CARLISLE Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound.
Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be called
The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursèd earth.
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child’s children, cry against you ‘woe!’ (4.1.140-150)
The Turks and infidels, whom Carlisle has just othered and invoked as the enemies of Christendom, the polar opposites of Christians and Englishmen, will become peaceful instead of warmongering and conflict-ridden, their habitual state, and tumultuous wars will engulf this seat of peace, England—John of Gaunt’s England, the sceptred isle of nostalgia and fantasy, and of prophecy, as here. Those tumultuous wars will confound kin with kin and kind with kind; they will set families against one another; they will be unnatural and disordered, as well as savage. (An audience in the 1590s might specifically recall the strange, potent battlefield scene in 3 Henry VI, in which the king encounters a Father who has killed his Son, and a Son who has killed his Father, as well as all the other internecine family conflicts staged in the first tetralogy.) England will become the place in which disorder, horror, fear and mutiny inhabit, or abide: it will no longer be Gaunt’s other Eden, demi-Paradise but its polar opposite, the field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls. Golgotha, the location of the Crucifixion, means the place of skulls; in Christian legend it was sometimes thought of as being on the site of the garden of Eden, or suggested that the wood of the Cross was made from the Tree of Knowledge. England will become a place where Christ is crucified anew.
O, if you raise this house against this house, Carlisle concludes, this house being at once the assembled parliament and, more generally, imagining England as a single household, a single family or dynasty, but fatally divided as Lancaster and York will be, and also glancing at the Biblical injunction, ‘And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand’ (Mark 3.24-5)—if you do such a thing, by seizing the throne from Richard or enabling it to be seized, it will the woefullest division prove that ever fell upon this cursed earth. It will be a catastrophe. The country will fall apart, in violence and bloodshed, and with repercussions that will be felt for generations. Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so, lest child, child’s children, cry against you ‘woe!’ Your children, and your children’s children, will curse and lament if you let this thing happen. Beware!
