BOLINGBROKE Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.
Come mourn with me for what I do lament
And put on sullen black incontinent.
I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.
March sadly after. Grace my mournings here
In weeping after this untimely bier. Exeunt (5.6.45-52)
Well, we are where we are. This is more than a downbeat ending to the play; it’s sombre, chilling, morally and spiritually anguished. Bolingbroke is simultaneously making a confession and a vow. I protest my soul is full of woe that blood should sprinkle me to make me grow. There’s a sense of baptism here, as Bolingbroke has become King Henry IV, or of the coronation service and its balm and holy oils with which Richard has been so obsessed—but here it’s neither water nor oil that has marked the moment of Bolingbroke’s transformation into King, but blood. And there’s also an echo of the penitential psalms, such as Ps 50/51, the Miserere, which in some translations has the penitent ask to be sprinkled with hyssop (asperges me hyssopo); the text is part of the Mass, a prayer for cleansing and forgiveness as the congregation are sprinkled with water. (To extend this perhaps rather tenuous connection, hyssop is the archetypal bitter herb in the bible. Of course it’s not actually mentioned here… but the frame of reference of Bolingbroke’s final speech is very much the Bible—Cain and Abel—and the liturgy.) Bolingbroke is also like the plants imagined at various points in the play, fertilised with blood; that’s the price of his flourishing.
And so he will mourn and lament, and his supporters must mourn with him too, immediately, incontinent, putting on sullen black, the voluminous black cloaks and hoods of funerals and ritual mourning. (The opening scene of 1 Henry VI has the assembled lords in mourning garb at the funeral of Henry V, an ominous theatrical precedent, given the faction and ultimately civil war into which the reign of Henry VI descends.) Even more than this, Bolingbroke will undertake a penitential pilgrimage: I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land to wash this blood off from my guilty hand. (Richard said that balm couldn’t ever be washedaway; for Bolingbroke that indelible stain will be blood. And he is therefore Pilate, as well as, indirectly, Cain.) Some in the audience might know already—and they would, later on, if they’d seen 2 Henry IV—that Bolingbroke never makes that voyage, but dies, in the palace of Westminster, in the Jerusalem Chamber.
Come mourn with me: an age-old plea for fellowship; don’t leave me alone with this. Grace my mournings here in weeping after this untimely bier. I need friends as much as I need loyal allies: in his final words, his spiritual anguish, his loneliness, Bolingbroke sounds like Richard, whose death, he admits, has been untimely.
It’s only just beginning. And it’s over.
