or killing anyone whom “the King favors” (II.i.47). Unlike the king, the people understand the Cardinal’s intention: “All the commons / Hate him perniciously and, o’my conscience, / Wish him ten fathoms deep” (II.i.49-51).
This might easily lead to rebellion, as the unjust tax had done, but Buckingham himself now appears and addresses them. He thanks them for their pity, yet asks them to listen to what he has to say and then to return to their homes and forget him. “The law I bear no malice for my death— / ‘T has done upon the premises but justice— / But those that sought it I could wish more Christians. / Be what they will, I heartily forgive ’em.” (II. 62-65). That is, he takes care not to impugn English common law or the proceedings of the court (it was indeed “a noble one”), while Christianly forgiving the jury and apparently his accusers (II.i.119). He calls upon the accusers or the jury to “glory not in mischief,” however, “for then my guiltless blood must cry against ’em” (II.i.66-68). The man whose anger had seemed unquenchable has quenched it, Christianly. “As the long divorce of steel falls on me” (foreshadowing the momentous marital divorce that looms), “make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice, / And lift my soul to heaven” (II.i. 76-78). There is not a hint of treason from the man falsely accused of treason. “I forgive all” and, as for the king, I “shall cry for blessings upon him” (II.i.83, 91). He can say this out of Christian charity but also from an understanding of justice: “I am richer than my base accusers, / That never knew what truth meant” (II.i.104-105). Providence stands: “Heaven has an end in all” (II.i.124). He asks God to forgive him for whatever sins he may committed.
The speech shakes the gentlemen. What if Buckingham really is innocent? Will not the people revenge him by attacking his accusers, despite his adjuration? Further, there is a new rumor, the “buzzing of a separation / Between the King and Katherine” (II.i.146-147). They suspect that Wolsey may have whispered accusations against her, as would be consistent with his policy of isolating the head of state from anyone who might oppose Henry’s chief (ir)religious counselor. Although Wolsey had accepted the Holy Roman Emperor’s gold in exchange for persuading the king to break the treaty with France, he now, one gentleman suggests, intends to take revenge upon the Emperor, who is also the king of Spain, the archbishopric of Toledo; as McMullen explains, the Emperor is Katherine’s nephew, so to strike at her is to strike at him (footnote, line 161). The other gentleman protests, “But is’t not cruel / That she should feel the smart of this? / The Cardinal / Will have his will, and she must fall.” (II.i.165-166). Indeed it is cruel, but we are in too public a place to continue the conversation, his friend observes. “Let’s think in private more” (II.i.168).
And to confirm their suspicions independently, the Lord Chamberlain reads a letter to himself from a person who had charge of some fine horses the Chamberlain had purchased, reporting that the Cardinal had confiscated them on the grounds that a master shall be served before a subject. He is joined by Suffolk and Norfolk, who report the king’s worries over his planned divorce, abetted by the man Norfolk now calls “The King Cardinal.” Until Henry knows that man for what he is, Suffolk adds, “he’ll never know himself” (II.ii.21). This is because Wolsey, as Norfolk sees, “dives into the King’s soul and there scatters / Dangers, doubts, wringing of the conscience, / Fears and despairs,” counseling a divorce that would cause “the loss of her / That like a jewel has hung twenty ears / About his neck” without ever “los[ing] her luster” but indeed “lov[ing] him with that excellence / That Angels love good men with,” whatever the strokes of Fortune (II.ii.30-33). What Wolsey intends is not a royal marriage with the Protestant Anne but with the Duchess of Alanson, the French king’s sister. That is, having missed his chance for advancement from the Holy Roman Emperor/King of Spain, Wolsey has shifted his hoped-for alliance to France, the country he persuaded Henry to ‘divorce’ England from. The Cardinal “turns what he list”; “all men’s honors / Lie like one lump before him, to be fashioned / Into what pitch he please,” acting as if he were God forming Man out of clay (II.ii.20). Suffolk can only pray, pray that God will “free us from his slavery” (II.ii.42). All this notwithstanding, Suffolk avows that “I love him not nor fear him” (denying the Machiavellian formula): “there’s my creed” ((II.ii.48-49). He hints at Protestant leanings, charging that the one “who made him proud” was the Pope (II.ii.54). And Wolsey will indeed laud Rome as “the nurse of judgment” (II.ii.92).
