Culture and Politics From Puritanism to Enlightenment

By Perez Zagorin

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520312739

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Culture and Politics

PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE

WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Publications from the

CLARK LIBRARY PROFESSORSHIP, UCLA

1.

England in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth

Century: Essays on Culture and Society

Edited by H. T. Swedenberg, Jr.

2.

Illustrious Evidence

Approaches to English Literature of the

Early Seventeenth Century

Edited, with an Introduction, by Earl Miner

3.

The Compleat Plattmaker

Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making in England

in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Edited by Norman J. W. Thrower

4.

English Literature in the Age of Disguise

Edited by Maximillian E. Novak

5.

Culture and Politics

From Puritanism to the Enlightenment

Edited by Perez Zagorin

Culture and Politics

From Puritanism to the

Enlightenment

Edited by

PEREZ ZAGORIN

Clark Library Professor, 1975-1976

1980

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY • LOS ANGELES • LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1980 by The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 0-520-03863-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-66078

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTRIBUTORS

I PROPERTY, MONOPOLY, AND SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II J. H. Hexter

II REASON, AUTHORITY, AND IMAGINATION: THE JURISPRUDENCE OF SIR EDWARD COKE Charles Gray

III JEWISH MESSIANISM AND CHRISTIAN MILLENARIANISM* Richard H. Popkin

IV POST-PURITAN ENGLAND AND THE PROBLEM OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT J. G. A. Pocock

V JOHN DRYDEN’S PLAYS AND THE CONCEPTION OF A HEROIC SOCIETY John M. Wallace

VI ISAAC NEWTON IN CAMBRIDGE: THE RESTORATION UNIVERSITY AND SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY Richards. Westfall†

VII IN SEARCH OF BARON SOMERS Robert M. Adams

VIII CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND BOURGEOIS IDEOLOGY: OBSERVATIONS ON CULTURE AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM IN THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Isaac Kramnick

IX BURKE’S SUBLIME AND THE REPRESENTATION OF REVOLUTION Ronald Paulson

INDEX

PREFACE

One of the most interesting and consequential duties that falls upon the annual incumbent of the Clark Library Professorship is the choice of the general subject of the seminar lectures to be delivered by invited guests under his auspices. Of the occupants of the Clark chair, I was the first historian, the first, that is, whose academic affiliation was with a university history department. All but one of my predecessors had been literary scholars and their seminars were mainly concerned with English literary history. (The exception is Professor Thrower, a distinguished geographer, who devoted his seminar to the history of cartography.) Now, history as an inquiry, since in principle it takes the entire human past for its province, is characterized by its many subject matters and approaches. This is not to say, of course, that it doesn’t possess its own distinctive methods and problems. Nevertheless, it has been and remains exceptionally broad in what it encompasses, more so than any of the other humanistic disciplines.

I thought I could best exemplify the historian’s contribution by

selecting a theme wide enough to subsume related topics of quite

different kinds, all of which would be revelatory of important

aspects or phases of the history of seventeenth and eighteenth cen-

tury English culture. I also wanted these topics to possess some

degree of coherence. I hope the reader will agree that the present

volume achieves these aims. The authors of the papers it contains

are specialists in diverse fields. Their subjects are drawn from the

history of political, legal, and religious thought, and from litera-

vii ture, science, and art. They include consideration of great and lesser individual figures, ensembles of ideas, and various cultural situations. The result, I think, is a collection of exceptional merit and interest.

Culture and politics, the terms that keynote the general theme of the collection, do not lead us toward divided and distinguished worlds, nor to a simple parallelism, but to intricately connected domains whose separate boundaries are extraordinarily hard to demarcate. This is obviously the case in the anthropological conception of culture, which has no normative implications. Here culture, taken as the determinate patterns and ways of life of any human community, envelops politics, giving it its assumptions, values, and ideals. But our engagement in these essays is primarily with culture in its more restrictive normative meaning: if not necessarily in the perfectionist sense of Matthew Arnold, then as that, at any rate, which designates the intellectual and imaginative creations of civilization. Perhaps we might then want to say that politics is the domain of power and of collectivities —of rulers and ruled, the strong and the weak, of classes, interests, and parties—while culture is the domain of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic values in their immediate relation to individual development and consciousness.

