Religion and Morality
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: A war begun with a bishop’s blessing, fought with prayers on both sides and credited entirely to God at the end. The play surrounds the killing with religion and never quite lets the account balance.
- Key Characters: King Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Exeter, Fluellen, Williams, Bardolph, Gower.
- The Core Tension: Henry is sincerely devout and consistently arranges for the sin to belong to somebody else. The play presents both facts without ranking them.
- Key Manifestations: Canterbury taking the sin on his own head; "We are no tyrant, but a Christian king"; mercy withdrawn from the traitors; the threat at Harfleur; Bardolph hanged for stealing a pax; the debate on the soldier’s soul; the prayer about Richard II; the killing of the prisoners and the boys; Non nobis and Te Deum on the field.
- Famous Quote:
"O God of battles! Steel my soldiers’ hearts"
(Act 4, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Henry forbids anyone to boast of the victory, ascribes it wholly to God, and orders two hymns sung over the dead. The piety is real. So is the fact that it settles nothing the play has raised.
May I With Right and Conscience Make This Claim?
The war has a moral audit before it has an army, and the audit takes one line each way.
Original
KING HENRY V: May I with right and conscience make this claim?
CANTERBURY: The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
KING HENRY V: So, with clear conscience, can I claim the French throne?
CANTERBURY: If wrong, the blame’s all mine, respected king!
Two things are being done at once, and neither is hidden. Henry is asking a genuine question in good faith – the play gives no sign that he is play-acting – and he is also asking the one man in England with the strongest financial motive to say yes. The Archbishop answers by offering to carry the guilt personally, which is not a legal opinion but an indemnity.
The transfer is theologically shaky and dramatically decisive. Sin, in the terms the play itself uses later, is not transferable: Henry will tell Williams that every subject’s soul is his own, which is precisely the principle that makes Canterbury’s offer worthless. Yet it works. Henry proceeds; the Archbishop is never mentioned again after Act 1; the guarantee is never tested.
What the exchange establishes for the rest of the play is a habit. Whenever moral weight lands on Henry, it is moved – to the Archbishop, to the Dauphin’s joke, to the Governor of Harfleur, to the soldiers’ own souls, to the French who raided the baggage. He never once refuses the responsibility outright, and he never once keeps it.
What Is It Then to Me, If Impious War
Outside Harfleur, Henry describes in detail what his own army will do if the gates are not opened, and he does it in explicitly religious language.
Original
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Arrayed in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirched complexion, all fell feats
Enlinked to waste and desolation?
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
(Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Why should I care if this ungodly war
Comes dressed in flames, appearing like the devil,
And, with a blackened face, commits cruel actions
That lead to your destruction and despair?
Why should I care when you’ve caused this yourselves
And you have let your virgins be mishandled
By angry men, then violently raped?
The speech names the war as impious – ungodly – and dresses it as the devil. Henry is not pretending that what he is threatening is holy. He is arguing that because it is diabolical it cannot be controlled, and because it cannot be controlled the fault belongs to whoever refuses to prevent it. "What is it then to me" is asked twice, and it is a real question, posed by a man who has just explained that he will not be able to hold his soldiers back.
This is the moral logic of the whole theme compressed into one speech. Evil is acknowledged fully, described vividly, and then assigned elsewhere. The Governor surrenders, nothing happens, and Henry immediately orders mercy shown to the town – which is either proof that the threat was a bluff or proof that it worked, and the play declines to say which.
It is worth noting what the Retold makes plain. Modern readers sometimes soften "hot and forcing violation" into general pillage; the modern verse does not permit that, and neither should an essay. The King of England is describing the rape of civilians by his own men.
For Pax of Little Price
The play’s sharpest test of religious principle is a small one. Bardolph, an old drinking companion from Eastcheap, steals a pax – a sacred plate kissed during the Mass – from a French church, and is condemned to hang under Henry’s own standing order that nothing be taken from the countryside.
Original
Fortune is Bardolph's foe, and frowns on him;
For he hath stolen a pax, and hanged must a' be:
A damned death!
