Kingship is a subject that fascinated Shakespeare for so long.

His history plays are an

unrelenting yet humane study of political man in actionor inaction. The succession question
was at the heart of a number of ideological debates on the nature and duty of the monarchy
during the Elizabethan period. The most significant debate was whether the succession was
governed by strict primogeniture or was in some ways elective. Whilst many considered
hereditary right to be the ideal form of succession, in reality England appeared to be
subscribed to a type of elective monarchy, as no claimant could hold the throne without the
acceptance of the governing elites, raising questions about the location and limits of
monarchical power in England.
The idea that there was something particularly divine about kingship was one which went
back at least to the earliest phases of medieval history. Many, if not most, kingdoms were
officially elective historically, though the candidates were typically only from the family of
the deceased monarch. The Saxon kings did not succeed each other by divine right or even by
the principle of inheritance. There was, undoubtedly, at all times a high regard paid to the
claims of blood and lineage; but the succession was not determined by the principle of mere
lineal descent. On the death of the king, the throne stood vacant until his successor could be
named by the witan, or lords of the council. It was still the same under the Normans. The
Conqueror himself claimed his crown in accordance with the will of Edward the Confessor,
and the claim was acknowledged. His eldest son was twice passed over in favour of younger
brothers. Stephen of Blois was acknowledged because the next of kin was a woman, Matilda,
and John the Lackland was preferred to his nephew Arthur as more competent to govern. But
the natural preference of Englishman for an eldest son and a direct lineal descent gradually
brought them to regard the crown as an inheritance. Yet that very principle of hereditary
monarchy, while it reduced the likelihood of royal kinsmen squabbling over the Crown, made
it more likely that unsuitable kings (by their youth, character, or incapacity) would sometimes
wear it. Above all, the persistent warfare of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries imposed
heavier obligations on Englands kings. (Medieval Britain, p.82)
Successive monarchs invariably claimed that they got their right to rule directly from God
rather than from the consent or wish of their people. This doctrine is known as the Divine
Rights of Kings. The king is God's deputy on earth and, therefore, under this principle the
kings can do no wrong as far as the people are concerned. Consequently, it will be up to God
to punish a wicked king, not man. The doctrine implies that any attempt to depose the king or
to restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act.
However, Figgis argues that, . the statement that the king was under no one save God was
the expression of patriotic aspiration rather than of actual fact....... They all had to recognize
the suzerainty of the Pope, which meant they could not have been answarable only to God.
Given the doctrine of a kings divine right, the chief duty of a subject was obedience to
monarchical authority, and the TudorStuart monarchs employed a wide range of political and

religious mechanisms to make certain that such a message was circulated widely. The
Homilies of the English Church, one of the first by-products of the Reformation, were
compiled by the government to be read at divine service.
Medieval kings had no automatic power of coercion. Royal authority, though in fact very
powerful, was moral. Obedience was recognized as a duty and kings were recognized as
almost religious figures. But they had no force at hand. Therefore royal authority depended
very much on the nobility. Kings like William the Conqueror, Henry I, Henry II, Edward I,
Edward III and Henry V were generally secure in the support of the majority of their nobles.
They were personally respected, and if some nobles tried to resist, these kings could generally
call on enough support to quell any rising. Discontented nobles had no resort short of open
defiance or violent revolt.
During the fourteenth century, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there was a continuous
struggle between the king and his nobles. The first crisis came in 1327 when Edward II was
deposed and cruelly murdered. Although the accession of Edwards son ensured that the
hereditary principle remained intact, the inviolability of anointed kingship had been
breached. (p.93 MB)With the security of the throne, respect for its dignity also vanished. Each
man, who was conscious that some drops of royal blood were in his veins, could aspire to
possess the throne if only he had strength enough to struggle for it and to keep it. Towards the
end of the fourteenth century Richard II was the second king to be killed by ambitious lords.
He was a strong believer of the doctrine of the Divine Rights of Kings. What seemed as
refinement to him to the nobles it was evidence that the king had lost touch with their
common interests. On the merest suspicion of treason, he rashly condemned John of Gaunt's
son, Henry of Bolingbroke, to ten years in exhile without even the pretence of a show trial.
This sort of justice made the English nobility uneasy. Ruthlessly deploying the monarchs
personal powers (He threw down whomsoever violated the Royal Prerogative was part of
the inscription he composed for his own tomb), Richards last two years have been justly
termed tyrannous..... Bolingbroke seized the Crown after being assured of support from the
Percy family whom Richard had alienated. (p. 114 MB). But although Henry IV passed the
crown to his son peacefully, he had sown the seeds of civil war.
With experience of war and government as Prince of Wales, Henry V proved a capable,
fearless, and authoritarian monarch who abandoned the careful ways of his father. Even
during his absences in France, his kingship was firm and energetic, enabling him to wage a
war that was as much a popular enterprise as Edward IIIs early campaigns had been. His
reign was the climax of Lancastrian England.
Shakespeare's Henry VI plays present the chaos of the Wars of the Roses, with loss of the
hard-won conquests in France, rebellion and disorder at home, noble turning against noble,
and faction destroying faction. England is torn by greed, treachery, and sensuality in high
place, and behind it all is the suggestion that all of this is God's punishment visited upon

