‘Maister of the earth’? Reassessing the Monarch-As-Husbandman Metaphor in Shakespeare’s Histories

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the suitability of the monarch-as-husbandman metaphor in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy in light of the environmental crises of the 1590s and the practical work of husbandry. Analysis of Shakespeare’s engagement with the metaphor typically focuses on Richard II and Henry V, with the former cited as an instance in which bad monarchic husbandry (Richard’s) is overcome by better (Bolingbroke’s) and the latter invoked as a consummate example of good monarchic husbandry in action, with Henry’s victory abroad figured as an act of national husbandry. This article suggests that Shakespeare’s Henry would have been understood as a bad husbandman, reading Shakespeare’s interrogation of the metaphor as a broader criticism of the government’s response to contemporary environmental crises. Putting pressure on the metaphor and comparing Henry’s language of husbandry to actual practice, this article offers a more nuanced understanding of Shakespeare’s engagement with the pressing environmental concerns of his day.

KEYWORDS:

• Husbandry
• Henry V
• 2 Henry IV
• agriculture
• Richard II
• Shakespeare

Addressing his first parliament in March 1603, King James I proclaimed, ‘I am the husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife’ (James 2003, 297.). His words operated on two interrelated metaphorical levels, invoking both his predecessor Elizabeth’s construction of herself as wedded to the nation and the widespread association between agrarian husbandry and patriarchal household management (cf. Goldberg 1983, 141–142). James drew upon a vast array of classical, biblical, and early modern texts which asserted a fundamental connection between the work of the husbandman, or yeoman, and the duty of the monarch. This was accomplished through both the idea of household management and an intellectual sleight of hand whereby ‘labour’ became associated not only with physical exertion, but with scholarly pursuits. Understood thus, to labour for the good of the commonwealth encompassed not only the physical exertion of agrarian workers, but also the political efforts of figures such as Francis Bacon and Robert Cecil, both of whom were heavily involved in a series of late Elizabethan parliamentary husbandry debates in response to the negative effects of enclosure (D’Ewes 1693, 564; Hartley 1995, 230; Townshend 1680, sigs. Iiii2r, Kk1r). It is in this more metaphorical sense that many Shakespeare scholars have read the playwright’s engagement with the doctrine of good husbandry. For such critics, ‘the political rhetoric of the commonwealth was readily absorbed into husbandry manuals’, and conversely, the rhetoric and theories of husbandry became a valuable tool for political statesmanship (Scott 2014, 19). Analysis of Shakespeare’s engagement with the political doctrine of good husbandry typically focuses on two history plays: Richard II and Henry V. While the former is often cited as an instance in which bad monarchic husbandry (Richard’s) is overcome by better (Bolingbroke’s), the latter is regularly invoked as a consummate example of good monarchic husbandry in action. Henry V’s victory abroad is ‘figured in georgic terms, as the “productive” work of national husbandry’ (Attié 2020, 771).

Yet this interpretation falters when husbandry moves from the metaphorical to the literal. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, climatic changes across England and Europe resulted in a period of severe weather historians have termed the Little Ice Age, which saw the global temperature average fall by about 1°Celsius (Degroot 2018, 2; cf.; Parker 2013; Blom 2020). Among its other consequences, the Little Ice Age resulted in a series of poor harvests, probably due to poor ripening and diseases, which swept the nation between 1586 and 1597, making food resources scarce and sending corn prices skyrocketing across Europe. Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have been acutely conscious of the practical effects of such climatic volatility ‘in what was still, for many Elizabethans, a subsistence economy’ (Markley 2008, 131; cf.; Borlik 2011, 2019, 2023b; Chiari 2018). To read early modern references to environmental instability as metaphorical, then, is to miss their very real material import. In this context, the intellectual husbandry of men like Bacon and Cecil – and the metaphorical performance of husbandry by monarchs like Richard and Henry – becomes a poor substitute for its agrarian counterpart. The present study participates in a wider ecocritical revaluation of natural metaphor in early modern studies which takes environmental history both seriously and literally (cf. Borlik 2023a; Dolan 2020; Eklund 2021; Laroche and Munroe 2017; Martin 2015).

This article will suggest that Henry V’s victory is anything but georgic, as it fails to address the ‘practical realities and negative pressures [that] have to be negotiated in any truly committed ecology’ (Fairer 2011, 215). Nor was this perspective unheard of in the period. Fitzherbert’s bestselling Booke of Husbandrie asserted that ‘the King, the Queene, or all other Lordes ſpirituall and temporall ſhuld not eate, without that they ſhulde labour’ (1573, sig. A1v).¹ The preacher Henry Smith felt similarly, invoking a second famous Biblical husbandman, Noah, in his critique of the age:

when we read how this Monarche of the Worlde [Noah] thought no scorne to play the husba[n]dman, we consider not his princely calling, nor his ancient yeers … or lowlye minde therein. Which may teach vs humilitie, though we learne to disdaine husbandrye. (1591, sig. A3r)

