Themes in Henry VI, Part 2

Part 2 opens with a marriage that is already a political defeat. Henry VI has agreed to wed Margaret of Anjou without a dowry and, worse, with a surrender of English-held territories in France. The English lords are appalled. Gloucester reads out the terms and physically cannot finish the document. York says nothing in the council meeting, but what he thinks is clear from his first private scene. Everyone around the king can see that a weak decision has been made, and everyone starts working out how to exploit it.

This is how faction operates in this play: not through open rebellion at first, but through private calculation. Everyone has a position, and everyone is working to improve it at the expense of everyone else. Margaret and Suffolk move against Gloucester because he is the Lord Protector — meaning he governs in the king's name — and that authority blocks their access to real power. Winchester supports the move against Gloucester because he hates him personally. York watches it all and waits.

York's early soliloquies are the clearest window into how factional politics works. He knows what he wants — the crown — and he understands that he cannot move towards it directly while Gloucester is in place, while Margaret is ascendant, and while his own power base is not yet strong enough. His observation that "Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep" describes exactly his own approach: he presents a calm surface while working very hard underneath it.

The faction against Gloucester is a coalition of people who do not actually trust each other. Margaret needs Suffolk. Winchester needs to be rid of Gloucester. Buckingham wants advancement. York wants the throne. They are all using each other and none of them is honest about it. The coalition's coherence depends entirely on the shared enemy. Once Gloucester is removed, the coalition will start consuming itself.

Gloucester himself understands what is happening. His wife has already been publicly disgraced through witchcraft accusations — a factional attack on him by proxy. He knows the witchcraft charge was designed to weaken him before the main assault. He tells his wife in Act 2 Scene 4: "Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud; / And after summer evermore succeeds / Barren winter." He is not surprised by what is coming. He simply cannot stop it.

Queen Margaret is the most capable political operator in the play and the most ruthless. She has understood faster than anyone else that in this court, scruple is a disadvantage. Her speech about the weeds in a garden — "Now 'tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted; / Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden / And choke the herbs for want of husbandry" — is delivered about Gloucester, but it describes her whole approach to power. Act fast. Act when opponents are weakest. Do not wait for them to take root.

The consequences of factional politics accumulate through the play. Suffolk is murdered at sea. Winchester dies in guilt and terror. York goes to war. By the end, the first battle of the Wars of the Roses has been fought. The factions that spent Acts 1 through 4 competing at court have graduated into military conflict. The transition is seamless. Political faction and civil war are not different things in this play. They are the same thing at different temperatures.

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Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, is probably the most straightforwardly virtuous figure in all three Henry VI plays. He is the Lord Protector — the most powerful man in England after the king — and he uses that power consistently in England's interest. He tells the truth when it costs him. He reads the marriage terms aloud even though they make Henry look weak. He opposes bad decisions even when opposing them makes him enemies.

This is what destroys him.

His wife, Eleanor, is first. She has a genuine ambition for advancement and consults with witches about the future — specifically about whether Henry will die and Gloucester will become king. It is politically naive and personally reckless, and her enemies use it immediately. Eleanor is publicly humiliated, forced to do penance walking through London in a white sheet, and then banished. The Duchess's fall is engineered — the informers who caught her were plants — but Gloucester cannot prove it, and the disgrace weakens him.

Eleanor herself is not simply ambitious. Her outburst against the Duchess of Somerset early in the play — "Could I come near your beauty with my nails, / I'd set my ten commandments in your face" — shows a woman who is angry, proud, and prepared to fight. "Ten commandments" here means ten fingernails, by the way: a contemporary insult meaning she would scratch her rival's face bloody. Eleanor is fierce. But her fierceness is channelled against the wrong enemies at the wrong time, and it costs her husband everything.

Gloucester's own fall is structured as a legal trap. He is accused of treason. He knows the accusations are false and manufactured. Henry knows it too — the king weeps openly and cannot bring himself to formally arrest Gloucester, so Margaret has to do it for him. Gloucester is taken to custody in Act 3 Scene 1. By Act 3 Scene 2 he is dead — murdered before trial, in the night, so that no trial can expose the conspiracy against him.

