Enter PHILIP, DUKE OF ALVA,
etc.
Oh, Philip, come with me;
Good news have I to tell you, news to make
Both of us happy—ay, the Kingdom too.
Nay come with me—one moment!
PHILIP (to ALVA). More than
that:
There was one here of late—William the
Silent
They call him—he is free enough in talk,
But tells me nothing. You will be, we trust,
Sometime the viceroy of those provinces—
He must deserve his surname better.
ALVA. Ay, sir;
Inherit the Great Silence.
PHILIP. True; the provinces
Are hard to rule and must be hardly ruled;
Most fruitful, yet, indeed, an empty rind,
All hollow’d out with stinging heresies;
And for their heresies, Alva, they will fight;
You must break them or they break you.
ALVA (proudly). The
first.
PHILIP. Good!
Well, Madam, this new happiness of mine?
[Exeunt.
Enter THREE PAGES.
FIRST PAGE. News, mates! a miracle, a miracle!
news!
The bells must ring; Te Deums must be sung;
The Queen hath felt the motion of her babe!
SECOND PAGE. Ay; but see here!
FIRST PAGE. See what?
SECOND PAGE. This
paper, Dickon.
I found it fluttering at the palace gates:—
‘The Queen of England is delivered of a dead
dog!’
THIRD PAGE. These are the things that madden
her. Fie upon it!
FIRST PAGE. Ay; but I hear she hath a dropsy,
lad,
Or a high-dropsy, as the doctors call it.
THIRD PAGE. Fie on her dropsy, so she have a
dropsy!
I know that she was ever sweet to me.
FIRST PAGE. For thou and thine are Roman to the
core.
THIRD PAGE. So thou and thine must be. Take
heed!
FIRST PAGE.
Not I,
And whether this flash of news be false or true,
So the wine run, and there be revelry,
Content am I. Let all the steeples clash,
Till the sun dance, as upon Easter Day.
[Exeunt.
At the far end a dais. On this three chairs,
two under one canopy for MARY and PHILIP,
another on the right of these for POLE. Under
the dais on POLE’S side, ranged along
the wall, sit all the Spiritual Peers, and along the
wall opposite, all the Temporal. The Commons
on cross benches in front, a line of approach to the
dais between them. In the foreground, SIR
RALPH BAGENHALL and other Members of the Commons.
FIRST MEMBER. St. Andrew’s day; sit close,
sit close, we are friends.
Is reconciled the word? the Pope again?
It must be thus; and yet, cocksbody! how strange
That Gardiner, once so one with all of us
Against this foreign marriage, should have yielded
So utterly!—strange! but stranger still
that he,
So fierce against the Headship of the Pope,
Should play the second actor in this pageant
That brings him in; such a cameleon he!
