MOWBRAY     [taking up the gage] I take it up, and by that sword I swear

Which gently laid my knighthood on my shoulder,

I’ll answer thee in any fair degree

Or chivalrous design of knightly trial.

And when I mount, alive may I not light

If I be traitor or unjustly fight.

RICHARD        What doth our cousin lay to Mowbray’s charge?

It must be great that can inherit us

So much as of a thought of ill in him. (1.1.78-86)

Mowbray accepts Bolingbroke’s challenge in precisely the chivalric terms in which it has been issued: as he picks up the gage he aligns his stooping gesture, potentially undignified and abased, with the moment at which he was dubbed knight by the King, swearing not by his own sword but by that sword with which Richard dubbed him knight. This is now about honour as much as loyalty and truth. I’m up for any kind of trial by combat, he tells Bolingbroke, so long as it’s fair, chivalrous, knightly; sanctioned by the standards and laws of knightly conduct. But he is specifically envisaging a joust, on horses: when I mount, he says, may I never alight, get off my horse again alive, if I am a traitor or fight unjustly. The barely-controlled horse of his furious initial response to Bolingbroke, his free speech curbed only by the presence of the King, has now been reimagined in a more acceptable form, as the means of judicial combat, and the very ground of knighthood (and ultimately glancing at the chivalrous knight as horseman). And he finishes with a defiant couplet.

Richard, disingenuous, politic, astute: goodness, what’s my cousin Bolingbroke accusing Mowbray of? It’ll have to be something MASSIVE, to make us even begin to imagine that he’s done something bad. Over to you, Bolingbroke…