thou fond many! With what loud applause
Didst thou beat Heaven with blessing Bolingbroke,
Before he was what thou would'st have him be!
And now being trimmed in thine own desires,
Thou, beastly feeder, art so full of him,
That thou provokest thyself to cast him up.
So, so, thou common dog, didst thou disgorge
Thy glutton bosom of the royal Richard,
And now thou wouldst eat thy dead vomit up,
And howlst to find it."
(Henry IV., Part 2, Act 1, Sc. 3.)

Gloucester in "Henry VI." (Part 2, Act 2, Sc. 4) notes the fickleness of
the masses. He says, addressing his absent wife:

"Sweet Nell, ill can thy noble mind abrook
The abject people, gazing on thy face
With envious looks, laughing at thy shame,
That erst did follow thy proud chariot wheels
When thou didst ride in triumph through the streets."

When she arrives upon the scene in disgrace, she says to him:

"Look how they gaze;
See how the giddy multitude do point
And nod their heads and throw their eyes on thee.
Ah, Gloster, hide thee from their hateful looks."

And she calls the crowd a "rabble" (Ib.), a term also used in "Hamlet"
(Act 4, Sc. 5). Again, in part III. of "Henry VI.," Clifford, dying on
the battlefield while fighting for King Henry, cries:

"The common people swarm like summer flies,
And whither fly the gnats but to the sun?
And who shines now but Henry's enemies?"
(Act 2, Sc. 6.)

And Henry himself, conversing with the keepers who have imprisoned him
in the name of Edward IV., says:

"Ah, simple men! you know not what you swear.
Look, as I blow this feather from my face,
And as the air blows it to me again,
Obeying with my wind when I do blow,
And yielding to another when it blows,
Commanded always by the greater gust,
Such is the lightness of you common men."
(Ib., Act 3, Sc. 1.)

Suffolk, in the First Part of the same trilogy (Act 5, Sc. 5), talks of
"worthless peasants," meaning, perhaps, "property-less peasants," and
when Salisbury comes to present the demands of the people, he calls him

"the Lord Ambassador
Sent from a sort of tinkers to the king,"
(Part 2, Act 3, Sc. 2.)

and says:

"'Tis like the Commons, rude unpolished hinds
Could send such message to their sovereign."

Cardinal Beaufort mentions the "u