Walking Home from Henry VI | American Enterprise Institute

I had a chance to see a monumental production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI at the Public Theater in New York City. The show is rarely performed due to its extreme length, but it was beautifully acted and staged. The show was also violent and leaned heavily on themes of family ties and loyalty; it was thrilling. 

Walking home, I couldn’t help thinking that despite being more than 400 years old, the show vividly telling the story of the War of the Roses in England has lessons which speak directly to the dynamics we see in politics today. At its heart, Henry VI is about law, legitimacy, and power.

It is made clear very early into the play that King Henry has the crown on his head by blood and by law, but it doesn’t save him from an early death, war, and political chaos throughout his kingdom. Henry cannot command, cannot punish behavior, and cannot project the kind of force that makes people believe the state is in charge. In pushing Henry off the throne, his principal rival, the Duke of York, doesn’t need to win the legal argument to claim power. He just needs Henry to keep losing on the ground among the peers until the legal claim looks like a technicality nobody is willing to die for.

This is a well-known dynamic. Max Weber argued that authority depends on legitimacy, not simply legality and Henry VI stages exactly that collapse. Henry remains the lawful king, but law alone cannot save him once people stop believing he can govern. Everyone still calls him king, but no one fears him anymore.

It’s hard not to see echoes of this dynamic today. I make no claim about any one leader specifically, but in our institutions—the courts, elections, and our bureaucracies. They can be procedurally spotless and still hemorrhage legitimacy if people stop believing they are competent, capable, or evenhanded. Once that belief goes, procedural perfection doesn’t buy much time. That’s the grim lesson of Henry VI: legality without legitimacy cannot produce stability; it produces a vacuum other people are willing to fight over.

The play is full of moments that reinforce this point about legitimacy. One well-known example is the line “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” (Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2). This line is proclaimed by Dick the Butcher during Jack Cade’s rebellion and while it is usually presented comically, the context is chilling. In reality, Jack Cade’s mob wants to tear down the entire apparatus of law and record-keeping so legitimacy itself can be reinvented through force. Law only matters if people believe someone has the authority to enforce it; otherwise, law is little more than words on a page.

A second example involves King Henry where he laments, “O God! methinks it were a happy life, / To be no better than a homely swain…” (Henry VI, Part 3, Act 2, Scene 5). In this scene, Henry gets separated from his forces and sits away from the battle; at a distance, he wishes that he were a shepherd instead of a king. Moments later, he experiences the tragedy of watching a son who has unknowingly killed his father and a father who has unknowingly killed his son. As this is all happening around him, the lawful king can do nothing except grieve with them. It is one of Shakespeare’s clearest images of lawful authority separated from effective power. Henry wears the crown by right, but as the kingdom tears itself apart around him, he can neither command events nor protect his subjects.

Unsurprisingly, in the end, Henry does not survive. Richard of the rival House of York—who eventually becomes the well-known King Richard III—kills Henry in the Tower of London after Edward IV has already taken the crown by force. While Henry’s last words invoke God, justice, and the judgment to come, Richard offers no response and pulls out his dagger.

At the time of his murder, Henry never loses his legal claim to the throne. But he loses something far more important: the belief that his rule means anything, for only the person with the largest and most powerful army gets to decide what legitimacy looks like.

Walking home, I kept thinking about how much bigger a story this is outside of the War of the Roses and the fight between the Lancasters and the Yorks. Certainly, laws, elections, and constitutions matter. But political orders also depend on people believing their institutions are capable, fair, and worthy of obedience. Kings and institutions function with the consent of the governed and it was exactly this consent that Henry lacked. When that belief disappears, the fight isn’t really about law anymore, it is about who gets to replace it.