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Like its two predecessors this play begins with a large set piece. The Yorkists, fresh from victory at St Albans, come to the parliament house to assert York’s claim to the throne. Their gloating over their defeated enemies brings open savagery into the sequence of plays; they display the blood still unwiped from their swords, and Richard of Gloucester, typically and laconically, produces Somerset’s severed head. Warwick’s threat that ‘The bloody parliament shall this be called’, taken with King Henry’s later avowal that he will not make ‘a shambles of the parliament-house’, brings in again the imagery of butchering which will be repeated to the end like a leit motif being used at the last by Margaret addressing her followers at Tewksbury, and by Henry speaking to his murderer: So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece And next his throat unto the butcher’s knife. (v. vi. 8–9)1

II Henry VI is about the collapse of Henry VI’s government and the coming of civil war. The play is set wholly in England, in the comparatively recent past, and the story told is so terrible that the dramatist has to do more than ‘show’ incidents, anticipating the audience’s simple response. There is nothing unexpected about French perfidy, or about the misbehaviour of powerful men during a boy king’s minority; but how is the war of English with English to be explained? For a long time after a civil war the reunited country feels that renewed faction is possible, and it has the war’s language on the tip of the tongue. Thirty years ago in some parts of Cheshire little boys soon knew whether they were for King or Parliament, and on Oak Apple Day some little cavaliers wore oak leaves to school. That war was three hundred years ago. We can be sure that among the audiences surrounding the stage where Henry VI was first performed, many spectators knew which of the roses they would wear for choice. The motives of York and the rage of Clifford will have been personal matters to those people, and the plays must have touched their lives in a way that had no precedent in the secular theatre. Not that Shakespeare wrote from a Yorkist or Lancastrian point of view; like Walter Scott’s Jacobite novels the history place are remarkably impartial.

The series of histories comprising the three parts of Henry VI and The Life and Death of Richard III begins with the death of Henry V and deals with the loss of his French conquests and the coming of civil war during his son Henry VI’s reign; it ends with Henry Tudor’s invasion, his defeat of Richard III, and the inauguration of a new order under the family of Tudor. The plays cover sixty-three complicated years from 1422 to 1485, and the general theory under which the dramatist arranged his materials was familiar because it provided a well-publicised case for the Tudors’ legitimacy. Edward Hall, whose The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York was in itself and through Holinshed’s Chronicles Shakespeare’s chief source, announces the theory in his opening sentences: What mischief hath insurged in realms by intestine division, what depopulation hath ensued in countries by civil dissension, what detestable murder hath been committed in cities by separate factions... this noble realm of England can apparently declare and make demonstration. ... But the old divided controversy between the fore-named families of Lancaster and York, by the union of matrimony celebrate and consummate between the high and mighty prince King Henry the Seventh and the Lady Elizabeth his most worthy queen, the one being indubitate heir of the house of Lancaster, and the other of York, was suspended and appalled in the person of their most noble, puissant and mighty heir King Henry the Eight.1