Will Morrisey Reviews

William Shakespeare and John Fletcher: Henry VIII (All Is True). Acts III-V, Epilogue. Gordon McMullan, ed. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2000.

Defeated by scheming Wolsey, her soul having grown “sad with troubles,” Queen Katherine has retreated to her rooms, where she has one of her ladies in waiting sing her a song to comfort her (III.i.1). Music, even secular music, need not beckon to pleasure; it can offer comfort, if not by invoking God then by invoking nature, which the mythical Orpheus renewed with his song, his music making “a lasting spring” (III.i.8). By hearing the Orphic music, not by seeing, one finds not so much truth as solace: “In sweet music is such art, / Killing care and grief of heart / Fall asleep or, hearing, die” (III.i.12-14). 

Her comfort, if she found it, ends with the arrival of the cardinals Wolsey and Campeius. “All hoods do not make monks,” she tells her ladies, and these two are false, indeed (III.i.23). Wolsey asks for a private conference, which she declines because her conscience is clear. “I know my life so even”—that is, true in both senses, honest and faithful (III.i.37). And “Truth loves open dealing” (III.i.39). When Wolsey begins to speak to her in Church Latin, so that her ladies won’t understand the conversation, she tells him to speak in English; if bad Catholic Churchmen intend to deceive the people, an honest Catholic layperson will insist on witnesses who hear what they say—foreshadowing the translation of the Bible into English by Protestant Anglicans. The men are here to hear, that is, to sound her out and, as usual, to ply her with their “counsel” (III.i.67). How do you “stand minded in the weighty difference / Between the King and you”? (II.ii.58-59). That is the sort of knowledge Wolsey always seeks, knowledge useful for manipulation.

Katherine knows that they intend to betray her. To Wolsey’s claim that she enjoys the King’s love and that in England her “hopes and friends are infinite,” she replies that no Englishman will “dare give me counsel,” fearing to be known as a friend to one who is “‘gainst his highness’ pleasure”: an excellent description of the dilemma subjects of tyrants always face (III.i.84-85). She tells them that the only persons she can trust live in her native country, Spain, perhaps hoping that Wolsey will do what he has done to many others—separate her from the king by sending her away—rather than what he has done to a few—separate her from the king by having her killed. They attempt to persuade her to stay under the king’s protection; in Campeius’s words, “‘Twill be much / Both for your honor better and your cause, / For if the trial of the law o’ertake ye, / You’ll part away disgraced” (III.i.94-98). Speaking frankly as always, Katherine ripostes, “Ye tell me what ye wish for both—my ruin. / Is this your Christian counsel? Out upon ye!” (III.i.98-99). God is above kings, and He will judge. “Ye have angels’ faces, but heaven knows your hearts” (III.i.145). You cardinals embody not the cardinal virtues but the cardinal sins. “Say I warned ye,” since “the burden of my sorrows” may yet “fall on thee” (III.i.109-110). She has been true to her husband, but “virtue finds no friends” (III.i.126). She has failed to produce an heir to the throne, and that, she suspects, is why he wants a young wife. The cardinals’ unpleasant, punning references to “service” ll.52, 67) reinforce this. Like the care and grief of heart Orpheus’ music kills, and like “the lily / That once was mistress of the field and flourished / I’ll hang my head and perish” (III.151-153). If Orphic music brings life and harmony, their words bring death and discord, as seen when the cardinals persist in their sham (“our ends are honest,” Wolsey protests) (III.i.154), and she, a woman without allies at her wit’s end, finally consents to hear their counsels, since the king “has my heart yet, and shall have my prayers / While I shall have my life” (III.i.180-181). As a Christian, her heart remains true, even if her mind can think of nothing more to say. Like true-hearted, Christian Buckingham, she will die, rumored to have been poisoned by an agent of the king himself. [1]

