Polixenes, again, argues touching the breach of amity between him and Leontes, that revenge is like to be all the more bitter for the cordiality of past confidence. Then, too, the implication of Lord Scroop, of Masham, in the conspiracy with Grey and Cambridge against Henry V.,—
“Nay, but the man that was his bedfellow,
Whom he hath cloy’d and graced with princely favours,—
That he should, for a foreign purse, so sell
His sovereign’s life to death and treachery!”
Henry reminds Scroop that he bore the key of all his counsels, and knew the very bottom of his soul; and he wept for him,—“for this revolt of thine, methinks, is like another fall of man.”—A later king of England, Edward IV., is made to despair when he sees his brother Clarence among the supporters of the foe: “Yea, brother of Clarence, art thou here too? Nay, then, I see that Edward needs must down.”—And once again, there is the Et tu Brute cue from which we started, thus set forth in all its suggestive force by Shakespeare’s Antony:
“For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar’s angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Cæsar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all:
For when the noble Cæsar saw him stab,