SCENE 2: A CHAMBER IN WHITEHALL. ENTER THE KING, QUEEN, LAUD, LORD STRAFTORD, LORD COTTINGTON, AND OTHER LORDS; ARCHY; ALSO ST. JOHN, WITH SOME GENTLEMEN OF THE INNS OF COURT

KING:

Thanks, gentlemen. I heartily accept

This token of your service: your gay masque

Was performed gallantly. And it shows well

When subjects twine such flowers of [observance?]

With the sharp thorns that deck the English crown.

A gentle heart enjoys what it confers,

Even as it suffers that which it inflicts,

Though Justice guides the stroke.

Accept my hearty thanks.

QUEEN:

And gentlemen,

Call your poor Queen your debtor. Your quaint pageant

Rose on me like the figures of past years,

Treading their still path back to infancy,

More beautiful and mild as they draw nearer

The quiet cradle. I could have almost wept

To think I was in Paris, where these shows

Are well devised—such as I was ere yet

My young heart shared a portion of the burthen,

The careful weight, of this great monarchy.

There, gentlemen, between the sovereign's pleasure

And that which it regards, no clamour lifts

Its proud interposition.

In Paris ribald censurers dare not move

Their poisonous tongues against these sinless sports;

And HIS smile

Warms those who bask in it, as ours would do

If … Take my heart's thanks: add them, gentlemen,

To those good words which, were he King of France,

My royal lord would turn to golden deeds.

ST. JOHN:

Madam, the love of Englishmen can make

The lightest favour of their lawful king

Outweigh a despot's.—We humbly take our leaves,

Enriched by smiles which France can never buy.

[EXEUNT ST. JOHN AND THE GENTLEMEN OF THE INNS OF COURT.]

KING:

My Lord Archbishop,

Mark you what spirit sits in St. John's eyes?

Methinks it is too saucy for this presence.

ARCHY: Yes, pray your Grace look: for, like an unsophisticated [eye] sees everything upside down, you who are wise will discern the shadow of an idiot in lawn sleeves and a rochet setting springes to catch woodcocks in haymaking time. Poor Archy, whose owl-eyes are tempered to the error of his age, and because he is a fool, and by special ordinance of God forbidden ever to see himself as he is, sees now in that deep eye a blindfold devil sitting on the ball, and weighing words out between king and subjects. One scale is full of promises, and the other full of protestations: and then another devil creeps behind the first out of the dark windings [of a] pregnant lawyer's brain, and takes the bandage from the other's eyes, and throws a sword into the left-hand scale, for all the world like my Lord Essex's there.

STRAFFORD:

A rod in pickle for the Fool's back!

ARCHY:

Ay, and some are now smiling whose tears will make the brine; for the

Fool sees—

STRAFFORD: Insolent! You shall have your coat turned and be whipped out of the palace for this.

ARCHY: When all the fools are whipped, and all the Protestant writers, while the knaves are whipping the fools ever since a thief was set to catch a thief. If all turncoats were whipped out of palaces, poor Archy would be disgraced in good company. Let the knaves whip the fools, and all the fools laugh at it. [Let the] wise and godly slit each other's noses and ears (having no need of any sense of discernment in their craft); and the knaves, to marshal them, join in a procession to Bedlam, to entreat the madmen to omit their sublime Platonic contemplations, and manage the state of England. Let all the honest men who lie [pinched?] up at the prisons or the pillories, in custody of the pursuivants of the High-Commission Court, marshal them.

[ENTER SECRETARY LYTTELTON, WITH PAPERS.]

KING [LOOKING OVER THE PAPERS]:

These stiff Scots

His Grace of Canterbury must take order

To force under the Church's yoke.—You, Wentworth,

Shall be myself in Ireland, and shall add

Your wisdom, gentleness, and energy,

To what in me were wanting.—My Lord Weston,

Look that those merchants draw not without loss

Their bullion from the Tower; and, on the payment

Of shipmoney, take fullest compensation

For violation of our royal forests,

Whose limits, from neglect, have been o'ergrown

With cottages and cornfields. The uttermost

Farthing exact from those who claim exemption

From knighthood: that which once was a reward

Shall thus be made a punishment, that subjects

May know how majesty can wear at will

The rugged mood.—My Lord of Coventry,

Lay my command upon the Courts below

That bail be not accepted for the prisoners

Under the warrant of the Star Chamber.