Dukes Norfolk and Surrey, along with Lord Surrey and the Lord Chamberlain, confer with one another at the royal palace. Their restiveness under King-Cardinal Wolsey has intensified. Surrey, especially, wants revenge for the execution of his father-in-law, Lord Buckingham. While the Lord Chamberlain worries that while we all know what Wolsey deserves, what can we realistically do? Wolsey “hath a witchcraft / Over the King in’s tongue” (III.ii.18-19). Norfolk immediately denies it: “O, fear him not: / His spell in that is out” (III.ii.19-20). He has been exposed, Suffolk explains, because his letters to the pope were intercepted and read to the king, who learned that it was Wolsey he urged the pope to delay ruling on the divorce because Henry was “tangled in affection” with Protestant Anne Bullen, which annoying fact has made it at least temporarily impossible for the Cardinal to arrange the king’s marriage to the French king’s sister, in the latest of Wolsey’s ever-shifting alliances. Now the king sees, knows the truth: that his trusted prelate “hedges his own way,” not the way of the king (III.ii.39). Further, Henry has already married Anne—who, Suffolk predicts will produce “some blessing to this land,” the child the audiences know to be Elizabeth I. The aristocrats are delighted with that marriage, as it ruins the Wolsey plot, inducing Cardinal Campeius to leave for Rome. As for Katherine, she hence forth will no longer be called ‘Queen’ but ‘Princess Dowager’ and ‘widow to Prince Arthur’; that is, the terms of Cranmer’s argument have been accepted by the Church and by Parliament, as well.  

At this, Wolsey and his ally, the attorney and Member of Parliament Thomas Cromwell, arrive, glumly. Wolsey knows that his letter has been intercepted but still imagines that he can somehow arrange the French marriage. “Anne Bullen? No, I’ll no Anne Bullens, for him.” (III.ii.87-88). She is nothing but “a spleeny Lutheran”—Luther himself, if not Anne, having been justly known for his high temper (III.ii.99). She does not serve his cause, and, sharing his bed, may well undermine the institutions of Catholicism, and therefore himself, in England. Meanwhile, Cranmer, that arch-heretic, reputedly sympathetic to Protestantism, has “crawled into the favor of the King”—an act of usurpation that Wolsey has always considered grounds for exile (III.ii.103). 

Enter the king, at a distance, reading evidence of Wolsey’s corruption. “What piles of wealth hath he accumulated / To his own portion!” (III.ii.107-108). Still worse, there may be “mutiny in’s mind” (III.ii.120). He had not earlier been able to see into a soul, and consequently stayed on the surface of things, of bodies. He now knows that the Cardinal’s thoughts are scarcely “fixed on spiritual objects,” but rather on matters sublunary (III.ii.132). Taking his seat on the throne, he has his Constable of the Tower, Thomas Lovell, call Wolsey over. To the Cardinal’s pious salutation, Henry gives an ironic reply: “You are full of heavenly stuff, and bear the inventory / Of your best graces in your mind, the which / You were now running o’er” (III.ii.137-139). But he drops his verbal masquer’s mask soon enough, coolly observing that he had reduced his own holdings “to bestow / My bounties upon you” (III.ii.159-160). Wolsey protests his loyalty (“for your highness’ good I ever labored / More than mine own that am, have and will be”), before the king hands him the evidence against him, walking out (III.ii.191-192). “This paper has undone me,” the Cardinal gasps, attributing the brutal turn of fortune to some “cross devil” (III.ii.210, 214). He now reveals, for the first time, what had been his supreme goal: “to gain the popedom” (III.ii.212). When Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey and the Lord Chamberlain arrive to strip him of the royal seal that entitles him to authenticate documents issued in the king’s name (and thereby to feign the king’s commands), and to retire to house arrest, Wolsey fulminates his denials. And the nobles have no written commission from the king; their mere “words cannot carry / Authority so weighty” says the man of words, of rhetoric, if not noticeably of the Word. The king will know “my truth,” he threatens, again demonstrating the ambiguity of the play’s subtitle, All Is True. The comprehensive charge against him, Norfolk tells him, is writing to Rome and to foreign princes, ego et rex meus, I and my king, a treasonous assertion of equality with the sovereign, one which he further parlayed in making the king “your servant” (III.ii.316). And they have also discovered his ambition to become pope by his customary method, bribery—presumably, bribes paid to the cardinals who would elect him. The king now commands the surrender of all his property and puts him “out of the king’s protection” (III.ii.344). 

The older English regime consisted of a monarch sometimes supported, sometimes not supported, by the aristocrats. Wolsey has attempted to replace the aristocrats with himself and the international aristocracy of the Church. The nobles have shown him that he has failed, and with this, they leave him alone. After Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey read out the inventory of charges against him, Chamberlain intervenes, advising them to “Press not a falling man too far”; it is “virtue” to relent, and “His faults lie open to the laws: let them, not you, correct him” (III.ii.33-35). Suffolk, to whom Wolsey has done the most injury, forgives him. This is a telling glimpse into the ethos of the English regime and an answer to Machiavelli. If the Common Law of England can provide the criteria for judging, provide a human equivalent to the God who reserves final judgment for himself, then Englishmen can forgive, can follow the Gospel command, without ruining themselves or their country. Continental Europe had no equivalent to the English Common Law, no institutional protection against Machiavellianism, in or out of the Church.

