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King John (reigned 1199-1216). He is one of the best known medieval English king and one of the most unpopular. The painting here illustrates a
moving scene in which Prince Arthur, the rightful claimant to the throne,
pleads with Hubert de Burgh, an agent of King John, to spare him from being
blinded with a red hot poker. King John succeeded his older brother, Richard
I (Coeur de Lion), as King of England. But the rightful heir was Arthur, Duke
of Brittany (the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and Constance of Brittany), a boy
7 years old. Geoffrey, also brother to Richard I, was older than John;
therefore his son Arthur rightly came before John in the order of
succession. John obviously considered Arthur a threat to his power and ordered Hubert de Burgh to violently remove the threat. When Hubert goes to the
castle where Arthur is imprisoned to blind the boy, which would make him unfit
to be king, Prince Arthur pleads with such eloquence with Hubert that he is
spared. Later, however, in an attempt to escape, Arthur leaps from the castle
wall and kills himself in the fall. Illustrations of Arthur's pleading with Hubert to spare him from blinding is a good example of Victorian sentimentality in art. Several British artists have addressed this subject. It was a favorite subject of the Victorians.
King John (reigned 1199-1216). He is one of the best known medieval English king and one of the most unpopular. John was born at Beaumont Palace,Oxford (1167). His father was Henry II Curtmantle, King of England (1133- ), His mother was Eleanor of Aquitaine, Duchess of Aquitaine (about 1122- ). Unlike his brother Richard, John was no great warrior and spent much of his life in England. He became King of Ireland (1177), Count of Mortain (1189), and Earl of Gloucester. Also unlike his brother, John was often a villian in Medieval legend. John acceded to the throne upon the death of his brother (1199). He married Isabella of Angoulême (1200). They had five children: Henry III, King of England, (1207- ), Richard of Cornwall, Earl of Cornwall (1209- ), Joan (1210- ), Isabella (Elizabeth), Empress of Germany (1214- ), and Eeanor (1215- ). He also had several illegitiamte children. Richard had been killed in battle in France defending his French possessions. John was less prone to risk his life in these bruttal battles. As a result he lost several possessions including Normandy to Phillip II Augustus of France (1205). John also faced domestic problems with the English nobility. The English barons forced him to concede the Magna Carta which John signed at Runnymede (1215). The Great Charter was a great concession on his part. It is generally seen as both the foundation of representative government in Britain and by assocuation the Dominions and the United States as well as the fondation of the principle that the king like his people were subject to law. John soon repudiated the charter, resulting in the First Barons War (1215) during which he died (1216). John's reputation was not at all aided by Shakespeare's "King John".
The painting here illustrates a
moving scene in which Prince Arthur, the rightful claimant to the throne,
pleads with Hubert de Burgh, an agent of King John, to spare him from being
blinded with a red hot poker. King John succeeded his older brother, Richard
I (Coeur de Lion), as King of England. But the rightful heir was Arthur, Duke
of Brittany (the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and Constance of Brittany), a boy
7 years old. Geoffrey, also brother to Richard I, was older than John;
therefore his son Arthur rightly came before John in the order of
succession. John obviously considered Arthur a threat to his power and ordered Hubert de Burgh to violently remove the threat. When Hubert goes to the
castle where Arthur is imprisoned to blind the boy, which would make him unfit
to be king, Prince Arthur pleads with such eloquence with Hubert that he is
spared. Later, however, in an attempt to escape, Arthur leaps from the castle
wall and kills himself in the fall.
Illustrations of Arthur's pleading with Hubert to spare him from blinding is a good example of Victorian sentimentality in art. Several British artists have addressed this subject. It was a favorite subject of the Victorians.
L.J. Post (1837-98) : The first image is a 19th-century engraving from a painting by L. J. Pott (1837-98). Post is one of the Victorian artists who pained the scene. His painting was widely distributed through an engraving. Post depicts Arthur flinging his arms around Hubert's neck in order to move the man to refrain from carrying out the terrible mission ordered by Arthur's uncle, King John. Notice the brazier in the right foreground by which the poker has been heated for the blinding. Here Arthurt looks about 9 or 10 years old. We have archieved his painting on the previous page
George Harlow (1787-1819): Here we have a painting by George Harlow, a British artist from the romantic period. In the Shakespeare play and therefore in the illustration here, Arthur is portrayed as a bit older than 7 years (figure 1). Prince Arthur kneels in supplication before Hubert, who holds a flaming branding fork in his right hand. To make the moral symbolism more graphic the painter costumes the boy in almost white clothing while Hubert, the would-be villain, is dressed in black. But Hubert as Shakespeare and Harlow depicts him is not really an evil man--only a basically good man who has been sent against his will upon a dreadful errand. Harlow conveys Hubert's basically humane nature in the softness and lowered eyes of his countenance.
William Frederick Yeames (1835-1918): William Frrederick (W.F.) was one of the most popular Victorian artists. Dramatic highly sentimental historical scenes were a speality of Yeames. The scene with Prince Hubert was prefect for him. The Yeames painting is one of best of the Victorian efforts.
"King John" is one of the two English history plays by Shakespeare ("Henry
VIII" is the other one) independent of the eight plays that, taken together,
make up the first and second tetralogies (i.e. the three parts of "Henry the
Sixth" and "Richard III" [the first tetralogy]; "Richard II", the two parts
of "Henry the Fourth", and "Henry the Fifth" [the second tetralogy]).