The people shall not find the stubbornness

Of Parliament a cheap or easy method

Of dealing with their rightful sovereign:

And doubt not this, my Lord of Coventry,

We will find time and place for fit rebuke.—

My Lord of Canterbury.

ARCHY:

The fool is here.

LAUD:

I crave permission of your Majesty

To order that this insolent fellow be

Chastised: he mocks the sacred character,

Scoffs at the state, and—

KING:

What, my Archy?

He mocks and mimics all he sees and hears,

Yet with a quaint and graceful licence—Prithee

For this once do not as Prynne would, were he

Primate of England. With your Grace's leave,

He lives in his own world; and, like a parrot

Hung in his gilded prison from the window

Of a queen's bower over the public way,

Blasphemes with a bird's mind:—his words, like arrows

Which know no aim beyond the archer's wit,

Strike sometimes what eludes philosophy.—

[TO ARCHY.]

Go, sirrah, and repent of your offence

Ten minutes in the rain; be it your penance

To bring news how the world goes there.

[EXIT ARCHY.]

Poor Archy!

He weaves about himself a world of mirth

Out of the wreck of ours.

LAUD:

I take with patience, as my Master did,

All scoffs permitted from above.

KING:

My lord,

Pray overlook these papers. Archy's words

Had wings, but these have talons.

QUEEN:

And the lion

That wears them must be tamed. My dearest lord,

I see the new-born courage in your eye

Armed to strike dead the Spirit of the Time,

Which spurs to rage the many-headed beast.

Do thou persist: for, faint but in resolve,

And it were better thou hadst still remained

The slave of thine own slaves, who tear like curs

The fugitive, and flee from the pursuer;

And Opportunity, that empty wolf,

Flies at his throat who falls. Subdue thy actions

Even to the disposition of thy purpose,

And be that tempered as the Ebro's steel;

And banish weak-eyed Mercy to the weak,

Whence she will greet thee with a gift of peace

And not betray thee with a traitor's kiss,

As when she keeps the company of rebels,

Who think that she is Fear. This do, lest we

Should fall as from a glorious pinnacle

In a bright dream, and wake as from a dream

Out of our worshipped state.

KING:

Beloved friend,

God is my witness that this weight of power,

Which He sets me my earthly task to wield

Under His law, is my delight and pride

Only because thou lovest that and me.

For a king bears the office of a God

To all the under world; and to his God

Alone he must deliver up his trust,

Unshorn of its permitted attributes.

[It seems] now as the baser elements

Had mutinied against the golden sun

That kindles them to harmony, and quells

Their self-destroying rapine. The wild million

Strike at the eye that guides them; like as humours

Of the distempered body that conspire

Against the spirit of life throned in the heart,—

And thus become the prey of one another,

And last of death—

STRAFFORD:

That which would be ambition in a subject

Is duty in a sovereign; for on him,

As on a keystone, hangs the arch of life,

Whose safety is its strength. Degree and form,

And all that makes the age of reasoning man

More memorable than a beast's, depend on this—

That Right should fence itself inviolably

With Power; in which respect the state of England

From usurpation by the insolent commons

Cries for reform.

Get treason, and spare treasure. Fee with coin

The loudest murmurers; feed with jealousies

Opposing factions,—be thyself of none;

And borrow gold of many, for those who lend

Will serve thee till thou payest them; and thus

Keep the fierce spirit of the hour at bay,

Till time, and its coming generations

Of nights and days unborn, bring some one chance,

…

Or war or pestilence or Nature's self,—

By some distemperature or terrible sign,

Be as an arbiter betwixt themselves.

Nor let your Majesty

Doubt here the peril of the unseen event.

How did your brother Kings, coheritors

In your high interest in the subject earth,

Rise past such troubles to that height of power

Where now they sit, and awfully serene

Smile on the trembling world? Such popular storms

Philip the Second of Spain, this Lewis of France,

And late the German head of many bodies,

And every petty lord of Italy,

Quelled or by arts or arms. Is England poorer

Or feebler? or art thou who wield'st her power

Tamer than they? or shall this island be—

[Girdled] by its inviolable waters—

To the world present and the world to come

Sole pattern of extinguished monarchy?

Not if thou dost as I would have thee do.

KING:

Your words shall be my deeds:

You speak the image of my thought. My friend

(If Kings can have a friend, I call thee so),

Beyond the large commission which [belongs]

Under the great seal of the realm, take this:

And, for some obvious reasons, let there be

No seal on it, except my kingly word

And honour as I am a gentleman.

