EXTON            As full of valour as of royal blood.

Both have I spilled. O would the deed were good—

For now the devil that told me I did well

Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.

This dead King to the living King I’ll bear—

Take hence the rest and give them burial here.

[Exeunt with the bodies]        (5.5.113-118)

Exton is filled with remorse, which is not uncommon among murderers in the histories: no opportunity for a charismatic speech of Machiavellian triumph here, and after all (as he perhaps now realises) he is merely a small cog in a much bigger machine, his suggestibility exploited and his impulses harnessed by larger forces. It was a devil that told him he did well. There’s a sense of a camera pulling back to a wide angle, and of History (with a capital H): this deed is chronicled in hell. This is how Exton will be remembered, if he’s remembered at all, as a murderer, a regicide, a traitor. Richard has died well, as full of valour as of royal blood, and Exton must live with the consequences, whether legal or psychological, of having spilled that blood, of having killed a King; it’s as if the enormity of that action has only just occurred to him. His coupling of this dead King with the living King makes Richard and Bolingbroke a pair, doubles once more, both Kings, one living and one dead. It’s a strange, literal manifestation of the doctrine of the king’s two bodies: the King is dead, long live the King! Exton will take Richard’s body to Bolingbroke, to prove what he’s done but also, perhaps, as a strange form of expiation. The rest—and yes, there might be two dead servants, or it could just be a nice example of a singular them—will be given burial here, where they’ve fallen, at Pomfret. The King is dead, the stage is cleared—and now the news must be taken to Bolingbroke. One scene to go.

That Richard was murdered by Exton appears in only one source, and historians generally agree that he starved to death, either of his own volition or through the actions of his keepers, in early 1400; the date often given is 14 February, with the order being given for his body to be taken to London on 17 February. The murder is, of course, more ‘dramatic’; it also more sharply focuses Bolingbroke’s culpability and guilt.