Henry's response to Gloucester's death is the most genuinely moving passage Henry VI gets in this play. He collapses. He is unable to speak for a time. When he does speak, he describes the loss with a tenderness that makes the entire scene different from the political intrigue surrounding it. What Henry cannot do — what he never does — is act on his grief in any political way. He mourns Gloucester. He does not punish those who killed him.

This pattern is the play's argument about goodness and political life. Gloucester is good. Being good means telling the truth, opposing bad deals, and refusing to use the means his enemies use against him. In a court built on faction and self-interest, these qualities are not protections. They are vulnerabilities. Goodness and political survival operate by different rules, and Gloucester refuses to accept that. He dies for it.

"What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted! / Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just" — Henry VI says this, and means it. He believes it. The problem is that an untainted heart and a just quarrel do not stop knives in the night. Virtue is not armour. The play knows this, even when its characters do not.

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Jack Cade is one of the strangest and most interesting figures in all of Shakespeare. He leads a popular uprising in Act 4 — a rebellion of common people against the established order — and he does it in the name of equality, justice, and the rights of the poor. His program includes abolishing money, sharing all things in common, and making himself "Lord Mortimerˮ to claim a kind of popular-aristocratic legitimacy. He is also violent, self-contradictory, and genuinely dangerous.

York is behind him, in a limited sense — he has encouraged Cade as a way to destabilise the government while he is away in Ireland. But Cade is not York's puppet. He has his own energy, his own grievances, and his own momentum. The rebellion takes on a life that York cannot fully control, which is the point: popular rebellion is not a tool that aristocratic manipulators can wield cleanly.

The famous line — "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" — comes from one of Cade's followers, Dick the Butcher. It gets laughs in modern productions, and it is meant to. But it is also a serious statement about the rebels' view of the legal system: lawyers, in this world, are the instruments of elite power, and destroying the law is how you destroy elite control. The humour and the violence sit right next to each other in this scene.

Cade's rhetoric is a parody of the rhetoric used by actual political leaders throughout the play. He promises what the other political figures promise — justice, reform, a better order — but he uses wilder language and immediately undermines his own arguments with contradictions. He declares literacy a crime. He has a man executed for being able to read. The joke is dark: Cade's attack on learning and record-keeping reflects a genuine fear among the uneducated poor that the written word is a weapon used against them.

Warwick's description of the commons as "an angry hive of bees / That want their leader" captures the establishment's view of the rebellion: leaderless, dangerous, irrational. But the description is also revealing in what it implies about leadership. The bees are only dangerous because they lack a leader. The solution, in Warwick's view, is to give them a better leader — not to address the conditions that made them angry. This is the governing class's default response to popular unrest in this play, and it is not a solution.

Cade's rebellion collapses as quickly as it rises. Alexander Iden, a Kentish gentleman, kills Cade in his own garden after Cade has been abandoned by his followers. The people follow whoever speaks to them most convincingly in the moment — they followed Cade when he was winning, and they follow Clifford's royalist appeals when Cade starts losing. The instability of the popular movement reflects the play's ambivalence: the rebels have genuine grievances and their violence is understandable, but they can be talked out of revolt almost as easily as they were talked into it.

"Small things make base men proud" — a royalist captain says this about common men who overreach their station. It is the governing class's contempt for the rebellion in a single line. But the play does not entirely endorse that contempt. The small things that make Cade and his followers proud are, in many cases, the same things the aristocrats want: respect, recognition, and a say in how they are governed.

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York watches the first three acts of this play waiting. He sees the Gloucester faction fall. He sees Suffolk rise and then fall. He watches Cade's rebellion burn through Act 4. He is calculating throughout. His soliloquies are the clearest expressions of naked ambition in the Henry VI trilogy — he does not disguise from himself or the audience what he wants, and he has a coherent plan for getting it.

What York wants is the crown. He believes his claim through the Mortimer line is stronger than Henry's claim through Lancaster. He may even be right about the legal argument — the play does not resolve it cleanly. But the means he chooses are the problem. He encourages Cade's rebellion as a destabilising measure while he is in Ireland. He returns with an army. He confronts the king directly. His ambition is not patient enough to wait for legitimate opportunity, and his impatience pushes him toward civil war.