Let gallows gape for dog; let man go free
And let not hemp his wind-pipe suffocate:
But Exeter hath given the doom of death
For pax of little price.
(Pistol, Act 3, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Fortune is an enemy of Bardolph,
He stole a church plate; now he will be hanged,
And that’s an awful death!
It’s fine to hang a dog; let him go free
Preventing rope from suffocating him.
But Exeter has ordered him to hang
For stealing a cheap plate.
Pistol’s plea is entirely self-interested and entirely reasonable. The object is worth almost nothing; the punishment is death; and the man is a friend. Fluellen refuses to intercede, and states the principle without hesitation: discipline must be kept, and he would see his own brother hanged in the same case.
Henry, informed of the sentence, endorses it in four lines and adds the reasoning – when leniency and cruelty compete for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the sooner winner. Not a word about the sacrilege, and not a word about Bardolph, whom he has known since Henry IV.
The scene works in two directions at once and is designed to. A king who hangs his own friend for robbing a church is a king holding an army to a genuine moral standard, which is exactly what Henry claimed at Harfleur he could not do. And a war in which a man dies for a cheap plate, while towns are threatened with sack and prisoners will shortly have their throats cut, is a war whose morality is being enforced at precisely the wrong scale.
Not To-day, O Lord
Alone before Agincourt, with the army asleep and the argument with Williams still unresolved, Henry prays. It is the only moment in the play when he speaks to no audience at all.
Original
O, not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!
I Richard's body have interred anew;
And on it have bestowed more contrite tears
Than from it issued forced drops of blood:
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,
Who twice a-day their withered hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard's soul.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, not today, don’t think about the crime
My father perpetrated for the crown!
I had Richard’s remains reburied nobly;
And I have cried more broken-hearted tears
Than drops of blood that fell from Richard’s body.
Each year, I pay five hundred lowly paupers
To put their hands together twice a day
And pray to heaven for forgiveness; I’ve made
Two funds that pay for sad and solemn priests
To sing for Richard’s soul.
The prayer is an itemised list. Reburial, tears, five hundred paid almsmen, two chantries – each entry a specific, costed act of penance for a murder Henry did not commit and from which he inherited a crown. And the request attached to the list is not forgiveness. It is a delay: not today.
Then comes the admission that makes the speech extraordinary. He says that all he can do is worth nothing, since his penitence comes after the fact. The most religiously articulate character in the play states, in private, that his own religious observance does not work.
Two readings are available and both are strong. The devotional reading takes the prayer at face value: this is a genuinely troubled Christian conscience, unusually honest about the limits of purchased absolution, and the honesty is what makes it moving. The sceptical reading notices the timing – the appeal arrives on the eve of a battle he expects to lose, and its content is a transaction rather than a repentance. What no reading can avoid is the sequence: the prayer ends, the battle is won, and Henry announces that God did it.
"…a righteous war, and seemed as much so to Shakespeare’s public as the war against the Nazis seems to us."
— John Dover Wilson, King Henry V, 1947
Key Quotes on Religion and Morality
Quote 1
We are no tyrant, but a Christian king;
Unto whose grace our passion is as subject
As are our wretches fettered in our prisons...
(King Henry V, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’m not a tyrant; I’m a Christian king.
And for our God, my passions are restrained
Like wretched prisoners locked up in a prison.
Quote Analysis: Henry’s self-definition, offered to the French ambassadors before he has heard their message. Christianity here is presented as a form of self-control: the King’s anger is chained the way prisoners are chained, and the image is his own. It is a claim about temperament rather than doctrine, and the play spends five acts testing it. Within four hundred lines he will send the Dauphin a threat about widows and unborn children; at Harfleur he will describe his own soldiers as beyond restraint; at Agincourt he will order prisoners killed. Whether the chain holds is the moral question of the play, and the metaphor Henry chooses – a passion imprisoned rather than absent – concedes in advance that something violent is being held down.
