Henry VI

These were not arbitrary changes.

The whim of this monarch or that, Henry VIII and Edward VI, did only what others in their place would and must have done.

They were certainly sovereigns with convictions of their own, but their attitude of mind was but the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, and they did not so much originate it as be swayed by it.

Those statesmen who have been held meanly subservient to them were, after all, men of like convictions.

It owes its present stately proportions and perpendicular style largely to the benefactions of Greville and others.

The tower is remarkable for a buttress, which is in some ways a kind of highly developed mullion running through the centre of the window of the lower stage.

It is perhaps rather more curious than beautiful, and as it cannot be of any constructional value and adds little if anything to the stability of the tower, we can only regard it as one of those freaks of the last phase of Gothic architecture which tell us, if we have but the wit to understand, that Reformation or no Reformation, with Henry VIII or without, the Gothic spirit was dying.

The curious ogee-shaped roof of a building seen in the foreground of the accompanying view of the church is that of a garden pavilion or gazebo of Campton House, the lordly mansion built in 1613 by Sir Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campton.

In 1470 a rapid revolution followed in England.

Henry VI found himself once more upon the throne, while Edward took refuge in Burgundy to the great annoyance of Charles the Bold.

In spite of the fact that the fugitive was his brother-in-law, Charles was fond of dwelling upon his own Lancastrian descent through his Portuguese mother, being alive to the possibility of succeeding in this way to the English throne.

His solution of the difficulty was characteristic of the time.

While publicly recognizing Henry VI as king and threatening death to any of his subjects who should join Edward, he secretly gave him help to return to England.

The utter overthrow of the Lancastrian cause at Barnet and Tewkesbury was a blow to the hopes of Louis XI, for whom fresh trouble with Burgundy, Brittany, and Guyenne had already arisen through the agency of St. Paul.

This noble was at once a vassal of Burgundy and constable or commander-in-chief of the French army.

Anne de Beaujeu had now retired from the regency, but expressed her strong disapproval of a policy she was no longer able to prevent.

The making of this bridge was a great hindrance to the town of Wallingford, whither the trade was of them that came out of Gloucestershire, but now they pass by Abingdon.

This John de St. Helens lived about the beginning of the reign of Henry VI.

This John builded the fair hospital by St. Helens in Abingdon, and gave fifty lee lands by year to the maintainers of it and the bridge.

The bridge of Archstone at Dorchester is but a new thing to speak of, and there was a ferry at high waters over Thames, and the bridge of Abingdon seemeth to have been the—missing words.

Talbot, Earl of Shrobsbury, and his son Lord Lyle slain in France.

This Earl's bones were brought out of Normandy to Whitchurch in Shropshire.

Talbot, next Earl to him, slain at Northampton Field, taking King Henry VI's part.

This earl had five sons.

In the treaty, the French king also agreed to give Henry his daughter, the Princess Catherine, in marriage.

She became the mother of the English king, Henry VI.

the arrangement that an english sovereign should be king of france was never put into effect for in less than two years after the treaty was signed the reign of the great conqueror came to an end henry died In the reign of his son, all his work in gaining French territory was undone.

By the time that Henry VI was twenty years old, England, as you will read in the story of Joan of Arc, had nothing left of all that had been won by so many years of war, except the single town of Calais.

CHAPTER XXXI.

JOAN OF ARK.

I like the melodious sing-song, the clear, simple one-line and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half-closes in an eighteenth-century symphony, in Peel, Kidd, Green, and The Histories of Shakespeare.

How anyone with music in him can turn from Henry VI— john and the two richards to such a mess of verse half developed into rhetorical prose as cymbeline is to me explicable only by the uncivil hypothesis that the artistic qualities in the elizabethan drama do not exist for most of its critics so that they hang on to its purely prosaic content and hypnotize themselves into absurd exaggerations of the value of that content even poets fall under the spell ben jonson described marlowe's line as mighty as well put michael angelo's epitaph on the tombstone of paolo uccello no wonder johnson's blank verse is the most horribly disagreeable product in literature and indicates his most prosaic mood as surely as his shorter rhymed measures indicate his poetic mood marlowe never wrote a mighty line in his life cowper's single phrase toll for the brave drowns all his mightinesses as great tom drowns a military band but marlowe took that very pleasant-sounding rigmarole of peel and green and added to its sunny daylight the insane splendours of night and the cheap tragedy of crime because he had only a common sort of brain he was hopelessly beaten by shakespeare but he had a fine ear and a soaring spirit in short one does not forget wanton arethusa's azure arms and the like but the pleasant-sounding rigmarole was the basis of the whole thing and as long as that rigmarole was practised frankly for the sake of its pleasantness it was readable and speakable it lasted until shakespeare did to it what raphael did to italian painting that is overcharged and burst it by making it the vehicle of a new order of thought involving a mass of intellectual ferment and psychological research The rigmarole could not stand the strain, and Shakespeare's style ended in a chaos of half-shattered old forms, half-emancipated new ones, with occasional bursts of prose eloquence on the one hand, occasional delicious echoes of the rigmarole, mostly from Calabans and mask personages, on the other, with, alas, a great deal of filling up with formulary blank verse which had no purpose except to save the author's time and thought.

When a great man

destroys an art form in this way, its ruins make palaces for the clever would-be great.

George Bevers, read by Algie Pugg.

Henry VI, read by Arielle Lipshire.

Harold, read by Sandra.

Jack

Away.

Exalt.

End of Act 1 Act 2 of Henry VI, Part 2 by William Shakespeare This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

Richard III, though not printed till 1597, was probably written not later than 1593.

We know with certainty that Marlowe collaborated with Shakespeare in preparing for the stage the three parts of the chronicle history of Henry VI, and there are many items of internal evidence to indicate that Marlowe collaborated also in the concoction of Richard III.

This would date the drama before the tragic death of Marlowe, who was born in 1564 and was murdered at the early age of 29.

William Shakespeare was two months younger than his colleague.

The chronicle histories of the Elizabethan playwrights were produced continuously, one after another, like those puppet plays of the Neapolitans that relate the legends of Carlo Mangio and take up the story every night where they left it off the night before.

The points at which an Elizabethan drama of this type began and ended were, therefore, arbitrary and almost accidental.

The figure of the bunch-backed Duke of Gloucester appeared, as a matter of course, in the later scenes of the chronicle history of Henry VI before a subsequent play was devoted to the record of his own reign.

Colley Cibber, therefore, exercised a thoroughly legitimate prerogative when he decided to begin his depiction of the character of Richard III by presenting a couple of scenes culled from the antecedent chronicle history of Henry VI.