RICHARD        Thy son is banished upon good advice,

Whereto thy tongue a party-verdict gave.

Why at our justice seem’st thou then to lour?

GAUNT            Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.

You urged me as a judge, but I had rather

You would have bid me argue like a father.

O, had it been a stranger, not my child,

To smooth his fault I should have been more mild;

A partial slander sought I to avoid

And in the sentence my own life destroyed.

Alas, I looked when some of you should say

I was too strict to make mine own away,

But you gave leave to my unwilling tongue

Against my will to do myself this wrong.

RICHARD        Cousin, farewell and uncle, bid him so.

Six years we banish him, and he shall go.

Flourish. Exit [Richard and his train] (1.3.233-248SD)

 

There’s a retrospective direction here for the huddle immediately after Richard stopped the combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray: Gaunt consented to the banishment; Richard consulted among his advisers. (The numbers will of course depend on the production: Gaunt, certainly, but how many others besides Bushy, Bagot, and Green? How long did it last? Having the discussion seen but not heard is a smart and interesting move.) There was good advice, apparently, and there was a party-verdict, a joint decision. (At least that’s how Richard’s spinning it now.) It becomes ever more apparent that in some respects the King is an extremely shrewd political operator. Gaunt has just been stating, resonantly, plaintively, that the king’s word is law, until it’s not: Richard is coming back and saying, but I consulted. But this was a group decision, to which you gave your assent. Are you going back on that? Why have you changed your mind? Why are you now louring, looking ominously and unfavourably, at our justice? (And is that our the royal plural, or a reminder that this was indeed a joint decision, as well as justice?) Gaunt has to fall back on aphorisms while he gathers himself: things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour; now I’ve thought about it a bit more, I don’t like it. It seemed like an agreeable solution in the moment, but not now. More poignantly: you urged me as a judge, but I had rather you would have bid me argue like a father. My principles got the better of me: because you asked me to respond politically, rather than paternally, I felt that I couldn’t plead on my son’s behalf. I spoke as a statesman, a royal counsellor, not a father, and in fact if it hadn’t been my own child, I would have spoken up on his behalf, pleaded for leniency, for his fault to be smoothed. I didn’t wanted to be accused of bias, of being partial (hence partial-slander)—and in that misguided high-mindedness, with that sentence of banishment, I’ve destroyed my own life. Indeed, I was waiting for others to speak up, to urge me to be lenient, but no one did. The advice you solicited, and that I gave was unwilling, and I wronged myself in giving it.

But also: Richard the fatherless boy, who came to the throne as a child of 10, his own father (never king) having died the year before. Fathers are important in this play; so is their palpable absence. And Richard is childless, too.

Richard is brusquely unmoved by this heart-felt, desperate sequence of couplets. Cousin, farewell (to Bolingbroke); say your goodbyes (to Gaunt). Six years we banish him, and he shall go. Decision made, discussion ended. A final flourish of trumpets, as Richard leaves, with his attendants; this could take some time. And the scale of the scene shrinks, as only the Lord Marshal, Gaunt, Bolingbroke, and Aumerle remain.