Though not enacted with your highness’ hand;
How much more to infringe the holy act
Made by the mouth of God, sealed with his hand?
I know my sovereign in my husband’s love
Doth but to try the wife of Salisbury,
Whether she will hear a wanton’s tale or no;
Lest, being guilty therein, by my stay,
From that, not from my liege, I turn away.
The countess, naturally, has the best of the argument, and shames the king. In this pleasant light is she presented by both chronicler and poet, and the lady, chiefly to honor whom the Order of the Garter was constructed upon the basis of the Order of the Blue Thong, was worthy of all the distinctive homage that could be rendered to her by knight or king.
Richard II., so fond of parade and pleasure, so refined and intellectual, so affable at first, so despotic and absolute at last, till he was superseded and then slain, is among the most melancholy of knights and sovereigns. He was not heroic, for he was easily elevated and easily depressed. He turned deadly pale on hearing, in Ireland, of the landing of Henry Bolingbroke in England, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury had preached in favor of the usurper. He was eminently courageous, sang a roundelay as well as any minstrel, and often made the roundelays he sung. He looked little like a knight indeed when he traversed part of Wales to Conway, disguised as a Franciscan friar; or flying from castle to castle, having sorry lodging and little food. It was in the dress and cowl of a monk that the once chivalrous Richard surrendered himself to his cousin. In the army of that cousin, sent to take Richard and his few faithful knights and squires who refused to detach his device from their coats, was “Sir Henry Percy” (the Hotspur of Shakespeare), “whom they held to be the best knight in England.”