If England to Itself Do Rest but True
With King John dead and the threat of invasion fading, Philip Faulconbridge reflects that the danger within is always greater than the danger without.
set in 1216
King Henry III 1216-1272
Herbert Beerbohm Tree as King John.
A portrait of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852–1917) as King John in William Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John, painted by Charles A. Buchel (1872-1950) in 1900. The play, which was probably written in 1594-1596 but not published until 1623, was popular in the nineteenth century but performances dwindled almost to extinction in the twentieth. It charts the reign of King John (r. 1199-1216), best known today as the Bad King John of the Robin Hood tales, as the wicked uncle responsible for The Disappearance of Arthur in 1202, as the tyrant forced by his own noblemen to sign The Great Charter at Runnymede in 1215, and as the man who squandered nearly all of the Crown’s estates in France. But see Macaulay on The Good Reign of Bad King John.
Introduction
At the end of William Shakespeare’s play The Life and Death of King John, written in about 1594-96, the King has just died an untimely death; with him has died the threat of a French invasion, and John’s heir Henry has returned home to England to assume the crown. Henry’s cousin Philip Faulconbridge heaves a sigh of relief, and draws an optimistic moral from all that has gone before.
O, LET us pay the time but needful woe,
Since it hath been beforehand with our griefs.*
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,*
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.
From ‘The Life and Death of King John’, by William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
* Philip is saying that there is no need to overdo the mourning for King John, since the country has had enough grief already from anticipating a French invasion that never came.
* In the play, the most prominent English noblemen are Prince Henry, John’s son, who came to the throne as King Henry III (r. 1216-1272); Geoffrey FitzPeter, Earl of Essex; William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury; William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke; and Roger Bigod or Bigot, Earl of Norfolk.
