RICHARD        We were not born to sue, but to command,

Which, since we cannot do to make you friends,

Be ready, as your lives shall answer it,

At Coventry, upon Saint Lambert’s Day.

There shall your swords and lances arbitrate

The swelling difference of your settled hate.

Since we cannot atone you, we shall see

Justice design the victor’s chivalry.

Lord Marshal, command our officers-at-arms

Be ready to direct these home alarms.       Exeunt. (1.1.196-205)

Richard’s had enough of the posturing and protestations; neither Mowbray nor Bolingbroke is going to back down, and they could well keep churning out defiant rhyming couplets for some time yet. So he pulls rank (which is, after all, what they’ve been asking him to do) by reminding them that he’s the one in charge, and that he is not accustomed to asking people to do things, but rather giving orders: we were not born to sue, but to command. So that’s what he does. He’s giving up on reconciling them, making them friends, and so he sets the time and place, Coventry, upon Saint Lambert’s Day. 17 September, apparently: Wikipedia supplies that the saint in question is St Lambert of Maastricht, honoured for his denunciation of the adulterous Merovingian King Pepin and murdered not long thereafter. I can’t find any evidence that the feast, or indeed the saint, would have been known in Elizabethan England. 17 September is now the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen…) It often raises a giggle in performance, because St Lambert isn’t exactly one of the big hitters of the church calendar, and perhaps also because it sounds not unlike St Leonard, also a Merovingian saint, the festivities for whom are murderously celebrated in the second episode of the first series of Blackadder. But, humorous-sounding saints aside, Richard’s done what they want: on that day, Mowbray and Bolingbroke must meet in formal judicial combat, whereby their swords and lances will arbitrate the quarrel between them, which is only getting more violently heated and intractable, the swelling difference of your settled hate. They must be there and ready, as their lives shall answer it, both on pain of death and ready to die. Justice—divine justice—shall design or designate the winner, in a proper chivalric combat. (Judicial combat no longer existed in Shakespeare’s England, and dueling most definitely did not have the same divinely or legally sanctioned status as an arbiter of right in the law. Shakespeare uses some of the terms which might frame a duel, however, and in particular the language of honour and reputation, to set up the older custom.) And in the last of the three concluding couplets, an ominous note: the Lord Marshal, ultimately in charge of such matters of chivalry, is charged with seeing that all the arrangements are made and passing on orders to the officers-at-arms, the relevant officials, that they be ready to direct these home alarms. Home alarms, domestic troubles, calls to arms within the country, rather than directed against a foreign enemy. Not quite civil war, or a coup, or a rebellion, but glancing at the possibility. And that’s the end of the scene.

It’s a strange opening in some ways, tense but static, with much subtext. Mowbray does most of the talking, by a long way, with Richard and Bolingbroke speaking almost equal numbers of lines and Gaunt making the odd contribution. The scene establishes a number of tropes, perhaps above all the use of liturgical, spiritual, and biblical language, which will come back again and again in the play. It also sets up, via Bolingbroke and Mowbray, a particular adversarial structure, a war of words, which could look equal, but is in fact quite lopsided; in the later confrontations between Richard and Bolingbroke, the former will speak much more but the latter will have, ultimately, the more devastating impact. But we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves…