• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Shall send between the red rose and the white

A thousand souls to death and deadly night.

PLANTAGENET.

Good Master Vernon, I am bound to you,

That you on my behalf would pluck a flower.

VERNON.

In your behalf still will I wear the same.

LAWYER.

And so will I.

PLANTAGENET.

Thanks, gentle sir.

Come, let us four to dinner: I dare say

This quarrel will drink blood another day.

[Exeunt.]

SCENE V. The Tower of London.

[Enter Mortimer, brought in a chair, and Jailers.]

MORTIMER.

Kind keepers of my weak decaying age,

Let dying Mortimer here rest himself.

Even like a man new haled from the rack,

So fare my limbs with long imprisonment;

And these gray locks, the pursuivants of death,

Nestor-like aged in an age of care,

Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer.

These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent,

Wax dim, as drawing to their exigent;

Weak shoulders, overborne with burdening grief,

And pithless arms, like to a wither'd vine

That droops his sapless branches to the ground:

Yet are these feet, whose strengthless stay is numb,

Unable to support this lump of clay,

Swift-winged with desire to get a grave,

As witting I no other comfort have.

But tell me, keeper, will my nephew come?

FIRST JAILER.

Richard Plantagenet, my lord, will come:

We sent unto the Temple, unto his chamber;

And answer was return'd that he will come.

MORTIMER.

Enough: my soul shall then be satisfied.

Poor gentleman! his wrong doth equal mine.

Since Henry Monmouth first began to reign,

Before whose glory I was great in arms,

This loathsome sequestration have I had;

And even since then hath Richard been obscured,

Deprived of honour and inheritance.

But now the arbitrator of despairs,

Just Death, kind umpire of men's miseries,

With sweet enlargement doth dismiss me hence:

I would his troubles likewise were expired,

That so he might recover what was lost.

[Enter Richard Plantagenet.]

FIRST JAILER.

My lord, your loving nephew now is come.

MORTIMER.

Richard Plantagenet, my friend, is he come?

PLANTAGENET.

Aye, noble uncle, thus ignobly used,

Your nephew, late despised Richard, comes.

MORTIMER.

Direct mine arms I may embrace his neck,

And in his bosom spend my latter gasp:

O, tell me when my lips do touch his cheeks,

That I may kindly give one fainting kiss.

And now declare, sweet stem from York's great stock,

Why didst thou say of late thou wert despised?

PLANTAGENET.

First, lean thine aged back against mine arm;

And, in that case, I'll tell thee my disease.

This day, in argument upon a case,

Some words there grew 'twixt Somerset and me;

Among which terms he used his lavish tongue

And did upbraid me with my father's death:

Which obloquy set bars before my tongue,

Else with the like I had requited him.

Therefore, good uncle, for my father's sake,

In honor of a true Plantagenet

And for alliance sake, declare the cause

My father, Earl of Cambridge, lost his head.

MORTIMER.

That cause, fair nephew, that imprison'd me

And hath detain'd me all my flowering youth

Within a loathsome dungeon, there to pine,

Was cursed instrument of his decease.

PLANTAGENET.

Discover more at large what cause that was,

For I am ignorant and cannot guess.

MORTIMER.

I will, if that my fading breath permit,

And death approach not ere my tale be done.

Henry the Fourth, grandfather to this king,

Deposed his nephew Richard, Edward's son,

The first-begotten and the lawful heir

Of Edward king, the third of that descent;

During whose reign the Percies of the north,

Finding his usurpation most unjust,

Endeavour'd my advancement to the throne.

The reason moved these warlike lords to this

Was, for that—young King Richard thus removed,

Leaving no heir begotten of his body—

I was the next by birth and parentage;

For by my mother I derived am

From Lionel Duke of Clarence, third son

To King Edward the Third; whereas he

From John of Gaunt doth bring his pedigree,

Being but fourth of that heroic line.

But mark: as in this haughty great attempt

They labored to plant the