Archbishop of Canterbury
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: The senior churchman of England, and the man who supplies Henry with a legal justification for invading France. He speaks the play’s first words and its longest single speech.
- Key Traits: Fluent, learned, endlessly patient with detail, and entirely political. He can construct a genealogy, a theory of the state and a war – and can do all three in a way that never sounds like self-interest.
- The Core Conflict: Canterbury has a bill before Parliament that would strip the Church of half its property. He needs the King distracted and the Church useful, and the French claim solves both problems at once.
- Key Actions: Tells Ely in A1S1 that the confiscation bill has been revived, and that he has offered the King a record sum to support the French campaign. Praises the transformed King. In A1S2 delivers the Salic Law speech, promises the Church’s money, takes the sin of the war on his own head, and answers the Scottish objection with the parable of the honey-bees.
- Famous Quote:
"The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!"
(Act 1, Scene 2) - The Outcome: He gets everything he wants. The bill is forgotten, the war begins, and Canterbury disappears from the play after A1S2 – never mentioned again, never held to the promise he made about the sin.
That Self Bill Is Urged
The very first thing said in Henry V, after the Chorus has finished asking for a Muse of fire, is a churchman telling another churchman that their property is under threat. The contrast is not accidental.
Original
It must be thought on. If it pass against us,
We lose the better half of our possession:
For all the temporal lands which men devout
By testament have given to the church
Would they strip from us; being valued thus...
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We have to think about it. If it passes,
We will lose more than half of our possessions,
For land bequeathed to us by pious men
Within their wills, donated to the church,
They’ll strip from us. And they will use the money...
Canterbury then itemises the bill with the precision of an accountant: the confiscated lands would support fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, six thousand two hundred esquires, a hundred almshouses, and a thousand pounds a year to the crown besides. He has read it closely and knows exactly what it would cost.
Ely asks what should be done. Canterbury’s answer, a few lines later, is that he has already offered the King an unprecedented sum from the clergy – and that he raised the subject of France while doing so. The two facts are placed side by side and never explicitly connected. Nobody in the scene says let us buy the King a war to save our lands. They do not need to. Shakespeare has arranged the information so that the audience makes the connection before the King has spoken a word.
Consideration, Like an Angel
The bishops then turn to the King himself, and the language changes completely. What follows is the play’s formal account of Henry’s transformation from the wild prince of the Henry IV plays into the model monarch.
Original
The breath no sooner left his father's body,
But that his wildness, mortified in him,
Seemed to die too; yea, at that very moment
Consideration, like an angel, came
And whipped the offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise,
To envelop and contain celestial spirits.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But once his father took his final breath,
His youthful folly, once ingrained in him,
Appeared to die as well; yes, at that moment,
Reflection, like an angel sent from heaven,
Consumed him, booting Adam out of Eden,
To leave his body like a paradise
Where holy spirits live in harmony.
The imagery is the imagery of conversion: an angel, the expulsion of fallen Adam, a body restored to paradise. Henry has not merely grown up; he has been redeemed, and the redemption happened at the exact instant his father stopped breathing.
Two things make this speech more interesting than a simple compliment. The first is the timing – Canterbury is praising the King to the man whose help he needs to keep the Church’s money, and the praise arrives immediately before the plan to enlist him. The second is a detail Canterbury seems not to notice. The reformation happened at the moment of accession, which means it coincided precisely with the acquisition of power. Whether that is a miracle or a career, Canterbury does not ask. Ely does raise the obvious question – how did a man with such disreputable friends learn all this? – and Canterbury’s answer is that miracles have ceased, so there must have been a mechanism, though he cannot say what it was.
In Terram Salicam
A1S2 gives Canterbury the longest speech in the play: more than sixty lines of Frankish genealogy, delivered to a full court, to establish that the French law barring inheritance through the female line does not apply to France.
