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Pardon me, Margaret; pardon me, sweet son—
The Earl of Warwick and the duke enforced me. (1.1.229–30)
Henry says these words to his wife and son after he’s made a deal to entail the Crown to York upon his death—an agreement that effectively disinherits Prince Edward. Yet even though Henry was the one to propose this deal, he now blames it on Warwick and York, whom he claims forced him to do it. This marks the first of several examples in the play where the king attempts to assert his innocence in the face of England’s rapid disintegration. For her part, Margaret refuses to absolve Henry of guilt. As she puts it to the king, “thou preferr’st thy life before thine honor” (1.1.247).
This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind,
Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea
Forced to retire by fury of the wind. (2.5.1–8)
Henry speaks these lines while sitting alone on a hill as he watches a battle unfold down below. His use of rhyming quatrains and pastoral imagery is remarkably out of step with the violence that’s occurring in the distance, demonstrating Henry’s withdrawn passivity as well as his penchant for fantasy. Though he is currently commenting on the way the tides of battle shift as fluidly as ocean tides, his attention will shortly turn toward the sweetness of the shepherd’s lifestyle. Henry wishes to leave the Crown behind with a desperation that can’t help but generate pathos in the audience.
The owl shrieked at thy birth—an evil sign;
The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howled, and hideous tempest shook down trees;
The raven rooked her on the chimney’s top;
And chatt’ring pies in dismal discords sung.
Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain,
And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope—
To wit, an indigested and deformèd lump,
Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree. (5.6.44–52)
In the play’s penultimate scene, just before Richard murders him in his cell, Henry prophesies that Richard will bring tremendous suffering and ruin to England. After making this prediction, the fallen king turns to personal attack, claiming that Richard’s disabilities are the physical manifestations of his ill-omened birth. Showing a remarkable—and, frankly, uncharacteristic—capacity for cruelty, Henry reads Richard for absolute filth, concluding that he is nothing more than “an indigested and deformèd lump.” In what is undoubtedly the dramatic climax of the play, Richard will soon interrupt Henry’s diatribe by plunging his blade into the king.