Suffolk's ambition is different in character. He wants power through proximity to the queen — through Margaret, whom he has installed as Henry's wife and who he loves. His influence depends entirely on her favour. When Margaret is secure, Suffolk is secure. When Margaret is threatened, he is exposed. His murder at sea in Act 4 — dragged off a boat and beheaded by pirates — ends both his ambition and his life with brutal abruptness. There is no clean moral accounting. He dies roughly, at sea, for reasons that are only partly about his own crimes.

The Duchess of Gloucester is a third case. Her ambition is not for herself, exactly — she wants Gloucester to be king, and she wants the position that would give her. But she acts recklessly and without calculation, and she is caught. Her punishment is public and humiliating. Her fall precedes Gloucester's and contributes to it. An ambitious wife can destroy a careful husband.

Winchester — Cardinal Beaufort — is the fourth. He has spent his life in competition with Gloucester and has now helped bring him down. His death scene in Act 3 is one of the most disturbing in the play: he dies in guilt, raving, unable to find peace, suggesting that even his confessor cannot help him. His ambition has produced a death that looks like damnation.

The pattern the play establishes is consistent. Every character who acts primarily out of self-advancement — Suffolk, Winchester, Eleanor, eventually York — comes to grief. The exceptions are not people without ambition but people who manage to attach their ambition to something larger than themselves. Warwick survives this play (though not the next two). Henry VI, who has no ambition at all, survives longest of all — though survival without agency is its own kind of destruction.

"Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud; / And after summer evermore succeeds / Barren winter" — Gloucester says this about his own situation, expecting what is coming. It is not self-pity. It is a precise seasonal metaphor: summer is the period of power and warmth, winter is what follows when the political climate turns. For every character who reaches a peak of power in this play, the winter follows.

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Part 2 moves steadily toward war. The first four acts are political — intrigue, accusation, trial, rebellion — but the violence running through them is not metaphorical. Gloucester is murdered in his bed. Suffolk is beheaded at sea. Cade's rebels kill Lord Say and parade his head on a pole. The play's final act is the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, at St Albans, and it ends with York victorious on the battlefield.

The relationship between the crown and violence in this play is not incidental. Henry VI holds a crown but cannot exercise its authority to stop the violence around him. He cannot protect Gloucester. He cannot punish Gloucester's killers. He cannot suppress the rebellion quickly enough to prevent bloodshed. The crown, as Henry wears it, is a symbol without the force to give it meaning.

Contrast this with how York and Margaret use force. Margaret has Gloucester killed because trial is too risky — violence is quicker and more reliable than law. York recruits an army while in Ireland. When he returns and confronts Henry, he has soldiers behind him. In this play, the people who understand that power requires violence are the ones who accumulate it. Henry, who refuses to think this way, loses.

Warwick's image of the commons as bees without a leader is partly a description of political violence: mass anger that moves without direction until something channels it. The bees sting randomly. A leader gives them a target. This is exactly what Cade provides for the rebels and what York provides for the Yorkist faction — a focus for violence that already exists but needs organisation.

"What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted" — Henry's belief that moral virtue protects against violence is the play's central tragic irony. He is right in a theological sense and completely wrong in a practical one. Gloucester had an untainted heart. It did not save him. Henry himself will eventually be killed in Part 3, and his untainted heart will not save him either.

The play does not present violence as simple or simply condemned. Suffolk's murderers are doing something lawless and politically destabilising, but Suffolk himself was responsible for Gloucester's murder and for policies that damaged England. Cade's violence is frequently targeted at genuinely exploitative figures — though it is also random and indiscriminate. York's military challenge to Henry is an act of treason, but the cause he is challenging has produced a weak king and a corrupt court.

By the end of Part 2, the first battle has been fought and the structure that held Henry's court together has been destroyed. Gloucester is dead. Suffolk is dead. Winchester is dead. The question of who holds the crown is no longer a political question. It is a military one. The transition from faction to war is complete, and violence has become the primary language of English politics.

This is where Part 3 begins.

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