No doubt, this way of putting it seems to get at a valid distinction, which is nevertheless quite plainly inadequate. For how can we deny that politics too is a realm of values, at least of moral ones, or that normative culture is also subject to the play of power and that its shaping role is directed toward collective as well as to individual consciousness and development? The difficulties we thus encounter in delimiting culture and politics may perhaps cause us to conclude that the two are pure abstractions impossible to disengage from one another. Just as politics bears the stamp of culture in the values, aspirations, goals, and even the styles of political actors, so culture responds to relations of power in the values it projects, the institutions that serve it, and in such of its forms as high and popular, aristocratic and bourgeois, or elite and mass culture.

Whatever the complications in defining the respective limits of culture and politics, no one familiar with the English society that appears in these essays would be tempted to dissociate the two. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the age of the Stuart and Hanoverian monarchies, experienced many changes, but present us throughout with a rich and manifold reciprocity of culture and politics which was visible and acknowledged. While there were of course different modalities of culture in a society so strongly marked by inequality and provincialisms, no cultural activity of the time was carried on as a hermetic pursuit to be reserved from the profane. L'art pour l’art (though even this phenomenon is hardly immune from the political) did not exist. Statesmen, ministers, and political men formed a comparatively small elite with many relations to writers great and small, philosophers, and artists, Popular and radical protest movements usually reflected their own distinctive cultural aspirations and identity. The severing of public and private worlds, the one to be abandoned in disgust or despair to the politician, the other to be cultivated as the inviolate realm of the inner life, was unthought of. Poets dealt naturally with public events and political themes. It was not an accident that the two great poems, which are also among the greatest of English political poems, Marvell’s Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland and Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, were both written in the seventeenth century. We may doubt whether any poet of the time, even the most detached —and Marvell in the Horatian Ode was extraordinarily detached as he viewed the rise of Cromwell and the fall of the Stuart monarchy—could have consented with modems like Yeats that the poet has no gift to set a statesman right or like Auden that poetry makes nothing happen. The attention devoted to political satire in both poetry and prose, especially in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, suffices to demonstrate the involvement of writers with political subjects and the latter’s accessibility to the demands of art.

Over a large part of this period the interrelations between culture and politics were most obviously affected by the invasive consequences of fierce divisions in religion and public life. The prelude to the eighteenth century peace of the Augustans was a century broken in the middle by a revolutionary civil war and overthrow of kingship, and near the end by a threatened civil war, a royal deposition, and change of rulers. The revolution of 1688 was followed, in spite of its finality, by several decades of high political insecurity and unremitting party strife. Only with Walpole and the Whig ascendancy was the governmental system consolidated which made the succeeding era the most inertial and politically conservative in English history. Yet even during these years, as they went on, there emerged the agitation of the movement for parliamentary reform, while at their end came the French revolution with its great divisive impact upon English politics.

Thus English culture invariably stood in mutual connection with explicit political interests, values, aims, and conflicts. This interconnection is noticeable in the following essays and in the termini of the collection as a whole. Each essay explores ideas, beliefs, and cultural situations and responses, which would make little sense out of their relevant political context. Puritanism, a pervasive element in English culture in the early seventeenth century, where these lectures begin, was primarily a religious phenomenon, but its irresistible nonconformity and impulsion to create a godly community led it to be deeply involved in political controversies. The Enlightenment, where the lectures end, carries us away from Puritanism into the deism, free thought, irréligion, and naturalism which gathered head during the eighteenth century and whose contributions to the formation of a liberal political order were immeasurable.

A rapid review of the essays comprising this volume will reveal their scope. The first three papers address subjects set in the span between the closing reign of Queen Elizabeth and the Restoration. In the opening essay, J. H. Hexter presents a reading of Shakespeare’s Richard Ilas the basis for a penetrating account of the importance of the idea of property in the English moral and political Weltanschauung. The essay by Charles Gray which follows is one of the most illuminating discussions to be found of the legal mind of Sir Edward Coke, a formidable personality, who as lawyer and judge exerted an influence of the first magnitude on English law and politics. Although not part of his original lectures, I have included Gray’s brief appendix on Coke’s conception of artificial reason as a valuable enlargement to one of its main topics. The third essay by Richard H. Popkin authoritatively recounts the interplay between Christian millenarianism and Jewish messianism at their common high point in the mid-seventeenth century, bringing out inter alia the ironies and misunderstandings implicit in their encounter.