Original
Which Salique land the French unjustly gloze
To be the realm of France, and Pharamond
The founder of this law and female bar.
Yet their own authors faithfully affirm
That the land Salique is in Germany,
Between the floods of Sala and of Elbe...
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The French misrepresent that Salic land
Is part of France, and that King Pharamond
Devised the law that blocked the female claim.
But even French historians admit
That Salic land exists in Germany,
Between the rivers Sala and the Elbe...
The argument is genuinely learned and, in its essentials, historically defensible: the Salic law did originate among the Franks in what is now Germany, and later French kings had in fact inherited through female lines when it suited them. Canterbury is not making things up.
He is, however, doing something more slippery. The speech proves that the French objection to Henry’s claim is inconsistent. It does not prove that Henry’s claim is good, and it takes some care not to notice the difference. And there is an argument Canterbury never raises: if inheritance through the female line is valid, then the Mortimer line – through which the Earl of Cambridge will conspire against Henry two scenes later – has a better title to the English throne than Henry does. The speech is a masterpiece of saying a great deal in order to leave one thing unsaid.
What is beyond dispute is its effect on stage. It is very long, very dry, and very hard to follow, and productions play it for comedy as often as not – the court losing the thread, the bishop shuffling documents. The comedy is not a betrayal of the text. A war is being authorised, and the authorisation is designed to be too complicated to check.
The Sin Upon My Head
Henry has warned Canterbury, at some length and in the name of God, not to twist his reading – because men will die on the strength of it. When the speech ends, the King asks the direct question: may I with right and conscience make this claim? Canterbury does not hesitate.
Original
The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!
For in the book of Numbers is it writ,
When the man dies, let the inheritance
Descend unto the daughter. Gracious lord,
Stand for your own; unwind your bloody flag;
Look back into your mighty ancestors...
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If wrong, the blame’s all mine, respected king!
It’s said within the Bible’s Book of Numbers
That when a man dies, his inheritance
Descends down to his daughter. Gracious lord,
Assert your rightful claim; put up your war flag;
Take inspiration from your ancestors.
Seven words, and the whole moral weight of the war changes hands. Canterbury does not say the claim is sound and leave it there; he offers to carry the sin personally, as though guilt were a debt one man could assume on another’s behalf. It is an extraordinary thing for an archbishop to offer, and it is offered instantly, without a pause for conscience.
The play does not let this go. Four acts later, on the night before Agincourt, the soldier Williams tells a stranger in a cloak that if the King’s cause is bad, the King himself will have a heavy reckoning to make when the severed limbs of his army join together on Judgement Day. He does not know he is talking to Henry, and he has never heard of Canterbury’s offer. The question of whether sin can be transferred is left open across three thousand lines, and the answer, from the one man in the play with nothing to gain, is no.
The rest of the speech moves straight from theology to blood: unwind the flag, remember your ancestors, go to your great-grandfather’s tomb. Having settled the conscience, Canterbury spends the next twenty lines on Crécy and the Black Prince.
So Work the Honey-Bees
One objection remains. If the army goes to France, Scotland will invade. Canterbury answers it not with troop numbers but with the most famous statement of Elizabethan political order in Shakespeare.
Original
Obedience: for so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home,
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad,
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds...
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Based on obedience. Take honey-bees,
Whose instinct shows how natural hierarchies
Reflect how structured nations should behave.
They have a type of king and officers,
Where some, like judges, keep domestic peace,
While others, merchant-like, will trade abroad,
And some will sting, like soldiers armed to fight,
And they will land upon a summer flower...
The speech runs on for another thirty lines and is beautifully made: singing masons building roofs of gold, civil citizens kneading honey, porters crowding at the narrow gate, a sad-eyed justice condemning the lazy drone. It is a whole society rendered as a hive, in which every function is fixed by nature and obedience is the organising principle.
