break their faith to God as well as us. Cry woe, destruction, ruin, loss, decay. The worst is death, and death will have his day. 

 SCROOP. Glad am I that your highness is so armed To bear the tidings of calamity. Like an unseasonable stormy day Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores As if the world were all dissolved to tears, So high above his limits swells the rage Of Bolingbroke, covering your fearful land With hard bright steel and hearts harder than steel. Whitebeards have armed their thin and hairless scalps Against thy majesty; boys with women’s voices Strive to speak big and clap their female joints In stiff unwieldy arms against thy crown; Thy very beadsmen learn to bend their bows Of double-fatal yew against thy state; Yea, distaff-women manage rusty bills Against thy seat. Both young and old rebel, And all goes worse than I have power to tell. 

 KING RICHARD. Too well, too well thou tell’st a tale so ill. Where is the Earl of Wiltshire? Where is Bagot? What is become of Bushy? Where is Green? That they have let the dangerous enemy Measure our confines with such peaceful steps? If we prevail, their heads shall pay for it. I warrant they have made peace with Bolingbroke. 

 SCROOP. Peace have they made with him indeed, my lord. 

 KING RICHARD. O villains, vipers, damned without redemption! Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man! Snakes, in my heart-blood warmed, that sting my heart! Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas! Would they make peace? Terrible hell Make war upon their spotted souls for this! 

 SCROOP. Sweet love, I see, changing his property, Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate. Again uncurse their souls. Their peace is made With heads, and not with hands. Those whom you curse Have felt the worst of death’s destroying wound And lie full low, graved in the hollow ground. 

 AUMERLE. Is Bushy, Green, and the Earl of Wiltshire dead? 

 SCROOP. Ay, all of them at Bristol lost their heads. 

 AUMERLE. Where is the Duke my father with his power? 

 KING RICHARD. No matter where. Of comfort no man speak! Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground? Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s, And nothing can we call our own 

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