Be—as thou art within my heart and mind—

Another self, here and in Ireland:

Do what thou judgest well, take amplest licence,

And stick not even at questionable means.

Hear me, Wentworth. My word is as a wall

Between thee and this world thine enemy—

That hates thee, for thou lovest me.

STRAFFORD:

I own

No friend but thee, no enemies but thine:

Thy lightest thought is my eternal law.

How weak, how short, is life to pay—

KING:

Peace, peace.

Thou ow'st me nothing yet.

[TO LAUD.]

My lord, what say

Those papers?

LAUD:

Your Majesty has ever interposed,

In lenity towards your native soil,

Between the heavy vengeance of the Church

And Scotland. Mark the consequence of warming

This brood of northern vipers in your bosom.

The rabble, instructed no doubt

By London, Lindsay, Hume, and false Argyll

(For the waves never menace heaven until

Scourged by the wind's invisible tyranny),

Have in the very temple of the Lord

Done outrage to His chosen ministers.

They scorn the liturgy of the Holy Church,

Refuse to obey her canons, and deny

The apostolic power with which the Spirit

Has filled its elect vessels, even from him

Who held the keys with power to loose and bind,

To him who now pleads in this royal presence.—

Let ample powers and new instructions be

Sent to the High Commissioners in Scotland.

To death, imprisonment, and confiscation,

Add torture, add the ruin of the kindred

Of the offender, add the brand of infamy,

Add mutilation: and if this suffice not,

Unleash the sword and fire, that in their thirst

They may lick up that scum of schismatics.

I laugh at those weak rebels who, desiring

What we possess, still prate of Christian peace,

As if those dreadful arbitrating messengers

Which play the part of God 'twixt right and wrong,

Should be let loose against the innocent sleep

Of templed cities and the smiling fields,

For some poor argument of policy

Which touches our own profit or our pride

(Where it indeed were Christian charity

To turn the cheek even to the smiter's hand):

And, when our great Redeemer, when our God,

When He who gave, accepted, and retained

Himself in propitiation of our sins,

Is scorned in His immediate ministry,

With hazard of the inestimable loss

Of all the truth and discipline which is

Salvation to the extremest generation

Of men innumerable, they talk of peace!

Such peace as Canaan found, let Scotland now:

For, by that Christ who came to bring a sword,

Not peace, upon the earth, and gave command

To His disciples at the Passover

That each should sell his robe and buy a sword,-

Once strip that minister of naked wrath,

And it shall never sleep in peace again

Till Scotland bend or break.

KING:

My Lord Archbishop,

Do what thou wilt and what thou canst in this.

Thy earthly even as thy heavenly King

Gives thee large power in his unquiet realm.

But we want money, and my mind misgives me

That for so great an enterprise, as yet,

We are unfurnished.

STRAFFORD:

Yet it may not long

Rest on our wills.

COTTINGTON:

The expenses

Of gathering shipmoney, and of distraining

For every petty rate (for we encounter

A desperate opposition inch by inch

In every warehouse and on every farm),

Have swallowed up the gross sum of the imposts;

So that, though felt as a most grievous scourge

Upon the land, they stand us in small stead

As touches the receipt.

STRAFFORD:

'Tis a conclusion

Most arithmetical: and thence you infer

Perhaps the assembling of a parliament.

Now, if a man should call his dearest enemies

T0 sit in licensed judgement on his life,

His Majesty might wisely take that course.

[ASIDE TO COTTINGTON.]

It is enough to expect from these lean imposts

That they perform the office of a scourge,

Without more profit.

[ALOUD.]

Fines and confiscations,

And a forced loan from the refractory city,

Will fill our coffers: and the golden love

Of loyal gentlemen and noble friends

For the worshipped father of our common country,

With contributions from the catholics,

Will make Rebellion pale in our excess.

Be these the expedients until time and wisdom

Shall frame a settled state of government.

LAUD:

And weak expedients they! Have we not drained

All, till the … which seemed

A mine exhaustless?

STRAFFORD:

And the love which IS,

If loyal hearts could turn their blood to gold.

LAUD:

Both now grow barren: and I speak it not

As loving parliaments, which, as they have been

In the right hand of bold bad mighty kings

The scourges of the bleeding Church, I hate.

Methinks they scarcely can deserve our fear.

