Ambition in Henry VI, Part 2

Eleanor Cobham sits in her chamber with a man named Hume, asking him plainly: “Have you spoken yet with Margery Jourdain, the clever witch? Will they undertake to do me good?” She wants magic to divine the future, to know whether her husband will be king. But her ambition—the hunger to rise higher than her station—is not hers alone. It spreads through the play like a contagion. Every character who grasps for power finds that the grasp itself becomes their ruin.

In the beginning, ambition wears a scholar’s robes. Suffolk arranges a marriage that gives away English land. York watches from the sidelines and calculates genealogy like a chess player, seeing the crown not as a burden but as the prize at the end of a line of descent. Eleanor’s witchcraft and her husband’s downfall teach the kingdom nothing. By the middle of the play, ambition has become more naked. The Cardinal wants the regency. Buckingham and Somerset scheme. Margaret uses beauty and whisper to shape the king’s mind. The play shows that ambition doesn’t stop—it only shifts hands. When one ambitious person falls, another rises to take their place. York’s patient scheming in Act 2 becomes his open march on London in Act 5. The crown draws him forward as surely as a lodestone draws iron.

But the play also gives voice to those who claim to despise ambition. Henry VI, pious and gentle, says he would rather be a subject than a king. Gloucester protests that he has no desire to rule, that his only wish is to serve his sovereign. Yet even these denials become suspect. Gloucester’s wife’s ambition brings him down, and his refusal to defend himself—his refusal to seize power when he might have—becomes its own kind of weakness. The play asks whether it is possible to live without ambition in a world where everyone else hungers for more. Henry’s passivity is not virtue; it is paralysis. Gloucester’s humility is not sanctity; it is blindness to the danger around him.

By the play’s end, ambition has become the engine of history itself. York does not win the crown through divine right or popular support. He wins it through will—through the willingness to gather armies, to defy the king, to push forward when others hesitate. The play does not celebrate this. It shows the cost: the death of good men, the dissolution of loyalty, the replacement of law with force. Yet it also makes clear that ambition cannot be wished away. In a world where power is the prize, the ambitious will always take it from the passive. The question is not whether ambition is right, but whether anyone can survive without it.