Richard II and the divine right of kings

In this excerpt from Chapter 3 of David Womersley’s Thinking Through Shakespeare, the subject is the entanglement of questions of religious and political authority in Shakespeare and European culture more generally.

Richard II was the play that Ernst Kantorowicz used to introduce his classic study of medieval political theology, The King’s Two Bodies. In a bravura chapter that set the terms of much later criticism, Kantorowicz depicted Richard as the embodiment of a medieval legal fiction that was about to fall victim to Machiavellian realpolitik, as embodied in the person of Richard’s kinsman Bolingbroke. Richard II thus became a dramatisation of (to draw on the title of another influential work of 20th-century scholarship) the waning of the middle ages, and Richard’s deposition was softened by nostalgia. It is a reading of the play as misleading as it has been influential.

Commentary on Richard II has been confused by the lack of understanding amongst literary critics of the practical political function of the theory of divine right kingship; that is to say, of the concrete and specific political objective the theory was forged to secure. Because modern critics have in general failed to understand that this theory was created to counter a rival, theocratic theory (the divine right of the Pope) they have, naturally but wrongly, assumed that the divine right of kings was somehow in tension with practical secular authority—that it was, in some mysterious but fundamental way, unworldly. But nothing could be further from the truth. The divine right of kings was the most audacious statement of the independent authority of the civil magistrate that the middle ages and the early modern period could produce, and hence it was the opposite of theocratic. It was the most worldly, the most secular, of political doctrines, just as it was expressed in language that was far more juristic than theological. We tend to let our attention dwell on the word ‘divine’, whereas in fact it should fall on the words ‘right’ and ‘kings’.

Within the play Richard, like many critics, is dazzled by the language of the theory, and distracted from, or perhaps simply ignorant of, its practical purpose. Richard II is often described as staging a collision between two rival political dispensations. But in fact it is better conceived of as a collision within a single political framework. A collision, that is, between an incumbent (Richard) who misunderstands the theory of which he is the beneficiary, who is beguiled by its surface qualities of language and symbol, but who is nevertheless the legitimate monarch; and a rival (Bolingbroke) who does understand that theory, but who, though very close to the throne, is not the rightful king. Richard II is a play about a separation between legitimacy and understanding which both echoes and transposes the separation between action and insight in the Henry VI plays.

Richard’s failure of understanding can be expressed in general terms as a concern with entitlements rather than obligations which leads him to confuse the figural with the literal, and the ancillary with the essential. Divine right theory, in its full development, came to rest on four cardinal pillars: first and most fundamentally, the assertion that monarchy was a divinely-ordained institution; second, that the Crown was transmitted by hereditary right; third, that kings are accountable to God alone; and fourth, that in consequence non-resistance and passive obedience are enjoined by God. The second, third, and fourth of these pillars were both logically and historically later developments of the doctrine. They are explicit formulations of positions or sub-doctrines that might be thought to be latent or implicit within the primary assertion that monarchy was divinely-ordained. A striking feature of Richard’s invocations of divine right theory is that he lays emphasis heavily upon these later, derivative or secondary, elements, and ignores or fails to grasp the implications of the primary element—the divine ordination of monarchy. That tendency is clear in Richard’s rhetorically-resonant speech of defiance on learning of Bolingbroke’s return to England:

KING RICHARD: So when this thief, this traitor Bolingbroke,
Who all this while hath reveled in the night,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the East,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But, self-affrighted, tremble at his sin.
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
Heaven for His Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel.  Then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.
—Richard II, Act III, Scene 2

It is striking that in this speech Richard lays such emphasis on the significance of the anointing with chrism that occurs during the rite of coronation. This seems to have been a matter which the historical Richard II also regarded as of the first importance. Nevertheless, when Shakespeare composed Richard II, it had been downgraded in the English church to a mere ceremony, as Cranmer had instructed Edward VI in 1547. The king is ‘God’s Anointed, not in respect of the oil which the bishop useth, but in consideration of their power which is ordained . . . The oil, if added, is but a ceremony: if it be wanting, that king is yet a perfect monarch notwithstanding, and God’s Anointed as well as if he was inoiled.’ That sacramental and theological position would be given legal corroboration in 1609 when Coke insisted that coronation was only ‘a royal ornament and solemnization of the royal descent, but no part of the title.’ Richard’s belief that the sacrament of royal unction necessarily brings with it divine protection and the promise of divine intervention is a gross politico-theological error.

That error is all the more striking because an exchange a few lines earlier between the bishop of Carlisle and Aumerle was a compressed tutorial (had Richard the ears to hear it) on the true understanding of divine right theory. Carlisle and Aumerle offer the king instruction in what that theory promised, and in what it required:

CARLISLE: That power that made you king
Hath power to keep you king in spite of all.