STRAFFORD:

Oh! my dear liege, take back the wealth thou gavest:

With that, take all I held, but as in trust

For thee, of mine inheritance: leave me but

This unprovided body for thy service,

And a mind dedicated to no care

Except thy safety:—but assemble not

A parliament. Hundreds will bring, like me,

Their fortunes, as they would their blood, before—

KING:

No! thou who judgest them art but one. Alas!

We should be too much out of love with Heaven,

Did this vile world show many such as thee,

Thou perfect, just, and honourable man!

Never shall it be said that Charles of England

Stripped those he loved for fear of those he scorns;

Nor will he so much misbecome his throne

As to impoverish those who most adorn

And best defend it. That you urge, dear Strafford,

Inclines me rather—

QUEEN:

To a parliament?

Is this thy firmness? and thou wilt preside

Over a knot of … censurers,

To the unswearing of thy best resolves,

And choose the worst, when the worst comes too soon?

Plight not the worst before the worst must come.

Oh, wilt thou smile whilst our ribald foes,

Dressed in their own usurped authority,

Sharpen their tongues on Henrietta's fame?

It is enough! Thou lovest me no more!

[WEEPS.]

KING:

Oh, Henrietta!

[THEY TALK APART.]

COTTINGTON [TO LAUD]:

Money we have none:

And all the expedients of my Lord of Strafford

Will scarcely meet the arrears.

LAUD:

Without delay

An army must be sent into the north;

Followed by a Commission of the Church,

With amplest power to quench in fire and blood,

And tears and terror, and the pity of hell,

The intenser wrath of Heresy. God will give

Victory; and victory over Scotland give

The lion England tamed into our hands.

That will lend power, and power bring gold.

COTTINGTON:

Meanwhile

We must begin first where your Grace leaves off.

Gold must give power, or—

LAUD:

I am not averse

From the assembling of a parliament.

Strong actions and smooth words might teach them soon

The lesson to obey. And are they not

A bubble fashioned by the monarch's mouth,

The birth of one light breath? If they serve no purpose,

A word dissolves them.

STRAFFORD:

The engine of parliaments

Might be deferred until I can bring over

The Irish regiments: they will serve to assure

The issue of the war against the Scots.

And, this game won—which if lost, all is lost—

Gather these chosen leaders of the rebels,

And call them, if you will, a parliament.

KING:

Oh, be our feet still tardy to shed blood.

Guilty though it may be! I would still spare

The stubborn country of my birth, and ward

From countenances which I loved in youth

The wrathful Church's lacerating hand.

[TO LAUD.]

Have you o'erlooked the other articles?

[ENTER ARCHY.]

LAUD:

Hazlerig, Hampden, Pym, young Harry Vane,

Cromwell, and other rebels of less note,

Intend to sail with the next favouring wind

For the Plantations.

ARCHY:

Where they think to found

A commonwealth like Gonzalo's in the play,

Gynaecocoenic and pantisocratic.

KING:

What's that, sirrah?

ARCHY:

New devil's politics.

Hell is the pattern of all commonwealths:

Lucifer was the first republican.

Will you hear Merlin's prophecy, how three [posts?]

'In one brainless skull, when the whitethorn is full,

Shall sail round the world, and come back again:

Shall sail round the world in a brainless skull,

And come back again when the moon is at full:'—

When, in spite of the Church,

They will hear homilies of whatever length

Or form they please.

[COTTINGTON?]:

So please your Majesty to sign this order

For their detention.

ARCHY: If your Majesty were tormented night and day by fever, gout, rheumatism, and stone, and asthma, etc., and you found these diseases had secretly entered into a conspiracy to abandon you, should you think it necessary to lay an embargo on the port by which they meant to dispeople your unquiet kingdom of man?

KING:

If fear were made for kings, the Fool mocks wisely;

But in this case—[WRITING]. Here, my lord, take the warrant,

And see it duly executed forthwith.—

That imp of malice and mockery shall be punished.

[EXEUNT ALL BUT KING, QUEEN, AND ARCHY.]

ARCHY: Ay, I am the physician of whom Plato prophesied, who was to be accused by the confectioner before a jury of children, who found him guilty without waiting for the summing-up, and hanged him without benefit of clergy. Thus Baby Charles, and the Twelfth-night Queen of Hearts, and the overgrown schoolboy Cottington, and that little urchin Laud—who would reduce a verdict of 'guilty, death,' by famine, if it were impregnable by composition—all impannelled against poor Archy for presenting them bitter physic the last day of the holidays.

