(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 195
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, 200
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: 205
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, 210
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 215
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. 220
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, 225
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 230
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 235
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, 240
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, 245
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 250
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 255
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, 260
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, 265
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 270
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 275
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. 280
[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 285
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 290
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. 295
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. 300
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 305
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, 310
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 315
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, 320
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, 325
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 330
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 335
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 340
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, 345
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 — 350
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 355
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, 360
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. 365
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: 370
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. 375
[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? 383
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. 387
[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. 397
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. 400
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 407
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. 411
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. 424
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. 435
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, 440 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. 445
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. 451
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, 455
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! 460
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 465
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. 470
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 475
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, 480
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 485
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!
SCENE 3
THE STAR CHAMBER. LAUD, JUXON, STRAFFORD, AND OTHERS, AS JUDGES. PRYNNE AS A PRISONER, AND THEN BASTWICK.
LAUD:
Bring forth the prisoner Bastwick: let the clerk
Recite his sentence.
CLERK:
‘That he pay five thousand
Pounds to the king, lose both his ears, be branded
With red-hot iron on the cheek and forehead,
And be imprisoned within Lancaster Castle 5
During the pleasure of the Court.’
LAUD:
Prisoner,
If you have aught to say wherefore this sentence
Should not be put into effect, now speak.
JUXON:
If you have aught to plead in mitigation,
Speak.
BASTWICK:
Thus, my lords. If, like the prelates, I 10
Were an invader of the royal power
Percy Bysshe Shelley - Delphi Poets Series Page 125