Act 2, Scene 3

Warkworth. Before the castle.

[Enter Northumberland, Lady Northumberland, and Lady Percy.]
Earl of Northumberland
874 I pray thee, loving wife, and gentle daughter,
875 Give even way unto my rough affairs;
876 Put not you on the visage of the times
877 And be like them to Percy troublesome.
Lady Northumberland
878 I have given over, I will speak no more:
879 Do what you will; your wisdom be your guide.
Earl of Northumberland
880 Alas, sweet wife, my honour is at pawn;
881 And, but my going, nothing can redeem it.
Lady Percy
882 O yet, for God's sake, go not to these wars!
883 The time was, father, that you broke your word,
884 When you were more endear'd to it than now!
885 When your own Percy, when my heart's dear Harry,
886 Threw many a northward look to see his father
887 Bring up his powers; but he did long in vain.
888 Who then persuaded you to stay at home?
889 There were two honours lost, yours and your son's.
890 For yours, the God of heaven brighten it!
891 For his, it stuck upon him as the sun
892 In the grey vault of heaven; and by his light
893 Did all the chivalry of England move
894 To do brave acts: he was indeed the glass
895 Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves:
896 He had no legs that practis'd not his gait;
897 And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,
898 Became the accents of the valiant;
899 For those who could speak low and tardily
900 Would turn their own perfection to abuse,
901 To seem like him: so that in speech, in gait,
902 In diet, in affections of delight,
903 In military rules, humours of blood,
904 He was the mark and glass, copy and book,
905 That fashion'd others. And him, O wondrous him!
906 O miracle of men! him did you leave,
907 Second to none, unseconded by you,
908 To look upon the hideous god of war
909 In disadvantage; to abide a field
910 Where nothing but the sound of Hotspur's name
911 Did seem defensible: so you left him.
912 Never, O never, do his ghost the wrong
913 To hold your honour more precise and nice
914 With others than with him! let them alone:
915 The marshal and the archbishop are strong:
916 Had my sweet Harry had but half their numbers,
917 To-day might I, hanging on Hotspur's neck,
918 Have talk'd of Monmouth's grave.
Earl of Northumberland
919 Beshrew your heart,
920 Fair daughter, you do draw my spirits from me
921 With new lamenting ancient oversights.
922 But I must go and meet with danger there,
923 Or it will seek me in another place,
924 And find me worse provided.
Lady Northumberland
925 O, fly to Scotland,
926 Till that the nobles and the armed commons
927 Have of their puissance made a little taste.
Lady Percy
928 If they get ground and vantage of the king,
929 Then join you with them, like a rib of steel,
930 To make strength stronger; but, for all our loves,
931 First let them try themselves. So did your son;
932 He was so suffer'd: so came I a widow;
933 And never shall have length of life enough
934 To rain upon remembrance with mine eyes,
935 That it may grow and sprout as high as heaven,
936 For recordation to my noble husband.
Earl of Northumberland
937 Come, come, go in with me. 'Tis with my mind
938 As with the tide swell'd up unto his height,
939 That makes a still-stand, running neither way:
940 Fain would I go to meet the archbishop,
941 But many thousand reasons hold me back.
942 I will resolve for Scotland: there am I,
943 Till time and vantage crave my company.
[Exeunt.]

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Notes

TLN 880archaic vocab
“my honour is at pawn; And, but my going, nothing can redeem it”
To put something 'at pawn' is to pledge it as security for a debt — as one would pawn a possession to a moneylender. Northumberland says his reputation is the pledge, and only marching to war can buy it back ('redeem it'). The economic metaphor of pawning and redemption was common in Elizabethan speech for any situation where honour had been staked and must be recovered.
TLN 894archaic vocab
“he was indeed the glass Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves”
A 'glass' in Elizabethan English is a mirror. Lady Percy says Hotspur was the mirror in which England's young noblemen dressed and preened themselves — that is, they modelled their conduct on him the way a man checks his appearance in a glass. The image makes Hotspur a living standard of chivalric behaviour.
TLN 897historical topical
“speaking thick, which nature made his blemish, Became the accents of the valiant; For those who could speak low and tardily Would turn their own perfection to abuse”
To 'speak thick' means to speak fast and with an impeded, hurried delivery — rapid speech that runs words together. Lady Percy says this was Hotspur's natural defect, yet soldiers deliberately mimicked it as a mark of manly energy, while those who naturally spoke in a slow and measured ('low and tardily') way abandoned their own easy eloquence to sound like him. The passage reflects how a great man's idiosyncrasies get recast as virtues by his admirers.
TLN 904rhetorical device
“He was the mark and glass, copy and book”
Lady Percy stacks four near-synonyms — mark (a target or standard), glass (a mirror), copy (a model text to write from), book (a text to be read and learned by heart) — all meaning the same thing: Hotspur was the supreme pattern of conduct. This piling up of equivalent terms for emphasis is the rhetorical device of synonymia. Each word adds a slightly different nuance: a mark is aimed at from outside; a glass shows you yourself; a copy is what you reproduce; a book is what you study.
TLN 908classical allusion
“to look upon the hideous god of war In disadvantage”
The 'god of war' is Mars, the Roman deity who presides over battle and its slaughter. Lady Percy says Northumberland left Hotspur to face Mars on unfavourable terms ('in disadvantage') — that is, outnumbered and without his father's reinforcements at Shrewsbury. Calling war a 'hideous god' captures its terrible, awe-inspiring power.
TLN 912archaic vocab
“do his ghost the wrong To hold your honour more precise and nice With others than with him”
In this passage 'ghost' means spirit or memory of the dead — not an apparition. 'Precise' means carefully strict or exact. 'Nice' does not mean pleasant here; it means fastidious, scrupulous, or overly particular. Lady Percy is saying: do not wrong Hotspur's memory by keeping your honour more carefully (precisely) and more scrupulously (nicely) with the Archbishop and Marshal than you ever kept it with your own son.
TLN 933rhetorical device
“never shall have length of life enough To rain upon remembrance with mine eyes, That it may grow and sprout as high as heaven, For recordation to my noble husband”
Lady Percy says her whole remaining life will not be long enough to let her tears ('rain upon remembrance with mine eyes') water the memory of Hotspur until it grows and rises to heaven as a lasting memorial ('recordation') to him. She conceives of memory as a living thing — a plant or tree — that her grief can cultivate by weeping on it. 'Recordation' is an archaic formal noun meaning a memorial, a solemn act of remembering.
TLN 938rhetorical device
“As with the tide swell'd up unto his height, That makes a still-stand, running neither way”
Northumberland compares his mind to the sea at the exact moment of high tide, when the water has risen to its peak and pauses before it turns — it is neither still coming in nor yet going out ('running neither way'). 'Still-stand' is a compound meaning a complete standstill, a moment of suspension. The simile captures his paralysis between joining the rebellion and fleeing to Scotland.