RICHARD        Draw near,

And list what with our council we have done.

For that our kingdom’s earth should not be soiled

With that dear blood which it hath fosterèd,

And for our eyes do hate the dire aspect

Of civil wounds ploughed up with neighbour’s sword,

And for we think the eagle-wingèd pride

Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts,

With rival-hating envy, set on you

To wake our peace, which in our country’s cradle

Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep,

Which so roused up with boist’rous untuned drums,

With harsh resounding trumpets’ dreadful bray

And grating shock of wrathful iron arms,

Might from our quiet confines fright fair peace,

And make us wade even in our kindred’s blood:

Therefore we banish you our territories. (1.3.123-139)

 

This isn’t just a long speech, it’s more or less a single sentence, made up of a series of subordinate clauses only clarified in its last line. It’s not clear how long the conference between Richard and his nobles has lasted, and both the length and the form—heated discussion between Richard and others, with much back-and-forth and gesticulation? Richard telling them what he plans to do, and ignoring any protestations? quiet resignation from the nobles at this caprice?—are entirely up to the production. Mowbray and Bolingbroke must draw near, but the King’s not going to tell them right away what their fate will be: first, he tells them why he’s taken this decision. And he does so in vivid, ghastly terms: he has made this decision to avoid bloodshed, that the land should not be soiled with the blood of its own people, whom the land has nurtured. He does not want civil strife, whereby neighbour turns on neighbour, ploughing up wounds. The land is a body, swords are ploughs (biblical language ironized: swords beaten into ploughshares metaphorically, not literally); Richard is imagining a nation and a land bloodily ripping itself apart. Civil war. (And the audience remembers the internecine conflicts of the first tetralogy, the Henry VI plays, Richard III, which come after Richard II in historical terms but predate it theatrically.) But there’s more, as Richard goes on to make the accusation, and the fear, specific: he accuses Bolingbroke and Mowbray of plotting together to start such a civil war. He accuses them of eagle-wingèd pride, sky-aspiring, ambitious thoughts; getting above themselves, yes, but in spiritual terms, he is characterizing them as Lucifer figures, full of pride, seeking to depose God himself (here, in the form of his anointed deputy, the King). The peace that such civil war would destroy is like a baby, fast asleep in its cradle, breathing gently (and, cleverly, the word baby is never used; it’s the child’s breath which is infant, and sweet, and our imaginations supply the slumbering child, its unmistakable baby perfume. Pity, like a naked newborn babe, as Macbeth will say, a decade or so later.) And here those who would stir up a civil war are like Herod, massacring innocents, although Richard doesn’t go quite so far, pausing with the evocation of the startled, frightened child, woken by boist’rous untuned drums, harsh resounding trumpets’ dreadful bray, the grating shock (much more evocative than clash) of wrathful iron arms, of weapons, those swords ploughing up and wounding the land and its people. And then, almost at its end, and its point—finally—the conceit pivots back to where it began, to blood on the land, family blood, so deep that it must be waded through, a dreadful flood. It’s to avoid all this, apparently—and with no proof, or indeed prior indication that they were planning to unite in such an insurrection—that King Richard has made this decision: to banish Mowbray and Bolingbroke.