Smith suggests that for monarchs and gentlemen, husbandry should be a literal, rather than metaphorical, practice as exemplified by Noah. He emphasises Noah’s virtue in ‘return[ing] to his labour a fresh, and scorn[ing] not to till and plant’, for ‘they that are humbled with religion, do not thinke themselues too good to do any good thing’ (1591 sig. A6r). Smith’s words might easily be read as a critique of men like Henry V, who appropriate the metaphor of the husbandman without truly inhabiting it. This article takes up this apparent contradiction between the metaphorical and practical aspects of husbandry, asking how suitable the monarch-as-husbandman metaphor actually is in Shakespeare, particularly in light of the environmental crises of the late sixteenth century. Challenging critical assumptions that ‘the discourse of good government’ is ‘nowhere … more accessible, and more relevant … than in the language of husbandry’ in Shakespeare’s plays, I argue that Shakespeare’s King Henry V is – and would have been understood as – a bad husbandman, and that understanding him in this way allows us to interrogate the metaphor more broadly (Scott 2014, 93). By attending to the practical realities of land management in scenes like the gardening scene in Richard II and Burgundy’s oration on husbandry in Henry V, I suggest that the metaphor falls apart under closer scrutiny.

The underlying logic of the metaphor rests on the intersecting concepts of household management and patriarchal authority. During the early modern period ‘husbandry’ could refer both to the male spouse and to the care and ordering of the household as a unit of production and consumption. Notions of order and good government were central to the management of both the domestic and national units as well as to the practical daily work of the husbandman. Gervase Markham – one of husbandry’s most prolific proponents – wrote that husbandry ‘is most necessary for keeping the earth in order’, while other widely read horticultural and agrarian texts such as Conrad Heresbach’s popular Foure bookes of husbandry stress the importance of ‘order’ throughout (Markham 1613, sig. A3v; Heresbach 1577). At once spouse and agrarian manager, the husbandman functioned as a potent metaphor for the well-ordered political state, ‘the great Nerue and Sinew which houldeth together all the ioynts of a Monarchie’ (Markham 1613, sig. A3). The metaphor became increasingly popular towards the latter half of Elizabeth I’s reign as the idea of agricultural improvement encouraged landlords to capitalise on their property; by 1600, Thomas Wilson could write that gentleman landlords had ‘become good husbands and know well how to improve their lands to the utmost’ (Wilson 1936, 19). Elizabeth’s government seems to have encouraged this attitude, taking a critical stance towards nobles who remained in London rather than returning to supervise their country estates (Larkin and Hughes 1969, 541). The responsibilities that came with aristocratic property ownership were articulated through the logic of husbandry.

In many ways, Shakespeare himself belonged to this late Elizabethan generation of absentee improving landlords, and his plays make frequent use of the language of husbandry as well as the ways identity depended upon land ownership. The garden scene in Richard II has long served as a critical touchstone for Shakespeare’s engagement with husbandry – as, indeed, has the play as a whole. Generally speaking, scholars have seen in Richard II a political ideology wherein kingship is gained through an individual’s proper management of the land and its inhabitants (cf. Eklund 2015; Scott 2014). Bolingbroke’s victory over Richard is represented as that of good husbandry over bad; ‘representing Bolingbroke as a good husbandman ascertains his moral integrity’ (Scott 2014, 24). Although Bolingbroke’s agricultural language is often cited, his references are typically general and allusive. Indeed, apart from his brief promise ‘to weed and pluck away’ the negative influence of Bushy, Bagot, and Green, Bolingbroke’s language lacks any sustained connection with that of husbandry (Richard II, 2.3.167). And despite an emphasis on requiring his ancestral lands, Bolingbroke makes conspicuously little attempt at husbandry once he has them. If, as Scott suggests, Bolingbroke’s ‘moral integrity’ and suitability for kingship are dependent upon his good husbandry, then its relative absence raises questions as to the legitimacy of his reign. This section therefore reads the garden scene with a more interrogative eye, asking how appropriate the metaphor of good husbandry can be for kingship when undermined by the behaviour of both the play’s monarchs.

At first glance, the prevailing critical assumption is an understandable one. The gardeners’ introduction by the queen seemingly makes explicit the relationship between the work of governance and that of husbandry: ‘here come the gardeners’, she says, ‘[t]hey will talk of state’ (Richard II, 3.4.24, 27). The head gardener then offers an extended metaphor of good management, carefully constructed to echo Bolingbroke’s behaviour, instructing his assistants to

[c]ut off the heads of too fast-growing sprays

That look too lofty in our commonwealth.

… I will go root away

The noisome weeds, which without profit suck

The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers. (3.4.33-39)

His language echoes contemporary husbandry manuals, particularly those involved with raising a grain crop. The execution of Bushy and Green only three scenes earlier ensures that his reference to ‘noisome weeds’ that must be ‘cut off’ and ‘root[ed] away’ recalls Bolingbroke’s related actions for the safety of the commonwealth. From there, however, the efficacy of the metaphor begins to break down. One of the under gardeners immediately challenges him, demanding

Why should we in the compass of a pale

Keep law and form and due proportion,

…

When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,

Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,

Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined

Her knots disordered and her wholesome herbs

Swarming with caterpillars? (3.4.40-47)