AUMERLE: He means, my lord, that we are too remiss,
Whilst Bolingbroke, through our security,
Grows strong and great in substance and in friends.
—Richard II, Act III, Scene 2

Aumerle ‘translates’ Carlisle’s orthodox divine right language into its true meaning, namely that political practicalities are not to be overlooked or neglected by those who claim to rule by divine right. Richard ignores Aumerle, and mishears Carlisle’s words as an assurance that the power that made him king will keep him king.  That Carlisle’s meaning was in fact what Aumerle said it was (namely, encouragement to take practical steps) is confirmed later in the scene, when Richard has surrendered to despondency on hearing of the executions of Bushy, Greene, and the Earl of Wiltshire.  Carlisle advises him once more:

CARLISLE: My lord, wise men ne’er wail their present woes,
But presently prevent the ways to wail.
To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength,
Gives in your weakness strength unto your foe.
Fear and be slain—no worse can come to fight;
And fight and die is death destroying death,
Where fearing dying pays death servile breath.
—Richard II, Act III, Scene 2

Carlisle, who in the next act will emerge as the spokesman for divine right at its most elevated pitch, nevertheless advocates practical remedies. Nor should this surprise us. Divine right does not remove the need for the king to be wise and prudent, and to believe that it does (as Richard seems to) is to indulge in magical thinking. Instead, the function of divine right theory is precisely to enlarge the arena in which regal wisdom and prudence can operate, by pushing back against the pretensions of the Pope. In the gardening scene the Gardener offers a catalogue, transposed into the language of horticulture, of the practical skills that even a divinely-appointed king cannot neglect. Indeed, if such a king does neglect them, that reveals a scandalous disregard for the divine power that has placed him on the throne. Hence those moments when one feels that Richard is edging towards blasphemy in his religious claims, language, and figurings. The veiled satiric point of this scene is that even a gardener understands divine right theory better than Richard does.

A common misunderstanding in criticism of Richard II is that there is a polar clash between the language of divine right deployed by Richard, and the language of law, customary right, and customary taxation deployed by the disgruntled peers. But there is no conflict between these two things (that is, between divine right theory and realpolitik), since the customary forms of secular authority are precisely what the doctrine of divine right was forged to defend against sacerdotal overreach. Divine right theory was thus in some sense a realpolitik response on the part of the civil power to papal encroachment. But Richard simply misunderstands the theory on which he relies. He focuses on its verbal and symbolic embodiment, to the detriment of its functional tendency. He ignores the political work the theory was intended to do in the world. As we saw in the first tetralogy principally through the character of Henry VI, the cardinal political error for a prince is to misunderstand the relation between civil and ecclesiastical authority. Richard’s later exchange of kingship for hermit-like piety and quasi-blasphemous self-comparisons with Christ is nothing more than an equal and opposite misunderstanding of that relationship. Towards the end of the play Richard duplicates Henry’s combination of insight without power in his accurate reading of Northumberland’s future. Divine right theory, even at its most ambitious, never asserted the identity of monarch and Christ. Rather, the monarch was a persona mixta. It is significant that James I, surely the monarch most well-informed about the doctrine, had misgivings about its thaumaturgical aspects, and was reluctant to touch for scrofula. Even he did not really imagine that, simply in virtue of being crowned, he had been transformed into a miracle-worker.

The mischievous tendency of Richard’s misunderstandings of divine right theory, and the encouragement those misunderstandings give to disruptive elements within the state, is made clear in the short coda to the Deposition scene. Bolingbroke has left the stage, leaving behind the abbot of Westminster, the bishop of Carlisle, and the disaffected peer Aumerle. It is a menacing combination of characters that would have been familiar to the play’s first audiences as boding ill to the state. Their misgivings would have been immediately confirmed:

ABBOT: A woeful pageant have we here beheld.

CARLISLE: The woe’s to come: he children yet unborn
Shall feel this day as sharp to them as thorn.

AUMERLE: You holy clergymen, is there no plot
To rid the realm of this pernicious blot?

ABBOT: Before I freely speak my mind herein
You shall not only take the sacrament
To bury mine intents, but also to effect
Whatever I shall happen to devise.
I see your brows are full of discontent,
Your hearts of sorrow, and your eyes of tears.
Come home with me to supper.  I’ll lay
A plot shall show us all a merry day.
—Richard II, Act IV, Scene 1

Religious oaths of alarming and unspecified amplitude (‘whatever I shall happen to devise’) misapplied to the furtherance of crime in an act of trespass on the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate: this is precisely what Elizabethan audiences had been instructed by recent history to fear in Roman Catholicism (they would certainly recall that Henri III of France had been assassinated in 1589 by the Dominican friar Jacques Clément).  York later makes clear that what had been intended was a textbook act of Roman Catholic regicide, and again draws attention to the aggravating feature of the misuse of the sacrament it had involved:

A dozen of them here have ta’en the sacrament
And interchangeably set down their hands
To kill the King at Oxford.
—Richard II, Act V, Scene 2

This alarming conjunction of religion and regicide is the natural outcome of Richard’s political misunderstandings.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His books include Divinity and State, Gibbon and the “Watchmen of the Holy City” and The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He is also the editor of many books, including the Penguin Classics editions of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and David Hume’s complete essays. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.