GREEN            Ah madam, ’tis too true and, that is worse,

The Lord Northumberland, his son young Harry Percy,

The lords of Ross, Beaumont and Willoughby

With all their pow’rful friends are fled to him.

BUSHY            Why have you not proclaimed Northumberland

And all the rest revolted faction, traitors?

GREEN            We have, whereupon the Earl of Worcester

Hath broke his staff, resigned his stewardship,

And all the household servants fled with him

To Bolingbroke.         (2.2.52-61)

Now that Green’s delivered the bad news about Bolingbroke’s return, he continues swiftly to give an even more dire account of the situation. The three powerful nobles seen in the previous scene, only a moment earlier, Northumberland, Willoughby, and Ross, have indeed gone to Bolingbroke (and this has the effect of neatly and economically moving the action on in time: they’re with Bolingbroke already, or well on their way, in the space of fifty lines of stage time, faster even than the horses that they called for). And Shakespeare cleverly escalates the size of the rebellion: Bolingbroke we knew about, and we saw Northumberland, Ross, and Willoughby. Beaumont is a new name, though, and Harry Percy hasn’t appeared yet in the play; they too have joined with Bolingbroke. (Harry Percy is the Hotspur of 1 Henry IV.) And it’s not just these big names, it’s all their powerful friends too, the lesser nobles and gentlemen to whom they are allied—and left unsaid is that those friends, too, will have their bands of loyal fighting men.

Bushy asks the obvious question: why have you not proclaimed Northumberland and all the rest of therevolted faction traitors? Stupid question, is Green’s implicit reply; we did that, of course. Had no effect. Except that the Earl of Worcester (who hasn’t appeared either, and won’t), the King’s steward, that is, the head of his household, one of the highest ranking court officials, broke his staff and resigned his stewardship. Historically, Worcester was Northumberland’s brother; by resigning his office in Richard’s household, he has made clear where his loyalties lie. Breaking his staff, the thin, white wooden stave which is the symbol of his position and rank, is an emphatic way of resigning, but more than that, it’s what would ordinarily accompany the death of the king: at great funerals (of kings, princes, nobles) their household officers ritually broke their staffs of office and threw the pieces into the grave. There’s a provocative suggestion that the king is, if not quite dead, then no longer king. And the household servants, those who knew Richard personally, who might have some personal loyalty to him above and beyond their allegiance to him as sovereign—they’ve all fled with Worcester too, to Bolingbroke.

Underlying this is a tension that a modern audience mightn’t be quite so alert to: Bushy, Bagot, and Green are personally dependent on the King in a way that Northumberland, Worcester and the rest aren’t. They’re knights, councillors, politicians, gentlemen (historically at least), but they’re not members of the ancient nobility of England. They have no great estates and command no loyal followers and, as may already have been made clear in performance, they are despised by the nobles for having led the king astray. If he falls, they fall with him.