The three plays of Henry VI resemble the three parts of The Godfather – escalating violence and vendettas between warring clans or tribes in generational conflicts about power.  At least with the fourth play and the next quartet, they stand for the following propositions.

First, politics are commonly about people, not policies.

Secondly, if you take power in government unlawfully, you debase your own currency by leaving your title to be impeached by someone doing the same to you.  After Lancaster deposed Richard II, this was the flaw, like a curse, that house had to live with in dealing with the house of York.  This led to the Wars of the Roses.

Thirdly, the violence and killing may escalate to the point where the whole raison d’être of the ruler has gone.  He cannot do his primary job of keeping the peace, and chaos reigns.  It is, someone said, as if Christ and his angels slept.

And fourthly, when that happens, the agony of the nation, and the natural abhorrence of a vacuum, may lead not just to a change of regime, but to a form of revolution in all the rules of the game – what we call the constitution. 

That is just what happened in Rome when the Republic brutalised itself, and Augustus, whom Gibbon dubbed the ‘crafty tyrant’, by stealth converted the exhausted state into an empire, and in England, when the Tudors reintroduced the exhausted magnates to the concept of absolute royal power.

Just how gruesome that whole process may be is set out in blood curdling detail in the three parts of Henry VI.  A new pinnacle of murderous horror is reached in the finale of the quartet in Richard III, when three ragged old crows on a barbed wire fence bark out their lamentations and curses before the ensainted heir of the Tudors finally slays the Yorkist dragon.  (And the birth of his son’s heir is positively hymned at the close of Henry VIII.)

It is with the horrors of these wars in this quartet that our playwright begins his career long descant on chivalry.  The prime warrior of the English, Talbot, threatens whole towns with the fury of his ‘three attendants’ – ‘lean famine, quartering steel, and climbing fire.’  He anoints his fighting heir as ‘the child of chivalry’, and then gives his old arms as young Talbot’s grave.  Then a ‘giglot wench’ on the French side, before she is burned at the stake – as either a saint or a slut – mocks his corpse ‘stinking and flyblown here at our feet’ (Henry VI, 4.7.76). 

What, then, was ‘chivalry’?  Murdering a child in front of his mother or father before cheering lords and prelates?  Well, we would get a different answer from this writer’ s most famous character in the next quartet.

We may not have given enough attention to the first point – that politics are mostly about people, not policies. 

As it happens, that was I think precisely the point made by works of history that were seen as revolutionary in the last century – Sir Lewis Namier, The Politics of England at the Accession of George III, and Sir Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, which dealt with the birth of Imperial Rome.

Here is Sir Lewis:

……parties at all times rest on types and on connections rather than on intellectual tenets….The division between Whigs and Tories….was latent in temperament and outlook, in social types, in old connexions and traditions.  But it was not focused on particular problems, and did not therefore supply clear lines of division in politics….The territorial magnates are usually described as an oligarchy or a nobility, which are misleading names, as they suggest exclusiveness based on inherited wealth…..The territorial magnates were the nucleus of that governing class, whose claims even now are based on rank, wealth, experience, and a tradition of social and political pre-eminence (or, according to George Meredith, are ‘comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air’).

Here is Sir Ronald:

Though concealed by craft or convention, the arcana imperii [secrets of power] of the nobilitas cannot evade detection.  Three weapons the nobiles held and wielded, the family, money, and the political alliance (amicitia or factio, as it was variously labelled)….The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham ….The ramifications of this oligarchy were pervasive, its most weighty decisions taken in secret, known or inferred by politicians of the time, but often evading historical record and baffling posterity….Persons not programmes came before the People for their judgment and approbation.  The candidate seldom made promises.  Instead, he claimed office as a reward, boasting loudly of ancestors, or, failing that prerogative, of his own merits….The best of arguments was personal abuse.

Our fourth and final point is the subject of The Roman Revolution, which was, like the work of Sir Lewis Namier, a work of outstanding and game-changing scholarship.  The author summarised it on page two.

It was the end of a century of anarchy, culminating in twenty years of civil war and military tyranny.  If despotism was the price, it was not too high; to a patriotic Roman of Republican sentiments, even submission to absolute rule was a lesser evil than war between citizens.  Liberty was gone, but only a minority at Rome had ever enjoyed it.  The survivors of the old governing class, shattered in spirit, gave up the contest….Yet the new dispensation, or novus actus, was the work of fraud and bloodshed, based upon the seizure of power and redistribution of property by a revolutionary leader.  The happy outcome of the Principate might be held to justify, or at least to palliate, the horrors of the Roman Revolution: hence the danger of an indulgent estimate of the person and acts of Augustus.

Well, they don’t write history like that anymore.  Nor do they write plays like Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra, which round out the Roman story, any more. 

