Page "Henry VI, Part 1" Paragraph 24

Another component of the patriotic sentiment is the religious note the play oftentimes strikes.

On the whole, everything Catholic is represented as bad, everything Protestant is represented as good: " The play's popularity 1592 has to be seen against the backdrop of an extraordinary efflorescence of interest in political history in the last two decades of the sixteenth century fed by self-conscious patriotic Protestantism's fascination with its own biography in history.

It is not for nothing that Part One is persistently anti-Catholic in a number of ways despite the fact that in the fifteenth century the entire population of England was nominally Catholic ( though not, of course, in 1592 ).

The French are presented as decadently Catholic, the English ( with the exception of the Bishop of Winchester ) as attractively Protestant.

" Talbot himself is an element of this, insofar as his " rhetoric is correspondingly Protestant.

His biblical references are all from the Old Testament ( a source less fully used by Catholics ) and speak of stoicism and individual faith.

" Henry V is also cited as an example of Protestant purity: " He was a king blest of the King of Kings ./ Unto the French the dreadful judgement day / So dreadful will not be as was his sight ./ The battles of the Lords of Hosts he fought " ( 1. 1. 28 – 31 ).

" King of kings " is a phrase used in 1 Timothy, 6: 15.

" Lords of Hosts " is used throughout the Old Testament, and to say Henry fought for the Lord of Hosts is to compare him to the Christian warrior king, David, who also fought for the Lords of Hosts in 1 Samuel, 25: 28.