His caterpillar reference extends the parallel between their work and Bolingbroke’s, although he does not seem to know yet of Bushy and Green’s deaths. Within the monarch-as-husbandman paradigm his question is understandable: why bother with the work of husbandry on a small scale if it has already failed on a larger one? His challenge critiques the metaphor’s unequal division of labour as well as suggesting the futility of their horticultural work. Instead of answering, the Gardener evades, noting that ‘[h]e that hath suffered this disordered spring/Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf’ (3.4.48–49). The implication is that, having been ‘plucked up, root and all, by Bolingbroke’, the mismanagement which plagued Richard’s reign is now concluded (3.4.52). Yet his impulse to sidestep the question, dismissing it as irrelevant given the changing political situation, suggests an inability to answer it. If husbandry fails on a national level, he seems to say, one must simply wait for it to be repaired by someone else such as Bolingbroke. At no point does he offer a justification for continuing their agrarian and horticultural husbandry when the monarch has ceased to perform his own. The disparity between kingly and practical husbandry, and the continuance of the latter in the face of the former’s cessation, casts the validity of the metaphor into doubt. This disparity is further underscored by the two halves of the scene; while the Queen retreats to the garden for ‘sport’, for the gardeners it is a place of work into which the real world continuously intrudes. The gardeners’ references to compromised fertility and insect infestation do not merely operate at the level of political metaphor but describe the very real environmental and agricultural problems brought about by the Little Ice Age.

Criticism has traditionally understood this speech as a critique of Richard, a moment wherein ‘Shakespeare brings the imperatives of kingships closely in line with the work of husbandry’ by demonstrating the monarch’s insufficiency on both accounts (Eklund 2015, 129). Yet this interpretation relies upon the oft asserted – but rarely demonstrated – husbandly prowess of Bolingbroke. The execution of ‘the noisesome weeds’ Bushy and Green may indicate, as the Gardener and Bolingbroke suggest, a return to ‘even’ government, yet the initial promise of this action is short lived. Even before the crown is on his head, Bolingbroke’s husbandry has been called into question, with Carlisle warning that ‘if you crown him … The blood of English shall manure the ground’ (Richard II, 4.1.137–138). His prediction of national death perverts the act of husbandry, suggesting that Bolingbroke’s reign will famish rather than nourish the nation. And, on a fairly literal level, it does. The various rebellions which plague his reign throughout Henry IV deplete its population and its natural resources, suggesting that his management – both literal and metaphorical – is distinctly lacking. Hillary Eklund notes that the gardeners’ critique of Richard depends upon ‘the qualities of time management, profitability, and control of natural resources’ (Eklund 2015, 129). Yet what evidence is there that Bolingbroke does better? Nowhere does he lay out a comprehensive plan for the nation’s management. His first impulse, like that of his son, is to go abroad, to ‘make a voyage to the Holy Land’, but within fifty lines that voyage has been indefinitely postponed by civil ‘broil[s]’ in Wales and the North (1 Henry IV, 1.1.47). The relative immediacy of these internal divisions undermines the peace his first lines anticipate, and thus any hope of successful husbandry. From an environmental standpoint, this Henry’s husbandry echoes the anthropocentric georgic identified by scholars such as Ken Hiltner (2011), in contrast to the boots on the ground georgic of the working man. Likewise, Henry’s inability to manifest his pilgrimage to the Holy Land suggests a related inability to manage time – events elude his control, thrusting time and land alike into disorder. Richard may be a poor husbandman, but Bolingbroke’s actions do not suggest much better management of the land. Political cronyism has been replaced with a different kind of internal division, and neither offers a foundation for peace – which, as Burgundy suggests in Henry V, is a necessary prerequisite for good husbandry.

Upon Bolingbroke’s accession as Henry IV, his subjects register the problematic impact his reign has upon English agriculture. Attempting to avoid conscription into Henry’s army, the Gloucestershire farmer Rafe Mouldy protests that if he is called up ‘[his] old dame will be undone/now for one to do her husbandry and her drudgery’ (2 Henry IV, 3.2.113–114). Its sexual undertones aside, Mouldy’s complaint suggests popular opposition to the trope of the yeoman-soldier. Humorous though he may be, Mouldy offers a valuable insight into the precarity the lower classes experienced as a result of repeated harvest failures throughout the 1590s. Although London authorities made some attempt to counter the crises, ‘renew[ing] measures to identify and relieve the poor, re-emphasis[ing] the duty of the public provision of the city granaries by the Livery Companies, and tighten[ing] regulation of the markets’, they did so within a context of overseas military endeavours which cost many ordinary Englishmen their livelihoods – if not their very lives (Walter 2019, 28). Mouldy’s complaint makes manifest Benjamin Bertram’s argument that the ‘assemblage of war…led to significant changes in the ecology of early modern England’ (Bertram 2018, 19). Where Bertram focuses on the ecological impact of preparations for war, Mouldy registers its affect upon those who worked the land.