The scene with Prince Arthur and Hubert is one of the most notable scenes in Shakespeare's play "King John". Arthur in the Shakesopearan play pleads with Hubert, "Will you put out mine eyes--these eyes that never did nor never shall did so much as frown on you?" Undoubtedly the play has led to the darkening of John's historical image. "King John" was probably written about 1594-95 and is mainly concerned with the reign of Richard I's (i.e., Richard the Lion-hearted's) younger brother, who
succeeded him on the throne under questionable circumstances. At the center
of the plot lies a dynastic dispute about who has the best claim to the crown--
John (who holds the throne by right of possession) or Prince Arthur, the child
son of John's dead brother Geoffrey (John's nephew). The French back Prince
Arthur's claim, which is pressed by the boy's mother Constance, while the
English forces support John. Prominent also in the action is the Bastard
Faulconbridge, who is the illegimitate son of John's other dead brother,
Richard Coeur-de-lion (Richard I). Faulconbridge, whom John knights with the
title of "Sir Richard Plantagenet", supports John's shaky claim to the throne
but also becomes the moral and political mouthpiece of the drama as well as a
character who comes to represent downright honesty in a world of political "commodity", compromise, and corruption. A war between France and England is temporarily averted by a patched-up marriage between Lewis, the heir to the French crown, and the Lady Blanch, John's niece. But this shameful peace is abhorrent to both the Bastard and the Lady Constance, Prince Arthur's mother. The peace does not last long. The Pope excommunicates John over a refusal to accept the Pope's choice for Archbishop of Canterbury, and in addition the Pope also orders the French king to break his truce with England and fight the English. When the English capture Prince Arthur in a battle, the French, prompted by the Pope, try to pursue their war with England with a view of placing the Dauphin (Lewis) on the English throne. Meanwhile Hubert de Burgh, a servant of John, is ordered by his king to put out Prince Arthur's eyes so as to render him unfit for the throne, thus nullifying his claim. But the boy pleads eloquently with Hubert, persuading him to spare him from such a horrible fate. Left alone in his prison cell, however, Prince Arthur attempts to escape by leaping off a high wall and dies in the attempt. John thus indirectly becomes the agent of his rival claimant's death. The English nobles, who believe that John has had the
boy murdered, turn against King John and go off to join the Dauphin Lewis, who has
meanwhile landed in England with a large army. In order to secure Cardinal
Pandulph's aid against the French army (Pandulph is the Pope's legate to
England), John submits to the Pope by surrendering his crown to the papal
legate and receiving it back again as a papal fiefdom. In return Pandulph
attempts to persuade the Dauphin to return to France and to give up his claim
to the English crown. This attempt fails, however, and the English and French
armies fight an indecisive battle, the English army being led by the Bastard
Faulconbridge. In this battle, a French count (Melun), who is dying of his
wounds, warns the English nobles who have revolted against John that the
Dauphin Lewis plans to have them all executed as soon as he has won the
English crown with their aid. Realizing that they are about to be betrayed by
their French leader, the English nobles revert to English allegiance and
support King John again. But just as they switch sides, they discover that
King John
is dying miserably, apparently having been poisoned by a monk at Swinstead
Abbey (note the touch of implied anti-Catholicism here). After John's death
Cardinal Pandulph succeeds in arranging an
honorable peace between France and England, and the crown of England passes in
orderly succession to John's son Henry, who takes the title of Henry III.
King John in Shakespeare's play is a very ambiguous character morally. He is
presented as a weak king, who holds his crown by force of possession rather
than by legitimate right since Prince Arthur, his nephew, has a stronger legal
claim (Arthur's father Geoffrey, being older than John, came before him
according to the rules of primogeniture). He is also indirectly responsible
for an innocent boy's death. But John is also presented as a figure of mixed religious loyalties since he both submits to the Pope and also resists papal domination in England, so that Protestants in Shakespeare's time could regard him as something of an anti-papist force in the 13th century (a kind of proto-Protestant). Prince Arthur,
on the other hand, is one of Shakespeare's most appealing child characters and
a moral innocent.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of "King John", at least to the modern reader, is that the Magna Carta is not mentioned. Here we are not sure why. Surely it was a matter of great theatrical potential for a dramatist. We wonder if because it involved constraints on royal power that Shakespeare did not think it adviseable to raise the issue in his play or perhaps it was not as well known as it was in later eras. A reader writes, "The importance of the Magna Carta in English history was not fully appreciated in Shakespeare's age, and most of the plays having to do with the
reign of King John written in the Renaissance do not even mention it. There
was an anonymous play that Shakespeare almost certainly used entitled "The Troublesome Reign of King John" (a two-part play), but this also omits any mention of the Magna Carta. Probably it was not thought of as very significant in the age of Tudor absolutism and centralized royal power. Elizabeth I certainly was not interested in reminding her subjects of their historical rights won by the barons who forced King John to acknowledge them in writing. Later in the age of enlightenment when the political rights of Englishmen were more insisted on (after the English revolution in which the last absolutist monarch, Charles I, had been beheaded and the monarchy had
been temporarily suspended under Oliver Cromwell), the Magna Carta was seen as
an important precedent. In Shakespeare's age, John's reign was thought of principally as offering a focus on the relationship of England to the papacy, but John became important to both Catholics and Protestants who could both see him (in different ways of course) as representing the independence of England from Rome or the reverse."
Of course Robin Hood is a literary figure and is not included. Here I am not sure if the legends of Ronin and Sherwood Forrest yey existed. Prince Arthur was an actual historical figure. The incident of the attempt to blind Prince Arthur occurs in some of the historical source material, but most modern historians do not regard
it as very credible. Probably Shakespeare regarded the incident, however, as
having actually occurred.
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