President or king?
Shakespeare's "Henry V" and the limits of immunity
I’m reading through Shakespeare’s plays in an attempt to make sense of the world. Today I’m writing about “Henry V.” For a quick reference to posts on previous plays, click here. Next week we’re back to comedy with “As You Like It.”
In multiple US courts of law, lawyers are presenting an argument that the President cannot be held legally accountable for anything he does in or out of office. A federal judge recently gave her decision on unfettered immunity: a President is not a king (and the defendant is not President).
This judicial opinion soothed many people, including me, who are alarmed at the thought of the Constitution shielding criminality. That sense of calm quickly dissolved. One opinion isn’t definitive; many more judges will be asked to consider the arguments for the limits, if any, of presidential immunity. Suppose that all judges in the land confirmed that the president isn’t a king and is legally accountable for crimes committed outside official duties. That would still leave us with the unsettling fact that the office of the president can protect even the worst among us, if Congress fails its duties.
Shakespeare wrote about kings, and in “Henry V” he gives us the arguments a king might make about limits to responsibility for his own actions. It’s a debate worth visiting today.
Summary
The play opens with two clerics, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely, discussing a bill that was introduced in the House of Commons when Henry IV was still alive. That bill would strip the Church of half its assets to fund the state, and it’s still pending. They think the new king, Henry V (called King Harry in the play), will be more persuadable, and decide to make the argument to him that he’ll gain more from the spoils of a war with France than he can achieve by taxing the Church.
The Archbishop of Canterbury gains an audience with Harry and lays out an argument that it’s Harry’s right to take over France. His argument persuades Harry of the self-righteousness of this cause. Harry calls for the French ambassador, sent by the Dauphin (the French king Charles’ son), to appear before him.
The French ambassador prefaces the Dauphin’s message by noting that Harry recently claimed some dukedoms in the name of King Edward (his great-grandfather). The Dauphin rejects Harry’s claim: “You cannot revel into dukedoms there.” Underscoring this message belittling the king’s youth, the ambassador presents a gift to Harry that mocks his reputation as a playboy: a tun (wine cask) filled with tennis balls. Harry responds sarcastically:
KING HARRY
We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us.
His present and your pains we thank you for.
When we have matched our rackets to these balls,
We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.”
-Act 1 Scene 2
He soon works himself up into the soaring. yet bellicose, indignation that he’ll maintain for most of the play:
KING HARRY
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands,
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
Ay, some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn,
But this lies all within the will of God,
To whom I do appeal, and in whose name
Tell you the Dauphin I am coming on
To venge me as I may, and to put forth
My rightful hand in a well-hallowed cause.
-Act 1 Scene 2
He sends off the ambassador and prepares his attack on France.
We’re introduced to Falstaff’s former associates Nim, Bardolph, and Pistol, and his former page named Boy. (Falstaff doesn’t appear in the play, which later announces his off-stage death.) This play’s lowlife characters are corporals and lieutenants in the king’s army. They have a stronger game in talking trash than in actual fighting.
Richard of Cambridge, Lord Scrope, and Sir Thomas Grey conspire against the King. At court, Harry first charms them, then asks what they thought of the mercy he showed recently to a man who had defamed him. The three conspirators say the king shouldn’t have treated the man so lightly. Taking his cue, Harry hands them letters detailing the charges of treason against them. He orders their executions.
The French King Charles meets with advisors to prepare for Harry’s attack. Rebutting the advice that Harry’s army will be weak, his son the Dauphin argues for a strong defense, to which Charles agrees. Exeter arrives from England with a message from Harry, demanding Charles step down and acknowledge England’s historical right to the French throne. Charles replies that he’ll think about it, hoping to delay the English while he prepares for war.
Harry and his troops cross the channel and arrive at the port of Harfleur, ready to take it: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, / Or close the wall up with our English dead./ … / Cry, “God for Harry! England and Saint George!’” (Act 3 Scene 1)
The battle is fierce. The town sounds a parley (cease-fire to discuss terms). Harry vows to the town’s Governor that Harfleur will suffer unthinkable atrocities if the Governor doesn’t yield. The Governor caves and the English take Harfleur. They continue on across France to take the crown.
King Charles’ court considers its next step, now that Harry and his army are advancing closer. Considering that the English are battle weary and their supplies weakened, the French decide that they’ll be able to capture him easily. Charles sends Montjoy to Harry to demand his ransom to put down arms.
Harry receives Montjoy’s message, and sends his own: although they are weakened, they are determined to persevere.