The 1590s saw significant popular resentment regarding both conscription and the fees levied to fund the war in Ireland. Francis Bacon’s 1593 testimony to Parliament reveals resentment among the lower orders for the increased taxation that resulted from foreign wars, the financial costs of which are alluded to in both Richard II and Henry V (Richard II, 2.1.246–247; Henry V, 1.1.8, 75–79). Bacon would later recall ‘the common people … muttering’ in the wake of the Invisible Armada scare of 1599 ‘that if the Council had celebrated this kind of Maygame in the beginning of May it might have been thought more suitable, but to call the people away from the harvest for it (for it was now full autumn) was too serious a jest’ (Bacon 2011, 361). Here, popular opposition to military action against Spain is tied to practical, local concerns: the effect of conscription upon the harvest. The disruption this occasioned would have been all too familiar to Shakespeare and his audiences, many of whom had experienced first-hand the devastating effects of famine. Considered in this context, Mouldy’s passing comment about husbandry becomes increasingly significant.

Mouldy’s objection at once invokes the spectre of popular resistance to conscription and ties that resistance specifically to the literal practise of husbandry. If, as one anonymous MP argued in 1597, ‘the strength of a prince consisted in the field that was tilled’, then removing those whose job it is to till those fields – whether literally, as in Mouldy’s case, or metaphorically – is not only poor husbandry but a source of potential monarchic weakness (Neale 1957, 340). Henry V later seems conscious of this risk, worrying that by departing for a war in France he risks the Scottish ‘galling the gleaned land with hot assays’ (Henry V, 1.2.51). To glean was to gather the last of the leftover grain, implying that the absence of Henry and his yeoman soldiers poses a very real risk not only to national security, but to the harvest upon which the nation depended for food. Henry’s metaphor reminds us that although the land has been harvested of men, its crops remain unharvested. What at first appears to be Mouldy’s cowardice couched in a sex joke, then, in fact vividly illustrates the wider impact that elite foreign wars could have on the agricultural activities upon which ordinary English people depended. As Robert Markley has noted in relation to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, ‘[w]hen summer’s lease has “all too short a date”, aristocrats may age early, but the tenant farmers on their estates face a much grimmer fate’ (Markley 2008, 137). Indeed, one of the central arguments during the debates over the enclosure bills of the late 1590s was that ‘because tillage in their hands yields more profit than dispersed in the hands of many, gentlemen will become grinders of the poor’ (Neale 1957, 366). By leaving his realm open to the threat of poor harvests by removing its farmers to fight in economically motivated foreign wars, Henry has arguably become just such a ‘grinder’. His acquisition of property abroad is achieved at the expense of husbanding his property at home, just as his father’s accession depends upon unhusbanding Rafe Mouldy’s farmlands.

Yet despite critical recognition that Henry V ‘meditates explicitly on the claims and limits of a national husbandry’, those limits are rarely extended to the underlying logic of the monarch-as-husbandman metaphor (Wall 1996, 784). In an increasing body of criticism which views the titular character’s rhetoric with scepticism, Henry’s invocation of this particular metaphor remains relatively unchallenged – and is even commended (cf. Dollimore and Sinfield 2002; Greenblatt 1994; McEachern 2006). A recent article in Studies in Philology, for example, presents ‘Henry’s strategic self-fashioning as a yeoman-king’, as at once calculated and entirely appropriate, attributing Henry’s victory to his successful deployment of the metaphor and his understanding of the ‘connection between the work of husbandry and the work of war’ (Attié 2020, 773, 770). Neither the metaphor nor the connection, however, is as straightforward as it appears.

Like the metaphor itself, the connection between husbandry and war was commonplace during the period. Barnaby Googe’s translation of Heresbach proclaims that ‘of husbandmen have been bread the valianteſt and worthieſt fouldiers … the hand that hath been vſſed to the ſpade, proueth often of greateſt value in the féeld’, and classical texts by Xenophon and Cato extolled farming as important training for future soldiers (Heresbach 1577, sig. A5v; Xenophon 1537; Cato and Varro 2014, 3). Bacon and Cecil would echo this rhetoric in the enclosure debates, with the former arguing in 1601 that ‘[t]he husbandman is a stronge and hardye man … a cheife observacion of good warryer’ (Hartley 1995, 451). Henry V frames himself in this context, describing himself to Katherine as ‘such a plain king that thou wouldst think I had sold my farm to buy my crown’ and ‘a fellow … whose face is not worth sunburning’ (Henry V, 5.2.125–127, 147–148). In other words, his agrarian-cum-martial labour has resulted in a tan redolent of Markham’s ‘plaine russet Husbandman’ (1613, sig. A1r). There are several problems with this figuration. Henry himself is quick to replace the label with that of a soldier, identifying himself repeatedly as ‘a soldier/A name that in my thoughts becomes me best’ and a ‘plain soldier’ (Henry V, 3.3.5–6, 5.2.149–15). If the relationship between husbandry and soldiery is rendered suspect by its practical impact upon yeomen such as Rafe Mouldy, Henry’s invocation of the metaphor reveals it to be no more than a useful rhetorical device.

