Musidorus their chief: choosing one of them, because princes, to defend them; and him, because elder and most hated of the tyrant, and by him to be ruled: whom forthwith they lifted up, Fortune, I think smiling at her work therein, that a scaffold of execution should grow to a scaffold of coronation. “But by and by there came news of more certain truth, that the king was not dead, but fled to a strong castle of his near hand, where he was gathering forces in all speed possible to suppress this mutiny. But now they had run themselves too far out of breath, to go back again to the same career; and too well they knew the sharpness of his memory to forget such an injury; therefore learning virtue of necessity, they continued resolute to obey Musidorus, who seeing what forces were in the city, with them issued against the tyrant, while they were in this heat, before practices might be used to deliver them, and with them met the king, who likewise hoping little to prevail by time, knowing and finding his people’s hate, met him with little delay in the field where himself was slain by Musidorus, after he had seen his only son, a prince of great courage and beauty, but fostered up in blood by his naughty father, slain by the hand of Pyrocles. This victory obtained with great and truly not undeserved honour to the two {167} princes, the whole estates of the country with one consent, gave the crown and all other marks of sovereignty to Musidorus, desiring nothing more than to live under such a government as they promised themselves of him. “But he, thinking it a greater greatness to give a kingdom, than get a kingdom, understanding that there was left of the blood royal, and next to the succession, an aged gentleman of approved goodness, who had gotten nothing by his cousin’s power but danger from him, and odiousness for him, having passed his time in modest secrecy, and as much from intermeddling in matters of government, as the greatness of his blood would suffer him, did, after having received the full power to his own hand, resign all to the nobleman; but with such conditions, and cautions of the conditions, as might assure the people, with as much assurance as worldly matters bear, that not only that governor, of whom indeed they looked for of good, but the nature of the government, should be no way apt to decline to tyranny.