MOWBRAY     First, the fair reverence of your highness curbs me

From giving reins and spurs to my free speech,

Which else would post until it had returned

These terms of treason doubled down his throat.

Setting aside his high blood’s royalty,

And let him be no kinsman to my liege,

I do defy him and I spit at him,

Call him a slanderous coward and a villain,

Which to maintain I would allow him odds

And meet him, were I tied to run afoot

Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps

Or any other ground inhabitable,

Wherever Englishman durst set his foot.

Meantime, let this defend my loyalty:

By all my hopes most falsely doth he lie. (1.1.54-68)

But what do you really think, Mowbray? He’s good, but he’s less controlled than Bolingbroke, more passionate, less chilly. His first conceit imagines speech as a horse, which (he says) is only being curbed, restrained by his deference to the king’s presence—otherwise he’d give his words free rein, and spur them on at top speed, post, so that Bolingbroke’s own words, his accusations of treason, were turned back on themselves and doubled down his throat. (It’s a slightly uneasy metaphor, a fleeting glimpse of Bolingbroke being choked with a horse… The galloping horse is also, almost inevitably, uncontrolled passion, unrestrained by reason. Horses will be important in the play.) Mowbray seems to regain a little control, noting that Bolingbroke is of royal blood, and kinsman to King Richard (they are first cousins), but he mentions it only to set it aside: he defies Bolingbroke and spits at him. Defy is a key word here: it’s the formal language of chivalric challenge, as well as an insult. Mowbray can’t quite keep it formal; he can’t keep a lid on his anger or, perhaps, maintain control of his body. Spitting is insulting, but it’s also common, and it suggests excess, a body out of control, in need of purgation – like the hot blood which has already been invoked. And now the insults flow: Mowbray calls Bolingbroke not only a traitor, but a slanderous coward and a villain (not simply a miscreant, a baddie, but common, a peasant, a slave). And he would maintain that, in another elaborate conceit, even if he had to prove it by running to the frozen ridges of the Alps, or any other ground inhabitable (that is, uninhabitable). He would climb the highest, frostiest mountain, and go to the ends of the earth (wherever Englishman durst set his foot: what it is to be an Englishman will periodically be moot in this play, although here Mowbray does rather sound like a stiff-upper-lipped Victorian explorer) in order to prove himself against Bolingbroke. He concludes by bringing it back to the formal point, the proper terms of the encounter: I am loyal, not a traitor. And Bolingbroke is a liar. The setting is medieval, as is the frame of the challenge and of judicial combat, but the terms here would be recognizable to a mid 1590s audience: Mowbray is ‘giving Bolingbroke the lie’, impugning his honour as a gentleman. Courtiers and gallants dueled on such terms.