Machiavelli’s prince is a man alone, but supposedly so to his own advantage, the better to keep his own counsel and plot the ruin or the subordination of others. Wolsey’s practice of Machiavellianism has left him literally alone, however—isolated from all those he had ruined or subordinated. “A long farewell to all my greatness” (III.351). He understands this not only as his own condition but as “the state of man,” who hopes, wins honors, then “falls, as I do” (III.ii.352, 358). Crucially, “I find my heart new opened” (III.ii.366). An open heart can admit God. He compares his fall to that of Lucifer. When his secretary, Cromwell arrives and pronounces himself speechless at the Cardinal’s ruin, Wolsey pronounces himself “truly happy” for the first time because “I know myself now, and I feel within me / A peace above all earthly dignities / A still and quiet conscience” (III.ii.378-380). While recognizing that his pride has led to all this—too much honor is too heavy a burden “for a man that hopes for heaven”—he hasn’t quite been cured of it, claiming “a fortitude of soul” that enables him “to endure more miseries and greater far / Than my weak-hearted enemies dare offer” (III.ii.389-390). And he is far from having lost his care for ‘this world,’ asking for news of it. Cromwell gives it to him in three blows in ascending order of humiliation. The king has replaced you with Sir Thomas More as Lord Chancellor, More being a member of the Carthusian order Wolsey had despised; Thomas Cranmer, his rival, has been named Archbishop of Canterbury; Lady Anne has finally been “viewed in open as [Henry’s] Queen” (III.ii.404). This last blow is the worst: “All my glories / In that one woman I have lost for ever” (III.ii.408-409). To Cromwell, who promises to pray for him, Wolsey holds himself out as an instructive example of how not to live. “Fling away ambition. / By that sin fell the angels…. Love thyself last; cherish those hearts that hate thee. / Corruption wins not more than honesty”—as anti-Machiavellian a teaching as there may be (III.ii.440-444). “Let all the ends thou aimest at be thy country’s / Thy God’s, and truth’s”—the theme of the play. Then, if you do fall, you will fall a martyr. “Had I but served my God with half the zeal / I served my king, he would not in mine age / Have left me naked to mine enemies” (III.455-457). To this he might have added, ‘and with a quarter of the zeal I served myself.’ Considering these last words in this play, one may conclude that Wolsey’s repentance is a work in progress. But isn’t everyone’s? In the meantime, he has achieved the Socratic philosopher’s aim, self-knowledge, with the Christian insight of being “a poor, fallen man” (III.ii.413). What is truth? said jesting Pilate. If the truth stood before him, embodied, then truth is both what is and Who is at once, and truth means not only understanding but fidelity to God and to the nature of the creature God made by breathing into some clay He fashioned, along with the fidelity to the regime that shields that faith from Machiavellianism.

The fourth Act begins with the two gentlemen who had witnessed Buckingham on the way to his execution, waiting for Lady Anne to pass by, after her coronation—one losing his head to the axe, the other having a crown placed upon hers. Regime change, or at least regime reform, has begun. They do not fear it. “The citizens, / I am sure, have shown at full their royal minds— / As, let ’em have their rights, they are ever forward— / In celebration of this day with shows, / Pageants, and sights of honor” (IV.i.7-10). That is, the English commoners are faithful, true citizens in a monarchic regime, a constitutional monarchy in which they have legal rights and are protected, whatever unjust machinations may go on at court.

One of the gentlemen has a list of those now elevated to higher office, including the Duke of Suffolk as High Steward, the Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshal; the anti-Wolsey aristocrats have been rewarded. Princess Dowager Katherine, he further reports, has been formally divorced, with the assent of Archbishop Cranmer, and has taken ill. The royal procession passes, with satisfying pageantry. The second gentleman exclaims, rather as Henry had done, that Anne has “the sweetest face I ever looked on”; as for the king, “I cannot blame his conscience” (IV.i.43, 47). A third gentleman concurs, pronouncing her “the goodliest woman / That ever lay by man,” adding that “Such joy / I never saw before” in the people (IV.i.69-70, 75-76). At the coronation ceremony, she “came to the altar, where she kneeled and, saint-like, / Cast her fair eyes to heaven and prayed devoutly,” then bowed humbly to the people; “she had all the royal makings of a queen,” acknowledging both the authority of God, the Highest, and the support of the ‘low,’ the commoners (IV.i.83-87). He also remarks that although Cranmer’s enemy, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, has become the king’s secretary, Cranmer will enjoy the support of Cromwell. Religious factions within the king’s court remain, but they seem more manageable, now that Wolsey has been removed.