Norfolk and Suffolk enter the king’s chamber, much to His Highness’s displeasure: “How dare you thrust yourselves / Into my private meditations? / Who am I?” (II.ii.63-65). He means, ‘Do you not know that I am your sovereign, not to be approached unbidden?’ but of course the king’s real dilemma is that he does not know the truth about the Cardinal and therefore about himself. “Who am I?” indeed. He orders them to leave, but before they can go, Wolsey and a papal Legate, Campeius, who has come to preside over the divorce proceeding, enter the chamber. Deluded Henry calls the Cardinal “the quiet of my wounded conscience,” a “cure fit for a king” (II.ii.73-74). The aristocrats leave, Suffolk whispering to Norfolk, “this cannot continue” (II.ii.82).
The prelates have sent messages to Rome and to clerics throughout Europe, soliciting their assurances that the king’s marriage to Katherine was actually against the will of God—this, to pressure her brother, the Spanish king to forego any objection. The king’s secretary arrives—Stephen Gardiner, elevated to that position by Wolsey, to whom he vows loyalty, not to Henry. Wolsey had moved his predecessor out of the palace, fearing his genuine virtue, which might have caused him to rise in the estimation of the king. “He was a fool,” Wolsey explains to Campeius, “for he would needs be virtuous” (II.ii.130-131). Henry would be virtuous, too, but he does not know himself, does not recognize that his pangs of conscience about having contracted a wrong marriage are in large measure pangs of eros regarding Anne Bullen. With the Cardinal’s help, he has persuaded himself otherwise. He is Wolsey’s fool, not a fool for Christ.
How has Anne responded to the king’s attentions? The queen’s lady in waiting talks things over with an “Old Lady,” a duenna-like character reminiscent of Juliet’s Nurse. She does have a conscience, worrying that Katherine is undeserving of the king’s disfavor, “so good a lady that no tongue could ever / Pronounce dishonor of her” (II.iii.3-4). Since it is “better to be lowly born” than to be raised up and then thrown down, “by my troth and maidenhead / I would not be a queen” (II.iii.22). The Old Lady is having none of that: “I would / And venture maidenhead for’t; and so would you, / For all this spice of your hypocrisy” (II.iii.24-26). A “woman’s heart” always yearns for “eminence, wealth, sovereignty,” and such prizes have bent your flexible “conscience” (II.iii.29, 32). “You would not be a queen,” she puns, ‘queen’ meaning whore, as well. When Anne denies any such ambition, the Old Lady sniffs, “Then you are weakly made” (II.iii.40).
The ubiquitous Lord Chamberlain enters with the news that the king intends to make Anne the Marchioness of Pembroke, along with a substantial income—this, presumably, to set her up either as his mistress or to elevate her aristocratic status, clearing the path to make her his queen, in one or both senses. The Chamberlain confides to the audience that, having “perused her well,” he understands how her well-mingled “beauty and honor” have captivated Henry. After he departs, the Old Lady exults (after all, she will accompany Anne to her new estate), while rather sharply remarking that these new honors will have kingly strings attached. One does not receive a thousand pounds a year in exchange for “no other obligation” than “pure respect” (II.iii.95-96). Anne is discomfited by this rough humor, asking only that her attendant say nothing about this to Queen Katherine. “What do you think me?” the Old Lady exclaims, her version of English good sense having been questioned (II.iii.108). In the morality plays, the Vetus homo, the Old Man, recalls Old Adam, the originator of original sin. The Old Lady is his womanly counterpart, serving as a touchstone for the New Lady, Christian and Protestant, testing her to find the truth of her. True or hypocritical? True or self-deluded, regarding her real motives?