But we might query ‘the happy outcome’ of the Principate.  If the constitution of the Republic was shaky, that of the Empire was no better.  Very few emperors died in their beds.  Rome never dealt with the succession issue properly.  In a history of that time, I wrote:

Augustus was disappointed with his own family, and nominated a seasoned soldier Tiberius as his successor.  A grandchild, who may have been seen as a successor notwithstanding his banishment, was promptly murdered on the news of the death of Augustus.  The new era started with a form of dynastic murder, and historians still puzzle over the nature of the ruling power, and the means by which it was transmitted on death.  There is, however, little reason to doubt that from this time on, the army and the provinces were looking at an emperor whose rule looked just about absolute.  Succession then hinged on death, and unhappy subjects in the right place generally were all too happy to arrange the death, and leave the choice of successor to the army in the form of the Praetorian Guard.

Gibbon was customarily majestic on the accession of Augustus.

Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.  A feeble senate and enervated people cheerfully acquiesced in the pleasing illusion, as long as it was supported by the virtue, or even by the prudence, of the succession of Augustus.

And he was customarily caustic on the Empire itself.

Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same.  A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.

So much for the myth of the civilisation of the Roman Empire.

And there is some ripe irony there in the failure of Rome to deal with succession in its own backyard – adequately, or at all, as lawyers are wont to say.  The Tudors, and in particular Henry VIII, well understood the categorical imperative of securing succession to the Crown after the horrors of the Wars of the Roses.  Those wars broke out under the weak King Henry VI.  And they so amply fulfilled the dire prophecy of Warwick.

And here I prophesy: this brawl today,
 Grown to this faction in the Temple garden,
 Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
 A thousand souls to death and deadly night.  (I Henry VI, 2.4.124-127).

But when King Henry turned to Rome to aid him to secure the succession to the English crown, Rome could not accommodate him.  Rome had a conflict of interest – that happened to involve that phantom body called the Holy Roman Empire.  That failure of the Vatican led England to break from Rome.  And that was the biggest revolution of the lot.

The group of plays about Henry VI concludes at the end of Richard III with the battle at Bosworth in 1485.  In one sense, Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, finished what Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster had begun in 1399 with the deposition of Richard II.  The scale of the breach of royal descent was celebrated by Shakespeare in the passion play Richard II, and in Henry V, even the king reflects on the flaw in his title on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. 

The scars left on England by the Wars of the Roses may not have matched those left on Germany by the Thirty Years War, but the lessons of a weak crown were fearful.  We need not trouble about labels like Medieval, Renaissance, or the Tudor Revolution to see how great was the difference in the governance of England at the time of Bosworth in 1485, and when parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534.  If you are going to pick a fight with God’s anointed, you want a better rock on which to stand than a wobbly crown.  It was parliament that would now define the role not just of the church, but of the crown itself.  That is a massive shift in under two generations. 

In a previous statute, the English in the preamble had indulged one of their customary divagations from veracity, when they had recited that ‘Where, by diverse sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire…’  The promotion involved in ‘empire’ would be canvassed in Hemry V – on both sides – but from then on, the focus of the English shifted from the old world of Europe to the new world of what assuredly would become an empire.*

The actual working of government in ancient Rome and England in the eighteenth century was not prescribed by law or in writing.  It was customary and turned on what the Romans and the English both called ‘patronage’ and we call corruption.  Syme said that under Augustus, ‘political competition was sterilised and regulated through a pervasive system of patronage and nepotism.’  You could say that of the Mafia.  Namier said that ‘the idea that the politically active part of the nation had a claim to maintenance on the State was generally accepted, even if it remained subconscious.’  That does sound very English.

But for our part, we may go back to the suggestion that politics are generally about people, not policies.  The phrase may be altogether too glib, but what if your system of governance relies on two political parties, and you can’t tell the difference in what either party stands for? 

And the sensible politicians know what the answers are, but they are too scared to put them to the people.  What use is your democracy then?

Well, whatever – when we hold these plays about Henry VI in our hands, and we speak our parts, we are living history, our history – and it may be as well to listen to what we hear. 

This is very much so if the whole shebang turns on a state of mind and we think that we are losing ours.  It’s all very well to talk of people and policies – what if you don’t have much of either?

*To understand this shift in England, we might compare England to France, the most constitutionally advanced state in Europe.  The Wars of the Roses occupied England in the 15^th century.  The French version, the Fronde, occurred in the 17th.  After the wars of the magnates, England saw the rise of parliament, the Reformation, and the beginning of the nobles acting with the commons against the crown.  France saw the rule of Cardinal Richelieu and the absolute rule of the Sun King.  The English had their main revolution in 1689, and it was comparatively bloodless.  The French started theirs in 1789 and then endured  about a century of horrors.  Among the main differences, the English had started house training their kings in 1215 with Magna Carta; about then, their lawyers and judges started developing their own native law common to all England, and produced king-baiters from hell; they had also been developing a parliament that would become the model for democracy for the world; and they had given themselves religious Home Rule in the 16^th century.  Russia knows none of those things.  And if you even hinted at them in Beijing, Cairo or Teheran, you would bring the house down.