Act 5, Scene 1

Salisbury. An open place.

[Enter the Sheriff and Guard, with BUCKINGHAM, led to execution.]
Duke of Buckingham
3188 Will not King Richard let me speak with him?
Sheriff
3189 No, my good lord; therefore be patient.
Duke of Buckingham
3190 Hastings, and Edward's children, Grey, and Rivers,
3191 Holy King Henry, and thy fair son Edward,
3192 Vaughan, and all that have miscarried
3193 By underhand corrupted foul injustice,—
3194 If that your moody discontented souls
3195 Do through the clouds behold this present hour,
3196 Even for revenge mock my destruction!—
3197 This is All-Souls' day, fellow, is it not?
Sheriff
3198 It is, my lord.
Duke of Buckingham
3199 Why, then All-Souls' day is my body's doomsday.
3200 This is the day which in King Edward's time
3201 I wish'd might fall on me, when I was found
3202 False to his children and his wife's allies;
3203 This is the day wherein I wish'd to fall
3204 By the false faith of him whom most I trusted;
3205 This, this All-Souls' day to my fearful soul
3206 Is the determin'd respite of my wrongs:
3207 That high All-Seer which I dallied with
3208 Hath turn'd my feigned prayer on my head
3209 And given in earnest what I begg'd in jest.
3210 Thus doth He force the swords of wicked men
3211 To turn their own points in their masters' bosoms:
3212 Thus Margaret's curse falls heavy on my neck,—
3213 "When he," quoth she, "shall split thy heart with sorrow,
3214 Remember Margaret was a prophetess."—
3215 Come lead me, officers, to the block of shame;
3216 Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame.
[Exeunt.]

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Notes

TLN 3199cultural context
“All-Souls' day is my body's doomsday”
All Souls' Day (November 2) was the Catholic feast when the living prayed for the souls of the dead in Purgatory. Buckingham uses the date for a grim pun: the feast of the dead is also the day his own body dies. Shakespeare follows Holinshed in setting the execution on this date, and the coincidence gives Buckingham his scaffold rhetoric — the day he prays for the dead becomes the day he joins them.
historical Holinshed's Chronicleshistorical The fall of princes (de casibus tragedy)
TLN 3206archaic vocab
“determin'd respite of my wrongs”
'Determined' here means fixed or appointed by some higher power, not chosen by Buckingham himself; 'respite' means a delay or postponement, but also the term for a reprieve of punishment. The phrase means 'the appointed, fated settling-up for the wrongs I did' — God has set this exact day as the moment Buckingham's crimes are finally paid for. 'Determine' in Elizabethan usage routinely carried the sense of 'bring to a fixed end' or 'decide absolutely.'
TLN 3207biblical allusion
“high All-Seer which I dallied with / Hath turn'd my feigned prayer on my head / And given in earnest what I begg'd in jest”
'The high All-Seer' is God — a title stressing his omniscience, that nothing is hidden from him. Buckingham had made a solemn oath calling God to witness while meaning the opposite of what he swore ('begged in jest'). Now that oath is being fulfilled literally, against him: God heard the perjured prayer and is answering it in deadly earnest. Swearing falsely by God — using his name as a prop for a lie — was a grave sin under the Third Commandment ('Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,' Exodus 20:7).
TLN 3210biblical allusion
“force the swords of wicked men / To turn their own points in their masters' bosoms”
Buckingham draws on a biblical image of divine justice: God turns the weapons of the wicked back against themselves so that those who plot destruction are destroyed by their own schemes. The clearest source is Psalm 7, in which God the righteous judge causes the wicked man's sword to enter his own heart: 'His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his cruelty shall fall upon his own pate' (Psalm 7:16). In the play's moral architecture, this is why Richard's own instruments keep failing him — and why Buckingham, who was Richard's instrument, is himself consumed.
historical Holinshed's Chronicles
TLN 3212historical topical
“Margaret's curse falls heavy on my neck”
Earlier in the play (1.3) Queen Margaret, the aged Lancastrian widow of Henry VI, cursed everyone who had wronged her house. Specifically she cursed Buckingham: 'O Buckingham, take heed of yonder dog... That dog that had his teeth before his eyes / To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood.' Now on the scaffold Buckingham explicitly names her curse as the thing killing him, and calls her 'a prophetess.' One by one the play has been closing the accounts Margaret opened in Act 1, and Buckingham is the last before Richard himself.
historical Holinshed's Chronicleshistorical The Wars of the Roses