From here we move into the later seventeenth and the eigh- teenth centuries. J. G. A. Pocock’s essay ranges widely in religious and republican thought in its pursuit of the character and sources of the Enlightenment in England which distinguished it from that elsewhere in Europe. The following three papers are all devoted to significant single figures. John M. Wallace’s essay offers a discerning interpretation of Dryden’s plays which enables us to see their closeness to contemporary preoccupations and demonstrates Dryden’s debt to Stoic ethics in his commitment to heroic, noncommercial values. Richard S. Westfall’s paper gives a striking portrait of Isaac Newton’s career at Cambridge together with an incisive analysis of the conditions that made the university unpro- pitious to scientific activity. Robert M. Adams’s essay on Lord Somers achieves a lively resuscitation of the Whig lawyer, politician, and patron that places him in representative relation to the post-1688 era and incidentally suggests his possible connection with Swift’s Tale of a Tub.

The two concluding papers look to the later eighteenth century and beyond. Isaac Kramnick, in his examination of the emerging genre of children’s literature, suggests that its themes and content are infused with bourgeois values and the socialization needs of burgeoning industrial capitalism. The final essay by Ronald Paulson deals with both art and literature, with Rowlandson and Blake, as well as Paine, Burke, and Rousseau, and with unconscious as well as conscious motives, in a stimulating exploration of the responses of thinkers and artists to the great French revolution.

This recital should sufficiently indicate the fine variety of the following essays, from which I trust the reader will derive the same instruction and enjoyment as did the audience to which they were first addressed. I recall with pleasure the monthly occasions when the seminar met, all present seated around a long table in the Clark Library’s large baroque salon, faculty and graduate students of the University of California and other institutions in attendance, as well as some regular nonacademic guests who joined us. The papers invariably inspired discussion and argument, after which we adjourned for tea and conversation in the library’s garden amidst the late afternoon sunshine; and as a sign of nature’s benevolence on these occasions, I can testify that during the 1975-1976 academic year I spent in Los Angeles, the sun never failed to shine on the day of a seminar.

I wish to thank the Chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles and the Clark Library Committee for the honor they accorded me in appointing me as Clark Library Professor and as the first incumbent of this chair to be named from outside the faculty of the University of California. I am especially appreciative, moreover, that my appointment coincided with the Clark Library’s fiftieth anniversary year and its attendant festivities.

I am also obliged to the distinguished scholars who accepted my invitation to deliver papers to the Clark Library Seminar and for their consent to the publication of their papers in this volume.

To Robert Vosper, Director of the Clark Library, and to William E. Conway, Librarian, I feel a particular debt of gratitude. Their thoughtfulness and hospitality toward my wife and me, and their unfailing competence and helpfulness, made my stay at the Clark Library most enjoyable and productive. I am extremely appreciative as well to the library staff, which is unexcelled in its courtesy and service.

P. Z.

CONTRIBUTORS

Robert M. Adams, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Charles Gray, Senior Research Associate, Yale University Law School.

J. H. Hexter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University.

Isaac Kramnick, Professor of Government, Cornell University.

Ronald Paulson, Professor of English, Yale University.

J. G. A. Pocock, Harry C. Black Professor of History, The Johns Hopkins University.

Richard H. Popkin, Professor of Philosophy, Washington University.

John M. Wallace, Professor of English, The University of Chicago.

Richard S. Westfall, Professor of History of Science, Indiana University.

