Who Murdered the Duke of Gloucester? Part 3

His hands were guilty of no kindred blood,
But bloody with the enemies of his kin.
O Richard! York is too far gone with grief,
Or else he never would compare between.
(II.i.82-85)

The Duke of York, the last living son of Edward III, is perhaps the central character of the play--at least when it comes to the question of how one must respond to a despotic king. He falls between Gaunt and Bolingbroke in his response to Richard. As we have seen, Gaunt is unwilling to challenge Richard no matter how great his sin. Bolingbroke, as we will see, is the one who dares to overthrow a King who has gone too far. York wavers between the two.

York begins this speech by rehearsing Richard's wrongs and the first among them is the death of Gloucester. He ends it by comparing Richard to his father, the Black Prince, the first of Edward's sons. The comparison is not a favorable one and the last point of comparison contains the final reference to Gloucester's death: "[Your father's] hands were guilty of no kindred blood, but bloody with the enemies of his kin." So York's answer to the question of who murdered the Duke of Gloucester is this: it was King Richard.

Yet it is not this, but Richard's decision to seize Gaunt's goods upon his death (and so disinherit Bolingbroke) that brings York to the point of not being able to stand any more of Richard's wrongdoing:

How long shall I be patient? ah, how long
Shall tender duty make me suffer wrong?...
If you do wrongfully seize Hereford's rights...
[You] prick my tender patience, to those thoughts
Which honour and allegiance cannot think.
(II.i.63-64, 201, 207-208)

The thoughts that honor and allegiance cannot think are thoughts of treason, assassination, and the deposing of a tyrannical king. York is as yet unwilling to think such thoughts and, though he will later yield to Bolingbroke upon his return, he remains true to the same idea of kingship as Gaunt (and, I will argue, as Shakespeare himself). When Bolingbroke overthrows Richard, we can dismiss his action as self-seeking and so it does not provide any compelling justification for the overthrow of an unjust king (such as we find in the Declaration). Yet in York's response to Richard--the response of a good man who has nothing to gain by Richard's overthrow--we see a real challenge to the idea that the king is inviolable: when a king is as bad as Richard, how can it not be right to overthrow such a king?

(York later speaks again of the King's role in Gloucester's death, right after hearing the news of the death of Gloucester's wife:

...I would to God,
So my untruth had not provoked him to it,
The king had cut off my head with my brother's.
(II.ii.100-102)