The English arrive in Agincourt and set up camp. At night, Harry puts on a cloak borrowed from a subordinate and walks the camp unrecognized as the king. He hears the unvarnished complaints of the men who serve him. One man, Williams, says that the king should be accountable for the losses his people have taken in battle. Harry argues against the idea that the king is responsible for loss from war. Williams and Harry exchange gloves, a challenge they’ll settle after the battle.
Harry returns to his tent and puts off his disguise. His advisors tell him they are well outnumbered by the French, five to one. Hearing his men wishing for what they do not have, Harry rallies them: “If we are marked to die, we are enough / To do our country loss; and if to live, / The fewer men, the greater share of honour.” (Act 4 Scene 3) So begins the famous ‘band of brothers’ speech:
KING HARRY
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
-Act 4 Scene 3
The battle is bloody and the English lose the Duke of York and the Earl of Suffolk. Harry orders all French prisoners to be executed (per Pistol, “Coup’ la gorge” [cut their throats]). The French suffer great losses amongst their leaders and lose the battle and therefore their kingdom to the English.
After the battle, Harry sets up a prank regarding the challenge he’d taken when walking disguised amongst the troops the eve of the battle. He gives Fluellen, a Welsh corporal, Williams’ glove and tells him to find Williams to finish the challenge. Harry then arrives and discloses that he, the king, was the man who accepted the challenge. Williams backpedals for a few uncomfortable minutes, until Harry laughs it off and orders that Williams’ glove be returned to him filled with crowns (coins).
In the final scene, the English and French negotiate terms. While Harry’s emissaries are brokering peace with France, Harry courts the king’s daughter, Catherine (whom Harry insists on calling ‘Kate’). Their courtship, somewhat hampered by not knowing the others’ language, resolves in Catherine saying she’ll marry him if her father agrees. The negotiations complete, heavily favoring the English, Charles agrees to the marriage of his daughter to Harry.
The Epilogue reminds us that their marriage will be short-lived, yielding one infant son who will become Henry VI when only 9 months old.
Thoughts
One way to approach this play is to consider its interest in language and how people use it. The clergy use rhetoric to redirect the king away from their coffers, pointing him instead to the French king. Harry wields a cannon of words against the Governor of Harfleur to bring that battle to a close. His vaulting speeches encourage his troops to throw their destinies into the maw of war. In disguise he argues, man to man, with Williams about the limits of a king’s responsibilities. He attempts to woo a bride with words she cannot understand. With words, a man can exceed the blunt limits of brute force. Harry, ever ambitious, uses every means at his disposal to achieve his ends and justify himself while doing so.
The play is also interested in how language creates divisions that are difficult to overcome. It focuses on the polyglot mixture that results from characters of different lands being thrown together: English, Irish, Welsh, French. The Welshman Fluellen speaks in an odd bastardization of English that’s played for comic effect, but which also highlights his strangeness amongst the English troops. On the field of battle, Pistol fails to understand his French adversary, and Boy (who has learned French) must translate for both of them. Pistol would rather have the French soldier ransom himself (and pocket the gains) than kill him in battle. But, he can only fleece him if he can communicate with his mark, and with Boy’s translation services they cut a deal.
Catherine prepares for a potential loss to the English by asking her maid, who had learned some English while in attendance in England, to teach her a few words. Catherine learns a few words, then is exhausted by having to learn such a coarse and ungainly language: “Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France pour tout le monde.” (These are words of the bad, the corruptible, gross, and vulgar, and not for honorable ladies to use. I wouldn’t want to pronounce these words before the lords of France for anything in the world.) It’s a pretty scene even while it establishes that language will present a barrier to a future union with England.
After England has won and her fate is almost sealed, Catherine fends off Harry’s advances by wielding her ignorance of his language. Harry, claiming not to know French, does seem to be able to translate her meaning: “CATHERINE: O bon Dieu! Les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies. KING HARRY: What says she, fair one? That the tongues of men are full of deceits?” After a long speech in which Harry makes his suit and ends with asking “wilt thou have me?”, Catherine’s reply is short and not so sweet: “Dat is as it shall please de roi mon père.” Harry has finally met his match for using rhetoric to win what he cannot by other means:
BURGUNDY Is she not apt?
KING HARRY Our tongue is rough, coz, and my condition
is not smooth, so that having neither the voice nor the
heart of flattery about me I cannot so conjure up the
spirit of love in her that he will appear in his true
likeness.
-Act 5 Scene 2
King Harry, who speaks to his men in poetry, tries to woo a bride in prose. He succeeds only in leveraging his military win to gain her as a spoil of war. This scene segues to the Epilogue’s chorus reminding us that Harry will die relatively young, leaving an infant to rule England, which will lead to the War of the Roses and the loss of the crown to Harry’s line.