Henry relentlessly redeploys the husbandman metaphor but fails to live up to it himself. Although he invokes the language of husbandry as a rhetorical strategy to foster community, it is couched in martial terms; the actual practice of husbandry becomes subsidiary to the military value of its practitioners. Henry addresses his foot soldiers as ‘good yeomen/Whose limbs were made in England’, but that profession is swiftly set aside as he instructs them to ‘show us here/The mettle of your pasture’ (Henry V, 3.1.25–27, emphasis mine). Their martial present supersedes their agrarian past, and it is as soldiers, not yeomen, that they must now prove their worth. Henry’s derision extends to dehumanising the yeomen as beasts, ‘greyhounds in the slips/Straining upon the start’ (3.1.31–32). His words recall Smith’s reproach of men who treat ‘thos that labour the earth…as though they were your seruants … as the beastes serue them, so they serue you: as though you were an other kind of men’ (1591, sig. A4r). Henry elsewhere describes husbandmen as ‘wretched slave[s]’, displaying precisely the attitude Smith censures. Henry implies that it is through martial prowess, not agrarian work, that worth – and perhaps even humanity – is conferred (4.1.265). The yeomen must prove themselves not in the agrarian husbandry which criticism has identified as ‘the primary site of England’s economy’, but rather in their ability ‘to war’ (Scott 2014, 8; Henry V, 3.1.25). On a purely practical level, however, the conversion of husbandman into soldier (which Henry repeatedly endorses) contributes to the mismanagement of agrarian resources: Burgundy later complains of ‘wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank’, and ‘corrupting in [their] own fertility’ (5.2.51, 40). If Henry has indeed ‘sold’ his farm (i.e. England), then he has abdicated not only responsibility for its management but his right to the title of husbandman. Elizabethan legislature might claim that ‘maintenance of the Ploughe & Tillage’ was ‘the Occac[i]on of the increase and multiplying of People both for [ser]vice in the Warres and in tymes of Peace’, but as Burgundy’s speech indicates, those wars can have devastating consequences for national husbandry (An Acte Againste the decaying of Townes and Howses of Husbandrye 1963, 893).

After all, in travelling to France, Henry is arguably in direct contradiction to the advice of husbandry writers such as Tusser, who wrote that

Ill huſbandrie ſpendeth

abrode like a mome

Good huſbandrie tendeth

his charges at home. (Tusser 1573, sig. G6r)

By spending his energy on the war in France, Henry has not only left England – and its corn harvest – open to Scottish invasion, but has failed to attend to ‘his charges at home’. Although the historical Henry remained in contact with his advisors back in England, recounting his military successes and requesting further funding or supplies, there is little evidence of this in Shakespeare’s play (cf. Chambers and Daunt 1931, 67–85). If Henry is a husbandman, he is a distinctly absentee one. Canterbury’s observation of Henry’s transformation from wastrel prince to king seems to confirm this distance: ‘Consideration like an angel came/and whipped th’offending Adam out of him/Leaving his body as a paradise’ (Henry V, 1.1.28–30). Upon first glance, Canterbury’s words figure the monarch’s body – and by implication the body of England – as an earthly paradise, echoing Henry’s grandfather’s ‘sceptr’d isle’ speech in Richard II. Yet upon closer scrutiny the comparison becomes increasingly problematic. To take ‘th’offending Adam out of [Hal]’ is, in effect, to take Adam out of England – which is arguably what happens, on a literal level, upon Henry’s departure for France. Adam was set in Eden to tend it, as both the Bible and husbandry manuals make explicit: the marginal gloss on man’s creation in the Geneva Bible reads, ‘God wolde not haue man ydle, thogh as yet there was no nede to labour’ (Gen 2:15). Upon his expulsion from Eden, Adam is ordered ‘to til the earth, whence he was taken’ (Gen 3:23). Adam’s husbandry both precedes and results from his fall. Upon his removal, then, both Henry’s body and the English soil with which it is associated become effectively unhusbanded – a state which early modern husbandry manuals depicted as highly dangerous.

According to Markham, without husbandry the earth risks ‘grow[ing] wilde, and like a wildernesse, brambles and wéeds choaking vp better Plants…nothing remayning but a Chaos of confusednesse’ (1613, sig. A3v). Here, the action of Henry V echoes that of Richard II, whose monarch is encouraged by bad counsellors to undertake foreign wars: ‘Now for the rebels which stand out in Ireland’, Green urges Richard, ‘[e]xpedient manage must be made my lord’ (Richard II, 1.4.38–39). It is arguably Richard’s absence which first enables Bolingbroke’s invasion of England; Northumberland tells us that he and his men

Are making hither with all due expedience,

And shortly mean to touch our northern shore.

Perhaps they had ere this, but that they stay

The first departing of the King for Ireland. (2.1.287-290, emphasis mine)

Henry’s exit from England has less immediately disastrous results, perhaps because the threat to England under his reign comes externally, from Scotland, rather than from a banished Englishman or internal factions, and any potential parallel between Richard’s bad advisors (Bushy, Bagot, Green) and Henry’s traitors (Cambridge, Scroop, Grey) is curtailed by the latter’s discovery and punishment. However, Exeter’s suggestion that ‘government, though…put into parts, doth keep in one consent’ will be swiftly disproven by the Henry VI plays – and, indeed, by the words of Henry’s own soldiers, – suggesting that internal discord is not forestalled, but merely postponed (Henry V, 1.2.180–181). The chorus appears to anticipate this, reminding the audience that those who ‘follow…leave your England as dead midnight still,/Guarded with grandsires, babies and old women (2 Chorus 17–24). The lines are equally applicable to the action of 1 Henry VI, in which the child monarch’s military expeditions abroad pave the way for his kingdom’s collapse into the factionalism of the Wars of the Roses. England’s ‘death’ occurs on both an agrarian and a human level: not only are those who would defend its soil gone to France, but so too are those who would husband it. The primary action of both plays, the war in France, can thus be interpreted as an act of husbandly negligence at best, and actively harmful husbandry at worst.