Perez Zagorin, Professor of History, The University of Rochester.

xiii

I

PROPERTY, MONOPOLY, AND

SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II

J. H. Hexter

I begin, for reasons that I hope will be intelligible before I end, with William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard II, written in 1595 or thereabout. To put you in mind of the bare sequence of events, a thumbnail sketch of the plot would go something like this:

Richard II, son of the Black Prince, eldest of the seven sons of Edward III, reigns in England. Two of his mighty subjects, Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford, Richard’s own first cousin, are at feud with one another. On the advice of his council Richard sends both Bolingbroke and Norfolk into exile. When Bolingbroke’s father and Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, dies, Richard does not call Bolingbroke back to England to receive his inheritance. Instead he goes to Ireland to put down a rebellion there, leaving his last surviving uncle, Edmund, duke of York, as lord governor of England in his absence. In that absence Bolingbroke returns to England. The people rally to him, nobles and common folk alike. York, finding no support, surrenders to him; and Richard, returning from Ireland, has no choice but to submit to his victorious cousin. He abdicates, and Bolingbroke ascends the throne with the title of Henry IV. Richard is held prisoner in Pontefract Castle, and slain there by Sr. Pierse of Exton, who hopes by his act to win the favor of the new king.

1 Such is the skeleton of The Tragedy of Richard II, such more or less was the actual course of events at the end of the fourteenth century, and such certainly was the outline of the story as it appeared in the account Shakespeare knew and approximately followed, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.¹

One peculiar trait of Richard II, the historical person, confronted Shakespeare with a difficulty: for an English monarch he was extraordinarily legitimate. He succeeded without opposition to a throne to which no man challenged his right. In this matter, at least, he was like his distant collateral Charles Stuart, the sole surviving son of James I, king of England. To all men to whom legitimacy of primogenitary descent in the male line from the legitimate kind in accordance with the custom of England constituted sufficient evidence of rightful inheritance of the throne, both Richard and Charles were unchallenged rightful rulers of England. The likeness is worth remark. During the 226 years between the death of the former and the accession of the latter, no ruler had sat on the throne whose title on accession to it was so beyond challenge and doubt as theirs, whose right to reign so few opposed.

One of Shakespeare’s tasks was to render it possible for his Elizabethan audience in 1595 to make sense of the conduct of the great men and the masses in coming to the aid of a rebel in 1399. In those dark days Englishmen, highborn and lowborn, had risen against their rightful king and supported and welcomed a usurpation that was to lie as a curse on the English for almost a century. What could lend even a faint color of justification to what Englishmen had done to their king at the end of the fourteenth century? What would make their actions at least intelligible, perhaps plausible, to Englishmen at the end of the sixteenth, to Englishmen who had yearly heard from the pulpit the powerful homily, Against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion?

In his quest for such justification, Shakespeare could rely on Holinshed’s help in general. In his characterization of Richard, or rather in his catalog of Richard’s misdeeds, Holinshed presented Shakespeare with an embarrassment of riches. Holinshed’s Richard II was a rotten king and a rotten man. Mostly, Richard appears in Holinshed, no skillful character portraitist, doing ill in action. He gratifies the evil councilors with whom he surrounds himself by issuing blank charters, for example, instruments that allow his corrupt favorites to exact money from his subjects under his seal for their own gain.² He even lets the realm to farm to his favorites and ill-councilors; that is, he lets them collect the public revenues for cash advances, to their gain and the realm’s loss.³ Richard breaks faith with many of the great men of the realm.⁴ He not only does enemies to death but desecrates their graves.⁵ He saddles his people with the high costs of his folly and extravagance by inflicting exorbitant fines,⁶ disinheriting rightful heirs,⁷ raising forced loans from his subjects, and never repaying them.⁸ His family, as well as his people, are his victims. His uncles, York and Gaunt, are among those who suffer from his breach of faith.⁹ He wrongfully exiles his first cousin Bolingbroke and confiscates his inheritance.¹⁰ He is guilty of the blood of his uncle, the duke of Gloucester, whose murder he procured.¹¹ Richard, says Holinshed, in a sentence that seems to have begun in measured judgment and ended in sheer revulsion, Richard ruled by will more than by reason, threatening death to each that obeyed not his inordinate desires.¹² From there on, the ordinarily flat and factual chronicler buries Richard in floods of vituperation, denouncing his untrue suggestions,¹³ pestilent kind of proceedings,¹⁴ hard dealing, willful will, wrongful purpose, spite, envy, malice.¹⁵

