Henry VI, Part 3

Henry VI, Part 3 is the bloodiest of the trilogy: full civil war between York and Lancaster, ending with the murder of Henry VI and the rise of the future Richard III.

Main characters

• King Henry VI
• Queen Margaret
• Richard, Duke of York
• Edward (later Edward IV), George (later Duke of Clarence) and Richard (later Duke of Gloucester), York's sons
• The Earl of Warwick, 'the Kingmaker'
• Young Rutland, York's youngest son

Plot summary

This summary gives away the ending.

Henry agrees to make York his heir, disinheriting his own son. Queen Margaret refuses to accept this and leads an army against York. She captures him at Wakefield, taunts him with a handkerchief soaked in his young son Rutland's blood, and has him killed. York's sons take up the fight, and Edward seizes the throne as Edward IV.

The kingdom swings back and forth: Warwick changes sides, Henry is restored, then deposed again. In a famous scene Henry, sitting on a molehill during the Battle of Towton, watches a son who has killed his father and a father who has killed his son. After the Yorkist victory at Tewkesbury, Richard of Gloucester murders Henry in the Tower and, in long soliloquies, reveals his own designs on the crown.

Themes

• Civil war and its human cost
• Oaths and betrayal
• Cruelty and revenge
• The rise of a villain

Famous lines

O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!

York to Margaret, Act 1 Scene 4

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile.

Richard of Gloucester, Act 3 Scene 2

More in our collection of famous Shakespeare quotes.

Sources

Hall's and Holinshed's chronicles. An earlier version was printed in 1595 as The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York.

On stage and screen

In 1592 the dying playwright Robert Greene warned fellow writers of an 'upstart Crow' with a 'Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde', a parody of York's line. It is the first known reference to Shakespeare in London, and shows this play was already famous.

See where Henry VI, Part 3 sits in Shakespeare's career on the timeline, or read about the playhouses it was written for.