RICHARD        Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord;

For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed

To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,

God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay

A glorious angel. Then if angels fight,

Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.      (3.2.54-62)

And now Richard really hits his stride and the whole speech comes into focus: it’s as if (orchestral metaphor) all the stuff about the earth and the flowers and the nettles and the snake, the sun and earth and the day and the night was just messing around in the woodwinds. But this is the whole brass section in full voice, a clarion call statement of belief: Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king. Two lines and only two words that aren’t monosyllabic, and so anointed, as it should, jumps out of the texture, the opposite of water, the only other polysyllabic word. This is the crux of it: has Richard been transformed by his coronation, and specifically by the act of anointing, such that he cannot be other than the king? He thinks so. This is an ontological argument, not a legal or political or even a moral one. Water cannot wash away that balm, that holy oil, no matter how rough or rude (the Irish sea he’s just crossed, but rough and rude are also implicitly applied to his enemies). I am the King; I am untouchable. The breath of worldly, mortal men, their weak, mere words (but also, picking up on rough and rude, the mental image of someone in your face, too close, stinking)—that breath, those words are powerless to depose the deputy elected by the Lord. God made me King. That’s that.

There’s more. (The trumpets swell.) For every man that Bolingbroke has pressed, impressed, forced to fight for him, to lift shrewd steel against our golden crown (the purity and brilliance of gold, set against the sharp brutality of steel; the perfection of the circle set against the sword; yes, there may well be a play of sexual symbols there too, the insurrection as violation) God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay a glorious angel. God is on my side. An army of angels. (And the conceit is animated by a play on coins: both crowns and angels are golden coins.) If angels fight, weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right. If God be for us, who shall be against us? The angel army might sound absurd, but the baroque grandeur of the rhetoric gives it such momentum that it persuades, however momentarily—and even more than that, what must convince, fatefully, is Richard’s apparently unshakeable conviction that he has been made king by God, and that such a change of state is irreversible. Couplet. Cadence. QED.