They would not let Will leave. The play had finished fifteen minutes earlier. But still 3,000 people roared in delight and begged the players and playwright to remain. They took bow after bow to the din of stamping feet. London’s richest – sat in the luxurious gallery – mixed with its poorest, who had paid a penny to stand. Will had made them believe that ‘this cockpit’ held ‘the vasty fields of France’ and of England too.
It was May 1599. William Shakespeare’s History of Henry II was the first play to be staged at the Globe at its new site on the south bank of the river in Elizabeth I’s capital city; it offered fantasy by candlelight under a ceiling painted as the heavens.
Shakespeare felt that his subject could not be bettered. He had breathed life into the legend of England’s most celebrated king – ‘Good’ King Henry II.
He told of a duke who had battled to become a king, ‘Alexander of the West’ and the finest warrior of his age. Henry had forged and held an enormous empire in twelfth-century Europe. England had not had such a king since the days of Arthur. His court was the most cultured in Europe, attracting writers, poets, scholars and mathematicians from across the known world. The king’s justice was everywhere, for everyone. He was a scholar-king, sportsman, politician and soldier, and his influence stretched as far as the holy city of Jerusalem.
This king had all the talents and all the gifts – until his family turned against him.
At first, there were only the traditional frustrations of royal sons, close to power but denied any of their own. But soon their mother joined the cause. Perfidy was in the air.
Before long, Henry’s sons and wife united with the kings of France and Scotland, and all who bore a grudge against him. Henry was threatened on six fronts: surely an impossible challenge to overcome, even for him.
The audience was enthralled by Henry’s rally to his men as they readied to fight at Dol: ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.’ The Globe, for a suspended moment, was a battlefield in north-western France.
Henry could not lose this encounter; if he did, his enemies would take his kingdom. But his skill and cool head won the day.
The victory at Dol spurred Henry to fight on. He put aside his grief as he battled for two hard years across England and France, moving with almost superhuman speed between the fronts.
By the end he had vanquished them all; and, as a mark of his greatness, he forgave them – even his wife. He gave her what he had promised when he stole her from her first husband, the king of France: real power.
He even forced his fractious archbishop, Thomas Becket, into submission. Henry and Becket had been fighting for ten years. Now Becket limped out of his self-imposed exile back to Canterbury, bitter and broken, worn out by fasts and penances. Henry gave him the kiss of peace.
Shakespeare’s epilogue completed the hero’s life: Henry died the grand old man of Europe, at peace with his wife and his sons, and his empire intact.
The story was brilliant propaganda for Elizabeth, the fairy queen. She was an absolute monarch, just as Henry had been. Shakespeare had not shied from depicting a complex character: Henry sometimes ruled harshly, but he could also be tender. The playwright had shown the audience Henry the king and Henry the man – imperfect to be sure, but remarkable in person and triumphant over adversity.
***
This is, of course, not what happened.
William Shakespeare, the genius propagandist of the Tudor and nascent Stuart dynasties, never wrote about Henry II. Instead he scattered his fairy dust over the Lancastrian faction in England’s War of the Roses, and the ultimate victors: his masters, the Tudors.
When the Globe theatre was moved across the river, the first play to perform there was most likely Henry V. The words I placed in Henry II’s mouth before his battle at Dol, Shakespeare placed in the mouth of Henry V on the morning of the battle of Agincourt on St Crispin’s Day. Agincourt is one of the most famous battles in English history; Dol is known only to a small band of medieval historians and enthusiasts. And today Henry II, the father of the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled England for 330 years, is largely forgotten.*
Henry was trained for power, but he had to fight for all that he gained. By the mid-1170s he was lord of England, Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Ireland. The princes of Wales and the kings of Scotland owed allegiance to him. He not only won an empire, but held it all. His lands in France were ten times the size of the French king’s.
Besides his conquests, he began a programme of unprecedented reform that set in place the rule of law across England. He was a patron of the arts, a man of letters and he placed England at the very centre of European culture; he was a prince of the twelfth-century renaissance.
By any measure, this is a man who should be celebrated as one of England’s greatest kings. And yet he is not. History might have judged and remembered Henry differently, had (as one of his biographers speculates1) he died in 1182. It is easy to imagine: a pressing matter of diplomacy that required his presence in Normandy, a sea crossing, a violent storm – and the drowning of the king in the English Channel.
Henry did not die in 1182; he lived for another seven years. These were the worst years of his life. They were blighted by his failure to dominate a new French king, Philip Augustus, and renewed fighting with his sons, who would hound him to his death.
Thomas Becket, Henry’s archbishop, did not die in his bed. Henry’s men murdered him in his cathedral church at Canterbury in 1170. The murder was the culmination of six years of bitter quarrels over the precedence of church or state. Just days before, Henry had exploded in anger at Becket’s behaviour. At his Christmas court he shouted, ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!’ Four loyal knights, believing Henry wanted rid of Becket, sped across the sea from Normandy to Canterbury. As they entered the cathedral fully armed, they shouted ‘King’s men, king’s men’, hacked off the top of Becket’s head and left his body awash with blood on the cathedral floor.
It took years for Henry to recover from the propaganda disaster of Becket’s death, and this may be a reason why Shakespeare never wrote about him – if he had tackled the thorny issue of Thomas Becket, it is doubtful that the play would ever have been performed. The Elizabethan and Stuart authorities did not take kindly to religious themes in plays.
Henry ended his days, not in the warm embrace of a loving family and peaceful empire, but unloved and alone, a broken man. Even his adored youngest son John betrayed him. England’s burning light was reduced to no more than a flicker in the shadows.
Tragic heroes, as Aristotle noted, attract us with their blend of light and shade. Like us, they are neither wholly good nor bad. We empathise with them, in part because the consequences of their mistakes seem to us far more severe than they deserve, echoing Lear’s lament, ‘I am a man more sinned against than sinning.’ We are drawn to them because we see the same frailties and the same capacity to err in judgement that we exhibit ourselves. They hold up a mirror to our own imperfections.
Although we may see fragments of ourselves in them, however, they are ultimately not the same as us. The Aristotelian tragic king plays on a grander stage – and his capacity to do good in the world, or inflict harm on others, is far greater and more wide-reaching as a result.
Henry is in many ways the classic tragic hero. And though an emotionally complex man, the cause of his undoing bears resemblance to that beloved of the Greek dramatists: hubris.
This book tells Henry’s true story,