If Holinshed’s Richard is rotten, Shakespeare’s is worse. The latter acts out all the nasty traits that Holinshed ascribes to Richard II. The economy of playcrafting does not allow Shakespeare to put on stage all the details of Richard’s viciousness which Holinshed offers, but he presents a good many and renders them vivid with a gift for language and drama beyond Holinshed’s conception, beyond the gift of any other man who ever lived. Halfway through the play, when he has made it clear that Richard is running headlong toward destruction, Shakespeare has not elicited, has not sought to elicit, a moment of sympathy for him. His Richard II is extravagant and rapacious, pitiless and heartless, envious and spiteful, a weak windy ham, a greedy misruler of monumental incompetence, and monumentally indifferent to the devastation his greed and incompetence cause. Insouci- antly, he inflicts suffering on his patient uncles, his cousin, his child wife, his whole people, caring only for his fawning favorites with whom his relations are perhaps queer. By the end of the first scene in Act II, Shakespeare has let us know, by the words he puts in the mouths of others and by the words and deeds of Richard himself, that the king is utterly without redeeming social, political, or moral qualities.

Besides providing Shakespeare with a general representation of Richard as an evil king, whom even good subjects might at least think of disobeying, Holinshed afforded the dramatist material for a splendid and powerful scene that makes sense of, if it does not make right, the rebellion Bolingbroke led against Richard. He describes the meeting at Doncaster. Holinshed tells us that even before Bolingbroke, returning illegally from exile, sailed for England,

divers of the nobility, as well prelates as other, and likewise many of the magistrates and rulers of the cities, towns, and commonality here in England, perceiving daily how the realm drew to utter ruin, nor like to be recovered to the former state of wealth whilst King Richard lived and reigned, devised with great deliberation and considerate advice, to send and signify by letters unto Duke Henry, whom they now called (as he was indeed) Duke of Lancaster, requiring him with all convenient speed to convey himself into England, promising him all their aid, power, and assistance, if he, expelling King Richard, as a man not meet for the office he bare, would take upon himself the scepter, rule, and diadem of his native land and region.¹⁶

Having been moved to action by the sufferings and plaints of his fellow countrymen, Bolingbroke, that "true-born Englishman/’ sets sail for his native land. Coming ashore at Ravensburgh in Yorkshire, with only a few score men, he makes for Doncaster, still not knowing whether the English, to whom he has come to see justice done them, will join him or crush him. And there in Doncaster the fate of Henry and Richard and England is decided, for there, in full array and with their host of armed followers, are the great northern lords, Westmorland, Northumberland, and his son Henry Hotspur. There they put themselves under Boling- broke’s command. And there, too, according to the chronicler, Bolingbroke

sware… that he would demand no more than the lands that were to him descended by inheritance from his father… [and] undertook to cause the payment of taxes and tallages to be laid down, and to bring the King to good government.¹⁷

In that great scene at Doncaster, Henry of Bolingbroke undertook to purge and to reform the realm and yet did not threaten to usurp the throne.

Now zealous Shakespeareans may find this account of the meeting at Doncaster a little perplexing. Perhaps they may find it hard to recall, to place, to identify that great scene in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard II. Let their worries cease. It is not there; Sheakespeare did not bother to seize on the opportunity Holinshed tossed his way. But why is it not there? Why did Shakespeare not seize the opportunity? At Doncaster, Henry Bolingbroke appears to his supporters as a knight errant seeking on behalf of a people oppressed, to challenge a king turned tyrant. The history we know tells us that John of Gaunt’s son and heir was a good deal more than a knight errant and a good deal less; the history that Elizabethans knew, though different from what we know, told them the same thing. The meeting at Doncaster tells us, as it told them, that there Henry showed himself only as a man come to right the wrongs of Richard’s subjects, seeking nothing but justice for all. That men so sorely put upon would follow one who so presented himself, particularly when he was by right descent the nearest heir to the throne, surely that is intelligible. However we construe Bolingbroke’s behavior at Doncaster, we can understand and sympathize with the actions of many who followed him in rebellion, not intending rebellion or seeing their actions in that lurid light.