The mercy that was quick in us but late,
By your own counsel is suppressed and killed:
You must not dare, for shame, to talk of mercy...
(King Henry V, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The mercy that I recently possessed
Has been suppressed and killed by your advice.
You mustn’t even dare to talk of mercy...
Quote Analysis: The three traitors have just advised the King, without knowing they were being tested, to punish a drunk who railed against him. Henry pardons the drunk anyway, then produces the warrants for their arrest and uses their own advice to close off any appeal. "Quick" means living: mercy was alive in him and they killed it. The move is brilliant and it is also a piece of moral bookkeeping – the executions are made the responsibility of the men being executed. Notice, too, that Henry sends them to their deaths with a blessing rather than a curse, and appears to mean it. This is the play’s characteristic combination: real Christian feeling and an argument that leaves the King’s conscience clear.
wherefore the king, most worthily, hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, 'tis a gallant king!
(Gower, Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
that’s why the king has worthily ordered every soldier to cut each prisoner’s throat. Oh, he’s a courageous king!
Quote Analysis: The most disturbing sentence in the play, and the disturbance is in the tone. Gower is the play’s plain, decent, unexcitable Englishman, and he reports the massacre of disarmed prisoners as evidence of gallantry. He also supplies a justification – the French raided the baggage and killed the boys – which arrives after the order, not before it, since Henry gives the command in the previous scene on hearing that the French are reinforcing. The play stages the atrocity, supplies the excuse, and puts the approval in the mouth of the character least likely to be lying. An essay that treats this as straightforward condemnation is reading against the text; so is one that treats it as untroubled endorsement.
But five and twenty. O God, thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to thy arm alone,
Ascribe we all! When, without stratagem,
But in plain shock and even play of battle,
Was ever known so great and little loss
On one part and on the other?
(King Henry V, Act 4, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Just twenty-five. Oh God, you did this work;
It wasn’t us, but you alone who did this,
We all agree! When, without trickery,
But in a battle balanced on both sides,
Was ever such a large and little loss known
From one side to the other?
Quote Analysis: Henry reads the English casualty list aloud – four named men and twenty-five others – and immediately hands the entire victory to God. The phrasing is liturgical: "not to us, but to thy arm alone" is the opening of Psalm 115, the psalm the army is about to sing. The humility is genuine and it is also perfectly convenient, because a victory ascribed to God is a victory that cannot be questioned. "Without stratagem" is the detail worth pressing: there was a stratagem – the stakes, the archers, the ground – and the killing of the prisoners happened forty lines earlier. What Henry declares here is not a lie, exactly. It is a decision about how the day will be remembered, made on the field before the bodies are counted.
Key Takeaways
- Guilt Is Always Moving: Canterbury takes it, the Dauphin is given it, the Governor of Harfleur is offered it, the soldiers are told it is their own. It never rests with the King.
- The Piety Is Not Fake: Henry prays alone, forbids boasting, orders hymns and hangs a friend for robbing a church. Any reading that makes him a cynic has to ignore the private scenes.
- Justice Operates at the Wrong Scale: A man dies for a pax of little price in the same war in which prisoners are killed by order.
- God Settles Nothing: Victory is ascribed to God, and the Epilogue reports that everything won was lost. Providence is claimed in Act 4 and quietly withdrawn fourteen lines from the end.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is Henry's religious faith sincere?
The evidence says yes, and the sincerity is what makes the play difficult rather than what resolves it.
Three pieces of evidence are hard to argue away. He prays alone, with no one on stage to be impressed, and admits in that prayer that his penance is worthless. He forbids his army to boast of Agincourt, on pain of death, and orders the credit given to God. And he hangs a man he has known for years for stealing from a church.
Come, go we in procession to the village.
And be it death proclaimed through our host
To boast of this or take the praise from God
Which is his only.
(King Henry V, Act 4, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come, we’ll go in procession to the village.
And state our soldiers will be put to death
If they boast of it, or take praise from God
Who did this for us.
