Page:Henry VI Part 2 (1923) Yale.djvu/148

136 Suffolk's answer begin with line 51. (For 'lowly' the Folio reads 'lowsie.')

 King Henry's blood. Suffolk had only a vague claim to kinship with the king. Our chief interest in his family connection rests in the circumstance that his wife, Alice Chaucer, appears to have been a granddaughter of the poet.

 my foot-cloth mule. A mule caparisoned with an elaborate cloth of state, reaching to the ground. Mules were highly regarded as mounts.

 ambitious Sylla. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, or Sylla (ca. 188-78 B. C.), enemy of Marius and author of the first great proscription or legalized massacre in Roman history. He figures in Lodge's play, The Wounds of Civil War (printed, 1594).

 Advance our half-fac'd sun, striving to shine. 'Edward III bare for his device the rays of the sun dispersing themselves out of a cloud.' (Camden.) The defeat of Warwick at Barnet was due to confusion of the badge of his supporter Oxford with the 'sun with rays' borne by Edward IV. 'Oxford's men, whose banners and armour bore the Radiant Star of the De Veres, were mistaken by their comrades for a flanking column of Yorkists. In the mist their badge had been taken for the Sun with Rays, which was King Edward's cognisance." (Oman, Warwick, p. 282.)

 Bargulus, the strong Illyrian pirate. In the Contention the passage reads: 'mightie Abradas, The great Masadonian Pyrate,' a borrowing apparently from Greene, who wrote in his Penelope's Web: 'Abradas the great Macedonian Pirat thought euery one had a letter of mart that bare sayles in the Ocean.' In his Menaphon Greene repeated the sentence verbatim. Nothing further has been discovered concerning Abradas. Bargulus is substituted in the Folio version of the play from Cicero's De Officiis, bk. ii, ch. 11: 'Bargulus [properly Bardylis] Illyricus latro