Act 3, Scene 1

Westminster. The palace.

[Enter the King in his nightgown, with a Page.]
King Henry IV
1273 Go call the Earls of Surrey and of Warwick;
1274 But, ere they come, bid them o'er-read these letters,
1275 And well consider of them: make good speed.
[Exit Page.]
King Henry IV
1276 How many thousands of my poorest subjects
1277 Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
1278 Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
1279 That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
1280 And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
1281 Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
1282 Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee
1283 And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber
1284 Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
1285 Under the canopies of costly state,
1286 And lull'd with sound of sweetest melody?
1287 O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
1288 In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch
1289 A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell?
1290 Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
1291 Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
1292 In cradle of the rude imperious surge
1293 And in the visitation of the winds,
1294 Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
1295 Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
1296 With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,
1297 That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
1298 Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
1299 To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
1300 And in the calmest and most stillest night,
1301 With all appliances and means to boot,
1302 Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
1303 Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
[Enter Warwick and Surrey.]
Earl of Warwick
1304 Many good morrows to your majesty!
King Henry IV
1305 Is it good morrow, lords?
Earl of Warwick
1306 'Tis one o'clock, and past.
King Henry IV
1307 Why then, good morrow to you all, my lords.
1308 Have you read o'er the letters that I sent you?
Earl of Warwick
1309 We have, my liege.
King Henry IV
1310 Then you perceive the body of our kingdom
1311 How foul it is; what rank diseases grow,
1312 And with what danger, near the heart of it.
Earl of Warwick
1313 It is but as a body yet distemper'd;
1314 Which to his former strength may be restored
1315 With good advice and little medicine:
1316 My Lord Northumberland will soon be cool'd.
King Henry IV
1317 O God! that one might read the book of fate,
1318 And see the revolution of the times
1319 Make mountains level, and the continent,
1320 Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
1321 Into the sea! and, other times, to see
1322 The beachy girdle of the ocean
1323 Too wide for Neptune's hips; how chances mock,
1324 And changes fill the cup of alteration
1325 With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,
1326 The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
1327 What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
1328 Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.
1329 'Tis not ten years gone
1330 Since Richard and Northumberland, great friends,
1331 Did feast together, and in two years after
1332 Were they at wars: it is but eight years since
1333 This Percy was the man nearest my soul,
1334 Who like a brother toil'd in my affairs
1335 And laid his love and life under my foot,
1336 Yea, for my sake, even to the eyes of Richard
1337 Gave him defiance. But which of you was by—
1338 You, cousin Nevil, as I may remember—
[To Warwick.]
King Henry IV
1339 When Richard, with his eye brimful of tears,
1340 Then check'd and rated by Northumberland,
1341 Did speak these words, now proved a prophecy?
1342 "Northumberland, thou ladder by the which
1343 My cousin Bolingbroke ascends my throne;"
1344 Though then, God knows, I had no such intent,
1345 But that necessity so bow'd the state
1346 That I and greatness were compell'd to kiss:
1347 "The time shall come," thus did he follow it,
1348 "The time will come, that foul sin, gathering head,
1349 Shall break into corruption:" so went on,
1350 Foretelling this same time's condition
1351 And the division of our amity.
Earl of Warwick
1352 There is a history in all men's lives,
1353 Figuring the natures of the times deceased;
1354 The which observed, a man may prophesy,
1355 With a near aim, of the main chance of things
1356 As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
1357 And weak beginning lie intreasured.
1358 Such things become the hatch and brood of time;
1359 And by the necessary form of this
1360 King Richard might create a perfect guess
1361 That great Northumberland, then false to him,
1362 Would of that seed grow to a greater falseness;
1363 Which should not find a ground to root upon,
1364 Unless on you.
King Henry IV
1365 Are these things then necessities?
1366 Then let us meet them like necessities:
1367 And that same word even now cries out on us:
1368 They say the bishop and Northumberland
1369 Are fifty thousand strong.
Earl of Warwick
1370 It cannot be, my lord;
1371 Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo,
1372 The numbers of the fear'd. Please it your grace
1373 To go to bed. Upon my soul, my lord,
1374 The powers that you already have sent forth
1375 Shall bring this prize in very easily.
1376 To comfort you the more, I have received
1377 A certain instance that Glendower is dead.
1378 Your majesty hath been this fortnight ill,
1379 And these unseason'd hours perforce must add
1380 Unto your sickness.
King Henry IV
1381 I will take your counsel:
1382 And were these inward wars once out of hand,
1383 We would, dear lords, unto the Holy Land.
[Exeunt.]

