14 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY And the flesh’d soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants. (III.iii.11-14) Relentless in messaging and tone, Henry continues to insult and intimidate the people of Harfleur with more threats of what awaits their people if they choose to hold out any longer: “What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause, / If your pure maidens fall into the hand / Of hot and forcing violation” (III.iii.19-21). Henry paints a terrible vision of the consequences of resistance. Claiming the inability to stay the hands of his warriors once released, Henry, no doubt, sends a chill down the spine of the inhabitants when he proclaims: We may as bootless spend our vain command Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil As send precepts to the leviathan To come ashore. (III.iii.24-27) Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command; Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds Of heady murder, spoil and villany. If not, why, in a moment look to see The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; Your fathers taken by the silver beards, And their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls, Your naked infants spitted upon pikes . . . (III.iii.29-38) Designed to intimidate the enemy in submission, Henry pushes to the edge of ethics and humanity. E. A. Rauchut cites British historian Barbara Donagan who notes Henry’s threats, “while savage indeed, were also standard. Towns that refused to surrender when summoned to do so knew that troops forced to a storm were then free to sack and kill,” actions which were, “as Shakespeare and his audience knew, within the terms of the ‘laws’ that still
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