Describing herself as mortally ill, Katherine hears her gentleman usher, Griffith, report the death of Wolsey, who died “full of repentance, / Continual meditations, tears and sorrows,” having given “his honors to the world again, / His blessed part to heaven” before dying “in peace” (IV.ii.27-30). Recalling Wolsey’s pride, ambition, corruption, arbitrary unlawfulness, and empty promises, Katherine observes that his final illness mirrored the illness of the example he left for the clergy. Griffith recalls her to charity, citing Wolsey’s rise “from an humble stock,” his scholarship, his powers of persuasion (IV.ii.49). Admittedly, he was insatiable in his desire to acquire (in this, a Machiavel), but “his overthrow heaped happiness upon him,” finding “the blessedness in being little”; “he died fearing God” (IV.ii.64, 68). With this, Katherine relents: peace be with him. These two speeches form a double funeral oration for the duplicitous man who finally repented. As she had done before, she calls for comforting music. This time, there are no scheming clergymen to interrupt; she dreams of a sort of heavenly masque, very much in contrast with the one Henry had participated in, at Wolsey’s dinner party. The Orphic music she heard first heralded life on earth, natural life, springtime; the solemn music she hears now heralds supernatural life after death, prefiguring Heaven, to which she holds up her hands in rejoicing. When she awakens, she tells Griffith not of an earthly crown offered her by the white-robed figures in her dream but of garlands and promises of “eternal happiness” (IV.ii.90).

She receives one last visitor. Lord Caputius, an ambassador in England from the Holy Roman Emperor, comes at the request of King Henry, to tender her former husband’s “princely commendations” and hope for her “good comfort” (IV.ii.119), to which she replies that “I am past all comforts here but prayers”(IV.ii.123). She gives him a letter she had written to the king, asking for his protection of their daughter, Mary, and for his pity on her loyal ladies in waiting, who “so long / Have followed both my fortunes faithfully”—both her reign as queen and her exile from the royal court (IV.ii.140-141). They deserve good husbands, aristocrats. As for the men in her employ, let them be paid wages due and “something over to remember me by” (IV.ii.151). Finally, tell the king, “in all humility,” that “in death I blessed him” and let “all the world” know the truth, that “I was a chaste wife to my grave” (IV.ii.161-163, 170). Inter me “yet like / A queen and daughter to a king” (IV.ii.171-172). Katherine’s testament expresses not only Christian charity but also Christian deference to ruling authority, as had Buckingham. Henry is marrying a Protestant, yet as a faithful Roman Catholic she makes no protest. It is true that she does not bless Anne, but neither does she curse her. She bears Lutheran Anne’s rise with silent patience. In this, she graciously acquiesces to the regime reform Act Four portrays. No Catholic-Protestant discord will result from her last words. This political settlement follows from her spiritual settlement; both her enemy, Wolsey, and Katherine have been blessed with the Christian liberation; the truth has set them free. In this sense, “all is true.”

Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, rigorous Catholic and former ally of Wolsey, sees Sir Thomas Lovell walking after midnight. “Affairs that walk, / As they say spirits do, at midnight have / In them a wilder nature than the business / That seeks dispatch by day,” he observes, justifying his curiosity about what Sir Thomas is about, a curiosity legitimated by his religious authority (V.i.13-16). Lovell knows about a wilder nature still, reporting that Queen Anne is in labor, and that it is feared she will die. No friend of Protestants, and indeed no friend of Gospel charity, the Bishop hopes that the child will survive and that the mother will not. This is too much for Lovell, who admits having entertained that tempting thought, “yet my conscience says / She’s a good creature and a sweet lady, [who] does / Deserve our better wishes” (V.i.24-26). She gets none from Gardiner, who replies that “it will ne’er be well” until both Anne and Archbishop Cranmer, a Protestant sympathizer, “sleep in their graves” (V.i.29, 32). Cranmer is “a most arch heretic, a pestilence / That does infect the land,” a rank weed, Sir Thomas, / And we must root him out” (V.i.45, 52-53). He has said as much to the Privy Council.