Am I second-guessing Shakespeare here? I do not think so, although in view of the recent dismemberments of the Bard by the bold and brilliant spirits that currently infest the theater, one no longer need apologize for second-guessing him. These days we may be grateful for an unexpected mercy if Lear is not portrayed as a hermaphrodite and Shakespeare’s lines are spoken, not recited in plain chant or omitted altogether. Still there is no need to second-guess him here. Obviously if the dramatic feasibility of the meeting at Doncaster is evident to me, Shakespeare. searching Holinshed with the world’s keenest eye for a dramatic effect, cannot have missed it. If he did not miss it, he must have rejected it, and if he rejected it, he must have believed he had a better alternative.

He did have an alternative, and he used it. Whether it was better is a matter of judgment, a matter that depends in a very particular sense on where one stands. Before we consider making such a judgment, let us examine the alternative. How did Shakespeare actually try to make it possible for his audience to empathize, if not sympathize, with Bolingbroke’s followers, even in some measure with Bolingbroke? When and where did he do it, and through what characters?

In the oddly telescoped time scale of the play, Shakespeare makes his move just a few days after Richard has exiled Bolingbroke. John of Gaunt, heartbroken at Bolingbroke’s banishment, denounces Richard to his face for his part in the murder of his uncle, Gloucester, Gaunt’s brother, and then dies (II, i, 93-115), 124-138). Richard, wholly unmoved, tells his last surviving uncle, Edmund of York, what he has in mind to do, now that Gaunt is dead (II, i, 159-162). Then, abruptly, York denounces Richard no more scathingly, but with a good bit more menace than Gaunt has just done. Says Edmund:

How long shall I be patient? Ah, how long Shall tender duty make me suffer wrong? Not Gloucester’s death, nor Hereford’s banishment Not Gaunt’s rebukes, nor England’s private wrongs… Have ever made me sour my patient cheek, Or bend one wrinkle on my sovereign’s face.

You prick my tender patience to those thoughts Which honour and allegiance cannot think.

[italics mine; II, i, 163-166, 169-170, 207-208]

When Edmund of York speaks so, when he hints so broadly, Richard cannot miss the point: even his uncle’s loyalty may be shaken if the king goes through with his design. He thus gives pause to that feckless monarch. Well may he do so, for his words are those not of a hero, nor of a villain, but of a survivor. Edmund of York is a survivor in two senses. Literally, he is the last of the seven sons of Edward III left in the land of the living. And, second, of those sons, and in a sense of all Englishmen, he is the man who shows himself best aware in word and act of the arts of survival, of what the conditions of safety and security, and of order and sense are in both men and societies, and of the limits that particular circumstances may require a man to accept lest he bring chaos and dissolution to societies, to men —and to himself, especially himself. Later in the play, as lord governor in Richard’s absence, Edmund of York will denounce Bolingbroke for returning from exile without the king’s permission,

… a banished man… come Before the expiration of thy time In braving arms against they sovereign.

[II, iii, 110-112]

But when he sees defeat as the inevitable outcome in the face of Bolingbroke’s overwhelming power, York prudently decides to remain as neuter (II, iii, 158). He then displays a view of neutrality somewhat compliant to the prospective victor. Immediately after declaring himself neutral he offers Bolingbroke the shelter and hospitality of the castle he is supposed to be keeping for the king. Later, he joins his troops to the triumphant rebel forces, and when Bolingbroke takes the throne as Henry IV, York becomes in turn his most loyal subject. It is this very prudent man who, in Act II, scene i, excoriates Richard after reminding him of the royal malefactions —Bolingbroke’s exile, the mistreatment of one uncle, the murder of another, the long roll of civil outrages against his own subjects —that he has hitherto passed over in silence, indeed without so much as a facial twitch to show disapproval. When Richard takes in all this, he is at last willing to attend and hear from York what he has done to pluck a thousand dangers on his head and lose a thousand well disposed hearts, what he has done to prick even York’s

… tender patience to those thoughts

Which honour and allegiance cannot think.

He cannot quite make out what he has done to arouse his docile uncle to such an unwonted emotional pitch. Actually, all he has said is that he is off to the Irish wars to show those rough rugheaded kernes who is who and what is what, surely nothing wrong with that, and that he is going to use the Lancaster estate, the plate, coin, revenues and moveables of John of Gaunt, who died a few minutes ago, to support his effort (II, i, 155-162). So in surprise and perplexity he asks, Why, uncle, what’s the matter? (II, i, 186). He is ready to listen. So should we be.