It is also, on inspection, an argument that does not answer the question. Westmoreland asked about the Scottish border; Canterbury has replied with a metaphor about insects. The conclusion he draws – divide England into four, take one quarter to France – is a military proposal supported by nothing but an analogy. And the analogy is doing a second job, because a hive is a place where nobody chooses anything. In a scene about whether to start a war, the churchman’s decisive image is of a creature that obeys by instinct.
The play will test the hive for the remaining four acts: three traitors at Southampton, four captains who cannot hold a conversation, a soldier who tells the King his cause may be rotten, and a thief hanged for a brass plate. None of it refutes Canterbury directly. The bees simply never turn up again.
"…even in this play, which is often assumed to be the one where Shakespeare is closest to state propaganda, the construction of ideology is complex."
— Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Alternative Shakespeares, 1985
Key Quotes
Quote 1
For I have made an offer to his majesty,
Upon our spiritual convocation
And in regard of causes now in hand,
Which I have opened to his grace at large,
As touching France, to give a greater sum
Than ever at one time the clergy yet
Did to his predecessors part withal.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For I have made an offer to the king,
Of which our clergy formally approve,
Relating to the current challenges,
Which I’ve explained in detail to the king,
Concerning France, by giving far more money
Than any clergymen have ever offered
To any of our previous kings before.
Quote Analysis: The single most important sentence in the first act, and it is spoken in private, forty lines before Henry appears. Canterbury has offered the crown a record payment, and he has raised France in the same conversation. The phrase "in regard of causes now in hand" is doing quiet work: the cause in hand is the bill that would take the Church’s lands. Shakespeare found this detail in Holinshed and chose to open his play with it. Every patriotic speech that follows – the Chorus’s prologues, the breach, Saint Crispin’s Day – is heard by an audience that already knows a bishop went shopping for a war.
It must be so; for miracles are ceased;
And therefore we must needs admit the means
How things are perfected.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For sure, for miracles no longer happen;
And so we have to recognise the way
People improve themselves.
Quote Analysis: Ely has asked how a prince who spent his youth in taverns became a master of divinity, politics and war. Canterbury’s reply is that miracles no longer happen, so there must be a natural explanation – and then he offers none. From an archbishop, "miracles are ceased" is a startlingly worldly thing to say; it is the language of a man who assesses causes and effects rather than providence. The line is also a small trap the play sets for its own rhetoric. Henry will spend the next four acts attributing everything to God, and the churchman closest to him has already ruled miracles out.
O, let their bodies follow, my dear liege,
With blood and sword and fire to win your right;
In aid whereof we of the spiritualty
Will raise your highness such a mighty sum
As never did the clergy at one time
Bring in to any of your ancestors.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Their hearts are there, so let their bodies follow,
Well-armed to fight and win what’s yours by right;
To help you, all the clergy of the church
Will raise a sum of money for your highness
That’s bigger than the clergy ever raised
For any of your ancestors before you.
Quote Analysis: The offer made in private in A1S1 is now made in public, and the juxtaposition is deliberately grotesque. "Blood and sword and fire" is followed immediately by an accounting promise, and the man urging the fire is the one who will not be near it. "We of the spiritualty" is the phrase to notice – Canterbury speaks as an institution rather than a man, and the institution is buying a war with money left to the Church in the wills of pious dead people. Everything about the sentence is doubled: spiritual authority and cash, other men’s bodies and the Church’s balance sheet.
Divide your happy England into four;
Whereof take you one quarter into France,
And you withal shall make all Gallia shake.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Split prosperous, contented England four ways;
Then take a quarter with you into France,
And just with them, you’ll terrify the French.
Quote Analysis: The practical conclusion of the honey-bee speech, and the moment the metaphor turns into a plan. A quarter of England’s strength will be enough to shake all Gaul – a confident number, produced by a churchman with no military experience, at the end of a parable about insects. The word "happy" carries a period sense of prosperous and fortunate, which makes the arithmetic sound almost domestic: take a quarter of the country’s contentment abroad and the rest will be fine. It is the last thing Canterbury says of any substance. The war is agreed within thirty lines, and he leaves the play.
