YORK              Why have those banished and forbidden legs

Dared once to touch a dust of England’s ground?

But then, more why—why have they dared to march

So many miles upon her peaceful bosom,

Frighting her pale-faced villages with war

And ostentation of despisèd arms?

Cam’st thou because the anointed King is hence?

Why, foolish boy, the King is left behind,

And in my loyal bosom lies his power. (2.3.89-97)

In previous scenes it might have been possible to see York as faintly ridiculous, a bit of a bumbler, promoted above his competency and having to make the best of things. Here, however, it is Plantagenet who speaks, full of the prophetic rage and eloquence more often associated with his brother, Bolingbroke’s own father, Gaunt. How BLOODY dare you? Banished and forbidden legs could sound briefly silly, as if detached from a torso, advancing a toe out of the sea on to dry land, but the sheer fury of it should close off that possibility. You shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t be touching even the smallest part, a dust, a speck, of English soil. But that’s only the start. Dust, earth becomes (as so often, and not least in Genesis, at the creation of Adam) a body, here a woman’s body: York is not quite accusing Bolingbroke of sexual assault, but he’s attributing a gendered and perhaps sexualised dimension to his invasion, whether the land is imagined as a threatened virgin or an insulted mother (or both). The conceit of an army marching so many miles upon her peaceful bosom may be a bit odd, and not entirely worked through, but the evocation of the pale-faced villages frighted with war is striking, as the terrified people watch the troops pass, bearing their despisèd arms, despisèd because they are weapons borne in the cause of rebellion and treason. (There’s some tricksy historical play here: one might imagine that the people look back fearfully to the Wars of the Roses, just passing out of living memory at the time when Shakespeare wrote; the Battle of Bosworth was in 1485, and a middle-aged English person in the 1590s could have spoken to someone who had spoken to someone who was there. But those terrible battles are in the future of the action of this play.)

Did you come because you knew that the anointed King is hence, away at war in Ireland? (Opportunist, even coward is the implication here.) Why, foolish boy (boy, always the most cutting insult, especially if Bolingbroke is still on his knees, as seems likely), the King is left behind, and in my loyal bosom lies his power. York is making a straightforward point here: he is officially the King’s regent, and as such fully exercises the sovereign’s power in his absence. There is no power vacuum. But, more importantly, and vitally for the action and language of the play as it will unfold from this point, York is foregrounding the potential for division between the body of the King and the power of his office. The King, King Richard, is absent in Ireland, it is true, but his power continues to be exercised throughout his realm. And, incidentally, York reminds Bolingbroke (and we might not even notice it) that the King is anointed, touched with holy oils at the moment of his coronation, as a sign that he is God’s deputy on earth, blessed and sealed with the divine. The question as to whether that is a permanent state, whether that action and identity can ever be repudiated or undone, will return. At the moment, it seems, York regards the status of the anointed King as immutable.