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Notes

TLN 1277rhetorical device
“O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse”
Henry addresses Sleep as if it were a person — a rhetorical figure called apostrophe. By calling it 'Nature's soft nurse,' he also personifies sleep as a caretaker who soothes the body, making its abandonment of him feel like a betrayal by a trusted servant. The speech is one of the most sustained apostrophes in Shakespeare.
TLN 1289archaic vocab
“watch-case or a common 'larum-bell”
A 'watch-case' is the housing of a clock or watch — a container that must stay awake to keep time. A ''larum-bell' (alarm bell) is a bell rung to raise people in an emergency. Henry means his royal bed has become not a place of rest but a vigilant, jangling device — always alert, never silent.
TLN 1303rhetorical device
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”
This is the speech's clinching aphorism — a short, balanced, quotable statement of a general truth, known as a sententia. Henry concludes that the weight of the crown makes sleep impossible, but the line carries the full Tudor doctrine that a king's 'body politic' (the office he bears) is a burden inseparable from the man.
historical The king's two bodies
TLN 1310rhetorical device
“the body of our kingdom How foul it is; what rank diseases grow”
Henry describes the state as a diseased human body — a sustained metaphor called the 'body politic.' 'Rank' means both foul-smelling and overgrown (as rank weeds); 'near the heart of it' specifies the northern rebellion as a mortal threat to the kingdom's vital center. Warwick's reply at TLN 1313 continues the metaphor, prescribing 'medicine.'
TLN 1317cultural context
“read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times”
The 'book of fate' is God's record of all that will happen — a biblical and classical commonplace for divine foreknowledge. 'Revolution of the times' means the turning cycles of history (revolution here is literal: a revolving, as of Fortune's wheel). Henry imagines that if anyone could read this book and see every coming disaster, they would simply give up and die.
classical Fortune and her wheel
TLN 1323classical allusion
“Too wide for Neptune's hips”
Neptune is the Roman god of the sea; his 'hips' measure the ocean's breadth, as if the sea were a body fitted to its divine owner. Henry imagines a geological cycle in which the oceans sometimes shrink so much that even Neptune's girth cannot fill them — the universe itself subject to ceaseless, destabilizing change.
TLN 1342historical topical
“Northumberland, thou ladder by the which My cousin Bolingbroke ascends my throne”
Henry quotes a prophecy the deposed Richard II spoke against Northumberland, warning that the earl who helped Bolingbroke to the crown would eventually turn against him. The lines appear (in slightly different form) in Richard II 5.1, when Richard parts from his queen at the Tower. Henry is shaken to find the prophecy coming true: Northumberland is now leading the northern rebellion against him.
historical Holinshed's Chronicles
TLN 1371rhetorical device
“Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo”
Warwick uses a simile to explain why the rebel army sounds larger than it is: Rumour — false report — repeats and amplifies every number the way an echo doubles a shout. The comparison is apt because the play literally opens with Rumour as a character, 'painted full of tongues,' whose function is exactly this doubling of misinformation.
classical Rumour and Fame personified
TLN 1377historical topical
“Glendower is dead”
Owen Glendower (Owain Glyn Dwr) was the Welsh chieftain who led a major rebellion against Henry IV beginning around 1400. His death — reported here as consoling news — removes the last of the three rebel leaders whose alliance (Percy, Glendower, and Mortimer) had threatened Henry in Part 1. The historical Glendower's death is conventionally dated around 1416, after Henry IV's own death; Shakespeare compresses the timeline.
historical Holinshed's Chronicles
TLN 1382historical topical
“were these inward wars once out of hand, We would, dear lords, unto the Holy Land”
Henry vows that once the civil war is settled he will lead a crusade to Jerusalem. This is a recurring promise across both Henry IV plays, haunted by a prophecy that he will die 'in Jerusalem.' He never makes the journey — he dies in a room at Westminster Abbey that happens to be called the Jerusalem Chamber.
historical The Jerusalem Chamber and the prophecy