England for Henry Bolingbroke's deposition and murder of King Richard II a half-century
before. Blameless as a man, Henry VI was failure as king. He was never competent to rule in
his own right. For the first thirty years of the reign, his regency council fought bitterly among
themselves, brought the kingdom to the edge of bankruptcy, and lost the remaining English
possessions in France with the exception of Calais. (citat)p.239 History of European society
The situation might have been different had Henry VI himself been a stronger character after
the model of his father and grandfather. The discontented nobility were divided between those
who remained loyal to Henry VI, the Lancastrians, and those who supported the duke of York,
the Yorkists. The duke of York was the heir of the earl of March. In 1460 the duke of York
claimed the throne for himself. After his death in battle, his son Edward took up the struggle
and won the throne in 1461. But the throne thus usurped stood on shaky foundations. Edward
IV had temporarily to give way before his rival. The final showdown came at Tewkesbury in
1471. Edward, young, warlike and charismatic, and supported by both his brothers Richard,
Duke of Gloucester, and George, Duke of Clarence was determined to annihilate the house
of Lancaster once and for all. (p. izmisliti MD) It was a decisive victory for York, a disaster
for Lancaster. Edward's last obstacle to the throne, Henry VI, was done away with in the
Tower of London.
Once one seizure of the throne based on a better dynastic claim had been made, others
followed, and in 1483, Richard of Gloucester similarly took the throne from Edward IV's son
to become Richard III. However, doing away with the rightful heirs to the throne was a step
too far, and the opposition to Richard was growing. Both Lancastrians and Yorkists detested
him, so when in 1485 Henry Tudor, Lancastrian claimant to the throne, landed in England,
they joined him. By his reckless ambition, Richard had split the Yorkist party, and handed the
victory and Crown to Henry Tudor. These dynastic struggles that lasted from 1455 to 1485
were later termed as the Wars of the Roses after the emblems of the two sides the red rose of
Lancaster and the white rose of York. The symbolic union of York and Lancaster was made
flesh in 1486 when Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV. A new
iconography was created merging the two once-warring roses into one the Tudor Rose.
The long years of civil disorder and instability which culminated in the Wars of the Roses had
shown Englishmen the futility of weak administration and divided power, and it was their
sense of the need for change which drove them to support Henry Tudor, although his
hereditary claim to the throne was exceedingly slight.
However, Henry's reign was disturbed by several rebelions, and the constant lack of money in
his treasury. With time, his style of government became more authoritarian, and the sole
purpose of his kingship became to make him rich. He had crushed his over-mighty subjects,
avoided the trap of weak kingship, but along the way he had become a tyrant, a kind of
absolute monarch. When Henry died in 1509, the treasury was full and the kingdom at peace.
Many of the old feudal families were either impoverished or extinct, and a new elite

composed largely of servants of the crown was beginning to develop. The authority of the
crown, in other words, was great, but the state as a whole remained dependent upon domain
revenues. (citat, p.240, History of European society). His son and namesake, Henry
VIII, would change the face of England forever.
Since the prospects of Queen Catherine giving him a male heir had proved futile, Henry VIII
wanted a papal annulment of his marriage on grounds of incest since marriage to the
wife of ones brother is prohibited by Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21. Clement temporized. He
appointed Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio as legates to resolve the matter on the theory
that their opinions would cancel each other out. Henry could not wait.Traditionally, the Pope
had claimed the allegiance of all European kings and had asserted his right to depose kings
at his will. (p.266)Therefore, the country had to be aroused to a new sense of sovereignty, its
potency. Rome would be demonised as the foreign, the alien, the enemy. Henry now asserted
that, by virtue of his God-given office, the King of England was an emperor. As such, he was
subject to no authority on Earth, especially to that of the Pope. The Pope claimed a Divine Right
for his position, and this could only be met by a counter claim not of fact, but of right. In the view of
the defenders of the Act of Supremacy the position of the Pope was that of a usurper. (Figgis citat
kod the Tudors) Working with Parliament rather than against it, Henry had hugely outdone his

