BOLINGBROKE          You have misled a prince, a royal king,

A happy gentleman in blood and lineaments,

By you unhappied and disfigured clean.

You have in manner with your sinful hours

Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him,

Broke the possession of a royal bed

And stained the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks

With tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs.      (3.1.8-15)

So Bolingbroke gets underway, with his list of charges, justifying to the audience, both on and off-stage, the summary execution of Bushy and Green which is about to be carried out. The first charge, the principal one, and probably the most accurate and least controversial, is that Bushy and Green have been bad, corrupt and corrupting advisers to the King. They have misled a prince, a royal king; they have corrupted his mind, prevented him from governing wisely and well. This is the most grievous charge that can be levied against favourites and counsellors, because (in a conceit going back at least to Plutarch, and much beloved of Renaissance humanist writers on government, and on the education of princes) the prince is like a fountain, whose power and influence flows out to every corner of the land. And if that source is corrupted by poor or malign counsel, then the whole realm suffers. (Yes, I did write a book partly about this.) Richard was, is, a happy gentleman in blood and lineaments, fortunate and blessed in his noble birth, his blood, and in his appearance, his temperament, his talents. But you have brought bad luck to him, unhappied him, made him miserable, and utterly disfigured, debased and corrupted all that is good about him. Fair enough; we’ve seen plenty of evidence of this.

The next bit is odd. Bolingbroke accuses Bushy and Green of having been the King’s lovers, having corrupted him sexually—and he frames in in terms of, you’ve made him betray the Queen, alienated him from his wife, made a divorce betwixt his queen and him (not an actual divorce, but an estrangement). This personalises what Bushy and Green are meant to have done: this isn’t the general corruption of a relationship between a ruler and his people, the corruption of an office and a role, it’s the poisoning of a particular relationship between two people, an act of deliberate, personal cruelty. The Queen’s apparent distress is vividly evoked; the audience might remember her grief at being parted from the King in 2.2, when it was Bushy who offered her a kind of metaphysical consolation and told her not to cry.

Bolingbroke’s accusation is often seized on in performance, suggesting that Richard and his favourites have had sexual relationships with each other (and with Aumerle too, sometimes). There’s no suggestion in the historical sources that Richard had homosexual relationships, and historically he seems to have been a devoted husband to his first wife Anne, deeply distressed by her death, and his second wife Isabella was a child; if he did commit adultery (as Holinshed does suggest) then it was apparently with women, not men. To suggest it here might remind the audience of Marlowe’s Edward II, where the King is unambiguously having a sexual relationship with his male favourite Gaveston, and ruling unwisely because of it. But to an early modern audience, what Bolingbroke’s doing would also be more generally familiar: he’s putting Richard beyond the pale. An accusation of sodomy—like an accusation of atheism—was a way of making other charges stick, of saying, this is a person who is generally corrupt, immoral, a bad, sinful person; mad, bad and dangerous to know. The accusation is enough; it’s a kind of ritual box to be ticked. In his first charge, that of bad counsel and the corruption of government, Bolingbroke can suggest that Richard is, not quite an innocent, but that he has been led astray by Bushy and Green. In this second, apparently invented, charge, Richard is implicitly as guilty as the other men, in allowing himself to be led astray into sinful hoursof sexual immorality and the apparent betrayal of his wife, who loves him and grieves for him. The hearers might pity the King, at first, but Bolingbroke’s aim here is for them to be disgusted by him as much as by Bushy and Green. He is wily, and utterly ruthless.