Key Takeaways
- The Motive Comes First: Shakespeare shows the Church’s financial interest in A1S1, before the King appears and before any patriotic speech is made.
- Learning Used as Cover: The Salic Law speech is genuinely scholarly and genuinely evasive. It proves the French are inconsistent, not that Henry’s claim is good.
- The Sin Transferred: Canterbury offers to carry the guilt of the war himself. The play spends four acts quietly asking whether that is possible.
- He Vanishes: Canterbury never appears after A1S2. He gets the war, keeps the lands, and is never held to anything he promised.
Study Questions and Analysis
Who is the Archbishop of Canterbury and why does the play begin with him?
The figure is Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1414 to 1443, though Shakespeare never names him in the dialogue. He is the highest churchman in England, and in A1S1 he and the Bishop of Ely are alone on stage discussing a threat to Church property.
My lord, I'll tell you; that self bill is urged,
Which in the eleventh year of the last king's reign
Was like, and had indeed against us passed,
But that the scambling and unquiet time
Did push it out of farther question.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My lord, you know the same bill is proposed,
Like in the eleventh year of our last king,
Which, had it passed, would have been detrimental,
Except the quarrelling and civil unrest
Delayed its passing till it was forgotten.
The historical basis is real. A bill to confiscate certain Church temporal lands was raised in Parliament in 1410 under Henry IV and revived in 1414, and Holinshed – Shakespeare’s main source – reports that the clergy encouraged the French war partly to divert it. Shakespeare did not invent the connection; he chose to open his play with it.
That choice is the whole point of the scene. The audience arrives having just heard the Chorus ask for a Muse of fire and princes to act, and is immediately given two bishops discussing a tax problem. Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) built its ironic reading of the play on sequences like this, tracking the gap between Henry’s "questionable personal motives and his professed devotion to God’s will". Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, in Alternative Shakespeares (1985), read the same material as ideology being assembled in front of us.
One caution against the cynical reading: it is worth noting that the 1600 Quarto cuts this scene entirely, which means an early audience could have seen a Henry V in which the Church’s motive never appears. Whether that was censorship, abridgement or revision is unknown, but it demonstrates how much the scene is doing.
What is the Salic Law speech and does it prove anything?
The Salic law was an ancient Frankish legal code, one clause of which was taken to bar women – and inheritance through women – from succeeding to land. The French used it to block Henry’s claim, which came through his great-great-grandmother Isabella, daughter of Philip IV.
Canterbury’s argument, delivered over more than sixty lines, is that the law applies to a region of Germany rather than to France, and that French kings have themselves inherited through women when it suited them.
Then doth it well appear that Salique law
Was not devised for the realm of France:
Nor did the French possess the Salique land
Until four hundred one and twenty years
After defunction of King Pharamond,
Idly supposed the founder of this law...
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Hence it is quite apparent Salic laws
Were not created to be used in France;
Nor did the French control the Salic land
Till four hundred and twenty-one years after
King Pharamond descended from the throne,
The man who, it is said, made up this law...
The scholarship is broadly accurate – Shakespeare took most of it verbatim from Holinshed – and it proves what it sets out to prove: the French objection is inconsistent. What it does not do is establish a positive right, and the gap between those two things is where the speech lives.
Two further problems are worth raising in an essay. First, if inheritance through the female line is valid, the Mortimer claim to the English throne outranks Henry’s, which is precisely why the Earl of Cambridge conspires in A2S2 – and the play conspicuously does not explain his motive. Peter Saccio’s Shakespeare’s English Kings (1977) sets out the genealogy the play avoids. Second, the argument is being made by a man with a large financial interest in its success.
