Loyalty and Betrayal in Henry VI, Part 2

Gloucester stands in the chamber where his wife has been convicted of witchcraft. “I banish her my bed and company,” he says, even as she is being led away to exile. His loyalty is not to his wife but to the crown, to the law, to his conception of duty. Yet this very loyalty—this refusal to defend her, to bend the rules for her sake—is what destroys him. Within a few scenes, Gloucester himself will be accused of treason. His conscience is clear. His heart is innocent. None of it matters. Loyalty, the play shows, is a virtue that only survives when others share it. When the powerful cease to value loyalty and begin to see it as weakness, the loyal are slaughtered like sheep.

In the first half of the play, loyalty is a constant theme and a constant casualty. Warwick loves Gloucester and mourns his death with genuine grief. Yet even Warwick’s sorrow cannot undo the murder. Somerset’s soldiers betray him. The commons, who have been loyal to the crown, are swayed by Jack Cade’s rhetoric and abandon their king. Salisbury begins the play as a loyal subject but by the end has decided that loyalty to an oath sworn to an unfit king is a sin greater than breaking that oath. Each character must make a choice: to remain loyal even when it seems to lead to ruin, or to break faith in the hope of saving oneself. The play shows that neither choice guarantees survival.

The later acts reveal the mechanism by which loyalty dies. When Suffolk is captured at sea, he appeals to his captors by reminding them of his former kindness to them. “Hast thou not kiss’d thy hand and held my stirrup? / Bare-headed plodded by my foot-cloth mule?” But kindness is not loyalty, and loyalty is not a debt that the living honor. His former servants kill him. The commons follow Cade not out of loyalty to him but out of hunger and hope that he might give them something better. When Buckingham and Clifford offer them the king’s pardon, they abandon Cade instantly. “Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro as this multitude?” the rebel cries in despair. Loyalty, it turns out, is a luxury good. The poor cannot afford it.

By the final scene, loyalty has become nearly extinct. York marches on London with an army. Salisbury, who swore to the king, now swears to York, having reasoned that a solemn oath to serve a bad king is itself a sin. The bond between subject and sovereign, between vassal and lord, has been broken beyond repair. Yet the play does not celebrate this rupture. It shows it as the tragedy it is. Gloucester was loyal unto death and was murdered for it. Warwick mourns Gloucester and then serves York because the king will not defend his own loyal servants. The play suggests that loyalty can only survive if the powerful honor it, protect it, and value it above ambition. When they cease to do so, the entire structure of trust that holds a kingdom together begins to crumble. By the end, there are no more loyal men left. There are only men fighting for their own survival and their own glory.