father. He had even secured for himself more land and money than the miserly Henry VII
could have dreamt of, and he got it by plundaring the wealth of the Church. By making
himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, Henry had taken the monarchy to the peak
of its power, but at a huge personal cost. The resulting turmoil of six marriages, two divorces,
two executions and a tragic bereavement had produced three children Edward, Mary and
Elizabeth. Henry decided that all three of his children would be named as his heirs. The
arrangement was embodied both in the King's own will and in a parliamentary act of
succession. Henry's provisions for the succession held, and, through the rule of a minor and
two women, gave England a sort of stability. But they also ushured in profound political
turmoil as well since it turned out that each of Henry's three children was determined to use
the royal supremacy to impose a radically different form of religion on the English. Two of
Henry's three children, Edward and Mary, had imperilled, by their contrasting religious
extremism, both the supremacy and the Crown.
When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, "mere English" as she boasted, she was a
brilliant, accomplished princess of twenty-five, gifted, like her father, with a genius for
kingship and for society, and she quickly became a kind of incarnation of the glory of
England. (The Background of Shakespearepage 46). Establishing the new religious
settlement was Elizabeth's first task as Queen. Like her father, Elizabeth wanted a middle way
in religion, partly because she believed in it and partly because she too saw it as the best way
for the royal supremacy, which she was determined to revive as her God given right. The
result was a church that was Protestant in doctrine, Catholic in appearance, and would satisfy

all but a handful of extremists on both sides. Like James, her successor, she believed in the
divine right of kings, but Elizabeth loved and trusted her people. In return, she inspired in
them a passionate personal loyalty which, more than anything else, explains her greatness.
However, Elizabeths refusal to wed and consequent failure to produce an heir to the throne
generated increasing anxieties as she visibly aged. Already by 1571, with the passage of the
Second Treasons Act (the so-called Statute of Silence), any debate on the topic of the queens
successor had been legally prohibited. ( CITAT) (S's works: Histories).
But the issue of succession would not go away. And it was brought into a sharp focus when a
rebellion brought about by her scandalous personal life forced Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, to
flee from Scotland and seek Elizabeth's protection. Elizabeth, however, kept her as a prisoner
for almost twenty years. Through the marriage of Margaret Tudor, Elizabeth's aunt, to James
IV of Scotland, the Stuarts' claims to the English throne were very strong although their
succession rights had been denied by Henry VIII's will. Despite her precarious position, Mary
allowed herself to be implicated in several Catholic plots. Faced with irrefutable evidence of
her guilt, Elizabeth was forced to agree to Mary's trial and condemnation. In 1588, Mary was
publicly beheaded like any other common criminal. The divinity that doth hedge a king,
which Elizabeth had fought so hard to preserve, had evaporated never fully to return.
With the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth's reputation stood at a zenith at home and
abroad. Defending the realm was the most fundamental duty of an English monarch, and
Elizabeth was every inch a queen. As the long reign of Queen Elizabeth neared an end, the
fear of an uncertain transfer of power and potential anarchy permeated the public
consciousness. Although Elizabeth could not bring herself to name Mary her heir, she was
aware that Mary's son, James VI of Scotland, had the strongest claim to the throne of England.
The blood matters after all. When Elizabeth died in 1603, James assumed the English throne
as James I. James came to the throne with not one but two sons, and so the worrisome issues
of succession created by Elizabeths childlessness seemed unlikely to afflict the kingdom
again. The new king, moreover, clearly and openly stated his theory of kingship, and in a
maturing nation-state, his assertion of powerful kingly prerogatives must have seemed
plausible to many. He strongly believed that the king was chosen by God, writes McDowal,
and therefore only God could judge him. James's ideas were not different from those of
earlier monarchs, or other monarchs in Europe.
Yet long before the Stuarts succeeded to the English throne, a European-wide discourse
argued the limited nature of kingship and promoted the right of resistance to tyranny, even
justifying the overthrow of rightfully enthroned kings if necessary. Such arguments were
rightly understood to be an enormous political threat; the alleged right of the people to set
aside a lawful king, either directly or through their representatives, struck at the very heart of
royal ideology.