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What earthy name to interrogatories
Can test the free breath of a sacred king?
Thou canst not, cardinal, devise a name
So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous
To charge me to an answer, as the pope.
Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more, that no Italian priest
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions,
But as we under God are supreme head,
So under Him that great supremacy,
Where we do reign, we will alone uphold,
Without th’ assistance of a mortal hand. (3.1.147–58)
With this speech, King John insults Cardinal Pandolf and rejects the idea that the pope has any authority over him. As the sovereign king of England, John’s power comes to him by the grace of God, not through an “earthy” intermediary. The force of John’s language here is notable, and it helps clarify why, even if he lacks a strong legal claim to the throne, he seems to be a fit ruler. By the same token, however, his brazenness in this moment also demonstrates a lack of foresight. John doesn’t seem to anticipate that Pandolf has the power to excommunicate him from the Catholic Church and turn his new ally, King Philip, back against him. Both events soon come to pass, and they mark the beginning of the end for John.
But thou didst understand me by my signs
And didst in signs again parley with sin;
Yea, without stop, didst let thy heart consent,
And consequently thy rude hand to act
The deed which both our tongues held vile to name.
Out of my sight, and never see me more!
. . .
Nay, in the body of this fleshly land,
This kingdom, this confine of blood and breath,
Hostility and civil tumult reigns
Between my conscience and my cousin’s death. (4.2.237–42, 45–48)
King John addresses these harsh lines to Hubert, lashing out when things sour for him after Arthur’s apparent death. John was originally the one to suggest Arthur’s execution. Now, though, in a fit of crazed hypocrisy, the king blames Hubert for consenting to his order. John’s mind is clearly experiencing a bout of “civil tumult,” which has left him altered. His inner turmoil stems in part from the recent news of his mother’s death. It also comes from the disorder caused in his court by the news of Arthur’s death. Once again, the king has failed to anticipate the consequences of his actions, and now he wants to place the blame on someone else’s shoulders. If John’s claim to the throne has previously been solidified by his superior fitness as a ruler, his increasing confusion is quickly eroding that advantage.
Poisoned—ill fare! Dead, forsook, cast off,
And none of you will bid the winter come
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw,
Nor let my kingdom’s rivers take their course
Through my burned bosom, nor entreat the north
To make his bleak winds kiss my parchèd lips
And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much.
I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait
And so ingrateful, you deny me that. (5.7.35–43)
John utters these lines in the play’s final scene, as he’s about to succumb to the poison administered to him by a vengeful monk. The monk’s poison has caused a horrific fever. Significantly, the onset of this fatal fever was foreshadowed earlier in act 5, when John referred to his anxiety in figurative terms as a “tyrant fever that burns me up” (5.3.14). Near-crazed with suffering, he now asks for “winter . . . / To thrust his icy fingers in my maw.” The cold of winter he calls for here references the figurative “summer” he spoke of earlier, when he complained that “there is so hot a summer in my bosom / That all my bowels crumble up to dust” (5.7.30–31). Even as this tormented deathbed scene depicts the king’s tragic end, it also underscores the senselessness of his downfall. Though John didn’t have the strongest legal claim to the throne, and though he made errors of judgment in his rule, neither of these political failures contributed to his death. Rather, he died at the hands of an unnamed monk with a personal vendetta against him.