Directors have exploited the speech’s length ruthlessly, and are entitled to. Its incomprehensibility is a feature: a decision to kill thousands of people is being taken on grounds that nobody in the room, including the King, could reproduce.
Is Canterbury a hypocrite or a statesman?
The play makes both readings available and refuses to arbitrate, which is characteristic. The evidence for hypocrisy is structural: motive established in private, argument produced in public, and no acknowledgement of the connection. The evidence for statesmanship is textual and is usually overlooked.
Canterbury is never shown lying. The Salic Law scholarship is real. The Church’s money is real and is handed over. The claim to France was live English policy for decades before this play begins, and an Elizabethan audience would have regarded it as at least arguable. And when the King challenges him – in the most solemn terms he uses to anyone – Canterbury answers immediately and without hedging:
Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war:
We charge you, in the name of God, take heed;
For never two such kingdoms did contend...
(King Henry, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So, contemplate advice you’re going to give me,
If you invoke a war now we’re at peace.
And, in the name of God, I urge you’re careful;
For France and England never disagree...
A hypocrite who has been warned in those terms and answers "the sin upon my head" is either very brazen or genuinely convinced. The play never tells us which.
There is a further complication that cuts against the simple cynical reading. If Canterbury is manipulating Henry, Henry is also using Canterbury – requiring a public, on-the-record, God-invoked authorisation before committing to a war he has evidently already been considering, since the Church’s offer was made before the play began. E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) read the tetralogy as broadly endorsing this order of things; Dollimore and Sinfield (1985) read the same scene as ideology under visible strain. Norman Rabkin’s "Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V" (1977) supplies the most honest description of the difficulty: the play "points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us".
What does "the sin upon my head" mean, and can guilt be transferred?
Canterbury is offering to assume responsibility before God for a war fought on his advice. The formula has scriptural precedents – blood-guilt taken upon oneself and one’s descendants – and in the immediate context it functions as a professional guarantee: the King has asked whether he may proceed with a clear conscience, and his spiritual adviser answers that any fault will be charged to the adviser’s account.
Whether that is theologically possible is the question the play keeps open, and it does so with unusual care. The transfer is offered in A1S2 and challenged in A4S1 by a private soldier who has never heard of it. Williams tells the disguised Henry that if the cause is not good, the King himself has a heavy reckoning to make when the severed arms and legs of his army reassemble on Judgement Day – a direct denial that responsibility can be delegated upwards or downwards.
Henry’s answer to Williams is a pair of analogies: a merchant’s son who dies in sin at sea does not damn the father who sent him; a servant killed while carrying money does not damn his master. Both arguments fail in the same way, because neither father nor master compels the journey as a king compels a war. Anne Barton’s "The king disguised" (1975) and Marilyn Williamson’s "The Episode with Williams in Henry V" (SEL, 1969) both read the exchange as a genuine argument that Henry loses and then closes down by other means.
What makes the structure so effective is the distance between the two moments. Canterbury’s offer is instant, confident and unexamined; the objection arrives three acts later, in the dark, from a man with nothing to gain, and is never answered. The Archbishop is not in the play by then. He made the promise and left.
What is the honey-bee speech doing?
Formally it answers a military objection: if the army goes to France, who defends the Scottish border? Canterbury replies that a well-ordered kingdom can do many things at once, and illustrates it with a beehive in which every creature has a fixed function.
The image was a commonplace of Elizabethan political writing, and the speech is its finest expression in English. It closes with a sequence of analogies that make simultaneity sound like nature itself:
As many arrows, loosed several ways,
Come to one mark; as many ways meet in one town;
As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea;
As many lines close in the dial's centre;
So may a thousand actions, once afoot,
End in one purpose, and be all well borne
Without defeat. Therefore to France, my liege.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Like many arrows shot from different spots can
Hit the same spot; or roads meet in the same town;
Or many streams all flow into one sea;
Or lines meet in the centre of a sundial;
That’s how a thousand actions that have started
Combine into a single purpose, and will
Succeed together. So, to France, my lord.