Making it a capital offence to claim any share of the credit is not the behaviour of a man managing his image; an image-manager would want the credit. Henry then orders Non nobis and Te Deum sung over the field – Psalm 115, not unto us but unto thy name give glory, and the Church’s great hymn of thanksgiving – and directs that the dead be buried in charity. Both armies’ dead.
What the sincerity does not do is settle the moral question. A ruler can believe entirely in the God he invokes and still use the invocation to close arguments he would otherwise lose. E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) reads the providential framing as the play’s own position; Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) reads the same material as the gap between Henry’s "questionable personal motives and his professed devotion to God’s will". Both are looking at the same lines.
Who is morally responsible for the war?
The play sets up an unusually clear chain of custody and then refuses to say where it stops.
Canterbury accepts the sin in Act 1, having first told Ely that the Church needs the war to defeat a bill in Parliament. Henry warns him before he speaks that thousands will die on his answer, which places the responsibility on the Archbishop in public and on the record. The Dauphin then supplies an insult which Henry converts into a cause. At Harfleur the Governor is told the sack will be his doing. In the camp, Bates says obedience wipes the crime out of the soldier and Williams says the King has a heavy reckoning; Henry answers that every subject’s soul is his own. After the battle, Gower assigns the killing of the prisoners to the French who raided the baggage.
Six positions, no adjudication. What the play does instead is show that the transfers are not equally available. Henry can lodge his responsibility with a bishop, formally, in front of witnesses. Williams can only lodge his with a stranger in the dark, and is paid off in the morning.
Alexander Leggatt’s Shakespeare’s Political Drama (1988) treats the histories as studies in the gaining and enforcing of public power, and this chain is the clearest example in the cycle. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Alternative Shakespeares, 1985) argue that even here, in the play supposedly closest to state propaganda, the construction of ideology is visibly complex – the mechanism is left on stage.
Why is Bardolph hanged for stealing a pax?
Because Henry issued a standing order that nothing be taken from the French countryside by force, and because the object was sacred. Both halves matter.
The military reason is policy, and Henry states it plainly when Fluellen reports the case: when leniency and cruelty compete for a kingdom, the gentler gamester wins soonest. An army that robs the population it claims to be liberating loses the country it is trying to take. The order is good strategy and, as the play presents it, good conscience too.
The religious reason is sacrilege. A pax was kissed by the congregation during Mass; stealing one is not ordinary theft. Fluellen, asked to intercede, refuses on principle and says he would let his own brother hang.
What gives the scene its charge is what Henry does not say. Bardolph was one of the Eastcheap companions of his youth; the audience of Henry IV knows him well. Henry does not name him, does not pause, and moves straight on to the next piece of business. Whether that is a king who has properly subordinated friendship to justice, or a man who has become something colder, is a judgement the text leaves entirely to the reader.
Theodor Meron’s Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws (1993) is the authority on the legal framework here, and shows that the punishment is consistent with the actual disciplinary ordinances of fifteenth-century English armies. This is not Shakespeare inventing a harsh king; it is Shakespeare dramatising a real code and choosing to apply it to a character we care about.
Was the killing of the prisoners a crime?
By the standards of the play’s own characters, at least one atrocity certainly was – and it is the French one that gets named.
Kill the poys and the luggage! 'Tis expressly against the law of arms: 'tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offer't; in your conscience, now, is it not?
(Fluellen, Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Killing the boys who looked after the luggage! That’s expressly against the accepted code of war. It’s the worst type of villainy, I tell you, as anyone can do. Is it on your conscience now?
Fluellen has a technical vocabulary for this – "the law of arms" – and he applies it without hesitation to the French. Nobody applies it to the English order. The play notices the asymmetry and says nothing about it, which is a form of saying something.
On the sequence, the text is precise and awkward. Henry gives the order in A4S6 on hearing that the French have reinforced, before the baggage raid is reported. Gower supplies the raid as the cause in the following scene. Editors have argued for centuries about whether this is deliberate or a seam left by revision; either way, the excuse and the act do not line up.