After the would-be persecutor departs, the king, who has been playing cards with Suffolk, arrives and asks Lovell “what is the news” of Anne’s labor. Lovell says he is praying for her in her suffering, upon which Henry dismisses Suffolk and calls for Cranmer to be brought to him. The king confides the news of complaints against the Archbishop at the last Council meeting, telling him he must retire to the Tower of London pending trial and bear this with patience. It is likely that Anthony Denny, a Protestant Privy Council member who had accompanied the king on this walk, informed him of Gardiner’s agitation. Cranmer “humbly thanks [his] highness,” for “I know / There’s none stands under more calumnious tongues / Than I myself, poor man” (V.i.108, 111-113). Upon closer questioning, Cranmer avers that “the good I stand on is my truth and honesty,” and “I fear nothing / What can be said against me” (V.i.122, 125-126). Having seen from his experience with the late Cardinal Wolsey with “what ease / Might corrupt minds procure knaves as corrupt / To swear against you,” and recalling how Jesus Himself was accused by false witnesses, the king recommends caution while assuring his friend that “they shall no more prevail than we give way to” (V.i.131-134, 143). To ensure that the enemies cannot punish him without such royal intervention, Henry gives him a ring to exhibit as proof of the king’s intention to be the final judge in the matter. After Cranmer leaves, weeping in gratitude, Henry tells the assembled aristocrats that the man “has strangled his language in tears”—more reliable guides to the truth of a soul than words, which are easier to use for deception—in a man, if not necessarily in a woman (V.i.157). As the supreme judge in the English regime, Henry has already examined the accused and found him humble, true or faithful, and honest. Having learned in Wolsey’s hard school of deception, he has become a prudent judge. 

Anne’s elderly duenna now arrives to announce that the queen has given birth. Tell me it’s a boy, a rightful heir to the throne, the king demands, at which point the old lady artfully obeys the command while leading him to the truth: it’s a “lovely boy,” in fact a girl who can give birth to boys, someday (V.i.164). She leaves, complaining that the money he paid her for her errand was insufficient; “I will have more or scold it out of him” (V.i.173). We will never know if she tries, as the play moves to more considerable controversies.

The Privy Council calls Archbishop Cranmer to its chambers, only to show its contempt by leaving him outside, cooling his heels with the “boys, grooms, and lackeys” (V.ii.17). When the king’s physician happens by, assuring Cranmer that he’ll report back to the king, who comes and views the scene from a window, indignantly. (His Highness is still enough of a Catholic to swear by the Virgin Mary at the sight.) Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor and an ardent Catholic, presides at the trial. Citing the frailty of human nature, More accuses Cranmer of having “misdemeaned” himself, “and not a little” by spreading the heresies of Protestantism through “the whole realm” (V.ii.48, 50). Gardiner remarks the political issues of “reformation”: “Commotions, uproars, with a general taint / Of the whole state,” as recently seen in the peasant revolts in two German states and the Anabaptist Rising in Münster. Cranmer defends himself by saying that no man living “more detests, more stirs against, / Both in his private conscience and his place, / Defacers of a public peace than I do” (V.ii.73-75). This Pauline response evidently does not answer the charge of heresy, since a Protestant would say the same as a Catholic on this point. When Gardiner pretends to speak for the king and remands him to the Tower (“where, being but a private man again, / You shall know many dare accuse you boldly— / More, I fear, are provided for”), Cranmer, who has promised himself to practice the virtue of patience, contents himself with irony: “Ah, my good lord of Winchester, I thank you: / You are always my good friend” (V.ii.89-93). In contrast with Wolsey and his former ally, Gardiner, Cranmer remains humble, since although he observes that Gardiner seeks his ruin, “Love and meekness, lord, / Become a churchman better than ambition” (V.ii.96-97). When the recording secretary, Thomas Cromwell, mildly criticizes Gardiner for being “too sharp” with “a falling man,” Gardiner accuses him of being “a favorer / Of this new sect” (V.ii.113-114). More quiets them and orders Cranmer to the Tower.

