[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.
NOTE:
363 Gonzalo’s 1870; Gonzaga Boscombe manuscript.
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