Theodor Meron’s "Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and the Law of War" (AJIL, 1992) is the essential treatment, and its conclusion is uncomfortable for both camps: the order was arguably defensible under the customs of war as they then stood, given a numerically superior enemy and prisoners who could rearm, and it was already being debated as an atrocity in Shakespeare’s sources. The play stages the debate and takes no side.
For an essay, the useful move is to hold three facts together: the order is given, the excuse arrives late, and the character with the strongest moral vocabulary in the army never turns it on his own king.
What does the play say about mercy?
That it is real, that it is a royal instrument, and that Henry is unusually precise about when it is available.
God quit you in his mercy! Hear your sentence.
(King Henry V, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
May God forgive you! Listen to your sentence.
The two halves of that line are the theme in miniature. Divine mercy is wished on the traitors with what appears to be real feeling; earthly justice proceeds in the same breath. Henry makes the distinction explicit – he forgives them personally and cannot pardon them as king, because the kingdom’s safety is not his to give away.
The pattern recurs. He pardons the drunk who railed against him, and hangs Bardolph. He shows mercy to Harfleur the moment it yields, having promised the opposite an hour earlier. He gives Williams money instead of punishment. Mercy in this play is never absent and never simply free: it is granted where it costs the crown nothing and withheld where it would.
The most generous reading is that this is what a working monarch’s conscience looks like – the personal and the political genuinely separated, with the King bearing the strain of both. The most sceptical is that "I forgive you and I am killing you" is a sentence that only a very sophisticated moral vocabulary could produce. Norman Rabkin (1977) would point out that the play gives you no instrument for choosing between them.
Does the play believe God gave Henry the victory?
Every character inside the play believes it. The play itself is more careful.
We are in God's hand, brother, not in theirs.
(King Henry V, Act 3, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We are in God’s hands, brother, not in theirs.
Henry says this to Gloucester when the army is sick, outnumbered and cut off, and it is the calmest line he speaks in the whole campaign. After the battle he forbids boasting and gives God the credit; Fluellen agrees that God fought for them; the army sings two psalms of thanksgiving.
What complicates it is the accounting. The French are shown losing the battle through arrogance, disorder and contempt for their enemy – the play spends three scenes on their overconfidence before a single arrow is fired. Providence and plain causation are both fully available, and the text supports either.
Then there is the Epilogue, which reports that Henry’s son lost France and England bled. If God gave Agincourt, God also took back everything it won within a generation. John Dover Wilson’s 1947 edition put the providential reading at its strongest, calling the campaign a righteous war; Lily B. Campbell’s Shakespeare’s "Histories" (1947) set it within Elizabethan providential historiography. Against that, the play’s own last fourteen lines make providence look less like a verdict than a phase.
How should students write about religion and morality in this play?
Three things separate a strong answer from an adequate one.
First, take the religion seriously as religion. Fifteenth-century kingship and sixteenth-century audiences did not treat divine sanction as decoration, and Henry’s scruples are presented as real. An essay that reads every prayer as public relations has flattened the play and will struggle with the soliloquy, which has no audience.
Second, follow the accounting rather than the sentiment. The theme is built as a ledger – sin offered and accepted, guilt assigned, penance itemised, credit ascribed – and the strongest analysis tracks where each entry is posted. Canterbury’s "the sin upon my head" and Henry’s "every subject’s soul is his own" contradict each other directly, and noticing that is worth more than any amount of general comment on Henry’s hypocrisy.
Third, keep the small scenes. Bardolph’s pax, the pardoned drunk, the shilling Williams refuses: the play makes its moral arguments in miniature far more often than in the set-piece speeches, and quoting a two-line exchange precisely beats quoting a famous speech loosely.
For critics, Theodor Meron (1992, 1993) is indispensable on the law of war and the two atrocities. Dover Wilson (1947) and Tillyard (1944) give the providential reading at full strength; Goddard (1951), Dollimore and Sinfield (1985) and Greenblatt (1988) give the sceptical one; Rabkin (1977) explains why the play sustains both. Use them to frame the disagreement rather than to end it.