At this, Cranmer produces the king’s ring, guaranteeing an immediate appeal of the sentence. “Ye blew the fire that burns ye,” Cranmer tells his dismayed accusers, just before Henry strides in, frowning. Wolsey-like, Gardiner fills the air with obsequious phrases invoking Henry’s honorable duty to defend the Church, to place “his royal self in judgment” between that Church and “this great offender” (V.ii.154-155). “I come not to hear such flattery now,” the king rejoins; “you play the spaniel / And think with wagging of your tongue to win me,” but he knows “thou has a cruel nature and a bloody” (V.ii.160-163). “I thought I had had men of some understanding / And wisdom of my Council, but I find none” (V.ii.169-170). The accusers are now the accused. Turning to Cranmer, he calls upon him to baptize his newborn daughter and to serve as her godfather. He commands Gardiner to embrace and love the Archbishop, which the rogue is not slow to do. Upon hearing Cranmer’s gracious and forgiving response, the king pronounces himself satisfied with this newfound union, which strengthens him and brings honor to them, he proclaims. In Cranmer particularly, he finds a “true heart” (V.ii.208)—the heart being the center of the soul as conceived in Christianity, truth being the theme of the play. He also knows that the commoners see this, regarding Cranmer as a faithful friend to those who are friends to him. 

From the few to the many: from time to time, throughout Henry VIII, the people enter the political stage—once in justifiable rebellion against heavy taxation, again in peaceful enjoyment of the coronation pageantry, now in a celebratory riot after the christening of the infant Elizabeth. They have breached the walls of the royal court, and the undermanned staff can scarcely control them. But they quickly come to order when a procession of notables approaches, with Garter, the King-of-Arms, shouting at them to make way for “the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth” (V.iv.2-3). Archbishop Cranmer delivers an oration before the king, prophesying that she will become like the Queen of Sheba in her desire for “wisdom and fair virtue,” of “pure virtue,” nursed by truth. “All is true”: the future queen herself will be true to England, bringing to “this land a thousand thousand blessings,” as truly prophesied by a true Christian (V.iv.19). Better than Machiavellian but also not the powerless sort of Christian woman—no Katherine—”She shall be loved and feared” (V.iv.30, emphasis added). As in Micah’s prophecy of an earthly paradise, under her rule “every man shall eat in safety / Under his own vine that he plants” (V.iv.33-34). Crucially, “God shall be truly known” (V.iv.36).

Under Elizabeth’s rule, music will consist of “merry songs of peace,” as men love their neighbors and God, who “shall be truly known” by a people freed from the conventional hierarchies of blood and governed instead by men who walk “the perfect ways of honor” and rest their claims to rule on that way of life, a new regime (V.iv.37). When she dies, a virgin, the ashes of this “maiden phoenix” will “create another heir / As great in admiration as herself” (V.iv.41-43)—England’s reigning king, James I, sponsor of the greatest English translation of the Bible. This man will “make new nations”—the American colonies—and “he shall flourish,” like “a mountain cedar, reach[ing] his branches / To all the plains about him” (V.iv.51-53). “O lord Archbishop,” Henry replies, “thou hast made me now a man” (V.iv.63). That is, although his wife had produced a daughter, Mary, her legitimacy was in question not because there was any doubt concerning his paternity—Katherine’s virtue was never in doubt—but because the grounds for his divorce from her, the claim that their marriage violated canon law and was therefore no marriage, had tormented him. The king declares a holiday in the literal sense: a holy day, a sabbath in which no man shall work. He is now the political equivalent of the Christian new man.

Epilogue is the play’s last character, complementing Prologue, completing this new kind of morality play. Epilogue is humble but of good cheer, remarking that the play will “never please / All that are here,” inasmuch as some will sleep through “an act or two,” awakened only by the trumpet blasts that sound periodically, heralding the arrival of the royal personage, while others will delight only in its satirical jabs at Londoners (V.iv.1-3). At least the play will be said to have exhibited “the merciful construction of good women, / For such a one we showed ’em”—Katherine, possibly Anne, possibly the faultless, prophesied Queen Elizabeth. That is a good enough result, since “all the best men are ours” when their ladies tell them to applaud (V.iv.13-14). 

James I is the great Protestant king. His mother, Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, Protestant Elizabeth’s half-sister (James’s godmother) gives him a link to the old, Roman Catholic England even as he embodies the new England of his father’s Anglican Church, which the new Archbishop of Canterbury, his father’s new Christian friend, presages. James kept England out of the Thirty Years’ War, the brutal religious war on continental Europe. He was compounded of both parties’ spiritual stock. 

Note

1. Shakespeare would not have known what modern research has confirmed: Katherine, blocked from visits to or from her daughter, Mary, died of natural causes, possibly cancer, but not before forgiving her former husband.

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

1. 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.”