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Summary
Edward enters the palace with Richard and George, followed by Margaret, Oxford, and Somerset under guard. Edward sends Oxford to prison and Somerset to his death. Prince Edward is brought in. The prince, though a prisoner, demands that Edward stand down from the throne. Richard insults the prince, who declares that he is better than all three traitorous and usurping brothers. Edward, Richard, and George, in turn, stab the prince to death. Margaret faints, and Richard slips off to the Tower. Margaret recovers and mourns her son, calling Edward and his brothers butchers for having slain a child. Margaret asks George to kill her, but he won’t. She calls for Richard to kill her, but he is gone. She is escorted away.
Richard arrives at Henry’s prison cell in the Tower. Henry suspects that Richard has come to kill him, having heard of his son’s death. He then gives a speech in which he predicts that thousands will weep for their dead sons, husbands, and parents because of Richard’s future deeds. Richard interrupts Henry’s speech and stabs him to death. Richard then ruminates over Henry’s body, thinking of reports he heard his mother give about his unusual birth, that he was born feet first and with teeth. He cites his physical deformity as a sign that he is alone in the world, with neither father nor brothers. He is a man alone, and his next move will be to spread rumors about George and cause his downfall. He departs with Henry’s body.
Edward enters the throne room with his queen, Lady Grey, along with George, Richard, Hastings, and his infant son, Ned. Edward sits on the throne again, speaking of the many nobles who died in the process of attaining it. Edward then asks his brothers to kiss his child. George does so willingly. Richard also kisses the child, but under his breath he compares himself to the infamous traitor Judas. As Edward relaxes in his throne, George asks what he wants to do with Margaret. The French have sent a ransom for her, so Edward tells George to send her back to France. He then concludes by calling for joyful entertainments to celebrate the birth of a peaceful new era.
Analysis
The first half of act 5 featured a tense build-up to the final showdown between Yorkist and Lancastrian forces on the battlefield. But instead of dramatizing the action onstage, Shakespeare skips right over the battle and picks up after Edward has declared victory over Margaret’s forces. Though perhaps anticlimactic from a modern audience’s perspective, viewers in Shakespeare’s day would have anticipated the Yorkist loss as a foregone conclusion. As such, the lead up might have felt less tensely dramatic and more dramatically ironic. Shakespeare underscore this irony by brutally juxtaposing Margaret’s high-flown rhetoric at the end of scene 4 with the fact of her loss at the top of scene 5. Just as her words turned out to be completely ineffective against Edward’s arms, her son’s vitriol against the king proves useless. After demanding that his captor relinquish the throne, Edward and his brothers summarily dispense with him. The same pattern repeats once more when Richard goes to kill Henry. Henry’s chilling prophecy of Richard’s future evil does nothing to stay the villain’s blade. Once again, arms win out against words.
In the final scenes of Henry VI, Part 3, the play turns fully toward Richard, the creeping villain who is finally beginning to execute his treasonous plan to usurp the throne from his brother. Although we have long known of Richard’s threatening plot, he has largely blended into the action over the past two acts. His role has mainly been focused on ensuring that the Yorkist claim to the throne succeeds, since this is the outcome that will make it most possible for him to claim the Crown. He’s made a convincing show of supporting his brother. However, now that Edward’s rule finally seems assured, Richard begins to act for his own gain. When he slips off to murder Henry, he doesn’t seem to be doing it on Edward’s order. Indeed, Edward prevents the killing of Margaret, saying that in slaying her son “we have done too much” (5.5.43), making it seem unlikely that he would call for Henry’s execution. Thus, Richard takes it upon himself to kill the former king. Though this act does further assure Edward’s rule, it also symbolically marks the beginning of Richard’s bid for the throne. From this point on, he declares, he’s a lone wolf set against the world.
The play therefore ends on a note of profound foreboding. If the audience has followed all three parts of the Henry VI sequence, they will have witnessed at length the troubles that have attended the titular character’s reign. Part 1 showed how in-fighting among the nobility led to the loss of much English territory in France. Part 2 demonstrated how the rifts among the nobility inspired the common people to throw their support behind a new claim to the throne. And now, as Part 3 comes to a close, we have seen how the bitter fight between the houses of York and Lancaster have laid further waste to the kingdom, embroiling it in political chaos defined by constantly shifting alliances. And yet, after all of that, Shakespeare is effectively suggesting that the worst is yet to come. As Edward settles into the throne, convinced that his success in battle has now made him invulnerable, we can already sense the villainous butchery hovering on the horizon.