Accountability and the crown
In the previous Henriad plays, Harry (Prince Hal) swayed between profligacy and responsibility, never managing to embrace fully the role his father wished him to play. Once he wears the crown, he toys with the idea of being a common man (“I think the King is but a man”) but doesn’t hesitate to disavow his former mates: he easily condemns Bardolph to execution for theft. After pranking the soldier named Williams, he caps the jest by giving him a glove-full of crowns (the stamped replica of the royal crown), mirroring the insulting jest he’d received from the Dauphin, with a cask full of tennis balls.
The argument between Williams and Harry illuminates how Harry deploys rhetoric in service to himself. At Harfleur, Harry had threatened the Governor to capitulate to avoid the war atrocities the English would wage against the people of Harfleur. He was explicit about the cruelty and violence that would result if the Governor failed to comply:
KING HARRY
If not—why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls;
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
While the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid?
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroyed?
-Act 3 Scene 3
Harry’s argument is that Harfleur’s government would be responsible for such heinous acts, not the perpetrators. On the eve of the battle at Agincourt, Williams argues that the King is accountable for the destinies of the men in service to him:
WILLIAMS But if the cause be not good, the King himself
hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs
and arms and hands chopped off in a battle shall join
together at the latter day, and cry all, ‘We died at such
a place’—some crying for a surgeon,
some upon their wives left poor behind them, some
upon the debts they owe, some upon their children
rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die
in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of
anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these
men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the
King that led them to it—who to disobey were against
all proportion of subjection.
-Act 4 Scene 1
Harry’s rebuttal is extensive. He gives a couple of examples: a father can’t be held responsible for the misdeeds of a son he sends to sea; a master who sends a servant to carry money for him can’t be accountable if the servant is robbed and murdered en route. He concludes from this that “The King is not bound to answer the particular / endings of his soldiers….” The soldiers themselves are responsible for their own miserable ends. The king can’t claim to know the characters of the soldiers themselves: they could have been murderers and thieves before they took to battle. At this point he reaches to his divine right as king: he’s doing God’s work, so his cause cannot be questioned by mere men.
This is the useful argument given him by the Archbishop, the logic that launched his campaign to take France: it’s God’s will. The argument tendered to the king originated in serving the interests of the Archbishop—a ruse to redirect Harry to another source of revenue, away from the Church. It’s not the king’s fault if his men die so that he can pursue an unjust cause but the soldiers’, and their remedy is to seek God’s mercy. The Governor of Harfleur, however, is responsible for his people’s deaths. The Governor serves not by the benediction of God, but of men.
Harry signals throughout the play that he is king by virtue of God’s will. Historically, monarchies wore this mythical right as a cloak, which is to say that they found it useful even though facts disagreed. From Harry’s great-grandfather Edward through Henry VII—five kings succeeding Harry—the English were embroiled in competing and violent succession arguments. For Harry, his divine right is a device to enable his ambitions, no more and no less. When he dons the cloak of a lesser man, he temporarily trades off his mythic cloak of absolute immunity.
Modern immunity
Monarchies are largely gone in today’s world, replaced by forms of government in which rulers gain their powers from constitutional elections. And yet, some vestiges survive. The United States President cannot be held accountable legally within its borders for decisions and actions taken in executing presidential duties. This construct recognizes that harmful outcomes are always possible at the highest level of authority, regardless the intention, and that it serves the country best to ensure its supreme executive is able to act without fear of personal repercussions. Without this security, a President might reasonably conclude that doing nothing at all is better than doing anything, regardless how well intentioned or crafted the policy decision.
The obvious flaw is that a person with bad intentions can wreak irreparable harm with impunity while acting as the President. To prevent that, the Constitution relied upon the three branches of government providing limitations on executive power, Congress’ authority to impeach, and ultimately upon the will of the people every four years. How much harm, they must have wondered, can one person do in four years?
“Henry V” can be seen as an extended argument on the rights and responsibility of a king who oversees the lives of people who are diverse in their languages and life experiences. The argument ends with Harry achieving all that he thinks he wants, but the Epilogue has the last word: this will not last. His ambitions will soon die with him, leaving the country in the hands of those who will tear the country apart in slaking their competing ambitions.
It's a story for our times. Curb the ambitions of those who grasp for power. Limit power to preserve its integrity.
Ellie’s Corner
This picture is of Ellie in her salad days. Not a tennis ball, but the remains of what looks to be a Rugrat ball. Such a character.
Thanks for reading,
Ellie looks ready for battle with that helmet on…”Once more into tte Treats, dear friends…”