It is to this bad husbandry that Burgundy’s Act V speech appears to allude. For Burgundy, peace is a vital precondition for husbandry. As such, ‘the warlike Harry’ is entirely incompatible with the metaphor of the monarch as husbandman; his very existence has, in Burgundy’s words, ‘chased’ both peace and husbandry away (Henry V, Prologue 5; 5.2.38). Although Burgundy’s speech is framed as one about France, it functions as a potent reflection of the unhusbanded English soil Henry has left behind, as well evoking the environmental crises that plagued the play’s first audiences. Lamenting that as a consequence of the war, the French soil is no longer ‘fertile’, he draws an explicit connection between neglected husbandry and war, figuring it as a direct consequence of taking the yeomen away to fight the nobles’ wars and asserting that the French people ‘grow like savages, as soldiers will’ (5.2.37, 59). Crucially, it is in this speech that ‘the language of misuse, decay, and disorder which was associated with the unthrifty Hal of 1 Henry IV returns’ (Scott 2014, 101). For Scott, the effect is ‘to remind the now King of England of his duty’, yet this article contends that Henry’s failure to heed this reminder, alongside his persistent misuse of the language of husbandry throughout the play, renders Burgundy’s attempt to instil good husbandry in Henry a vain one.

Critics have acknowledged that Burgundy’s speech, which is not found in the quarto, ‘ties in with the folio’s altogether more complex and questioning approach to Henry’s achievements than we find in the quarto’ in its ‘implication that warfare may ruin what it seeks to conquer’ (Dutton 2005, 204). However, their analysis of that questioning remains confined to Henry’s actions and motivations – not to the agrarian metaphor to which both he and the play make frequent recourse. In a play saturated with agrarian images, it is worth noting the specificity of Burgundy’s language of husbandry in contrast to Henry’s more general invocation of the metaphor. While Henry makes occasional and vague references to practices such as gleaning or mowing, Burgundy speaks in technical terms of ‘even-pleached’ hedges, a rusted ‘coulter’, and a wanting ‘scythe’, moving fluidly between specific agricultural issues and general wartime concerns (Henry V, 5.2.44, 46, 50). Specific too are his references to particular plants such as ‘darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory’, which echo the emphasis on first-hand knowledge and experience which characterised many of the period’s bestselling husbandry texts (5.2.45). John Fitzherbert, arguably the father of the early modern English husbandry manual, maintains that

it is better the practyce or knowledge of an huſbandman p[ro]ued, then the ſayence or connying of a phyloſopher not proued, for there is nothinge touching huſbandrye and other profetes conteyned in this preſent boke, but I have had y^e experience thereof and proued the ſame,

and Markham repeatedly promises to ‘dayly practise and experience which I collect’ (Fitzherbert 1573, sig. F3v; Markham 1613, sig. N1r). Elizabethan legislation echoes this emphasis on local and personal knowledge, with the 1597 Act for the Maintenance of Husbandrie and Tillage noting differences ‘according to the Nature of the Soyle and course of Husbandrie used in that parte of the Countrey’ (An Acte Againste the decaying of Townes and Howses of Husbandrye 1963, 894). Practical and accurate knowledge thus seems to have been of particular importance in early modern husbandry. Although the historical Duke of Burgundy would hardly have had practical experience in husbandry, placing contemporary husbandry advice in the mouth of one of Henry’s advisors, at a pivotal moment in the play, creates a powerful contrast to the merely metaphorical husbandry of the king.

Henry himself seems more intent upon devastating landscapes than husbanding them. Urging the surrender of Harfleur, Henry threatens not to leave ‘[t]ill in her ashes she lie buried’, promising that ‘the fleshed soldier…shall range,/With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass/Your fresh fair virgins and your flowering infants’ (Henry V, 3.3.9–14). His words suggest total destruction of the town and its surrounding countryside, figuring this destruction in distinctly agrarian terms (mowing, flowering). Henry’s soldiers have entirely eclipsed their prior identities as husbandmen, instead razing the landscape and the women with whose bodies it was so commonly associated. Theirs is no act of husbandry, but rather the appropriation of its language to achieve its opposite: ‘waste and desolation’ (3.3.18). Although one could argue that Henry’s threats are purely posturing to achieve the town’s surrender, the lines’ exclusion in the first quarto edition of the play suggests that they were deemed sufficiently problematic as to be censored.² Henry makes similar threats an act later, proposing a form of agricultural and biological warfare wherein ‘the sun shall greet them [the English dead] … Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,/The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France’ (4.3.99–103). Here, Henry’s ‘good yeomen’ enact anti-husbandry, polluting the earth and infecting rather than nourishing its inhabitants. In the entire play Henry makes only one explicit reference to husbandry, remarking that ‘our bad neighbour makes us early stirrers/Which is both healthy and good husbandry’ (4.1.6–7). ‘Good husbandry’ here is filtered through both martial and medical lenses; its benefit is first to the war in France (in rising early they may gain an advantage over their opponents) and second to his own wellbeing (it is ‘healthy’). Heresbach writes that ‘early going to worke is a greate matter’ and one’s bailiff should ‘be a good rifer … firſt vp in the morning, and the laſt that goeth to bed’, suggesting that Henry’s interpretation may be broadly correct (1577, sig. B6v). However, the context in which Henry alludes to this ‘Good husbandry’ makes no reference to the practical work of the husbandman. Henry may be ‘early going to worke’, but the nature of that work is, as Burgundy’s speech reveals, antithetical to that of good husbandry. Henry’s sole use of the term suggests that his idea of agrarian labour is more fantasy than anything else.

