2 - Reversing the conquest: deputies, rebels, and Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI

Summary

Midway through the first part of Shakespeare's Henry VI, “English John Talbot,” that “terror” of the French and embodiment of patriotic heroism, finds himself and his soldiers cut off from reinforcements and surrounded by enemies before Bordeaux. “O negligent and heedless discipline!,” he exclaims:

How are we parked and bounded in a pale,

A little herd of England's timorous deer

Mazed with a yelping kennel of French curs!

(4.2.44–47).

Undeterred, Talbot fights on against the odds until, spiritually broken by the death of his son, he finally expires, the symbol of a vanishing chivalry (4.7.30–32). As part of the play's evocation of the vicissitudes of English militarism in France, Talbot's fatal isolation at Bordeaux has been expertly related by Leah Marcus to the involvement of Protestant Englishmen in the French wars of religion of the early 1590s, the years to which Shakespeare's first tetralogy belongs. In flocking to assist the beleaguered regime of Henri IV, English volunteers were defending a foreign prince against Catholic insurgency, rather than securing their nation's sovereign territories. Yet as recently as 1559, land in France had been under English control. In that year, Elizabeth had agreed to return the Pale of Calais to the French, thus giving up the final piece of a Medieval empire that at its height under Henry V had covered much of France. Although Elizabeth continued to style herself queen of England, Ireland, and France, the last claim was more symbolic than substantive, a nostalgic glance toward a glorious national past.

In fact, after 1559 Ireland remained the only overseas territory to which the English monarch could realistically claim sovereignty.