YORK              Take Hereford’s rights away and take from time

His charters and his customary rights,

Let not tomorrow then ensue today,

Be not thyself—for how art thou a king

But by fair sequence and succession?

Now, afore God—God forbid I say true—

If you do wrongfully seize Hereford’s rights,

Call in the letters patents that he hath

By his attorneys-general to sue

His livery, and deny his offered homage,

You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,

You lose a thousand well-disposèd hearts

And prick my tender patience to those thoughts

Which honour and allegiance cannot think.

RICHARD        Think what you will, we seize into our hands

His plate, his goods, his money and his lands. (2.1.195-210)

 

York is now making a point about the fundamental order of the world, its interconnectedness, its causalities. If Richard takes away Bolingbroke’s rights, by denying him his inheritance, then he might as well destroy time itself, deprive time of his charters and his customary rights, that is, the way the universe works, in terms of order, sequence, cause and effect. If you deprive Bolingbroke of what is lawfully his, York pleads with Richard, it’s as much a violation of the natural order as tomorrow not ensuing, following today. And, more to the point, you disrupt the very processes and structures by which you are king, by fair sequence and succession. (Another reason why there was so much emphasis, a moment earlier, on Richard as the heir of his father and grandfather, if not in all respects, as York has also argued.)

 

Then it gets knotty and legalistic. York is suggesting that as part of wrongfully seizing Hereford’s rights, the king would need to call in, revoke, the letters patents, official documents, that gave Bolingbroke the right to appoint and empower legal representatives, his attorneys-general, to claim his livery, his income in England even while he himself is abroad. The offered homage is the ritual profession of allegiance to the king which would allow Bolingbroke to claim his inheritance and titles (and not least as duke of Lancaster); unable to make it in person (because, banished) he would ordinarily be able to pay a fine. The point is less the detail (and I had to haul all of that out of the commentary) than that Richard is acting illegally as well as immorally and unwisely, and by so doing, he is disrupting and damaging the whole edifice of the common law, and natural law as well. And that will have consequences, bad ones: you pluck a thousand dangers on your head, you lose a thousand well-disposèd hearts. If you deprive a man of his inheritance, if you fail to keep your side of the bargain as the guarantor of law and order in the realm and go so far as to violate the law, the people will turn against you. And even I, for all my tender patience (returning to the terms in which York began his intervention: How long shall I be patient? Ah, how long shall tender duty make me suffer wrong?) will start to think thoughts which honour and allegiance cannot think. Disloyal thoughts. Treasonous thoughts. Even me.

 

OK, WHATEVER, think what you will, replies Richard. It makes no difference. We seize into our hands his plate, his goods, his money and his lands. And this neatly coupleted statement isn’t just a straightforward recapitulation of his initial claiming of Gaunt’s goods. For one, it’s not clear to whom his refers, but here, it’s presumably Hereford, Bolingbroke, not Gaunt. Richard isn’t even pretending to deny or fudge what he’s doing. And secondly, he explicitly says lands—this is the big deal, the real disruption of the laws and customs of inheritance. The moveables, the money—that’s bad enough. But the lands—that’s an outrage.