You ever read Henry the Fifth ?

I wager you haven't. Let's read together.

WILLIAMS

We see yonder the beginning of the day, but I think we shall never see the end of it. Who goes there?

KING HENRY

A friend.

WILLIAMS

Under what captain serve you?

KING HENRY

Under Sir Thomas Erpingham.

WILLIAMS

A good old commander and a most kind gentleman. I pray you, what thinks he of our estate?

KING HENRY

Even as men wreck'd upon a sand, that look to be wash'd off the next tide.

BATES

He hath not told his thought to the King?

KING HENRY

No; nor it is not meet he should. For though I speak it to you, I think the King is but a man as I am. The violet smells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. Therefore, when he sees reason of fears as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are; yet, in reason, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army.ⁱ

BATES

He may show what outward courage he will; but I believe, as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in Thames up to the neck; and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here.ⁱⁱ

KING HENRY

By my troth, I will speak my conscience of the King: I think he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is.ⁱⁱⁱ

BATES

Then I would he were here alone; so should he be sure to be ransomed, and a many poor men's lives saved.

KING HENRY

I dare say you love him not so ill, to wish him here alone, howsoever you speak this to feel other men's minds. Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King's company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable.

WILLIAMS

That's more than we know.^iv

BATES

Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the King's subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us.

WILLIAMS

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, "We died at such a place"; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.^v

KING HENRY

So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him; or if a servant, under his master's command transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in many irreconcil'd iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant's damnation. But this is not so. The King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death, when they purpose their services. Besides, there is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers.^vi Some peradventure have on them the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder; some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury^vii; some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before gored the gentle bosom of Peace with pillage and robbery. Now, if these men have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God. War is his beadle^viii, war is his vengeance; so that here men are punish'd for before-breach of the King's laws in now the King's quarrel. Where they feared the death, they have borne life away; and where they would be safe, they perish. Then if they die unprovided, no more is the King guilty of their damnation than he was before guilty of those impieties for the which they are now visited. Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own.^ix Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained; and in him that escapes, it were not sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outlive that day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare.^x

WILLIAMS

'Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head, the King is not to answer for it.

BATES

I do not desire he should answer for me; and yet I determine to fight lustily for him.

KING HENRY

I myself heard the King say he would not be ransom'd.

WILLIAMS

Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our throats are cut, he may be ransom'd, and we ne'er the wiser.^xi

KING HENRY

If I live to see it, I will never trust his word after.

WILLIAMS

You pay him then. That's a perilous shot out of an elder-gun, that a poor and a private displeasure can do against a monarch! You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather. You'll never trust his word after! Come, 'tis a foolish saying.^xii

KING HENRY

Your reproof is something too round. I should be angry with you, if the time were convenient.^xiii

WILLIAMS

Let it be a quarrel between us if you live.

KING HENRY

I embrace it.

WILLIAMS

How shall I know thee again?

KING HENRY

Give me any gage of thine, and I will wear it in my bonnet; then, if ever thou dar'st acknowledge it, I will make it my quarrel.

WILLIAMS

Here's my glove; give me another of thine.

KING HENRY

There.

WILLIAMS

This will I also wear in my cap. If ever thou come to me and say, after to-morrow, "This is my glove," by this hand I will take thee a box on the ear.

KING HENRY

If ever I live to see it, I will challenge it.

WILLIAMS

Thou dar'st as well be hang'd.

KING HENRY

Well, I will do it, though I take thee in the King's company.

WILLIAMS

Keep thy word; fare thee well.

BATES

Be friends, you English fools, be friends. We have French quarrels enow, if you could tell how to reckon.

[Exeunt soldiers.]

I doubt anyone ever wasted his time reading Shakespeare. There's so precious little worth reading in this doggerel of a language...

1. In other words, that while a king has the same resources as any other man, the same two hands, the same one head, what he must do with them is much more than what the common man must do with his.

   The same two legs must carry him a longer distance in a shorter time, somehow - because he doesn't just provide for the satisfaction of one woman and her offspring but of many women and countless offspring. The same violet's scent must somehow imbibe him of much more sweetness, to satisfy the draw of both private individual and public institution, entwined in his one person.

   And yet the moral isn't that all kings are better men - just that most men are paltry kings. [↩]

2. Id est, better some well bound if certain inconvenience than the dubious fate unknown. This is how poverty works - that the poor pay to be insured against rain, and if it rains sausages the insurer gets to keep them. [↩]
3. The difference between king and subject is that the king will do as he pleases, whereas the subject will do as commanded. It's one thing for the subject's dream to go wherever it may go, inconsequential as it is. But if the king ever finds himself wishing he were somewhere else than where he went, abdication's imperative. [↩]
4. And never will they know, for lack of faculty with which to know. Which is why "seeing loyalty" still is no kind of loyalty, but nude interest. [↩]
5. As you can see, they had women bawing from under a soldier's helmet even in King Henry's camp at Agincourt. One should rightly suppose that even if a gender were extirpated from the species through cosmic cataclism, some mere cuttings of the other will suffice to create it anew. A rib, a fingertip, a nothing much at all. They're there. [↩]
6. Think well about this. Everyone to himself would appear a standard for the world, yet almost no-one is. And he who is will know it in this sign, and in no other sign : that he is king. [↩]
7. To take the virgin is almost a duty - and has to be, as maidens make scarcely palatable quarry. To lie to her however is quite shameful, as it isn't to lie to a well worn wench, which may be mere repartee and wordplay. This because the child specifically lacks the experience that'd allow her to judge and weigh them seals.

   You don't want to lie. Not to the young. [↩]

8. A beadle is the obnoxious woman shaking the coin chest in church. Her :

   [↩]

9. Pointedly not the opposite, pointedly not "every subject's need is the king's, yet every subject's will his own" as clamored deliberately and with intent to harm by that obscene, pollutive mockery pretending itself "constitutional" monarchy, entirely an exercise in base defilement, "alt-thin" obesity, "otherwise beautiful" ugly, "alternatively able" limp and lame abomination, "just as good" plastic ersatz of the genuine article. [↩]
10. The argument for which an obscure Frenchman is held famous by his ignorant countrymen appeared plain as day in the supposedly ill-read Shakespeare a century prior. What now ? Hold your philosophy cheap for not having been there on Crispin's day ? [↩]
11. The problem is deeper than it may appear. To quote a Trilema commenter,

    If you are on the far right of the bell curve, the farther to the left of you you observe, the more transparent the persons are to you. It should actually be easy to pick out the REAL sociopaths around the mediocre middle for you with some training (which is valuable). But now turn this around.
    To those in the middle and lower, those at the right end of the bell curve might as well be sociopaths, they are not equipped to find out as they are significantly worse at pattern recognition and problem solving, and no one is playing with ALL his cards revealed except the totally mentally retarded.
    Add to this that the capacity to control or subdue innate empathy is generally higher the more intelligence increases, and we see that the majority of humans will never really know whether their masters are "evil" or just know better.

    It is the incontrovertible if inconvenient fact of the matter that it is not for the subject to judge his master, not for the slavegirl to judge her owner, not for the liege to weigh the sovereign, and generally speaking no matter how it may squirm, loyalty stays blind or goes away. [↩]

12. Also no small matter. The concept of trust works downwards from the primum movens, not back up towards it. The courts exist to pass sentence, but their authority flows from the king, and no sentence of theirs can attach to him. [↩]
13. The king has a point - that the only way this matter can be resolved is by putting it in the field. [↩]