Back at court, the Archbishop of Canterbury, several bishops, the two Cardinals, and King Henry and Queen Katherine gather to hear the judgment of Rome on Katherine. She pleads her case, asking for right, justice, and pity, having always “been to you a true and humble wife” and the mother of his children (II.iv.21). Twenty years earlier, Henry’s father and her father had “gathered a wise council to them / Of every realm…who deemed our marriage lawful” (II.iv.49, 51). Turning to Wolsey, who counsels patience, she assures him that she will be—”when you are humble”! (II.iv.72). “You are mine enemy, and make my challenge / You shall not be my judge” (II.iv.75-76). O, but Madam, he smoothly replies, “You speak not like yourself”; “you do me wrong” (II.iv.83, 86), failing to display your usual gentle and wise disposition. Knowing that he “tender[s] more your person’s honor” than his “high profession spiritual,” knowing further that his heart—again, the center of the soul—is “crammed with arrogancy, spleen and pride,” she continues to refuse the Cardinal as her judge and appeals to the Pope, demanding “to bring my whole cause ‘fore his Holiness, / And to be judged by him” (II.iv. 108, 114-115, 118-119). She walks out.
Henry admits that Katherine is “the queen of earthly queens,” a woman of “sweet gentleness,” saintly meekness, “wife-like government,” and unquestioned piety; “noble-born, /And like her true nobility she has /Carried herself toward me” (II.iv. 134-139). Worried, the Cardinal quickly requests that the king declare publicly that he had nothing whatever to do with arranging these proceedings. The king so absolves him—whether naively, self-deludingly, or hypocritically, one can only guess. He further excuses the queen’s outburst by saying she must have been lied to by Wolsey’s enemies, who are wont to bark “like to village curs” (II.iv.156). It was rather the Bishop of Bayonne, a French ambassador, who raised doubts about the legitimacy of his marriage to Katherine, in light of a proposed marriage between his daughter Mary and the Duke of Orléans. He then worried that his lack of a male heir was a divine judgment on himself. Weighing “the danger which my realms stood in / By this my issue’s fail,” “hulling in /The wild sea of my conscience, I did steer / Toward this remedy whereupon we are / Now present here together,” intending therewith to “rectify my conscience” (II.iv. 194-200). He challenges the Bishop of Lincoln to prove his marriage lawful, in which case he will remain married to Katherine. At that, Campeius asks for an adjournment of the proceeding, given the queen’s absence, at which point Henry suspects the “dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome” (II.iv.234). To evade them, he decides to call upon “my learned and well-beloved servant,” Thomas Cranmer, who had written the document sent to Rome and the clerics of Europe, justifying the divorce on the grounds that Katherine had been married before she married the king. With his approach, “I know / My comfort comes along” (II.iv.236-237). He dismisses the court, which has not comforted the royal Epicurean. [1]
King Henry Eighth and Cardinal Wolsey share a decidedly unspiritual bond: the love of pleasure. Both have fattened in self-indulgence. They differ, in that the king means well, wants to do justice, is troubled when he fails, whereas Wolsey is a Machiavellian; he loves ruling even more than pleasure. As of the midpoint in the play, he has out-schemed the king.
Note
- While the play does not explain the argument in favor of what it calls the divorce (actually an annulment), it would have been familiar to the audience. Katherine of Aragon had first married Henry’s elder brother, Arthur, then Prince of Wales, heir to the throne occupied by Henry VII. Arthur died, and under canon law a man is not allowed to marry his brother’s widow. The pope granted Henry of York dispensation to do so. Cranmer’s argument for annulling the marriage thus rested upon canon law, not the dispensation; the reason for appealing to clerics throughout Europe, not only the pope, might be a suspicion that the pope might not overrule the dispensation. This would explain both Katherine’s appeal to papal authority and Henry’s impatience with papal “sloth and tricks.”
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