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Very early in the morning, a messenger knocks at the door of Lord Hastings, sent by Hastings’s friend Lord Stanley. The messenger tells Hastings that Stanley has learned about the “divided counsels” that Richard plans to hold this day (III.i.
Hastings dismisses Stanley’s fears and tells the messenger to assure Stanley that there is nothing to fear. Catesby arrives at Hastings’s house. He has been sent by Richard to discover Hastings’s feelings about Richard’s scheme to rise to power. But when Catesby brings up the idea that Richard should take the crown instead of Prince Edward, Hastings recoils in horror. Seeing that Hastings will not change his mind, Catesby seems to drop the issue.
Stanley arrives, complaining of his forebodings, but Hastings cheerfully reassures him of their safety. Finally, Hastings goes off to the council meeting along with Buckingham. Ironically, Hastings is celebrating the news that Elizabeth’s kinsmen will be executed, thinking that he and his friend Stanley are safe in the favor of Richard and Buckingham. Hastings is blissfully unaware of Richard’s plan to decapitate him should Hastings refuse to join Richard’s side.
Read a translation of Act III, scene ii →
Guarded by the armed Sir Richard Ratcliffe, the queen’s kinsmen Rivers and Gray, along with their friend Sir Thomas Vaughan, enter their prison at Pomfret Castle. Rivers laments their impending execution. He tells Ratcliffe that they are being killed for nothing but their loyalty, and that their killers will eventually pay for their crimes. Gray, remembering Margaret’s curse, says that it has finally descended upon them, and that the fate that awaits them is their punishment for their original complicity in the Yorkists’ murder of Henry VI and his son. Rivers reminds Gray that Margaret also cursed Richard and his allies. He prays for God to remember these curses but to forgive the one Margaret pronounced against Elizabeth herself, and her two young sons, the princes. The three embrace and prepare for their deaths.
At Richard’s Council session in the Tower of London, the suspicious Hastings asks the councilors about the cause of their meeting. He says that the meeting’s purpose is supposed to be to discuss the date on which Prince Edward should be crowned king, and Derby affirms that this is indeed the purpose of the meeting. Richard arrives, smiling and pleasant, and asks the Bishop of Ely to send for a bowl of strawberries. But Buckingham takes Richard aside to tell him what Catesby has learned—that Hastings is loyal to the young princes and is unlikely to go along with Richard’s plans to seize power.
When Richard re-enters the council room, he has changed his tune entirely. Pretending to be enraged, he displays his arm—which, as everyone knows, has been deformed since his birth—and says that Queen Elizabeth, conspiring with Hastings’s mistress Shore, must have cast a spell on him to cause its withering. When Hastings hesitates before accepting this speculation as fact, Richard promptly accuses Hastings of treachery, orders his execution, and tells his men that he will not eat until he has been presented with Hastings’s head. Left alone with his executioners, the stunned Hastings slowly realizes that Stanley was right all along. Richard is a manipulative, power-hungry traitor, and Hastings has been dangerously overconfident. Realizing that nothing can now save England from Richard’s rapacious desire for power, he too cries out despairingly that Margaret’s curse has finally struck home.
Read a translation of Act III, scene iv →
Stanley’s dream of the boar is the latest of many supernatural signs and omens in the play. Given what we know about Richard, Hastings obviously would have been wise to pay attention to this omen. Instead, he dismisses it, due to his supposedly rational skepticism. “I wonder he’s so simple, / To trust the mock’ry of unquiet slumbers,” he says genially of Stanley (III.ii.
Clearly, Hastings makes the wrong decision here, and when he realizes his doom in Act III, scene iv, he thinks back to previous omens. Stanley dreams not only that the boar destroys him, but also that Hastings’s own horse stumbles three times on the way to the council “[a]s loath to bear me to the slaughter-house” (III.iv.
Hastings also muses before his death on the “momentary grace of mortal men,” an idea that the play returns to again and again (III.iv.
In the moments before his death, Hastings muses on this theme. He reflects that the person who builds his hopes on material prosperity instead of God’s grace “[l]ives like a drunken sailor on a mast, / Ready with every nod to tumble down / Into the fatal bowels of the deep” (III.iv.
