Bishop Of Canterbury
Canterbury supplies the play's opening demonstration that policy and piety can serve the same end without either party involved needing to examine the coincidence too closely — his elaborate justification of Henry's claim to France arrives conveniently bundled with his own institution's survival.
Appears In
Biography
Canterbury opens the play in private conference with the Bishop of Ely, and the subject is not piety but self-preservation: a bill before Parliament threatens to strip the Church of the greater part of its temporal wealth, and Canterbury has found what he considers an elegant solution — encourage the young king toward a war with France so thoroughly absorbing that Parliament's attention, and the king's, moves elsewhere entirely. To sweeten the arrangement, Canterbury offers the crown a vast sum toward the war's expenses, a donation whose timing makes its real purpose difficult to mistake.
Summoned before Henry to give his honest counsel on the legitimacy of the English claim to the French throne, Canterbury delivers one of the longest and most elaborately technical speeches in the entire Shakespearean canon — a genealogical argument through Salic law, French and English inheritance, and the house of Lorraine, delivered with the confident thoroughness of a churchman who has done his homework and has every institutional reason to reach the conclusion he reaches. Henry presses him hard on whether his conscience is clear, and Canterbury swears it is, in a scene the play allows to remain genuinely ambiguous: is this rigorous scholarship, or self-interested rationalization dressed in a scholar's robes?
Once the war is set in motion, Canterbury recedes from the play's center, his function discharged. He has given Henry the legal and moral cover a Christian king requires before shedding blood for a crown, and in doing so has also, not incidentally, secured the Church's own temporal fortune for another season.
Motivation
Canterbury is motivated by the Church's temporal self-interest as much as by any settled conviction about the justice of Henry's claim, and the play lets both motives sit side by side without insisting the audience choose between them.
Personality
Canterbury's command of genealogy, law, and precedent is genuinely formidable, and he deploys all of it in service of a conclusion that happens to save his own house a great deal of money — a coincidence he never acknowledges and the play never resolves. His persuasiveness lies less in passion than in sheer accumulated detail, burying any doubt under the weight of scholarly thoroughness.