King John Loyalty Quotes

These lines from near the very beginning of the play show us a character who adheres closely to the standards of loyalty demanded by his job. As a messenger, Châtillon will deliver a defiant message from one king to another, but he won't add anything extra; there will be no special digs from Châtillon himself. In this close attention to duty, Châtillon will provide a contrast to other characters later in the play who are not so dedicated to this principle.

Here the Bastard gives us a typically jokey twist on the whole theme of loyalty. When he first speaks, we think that he is expressing the supreme loyalty a subordinate can offer to a person higher up in the social hierarchy: the Bastard says he will follow Eleanor even if it means his own death. But Eleanor is clever enough to realize that the Bastard could be sneakily promising no such thing; maybe he's saying that he wants her to meet death first, allowing him time to make a convenient exit out the back. But the Bastard has his own retort to this, disguised by politeness: "You first, ma'am." These lines show that the Bastard can think for himself; he isn't loyal to the point of blindness.

Much like the Bastard in the previous quotation, a citizen here shows that people in lower positions on the social hierarchy need to be careful about whom they give their loyalty to. If you think about it, this makes total sense: if the citizens of Angers make an alliance with the weaker of the two kings, then the stronger of the two kings will just attack them, anyway, and defeat them. Then, that king will probably kill the citizens of Angers, just to punish them for having supported the other guy. On the other hand, if the citizens of Angers side with the stronger king, then they will be protected against the weaker king if the weaker king then attacks them. So, the smart way to be loyal is only to be loyal to the strongest person. But is that really being loyal at all?

After Pandolf has tried to break up the alliance between King John and King Philip, King Philip shows that he values loyalty. It would be horrible for him, after he has just married his son Louis to John's niece Blanche, to have to go to war against his new family. Not too shabby, Philip, but the true test of loyalty is whether you stick together through thick and through thin. Will he? We'll just have to see. (We're not holding our breath.)

These words come from the long, tricky, and complicated speech in which Pandolf tries to show King Philip that severing his alliance with King John is simply the right thing to do. We think it's pretty clear that Pandolf is being deliberately confusing in order to intellectually bludgeon his opponents into submission, but we think his speech can actually be broken like this: basically, Pandolf is saying that (a) you think you're behaving in a religious way by staying loyal to John; (b) but you forget that John is an enemy of the Church, and therefore an enemy of religion; (c) because you swore loyalty to the Church and to religion first, then you never should have gotten involved with John in the first place; (d) therefore, the most loyal thing to do is to break your alliance with John, because it lets you keep your original vow of loyalty to the Church. Do you agree with this logic? If you were King Philip and really wanted to keep your alliance with King John, what would you say to Pandolf at this point?

If you've already read the play, you know how things turn out in the three-way argument between John, Philip, and Cardinal Pandolf: Philip breaks his alliance with John, meaning that England and France must do battle against each other once again. It's at this point that Blanche makes the speech you see here. Because she is loyal to both sides—to John and his family through blood, and to Louis and his family through marriage (and, hence, by blood, too, according to the Christian tradition that a man and his wife become "one flesh")—there's no way that any battle can turn out well for her.

Compare Hubert's lines to those of the Bastard in the second quotation from this section. In Hubert's words, we find none of the humor that characterized the Bastard's speech; this guy seems to really mean his frightening pledge of ultimate loyalty. Does this mean that Hubert will turn out to be more loyal than the Bastard? Not necessarily, as later events in the play reveal.

In these lines, we see the horrible things that loyalty can make people do. Arthur points out that his eyes (and, we can assume, he himself) never did anything to Hubert. But, just because Hubert told King John that he would do it, Hubert says that he is going to go ahead and commit this horrible act. Of course, Hubert doesn't actually go through with it, but he comes pretty darn close. We can pretty safely bet that he's carried out lots of other horrendous murders on the king's behalf (Peter of Pomfret, anyone?). So, yeah, loyalty… sometimes not so good.

These lines make King John look pretty low. We'd say they definitely speak to his weakness of character and his inability to take responsibility for his own actions. That said, he does have a bit of a point. If kings weren't served by people so eager to prove themselves loyal—or if they were served by people who had a better understanding of what kings really need done, not just what they think they need done—it might end up sparing everyone a lot of grief. But, then again, you could say it's the king's fault in the first place for placing such a premium on loyalty that people will commit outrageous crimes just to avoid ending up in the king's bad books—and having such crimes committed against them.

These lines reveal some of the play's key paradoxes of loyalty. On the one hand, Salisbury is angry that the king no longer deserves his loyalty because of the shameful actions he has done. So he swears loyalty to the corpse of Arthur instead. But by swearing loyalty to Arthur, he has to then betray his king. Pandolf kind of has a field day with this—at the moment, he's giving his blessing to the people who break their loyalty with King John. It's a crazy world out there.