The rhetorical move in that last half-line is worth marking. Four beautiful analogies have established that many things can share one purpose – and the purpose is then announced as France, as though it followed. Nothing in the argument makes France the mark the arrows hit.
E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) treated speeches like this as the play’s own political philosophy, and for a generation the beehive was quoted as evidence that Shakespeare endorsed a fixed, providential social order. That reading has not held. Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) argues that the history plays "occupy various sites of contention, between older and newer conceptions of history", and that the orthodoxies they voice are under pressure rather than simply affirmed. Claire McEachern’s The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (1996) examines the same corporate fiction of a loving, ordered nation and where it strains.
The strain in this case is easy to demonstrate from the play itself. The commonwealth Canterbury describes produces, within one act, three noblemen taking foreign money to murder the King. Nobody refutes the bees. The play simply proceeds to behave otherwise.
Why does Canterbury disappear after Act 1?
He has done his work. Once the war is authorised and the Church’s money pledged, the play has no further use for him, and he does not appear or get mentioned again in three and a half acts.
The disappearance is more pointed than it looks. Consider what happens to everyone else who touches this war. Bardolph is hanged; Nym is hanged; the Boy is murdered; Falstaff dies of a broken heart; York and Suffolk are killed; Pistol goes home widowed and beaten; the French prisoners have their throats cut; Katharine is married to the conqueror. Canterbury keeps his lands and vanishes.
His last line before the ambassadors are admitted is a small, chilling piece of confidence:
Then go we in, to know his embassy;
Which I could with a ready guess declare,
Before the Frenchman speak a word of it.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Let’s go to hear what he has got to say;
Though I think I can hazard at a guess
Before the Frenchman’s said a word of it.
He knows what the French will say before they say it. It is the line of a man who has already modelled the whole sequence – the embassy, the insult, the King’s response, the war – and it comes moments before the Dauphin’s tennis balls arrive on cue.
Structurally, the exit also serves the play’s design. Once Act 2 begins, the war belongs to the Chorus and to Henry, and the register becomes heroic. Keeping Canterbury on stage would keep the question of motive visible. Shakespeare puts the motive first, removes it, and lets the audience decide whether to carry it into the rest of the play. Norman Rabkin (1977) would say that this is exactly how the play keeps its two readings alive.
How should students write about Canterbury in an exam?
The most common weakness is to treat him as a straightforward villain and stop there. That reading is defensible but thin, and it usually rests on A1S1 alone. A stronger answer does three things.
First, it uses him structurally rather than psychologically. Canterbury is where the play puts the question of why the war happens, and the answer he provides is layered: property, law, scripture, ancestry and national order, in that sequence, in under two hundred lines. Tracking the sequence is more useful than deciding whether he is sincere.
Second, it notices what he says that is not self-serving. This, on the Scottish threat, is a genuine historical argument and turns out to be true:
She hath been then more feared than harmed, my liege;
For hear her but exampled by herself:
When all her chivalry hath been in France
And she a mourning widow of her nobles,
She hath herself not only well defended...
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Our people were more scared than hurt, my lord;
Recall England’s example from before:
When England’s noblemen all fought in France,
And England seemed to be a grieving widow,
England did not just self-defend herself well...
He is referring to the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346, when an English force captured David II of Scotland while Edward III was campaigning in France. No Scottish invasion troubles this play, so Canterbury turns out to have been right.
Third, it connects him to the rest of the play. The sin he takes on his head is disputed by Williams in A4S1. The order he describes in the beehive is contradicted at Southampton and at Harfleur. The claim he constructs is what Exeter carries to Paris in A2S4. Canterbury is not a self-contained character study; he is the first move in an argument the play conducts for five acts. Harold C. Goddard (1951) and Dollimore and Sinfield (1985) are the most useful critics to cite, provided they are used to open the question rather than close it.
