it is not the
superficial though very English splendour of the king himself, but the
really potent and ascendant nature of the butcher's son on the one
hand, and Katharine's subdued reproduction of the sad fortunes of
Richard the Second on the other, that define his central interest.*

With a prescience of the Wars of the Roses, of which his errors were
the original cause, it is Richard who best exposes Shakespeare's own
constant sentiment concerning war, and especially that sort of civil
war which was then recent in English memories. The soul of
Shakespeare, certainly, was not wanting in a sense of the magnanimity
of warriors. The grandiose aspects of war, its magnificent
apparelling, he records [192] monumentally enough--the "dressing of the
lists," the lion's heart, its unfaltering haste thither in all the
freshness of youth and morning.--

Not sick although I have to do with death--
The sun doth gild our armour: Up, my Lords!--
I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,
Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury.

Only, with Shakespeare, the afterthought is immediate:--

They come like sacrifices in their trim.

--Will it never be to-day? I will trot to-morrow a mile, and my way
shall be paved with English faces.

This sentiment Richard reiterates very plaintively, in association with
the delicate sweetness of the English fields, still sweet and fresh,
like London and her other fair towns in that England of Chaucer, for
whose soil the exiled Bolingbroke is made to long so dangerously, while
Richard on his return from Ireland salutes it--

That pale, that white-fac'd shore,--
As a long-parted mother with her child.--
So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth!
And do thee favour with my royal hands.--

Then (of Bolingbroke)

Ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons
Shall ill become the flower of England's face;
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation, and bedew
My pastures' grass with faithful English blood.--

[193]

Why have they dared to march?--

asks York,

So many miles upon her peaceful bosom,
Frighting her pale-fac'd visages with war?--

waking, according to Richard,

Our peace, which in our country's cradle,
Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep:--

bedrenching "with crimson tempest"

The fresh green lap of fair k