Arch.

'Tis well done.

My friends and brethren in these great affairs,
I must acquaint you that I have received
New-dated letters from Northumberland;
Their cold intent, tenour, and substance, thus:
Here doth he wish his person, with such powers
As might hold sortance with his quality,
The which he could not levy; whereupon
He is retired, to ripe his growing fortunes,
To Scotland; and concludes in hearty prayers
That your attempts may overlive the hazard
And fearful meeting of their opposite.

Mowb. Thus do the hopes we have in him touch ground, And dash themselves to pieces.

Hast.

Enter a Messenger.

Now, what news?

Mess. West of this forest, scarcely off a mile,

In goodly form comes on the enemy;

And, by the ground they hide, I judge their number
Upon or near the rate of thirty thousand.

Mowb. The just proportion that we gave them out.
Let us sway on,1 and face them in the field.

Arch. What well-appointed leader fronts us here?
Mowb. I think it is my Lord of Westmoreland.

Enter WESTMORELAND.

West. Health and fair greeting from our general, The Prince, Lord John and Duke of Lancaster.

Arch. Say on, my Lord of Westmoreland, in peace, What doth concern your coming.

1 To sway was sometimes used for a rushing, hasty movement. Thus Holinshed: "The left side of the enemy was compelled to sway a good way back and give ground."

2 Well-appointed is the same as well-furnished, or well-equipped.

West.

Then, my lord,

Unto your Grace do I in chief address
The substance of my speech. If that rebellion
Came like itself, in base and abject routs,
Led on by heady youth, guarded3 with rags,
And countenanced by boys and beggary,-
I say, if damn'd commotion so appear'd,
In his true, native, and most proper shape,
You, reverend father, and these noble lords,
Had not been here, to dress the ugly form
Of bare and bloody insurrection

With your fair honours. You, Lord Archbishop,-
Whose see is by a civil peace maintain'd;

Whose beard the silver hand of peace hath touch'd;
Whose learning and good letters peace hath tutor❜d;
Whose white investments 4 figure innocence,
The dove and very blessèd spirit of peace,
Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself

Out of the speech of peace, that bears such grace,
Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of war;
Turning your books to greaves,5 your ink to blood,
Your pens to lances, and your tongue divine

To a loud trumpet and a point of war?6

3 Guarded is a term of dress; to guard being to ornament with guards or facings. See vol. iv. page 165, note 31.

4 Formerly all bishops wore white, even when they travelled. This white investment was the episcopal rochet.

5 Greaves were leg-armour, and were sometimes made of leather; and, as books were covered with leather, the figure of turning mind-armour into leg-armour was natural and apt.

6 A point of war is a warlike strain of music. So in Greene's Orlando Furioso: "To play him hunt's-up with a point of war." And in Peele's Edward the First, 1593: "Sound proudly here a perfect point of war." Also, Scott, in Waverly, Chap. xlvi.: "The trumpets and kettle-drums of the cavalry were next heard to perform the beautiful and wild point of war appropriated as a signal for that piece of nocturnal duty."

Arch. Wherefore do I this? so the question stands.
Briefly to this end: We are all diseased;
And with our surfeiting and wanton hours
Have brought ourselves into a burning fever,
And we must bleed for it: of which disease
Our late King, Richard, being infected, died.
But, my most noble Lord of Westmoreland,
I take not on me here as a physician ;
Nor do I, as an enemy to peace,
Troop in the throngs of military men;
But, rather, show awhile like fearful war,
To diet rank minds sick of happiness,

And purge th' obstructions which begin to stop
Our very veins of life. Hear me more plainly.
I have in equal balance justly weigh'd

What wrongs our arms may do, what wrongs we suffer,

And find our griefs heavier than our offences.

We see which way the stream of time doth run,
And are enforced from our most quiet sphere
By the rough torrent of occasion;

And have the summary of all our griefs,

When time shall serve, to show in articles;
Which long ere this we offer'd to the King,
And might by no suit gain our audience :

When we are wrong'd, and would unfold our griefs,
We are denied access unto his person

Even by those men that most have done us wrong.
The dangers of the days but newly gone,
Whose memory is written on the earth
With yet-appearing blood, and the examples
Of every minute's instance,7 present now,
Have put us in these ill-beseeming arms;

7 "Examples of every minute's instance" probably means examples which every minute supplies or instances.

Not to break peace, or any branch of it,
But to establish here a peace indeed,
Concurring both in name and quality.

West. When ever yet was your appeal denied ;
Wherein have you been galled by the King;
hath been suborn'd to grate on you;
That you should seal this lawless bloody book

What peer

Of forged rebellion with a seal divine,

And consecrate commotion's bitter edge?

Arch. My burden general is the commonwealth; To brother born an household cruelty,

I make my quarrel in particular.8

West. There is no need of any such redress;
Or, if there were, it not belongs to you.

Mowb. Why not to him in part, and to us all
That feel the bruises of the days before,
And suffer the condition of these times
To lay a heavy and unequal hand
Upon our honours?

West.

O, my good Lord Mowbray,
Construe the times to their necessities,
And you shall say indeed, it is the time,
And not the King, that doth you injuries.
Yet, for your part, it not appears to me,
Either from th' King, or in the present time,
That you should have an inch of any ground
To build a grief on: were you not restored
To all the Duke of Norfolk's signiories,

8 Here burden general of course refers to the public grievances which the speaker has just been recounting, and for the redress of which he claims to be in arms. Then, besides this, he has a private or particular cause of quarrel in the wounding of his household affections by the cruelty inflicted on his own brother. So, in the preceding play, i. 3, we have Worcester speaking of the Archbishop as "bearing hard his brother's death at Bristol, the Lord Scroop." See Critical Notes.

Your noble and right-well-remember'd father's?

Mowb. What thing, in honour, had my father lost,
That need to be revived and breathed in me?
The King, that loved him, as the State stood then
Was, force perforce,9 compell'd to banish him:
And when that Henry Bolingbroke and he
Being mounted and both roused in their seats,
Their neighing coursers daring of the spur,
Their armed staves in charge, 10 their beavers down,11
Their eyes of fire sparkling through sights of steel,12
And the loud trumpet blowing them together;
Then, then, when there was nothing could have stay'd
My father from the breast of Bolingbroke, -

O, when the King did throw his warder down,13

His own life hung upon the staff he threw :

Then threw he down himself, and all their lives

That by indictment and by dint of sword

Have since miscarried under Bolingbroke.

West. You speak, Lord Mowbray, now you know not what.

The Earl of Hereford 14 was reputed then

In England the most valiant gentleman:

Who knows on whom Fortune would then have smiled?

9 Force perforce was a reduplicate way of intensifying an expression of necessity; like the French force forcée. The Poet has it repeatedly thus. So in 2 King Henry VI., i. I: "And, force perforce, I'll make him yield the crown." See, also, vol. x. page 47, note 10.

10 That is, their lances being fixed in rest for the encounter.

11 The beaver was a movable part of the helmet, covering the face in fight, but lifted up when the wearer chose. See page 103, note 20.

12 The holes in their helmets, through which they could see to direct their aim.

13 This refers to the act of Richard in arresting the duel between Bolingbroke and the Duke of Norfolk, and ordering them both into exile. The matter is represented at length in the third scene of King Richard II.

14 This is a mistake; he was Duke of Hereford.