Henry himself seemingly recognises his conception of husbandry as such in Act IV. Musing on the pressures of kingship, he envies

the wretched slave,

Who with a body filled and vacant mind

Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread

…

like a lackey from the rise to set

Sweats in the eye of Phoebus

…

And follows so the ever-running year

With profitable labour to his grave (Henry V, 4.1.205-274

Here, Henry’s allusion to husbandry illustrates his detachment from and ignorance about the practical work it involves. His words recall – or perhaps directly reference – husbandry manuals such as Heresbach’s, which invoke the classical Horatian theme of the pleasures of ‘the life of the country’, although in Henry’s case it is clearly a fantasy (Heresbach 1577, sig. A3r). Heresbach’s landowner Cono is convinced that ‘I, in this my kingdome, or rather poore cottage, am more happie than a great ſort of kings and princes of the world, that are lords of ſo many and ſo large dominions’ (1577, sig. A8r). Cono’s sentiments are tempered by his initial slip of the tongue: he speaks first of ‘my kingdome’ before seeming to recall his audience and adjusting hastily to ‘or rather poore cottage’. The effect is disingenuous in a book seemingly written for gentlemen farmers who can afford a bailiff to manage things ‘for his maſters profite’ (1577, sig. B7v). In this he has the advantage of Henry, of ‘whose state’, upon his untimely death, ‘so many had the managing/That they lost France, and made his England bleed’ (Henry V, Epilogue 11–12). The direct allusion to management evokes the language of husbandry manuals on both an agrarian and domestic level. While Henry could hardly have predicted his death during his son’s infancy, the gross mismanagement of the kingdom at that time suggests that Henry’s own husbandry of it was insufficient, failing to create a mechanism for successful governance even in the event of unexpected crises. On both a practical and a metaphorical level, then, Henry has failed to properly husband his estate. Here again Henry echoes Smith’s sermon, ‘wherby we are warned that he which liueth onely to himselfe, is not to be remembred of them which liue after … Noah planted a vineyard, not for him self but for the ages to come after’ (1591, sig. A7v). Smith invokes a crucial reality of husbandry: its aim is not only to provide for the immediate future, but to implement structures which will endure for successive generations. In an era when husbandry manuals, sermons, and government officials alike extolled the virtues of thrift, Henry’s oversight is a significant one – and, crucially, one also committed by the reigning monarch at the time of the play’s composition.

The succession crisis that dominated Shakespeare’s first decades as a playwright was closely tied to concerns surrounding English land and its husbandry. These questions intersected in the figure of Elizabeth, whose childless body was at once perceived as an echo of contemporary agricultural crises and a source of immense anxiety regarding the future management of the kingdom. Although generally figured as masculine, much of good husbandry revolved around practices and processes traditionally coded as feminine, such as thrift retaining resources. The OED’s definition repeatedly directs the reader to compare it to housewifery, which is defined in strikingly similar terms as ‘household management; performance of domestic tasks’ and ‘[t]he quality of managing resources with skill and economy to avoid undue waste; thrift’ (‘housewifery, n.1a and 1b’, 2022). The parallels between husbandry and housewifery meant that, on both a literal and metaphorical level, neither the housewife nor the husbandman was immune from the reproductive and conservative imperative to produce and provide for future generations. Elizabeth’s own father was a case in point. It is striking, then, that the history plays most strongly associated with the metaphor of husbandry, Richard II and Henry V, both feature monarchs who fail to adequately provide for the nation’s future. As both a poor monarch and a poor husbandman, Richard could be said to bear out the truth of the metaphor, yet in Henry, Shakespeare gives us an apparently successful monarch who has nevertheless failed to provide ‘for the ages to come after’. Henry’s inability to ensure the continued good management of his estate thus renders him a poor husbandman.

