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Summary
Several lords, including Richard Plantagenet, Somerset, and others, enter the Temple Garden near the law courts in London. Plantagenet appears to have just presented a case related to his claim to nobility, and now he says that those who believe the truth of his argument should pluck a white rose off the briar to show their allegiance to him. Somerset says those who support him in his dispute of Plantagenet’s claim should pluck a red rose. The other nobles present each make their choice.
Plantagenet and Somerset trade insults and scorn each other. Somerset criticizes Plantagenet’s father, who was put to death as a traitor by Henry V. Plantagenet says his father was accused and put to death without trial, but his treason was never proven. He says he will remember this slight for a long time, and both men swear that they and their allies will wear their roses as a sign of their enduring hatred of each other. When Somerset departs, Plantagenet and Warwick talk. Warwick says he believes that the next meeting of Parliament will restore the title Plantagenet lost when his father was put to death. Meanwhile, he will continue to wear Plantagenet’s rose, though he foresees that this dispute in the garden will send thousands of people to their deaths under the sign of the white rose and the red.
Later that day, in a cell in the Tower of London, Mortimer awaits his death. He speaks of his declining strength and wonders when his nephew Plantagenet will come. Mortimer comments on the misfortune he has suffered since Henry V first came to power, and he says that Plantagenet has suffered under the same fate. When Plantagenet arrives at the cell, he tells Mortimer about his disagreement with Somerset. He then asks Mortimer to explain how his father came to be executed. Mortimer explains that his family was next in line to the throne after Richard II, but when Henry Bolingbroke deposed him and became Henry IV, the house of Lancaster took control of the Crown. When he attempted to reassert himself as the rightful heir, Mortimer was thrown in jail. Later, Plantagenet’s father raised an army to try to install Mortimer on the throne, but he was captured and executed, and the Mortimers were suppressed.
Plantagenet observes that Mortimer is the last of his line, and Mortimer names Plantagenet as his heir. Though Plantagenet is still upset at the injustice visited upon his father, Mortimer urges him to accept that the house of Lancaster is firmly established on the throne. The aged man then dies in Plantagenet’s presence. As the jailkeepers remove Mortimer’s body from the cell, Plantagenet hurries off to Parliament hoping to regain some of the power stolen from him.
Analysis
There is no historical fact to suggest that the confrontational scene in the Temple Garden ever took place. Even so, Shakespeare’s staging symbolizes what was a very real rift within the English nobility between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians. And, as Warwick correctly prophesies at the end of scene 4, this rift led to decades of political unrest that the history books have grandiosely termed the “Wars of the Roses.” This disagreement would last until Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian descendant, defeated Richard III, the last of the Yorkist kings, and then married a Yorkist heir, thereby uniting the red and the white roses. We might see the play as offering a convenient origin for this civil conflict. Yet the terms of the dispute between Plantagenet and Somerset aren’t laid out with enough clarity to seem entirely warranted. Was Plantagenet really cheated out of the throne, or does each of these men simply desire the throne for selfish reasons? Although this scene may serve as an illustration of the origin of these events, as an actual explanation, it falls short.
The events described by Mortimer would later be made famous on the Shakespearean stage, in Richard II. Some historians of Shakespeare’s time suggested that by deposing Richard II—the rightful heir—Henry IV committed a crime against God and, thus, incurred punishment in the form of a hundred years of bloody struggle in England. Even Henry V, preparing to attack the French in Henry V, worries he will be punished for his father’s crimes. The later events depicted in Richard III, when a truly merciless king succeeds Henry VI, illustrate the heights of depravity reached by a family line that may not have rightfully held the throne in the first place. All this was finally repaired by Henry VII, whose marriage resolved the symbolic war between the red and white roses. Shakespeare, writing during the rule of Queen Elizabeth, the last of the York line, took pains to suggest that the York family was the rightful heir to the throne and that the unfortunate struggle of the Wars of the Roses led to the rightful coronation of Elizabeth’s forefathers. Hence, Shakespeare’s history of the dispute is never impartial, often subtly privileging the York side.
