Somerset enters the play as one of England’s great lords, yet remains a strangely hollow figure—ambitious, present at crucial councils, but speaking rarely and with little force. His few lines reveal a man caught in the machinery of court faction, allied with Suffolk and the Cardinal against Gloucester, yet ultimately expendable. He speaks only eleven times across the entire play, and in those rare moments his voice is almost apologetic, as if he knows his position rests on the favor of more powerful men. When he offers himself to Somerset to “go regent over the French,” he does so with deference, understanding full well that this regency is a poisoned gift, a posting that will either destroy him or advance him depending on York’s whim and the shifting sands of court allegiance. By the play’s end, Somerset is dead—killed by the young Richard under a sign reading “The Castle” in Saint Alban’s, fulfilling the witch’s cryptic prophecy that he should “shun castles.”
Somerset’s trajectory traces the fate of every ambitious man who allies with the wrong faction. He is neither villain nor hero, but rather a minor piece in York’s and Suffolk’s larger games. The play uses him to show how the great machinery of political ambition crushes those who lack either the wit of York, the charisma of Suffolk, or the virtue of Gloucester. He survives most of the play by staying quiet and following orders, yet his very invisibility proves his undoing. When Cade’s rebellion threatens, Somerset hides rather than leads. When Henry finally asserts himself and locks Somerset in the Tower to placate York, Somerset accepts his imprisonment with humble grace—“I’ll yield myself to prison willingly, / Or unto death, to do my country good.” But this piety wins him no favor. York’s young son Richard hunts him down at Saint Alban’s and runs him through, and Somerset falls beneath the symbolic sign that sealed his doom.
What makes Somerset’s death significant is not his character—which the play barely develops—but what it represents. His corpse at Saint Alban’s is one of the first bodies of what will become the Wars of the Roses. The careful balance of the early play, the factional maneuvering, the witches’ prophecies, all lead to this moment of sudden, brutal violence. Somerset dies not because he is particularly evil or incompetent, but because he backed the losing side, and because in the end, words and political schemes give way to swords. His eleven lines are enough to mark him as a player in the great game of thrones, but not enough to save him from becoming merely another severed head in the play’s landscape of political horror.
