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QUEEN:
To a parliament?
Is this thy firmness? and thou wilt preside
Over a knot of … censurers, 320
To the unswearing of thy best resolves,
And choose the worst, when the worst comes too soon?
Plight not the worst before the worst must come.
Oh, wilt thou smile whilst our ribald foes,
Dressed in their own usurped authority, 325
Sharpen their tongues on Henrietta’s fame?
It is enough! Thou lovest me no more!
[WEEPS.]

KING:
Oh, Henrietta!

[THEY TALK APART.]

COTTINGTON [TO LAUD]:
Money we have none:
And all the expedients of my Lord of Strafford
Will scarcely meet the arrears.

LAUD:
Without delay 330
An army must be sent into the north;
Followed by a Commission of the Church,
With amplest power to quench in fire and blood,
And tears and terror, and the pity of hell,
The intenser wrath of Heresy. God will give 335
Victory; and victory over Scotland give
The lion England tamed into our hands.
That will lend power, and power bring gold.

COTTINGTON:
Meanwhile
We must begin first where your Grace leaves off.
Gold must give power, or–

LAUD:
I am not averse 340
From the assembling of a parliament.
Strong actions and smooth words might teach them soon
The lesson to obey. And are they not
A bubble fashioned by the monarch’s mouth,
The birth of one light breath? If they serve no purpose, 345
A word dissolves them.

STRAFFORD:
The engine of parliaments
Might be deferred until I can bring over
The Irish regiments: they will serve to assure
The issue of the war against the Scots.
And, this game won–which if lost, all is lost– 350
Gather these chosen leaders of the rebels,
And call them, if you will, a parliament.

KING:
Oh, be our feet still tardy to shed blood.
Guilty though it may be! I would still spare
The stubborn country of my birth, and ward 355
From countenances which I loved in youth
The wrathful Church’s lacerating hand.
[TO LAUD.]
Have you o’erlooked the other articles?

[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?