Then York tells him what the matter is, what trouble might follow if he were to

wrongfully seize Hereford’s rights, call in the letters patents that he hath by his attorneys-general to sue his livery, and deny his offered homage.

[II, i, 201-204] We need to look at that passage and to reflect on it. What we are looking at is blank verse, believe it or not. I have merely omitted the initial capitals of each verse and the line breaks at the end. Here is how it is ordinarily printed:

… wrongfully seize Hereford’s rights, Call in the letters patents that he hath By his attorneys-general to sue His livery, and deny his off red homage.

The first thing we might reasonably think about this exercise of Shakespeare ’s is that it is not up to much as poetry. One would give long odds against its making a dictionary of quotations, even one rather casual as to standards for admissions. The second thing we might think and wonder at is that it is poetry at all. English law of real property does not immediately strike one as the most promising subject to deal with in iambic pentameter, and only a poet of no imagination at all or one of enormous imagination would consider trying to do it. And the third thing we might think is that given an open option, this, instead of the meeting at Doncaster, is what Shakespeare chose to make the very heart of his effort to open the minds of his contemporaries to what made sense of Bolingbroke’s illegal incursion into England. According to Shakespeare, not Holinshed, that is, this is what is supposed to have vindicated Bolingbroke’s following in their own minds for their rebellion. And what is this? It is a brief (but not brief enough) disquisition, in blank verse of all things, on the legal forms of entry of a rightful heir into an estate held by military tenure.

Let there be no mistake, the inheritance of real property is the heart of it. To be certain that his audience does not miss the point, Shakespeare covers the ground again. The second time it is not York predicting dire events if Richard proceeds as he says he intends to; it is Bolingbroke himself at once justifying his own actions and validating York’s dire predictions. With his host of followers, he stands in arms against Richard before Berkeley Castle. York, the captain of the castle, comes to parley with him. He upbraids Bolingbroke for his very presence in England. His incursion with ostentation of despised arms has put him, York says,

In gross rebellion and detested treason.

Thou art a banished man, and here art come Before the expiration of thy time In braving arms against thy sovereign.

[II, iii, 108-1111

So Bolingbroke must justify his recent actions, or at least try to. And try he does.

I am denied to sue my livery here, And yet my letters patents give me leave. My father’s goods are all distrained and sold, And these, and all, are all amiss employed. What would you have me do? I am a subject; And I challenge law, attorneys are denied me; And therefore personally I lay my claim To my inheritance of free descent.

[II, iii, 128-135]

And there we are again, a law lecture in blank verse. That this law lecture of Bolingbroke’s is twice as long as the previous one by his uncle does not make it twice as good. Again confronted with the dramatic necessity of having Bolingbroke speak as persuasively as possible of the grounds and justification of his armed rebellion, almost incredibly Shakespeare again has him emit a brief series of technical observations in iambic pentameter on certain elements of the English law of real property and civil procedure. Sue my livery…letters-patent…goods distrained and sold … law … attorneys … claim to my inheritance … free descent.

So again the question, the problem: how could Shakespeare believe, how could he imagine, that the way to reach his audience on Bolingbroke’s behalf was to dress him out, not as an armed paladin for justice to all Englishmen, as he had indeed appeared in history at Doncaster, according to Holinshed, but as a suitor seeking by force as a last resort to have an infraction of his property rights rectified, and doing so only after every effort to get what was his through legal process had been frustrated? Again, note Shakespeare’s complete commitment to the second alternative, the one that portrays the returned Bolingbroke as a man seeking to vindicate his property rights, not as one who comes heroically to interpose himself between a despot and his suffering people. To support this view of Shakespeare’s presentation of Henry there is more than the argument from silence about the omission of the meeting at Doncaster. Bolingbroke has a good many things to say from the first time we see him after his return to England to the moment when Richard, reduced to despair by his own rhetorical effusion of self-pity, thrusts himself and his authority into his cousin’s hand. Only casually and fitfully in his utterances does Bolingbroke take on the role of champion of the oppressed. Thus, after York has capitulated to him, Bolingbroke mentions his pledge to deal with the