Henry Platagenet and the Special Military Operation

Two shadowy, gowned figures stand together in close converse; they’re apprehensive- there’s a problem, and a possible solution- but will it work? The figures are Archbishops, of Canterbury and of Ely; their problem, a government bill that would see them stripped of half their lands; the solution, to bribe the new head of state, Henry V, to commence a destructive but more importantly, distracting, invasion of France. We’re in the early 15th century, The Hundred Years Special Military Operation; or War, if you prefer. And, specifically, war as imagined by Shakespeare. Although I studied the play for A level, it’s now fallen out of favour- too many long speeches, not enough interesting parts for women, far too much war, and far, far, too jingoistic. Just think of Laurence Olivier’s vastly expensive, Winston Churchill sponsored Technicolor epic of 1944, produced to coincide with the Allied landings in Normandy, Olivier’s Henry a clear proxy for Churchill himself, all that oratorical eloquence and bellicose grandstanding. Oh, and there’s also not much love interest, unless you count Henry soft talking a bewildered French Princess into the ultimate marriage of convenience at the end of the play, one eye on the diplomats in the next room as he shamelessly works his schoolboy French.

But Henry’s disappearance from our collective educational experience is a shame, and I’ve found myself reflecting on it, and what it has to tell us, during the unfolding horrors of the war in Ukraine.

Canterbury and Ely need to offer Henry a pretext for invading France, and they find it in ridiculing the Salic Law, which in their reading offers no barrier to an English Plantagenet reclaiming the French throne from the House of Valois. The last time I saw this on the stage, the actor playing Canterbury unfolded an endless scroll of parchment, implying that the French defence was not only wrong, but fundamentally absurd. Comparably, do you remember Putin’s bizarre malice dance about Ukraine? It’s not even a country, he fumed, just a bit of land given away by us. Like Henry, Putin relies on a close and useful relationship with the church, embodied in the Moscow Patriarch, Kirill, who spent the Orthodox Church’s Easter in grotesquely blessing the tanks and missiles which kill children, mothers and Holocaust survivors, and talking of the Holy War against the evil West. Kirill was KGB approved in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union still criminalised Christianity, so it’s just possible his holiness is not all that it seems.

This unholy union of secular and divine power is nothing unusual. On the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, of 1651, a huge Kingly torso emerges, Monty Python style from a flat landscape, sword in one hand and crozier in the other. Hobbes, writing amidst the desolation of the English Civil War, was clear that only an absolute monarch, uniting state and church, could prevent men from living lives that were “nasty, brutish and short”. In Andrey Zvyagintsev’s impressively bleak 2014 film, Leviathan, a family cling to their modest but attractive home in the wilds of Russia, but are being forced out by an unholy alliance of corrupt Mayor Vadim and the Orthodox Bishop, who wants the land for another temple; the film ends shockingly, with the wrecking ball smashing into the house’s wooden interior like a missile into an Odessa apartment block, and smug self-congratulatory smiles exchanged between Bishop and Vadim. Incidentally, Christ, about whom it seems reasonable to speak at Easter time, seemed well aware that church and state was a toxic combination- “render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s” is sound advice.

Let’s fast forward through Shakespeare’s play, to the besieged walled town of Harfleur. Outside are Henry and his soldiers; inside, old men, women, children, the innocent and the unarmed, represented by their hapless Governor. Surrender, cries Henry, or… “if I begin the batt’ry once again/I will not leave the half achiev’d Harfleur till in her ashes she lie buried.” Anyone who has watched the weeks of reducing the beautiful city of Mariupol to rubble will recognise the strategy. And what of the people? Henry’s soldiers will “range / With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass your fresh-fair virgins and our flow’ring infants…your fathers taken by the silver beards, / And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls.” Media and military analysts refer to Putin’s Syria playbook; but it was already there in Shakespeare’s scintillating dramatic verse of 1599, and the chill to the soul I experienced when I read it as a sixteen-year-old is as potent as ever.

My teacher, dressed in the brief authority of the academic gown, claimed this to be the high point of rhetoric, Shakespeare’s unequivocal celebration of military charisma; I felt differently. It’s patently clear that Henry is ruthless and barbaric, and that his soldiers are murderers and rapists, most definitely nasty and brutish, but he’s at least more honest than Putin, who continues to make the extraordinary claim that his soldiers are “noble”. And this is, surely, why the play is wonderful, and why we need to watch it, to read it, and to teach it. Shakespeare neither expects us to admire Henry, or to despise him- he merely presents him for our awed and horrified contemplation, granting us an astonishingly forensic, X-ray insight into a ruler, warts and all, in his glory and psychopathy. It’s the difference between literature and propaganda, and why Matthew Arnold addressed Shakespeare thus: “We ask and ask- Thou smilest and art still / Out-topping knowledge”.

As the war in Ukraine proceeds in ever more nightmarish tableaux, Shakespeare saves us some consoling words. The play appears to end triumphantly; Henry’s achieved the mother of all miracles at Agincourt, and speed dated Princess Katherine, future proofing his ambition and hubristically claiming– “I love France so well…that I will not part with a village of it”.

But then, as only Shakespeare can, he wipes the tableau, leaving, on stage alone, the Chorus. And this is all he says: Henry’s success was brief. He was dead a few years later. His son lost everything…