Henry V seems to recognise the disparity between the idealised ‘life of the country’ he imagines for his ‘wretched slave’ and its practical realities. His initial envy for the peasant’s ‘[sleep] in Elysium’ and ‘profitable labour’ is tempered by allusions to the hardships and never-ending ‘toil’ of such a life (Henry V, 4.1.271, 274, 276). His peasant counterpart is repeatedly figured in terms evoking his dependent status; ‘lackey’, ‘wretch’, ‘slave’ (4.1.269, 275, 278). Where Cono can ‘rise and walke about my ground … viewe [his] woorkemen, [his] pastures, [his] medowes’, Henry’s wretch is clearly classed as one of those ‘woorkemen’ rather than a landowner in his own right (Heresbach 1577, sig. A3r). His schedule is closer to that of a true husbandman: he ‘doth rise’, Henry tells us, ‘after dawn’, and his day is governed by ‘the rise to set’ of the sun (Henry V, 4.1.271, 269). Henry repeatedly references the cyclical nature of such an existence, imagining the yeoman to work from ‘the rise to set’ of sun before arising the ‘next day after dawn’ to repeat his labour, ‘[following] … the ever-running year’ until his death (4.1.269, 271, 273). Yet the historical reality of agrarian production in the sixteenth century – and particularly during the decade of Henry V’s composition and performance – belies any sense of stability. The precarity resulting from the poor harvests of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries affected farmers and consumers alike, bringing unemployment, rising food costs, and decreased profits which, alongside ‘government policies designed to minimise idleness kept labour cheap, suppressed strikes, and exploited indentured labourers … stirred up unrest and resistance among the lower orders’ (Eklund 2015, 35). At the same time, enclosure and the Tudor clearances curtailed access to common land, which had previously provided essential sustenance and fuel to rural populations.

Not only does this cast the purported pleasure and stability of ‘the life of the country’ into doubt, but it would have resonated with Shakespeare’s audiences, many of whom were likewise recent migrants from farming regions. Such men would have been far likelier to echo the resentment of men such as Rafe Mouldy or John Bates than to champion either Henry’s war or his vision of agrarian life. Upon closer inspection, the metaphor of the nation as husbanded by the monarch seems increasingly inappropriate in light of the very real and pressing environmental issues facing the husbandmen of Shakespeare’s day. Following Henry’s encounter with the three common soldiers John Bates, Alexander Court, and Michael Williams, this fantasy of husbandry seems distinctly out of touch. As Henry’s ‘wretched slave’ demonstrates, the georgic is inescapable even in pastoral fantasies; the illusion of otium is maintained by the georgic labour of the working classes.

Throughout the second tetralogy, Shakespeare demonstrates how the practical realities of the work of husbandry render it an inadequate and inappropriate metaphor for the work of the monarch. Yet although monarchs such as Richard II have received sustained critical attention for their failure to properly husband the nation, such studies are predicated on the assumption that the metaphor itself is a sustainable one. That is not to say that bad husbandry necessarily equates to bad kingship. Although in recent decades criticism has taken a more nuanced approach to the portrayal of Henry V, for example, he is nonetheless presented as a broadly successful monarch. It is perhaps the contrast between his kingly aptitude and his husbandly insufficiency which most clearly reveals the inadequacy of the monarch as husbandman metaphor. Henry’s reign is broadly depicted as a success, indicating that monarchic aptitude is not dependent upon the metaphor or practice of husbandry. Criticism by Scott and others has often discussed Shakespeare’s gardens – and related natural spaces – in terms of their metaphorical or figurative connotations. As the scenes I focus on demonstrate, however, these spaces also operate on a profoundly literal level, and to ignore or otherwise elide that aspect of them precludes a full understanding of Shakespeare’s engagement with the doctrine of good husbandry. Putting pressure on the monarch-as-husbandman metaphor and comparing the language of husbandry used by these monarchs to actual practice, then, enables a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the plays themselves and of the pressing environmental concerns of their day. By repeatedly pairing the pressing environmental and economic concerns of the commons with the aristocratic wars of succession, Shakespeare forces his audience to see the two as profoundly interconnected, staging the human and environmental costs of civil and foreign wars alike. In doing so, it becomes apparent that the metaphor of the monarch-as-husbandman is ultimately an unsustainable one, both in light of the devastating food shortages and related agricultural crises of the 1590s and of the practical work of the husbandman himself.

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Chloe Fairbanks

Chloe Fairbanks recently completed her PhD at the University of Oxford and is now an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, researching transculturality in early modern London at the level of daily practice. She is currently revising her doctoral thesis into a monograph entitled Earth, Realm, England.

Notes

1. Fitzherbert’s text saw numerous editorial interventions between the 1530s and the final edition in 1598, which differs substantially from its predecessors (McRae 2002, 143–145). References in this article are to the 1573 edition as the most recent contemporary edition with content consistent with the book’s history. This particular line remains constant until 1598, at which point both it (and the author’s prologue in which it appears) disappear. The timing of this deletion is potentially significant in relation to the environmental crises of the 1590s, which I suggest may have informed similar cuts in the quarto of Henry V.

2. The 1600 quarto skips from ‘I will not leaue the halfe atchieued Harflew,/Till in her ashes she be buried’ to ‘The gates of mercie are all shut vp./What say you, will you yeeld and this auoyd,/Or guiltie in defence be thus destroyd?’, with which the king’s speech ends. No mention is made of Henry’s husbandmen-turned-soldiers committing acts of explicitly agricultural devastation, and the king’s ‘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?’ is likewise expunged (3.3.15–18). The speech is not the only one to receive cuts; the choruses are removed throughout the quarto edition, as is the entirety of Burgundy’s oration on good husbandry. Many of the cuts soften the character of Henry – particularly expedient in the wake of the Essex rebellion – and remove the interrogation of his invocation of the husbandry metaphor.