Act 5, Scene 2

Plain near Tamworth.

[Enter with drum and colours, RICHMOND, OXFORD, SIR JAMES BLUNT, SIR WALTER HERBERT, and others, with Forces, marching.]
Earl of Richmond (Henry VII)
3217 Fellows in arms, and my most loving friends,
3218 Bruis'd underneath the yoke of tyranny,
3219 Thus far into the bowels of the land
3220 Have we march'd on without impediment;
3221 And here receive we from our father Stanley
3222 Lines of fair comfort and encouragement.
3223 The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar
3224 That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,
3225 Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
3226 In your embowell'd bosoms,—this foul swine
3227 Lies now even in the centre of this isle,
3228 Near to the town of Leicester, as we learn:
3229 From Tamworth thither is but one day's march.
3230 In God's name cheerly on, courageous friends,
3231 To reap the harvest of perpetual peace
3232 By this one bloody trial of sharp war.
Earl of Oxford
3233 Every man's conscience is a thousand swords,
3234 To fight against that bloody homicide.
Sir Walter Herbert
3235 I doubt not but his friends will turn to us.
Sir James Blunt
3236 He hath no friends but what are friends for fear,
3237 Which in his dearest need will fly from him.
Earl of Richmond (Henry VII)
3238 All for our vantage. Then in God's name, march:
3239 True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings;
3240 Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
[Exeunt.]

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Notes

TLN 3221historical topical
“our father Stanley”
Thomas, Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, is Richmond's stepfather — which is why Richmond calls him 'father.' Stanley is in a precarious position: he secretly supports his stepson's invasion but Richard holds Stanley's own son George as a hostage to guarantee his loyalty. The 'lines of fair comfort' Stanley has sent are private letters of encouragement smuggled to the rebel army, meaning Stanley's troops, though with Richard's force, may switch sides at the decisive moment.
historical The Battle of Bosworth Field
TLN 3223historical topical
“wretched, bloody, and usurping boar”
Richard III's personal heraldic badge was a white boar, worn by all his retainers as a livery emblem. Richmond's epithet collapses the man and his badge: to call Richard 'the boar' was instantly legible to any Elizabethan as a reference to the badge of his household, the same animal Stanley dreamed 'had razed off his helm' back in 3.2. 'Usurping' reminds the army that Richard's crown rests on the murder of the lawful princes.
historical The White Boar (Richard's Badge)
TLN 3225rhetorical device
“Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough”
Richmond extends the boar metaphor into a series of revolting feeding images: 'wash' is the liquid slop fed to pigs, so Richard drinks English blood the way a hog drinks pig-swill; 'trough' is the pig's feeding-trough; 'embowell'd' means disemboweled. The three lines work as an amplification, each image more viscerally disgusting than the last, turning a heraldic badge into a portrait of predatory glutton-violence. The effect is to strip Richard of all human dignity before the army's eyes.
TLN 3239rhetorical device
“True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings; Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.”
Richmond closes the scene with a rhyming couplet built on chiasmus: 'kings...gods...meaner creatures...kings' crosses two ascending terms so the sentence reverses on itself. The line means that true hope can raise kings to godlike status and lift the lowly to kingship — an allusion both to Richmond's own rise from exile and to the theological framing of his cause as providentially sanctioned. The compressed symmetry signals the scene's formal close and gives the marching army a memorable rallying slogan.
historical Richmond and the Tudor Myth