-starred friendship.
The actual crisis falls within the third act: it is marked by the murder
of Gaveston and the resolution of the king at last to offer armed
resistance to the tyranny of the barons. The oath by which he seals his
decision is royally impressive.

[_Kneeling_] By earth, the common mother of us all,
By heaven, and all the moving orbs thereof,
By this right hand, and by my father's sword,
And all the honours 'longing to my crown,
I will have heads and lives for him as many
As I have manors, castles, towns and towers!

From that oath is born the catastrophe that immediately ensues. A
temporary victory, followed up by revengeful executions, is succeeded by
defeat, captivity, loss of the crown, and a fearful death.

King Edward is not portrayed as weak mentally or morally. Gaveston, in
the first scene, speaks of his master's effeminacy, and on more than one
occasion there are hints from the royal favourites that the king should
assert his majesty more vigorously. But over and over again Edward
breaks out into anger at the insolence of his subjects and only fails to
crush them through the impossibility of exacting obedience from those
about him. In Act I, Scene 4, it is Mortimer's order for the seizure of
Gaveston that is obeyed, not the king's command for Mortimer's arrest.
When the warrant for his minion's exile is submitted to him, the king
refuses point blank, in the face of threatening insistence. 'I will not
yield', he cries; 'curse me, depose me, do the worst you can.' He only
gives way at last before a threat of papal excommunication, the crushing
power of which had been made abundantly clear by its effect on King John
just a century before. Indeed we need not go further than the first
scene to find that Marlowe is resolved to put the right spirit of
wilfulness and angry determination in his fated monarch. There we find
this speech by him:

Well, Mortimer, I'll make thee rue these words;
Beseems it thee to contradict thy king?
Frownest thou thereat, aspiring Lancaster?
This sword shall plane the furrows of thy brows,
And hew these knees that now are grown so stiff.
I will have Gaveston; and you shall know
What danger 'tis to stand against your king.

And again, when the barons have withdrawn, he bursts out--

I cannot brook these haughty menaces;
Am I a king, and must be over-ruled!--
Brother, display my ensi