QUEEN:

Is the rain over, sirrah?

KING:

When it rains

And the sun shines, 'twill rain again to-morrow:

And therefore never smile till you've done crying.

ARCHY: But 'tis all over now: like the April anger of woman, the gentle sky has wept itself serene.

QUEEN:

What news abroad? how looks the world this morning?

ARCHY: Gloriously as a grave covered with virgin flowers. There's a rainbow in the sky. Let your Majesty look at it, for

'A rainbow in the morning

Is the shepherd's warning;'

and the flocks of which you are the pastor are scattered among the mountain-tops, where every drop of water is a flake of snow, and the breath of May pierces like a January blast.

KING: The sheep have mistaken the wolf for their shepherd, my poor boy; and the shepherd, the wolves for their watchdogs.

QUEEN: But the rainbow was a good sign, Archy: it says that the waters of the deluge are gone, and can return no more.

ARCHY: Ay, the salt-water one: but that of tears and blood must yet come down, and that of fire follow, if there be any truth in lies.—The rainbow hung over the city with all its shops,…and churches, from north to south, like a bridge of congregated lightning pieced by the masonry of heaven—like a balance in which the angel that distributes the coming hour was weighing that heavy one whose poise is now felt in the lightest hearts, before it bows the proudest heads under the meanest feet.

QUEEN:

Who taught you this trash, sirrah?

ARCHY: A torn leaf out of an old book trampled in the dirt.—But for the rainbow. It moved as the sun moved, and…until the top of the Tower…of a cloud through its left-hand tip, and Lambeth Palace look as dark as a rock before the other. Methought I saw a crown figured upon one tip, and a mitre on the other. So, as I had heard treasures were found where the rainbow quenches its points upon the earth, I set off, and at the Tower— But I shall not tell your Majesty what I found close to the closet-window on which the rainbow had glimmered.

KING:

Speak: I will make my Fool my conscience.

ARCHY: Then conscience is a fool.—I saw there a cat caught in a rat-trap. I heard the rats squeak behind the wainscots: it seemed to me that the very mice were consulting on the manner of her death.

QUEEN:

Archy is shrewd and bitter.

ARCHY: Like the season, So blow the winds.—But at the other end of the rainbow, where the gray rain was tempered along the grass and leaves by a tender interfusion of violet and gold in the meadows beyond Lambeth, what think you that I found instead of a mitre?

KING:

Vane's wits perhaps.

ARCHY: Something as vain. I saw a gross vapour hovering in a stinking ditch over the carcass of a dead ass, some rotten rags, and broken dishes—the wrecks of what once administered to the stuffing-out and the ornament of a worm of worms. His Grace of Canterbury expects to enter the New Jerusalem some Palm Sunday in triumph on the ghost of this ass.

QUEEN:

Enough, enough! Go desire Lady Jane

She place my lute, together with the music

Mari received last week from Italy,

In my boudoir, and—

[EXIT ARCHY.]

KING:

I'll go in.

QUEEN:

MY beloved lord,

Have you not noted that the Fool of late

Has lost his careless mirth, and that his words

Sound like the echoes of our saddest fears?

What can it mean? I should be loth to think

Some factious slave had tutored him.

KING:

Oh, no!

He is but Occasion's pupil. Partly 'tis

That our minds piece the vacant intervals

Of his wild words with their own fashioning,—

As in the imagery of summer clouds,

Or coals of the winter fire, idlers find

The perfect shadows of their teeming thoughts:

And partly, that the terrors of the time

Are sown by wandering Rumour in all spirits;

And in the lightest and the least, may best

Be seen the current of the coming wind.

QUEEN:

Your brain is overwrought with these deep thoughts.

Come, I will sing to you; let us go try

These airs from Italy; and, as we pass

The gallery, we'll decide where that Correggio

Shall hang—the Virgin Mother

With her child, born the King of heaven and earth,

Whose reign is men's salvation. And you shall see

A cradled miniature of yourself asleep,

Stamped on the heart by never-erring love;

Liker than any Vandyke ever made,

A pattern to the unborn age of thee,

Over whose sweet beauty I have wept for joy

A thousand times, and now should weep for sorrow,

Did I not think that after we were dead

Our fortunes would spring high in him, and that

The cares we waste upon our heavy crown

Would make it light and glorious as a wreath

Of Heaven's beams for his dear innocent brow.

KING:

Dear Henrietta!