King Edward is not portrayed as weak mentally or morally. Gaveston, in the first scene, speaks of his master's effeminacy, and on more than one occasion there are hints from the royal favourites that the king should assert his majesty more vigorously. But over and over again Edward breaks out into anger at the insolence of his subjects and only fails to crush them through the impossibility of exacting obedience from those about him. In Act I, Scene 4, it is Mortimer's order for the seizure of Gaveston that is obeyed, not the king's command for Mortimer's arrest. When the warrant for his minion's exile is submitted to him, the king refuses point blank, in the face of threatening insistence. 'I will not yield', he cries; 'curse me, depose me, do the worst you can.' He only gives way at last before a threat of papal excommunication, the crushing power of which had been made abundantly clear by its effect on King John just a century before. Indeed we need not go further than the first scene to find that Marlowe is resolved to put the right spirit of wilfulness and angry determination in his fated monarch. There we find this speech by him: Well, Mortimer, I'll make thee rue these words; Beseems it thee to contradict thy king? Frownest thou thereat, aspiring Lancaster? This sword shall plane the furrows of thy brows, And hew these knees that now are grown so stiff. I will have Gaveston; and you shall know What danger 'tis to stand against your king. And again, when the barons have withdrawn, he bursts out-- I cannot brook these haughty menaces; Am I a king, and must be over-ruled!-- Brother, display my ensigns in the field: I'll bandy with the barons and the earls, And either die or live with Gaveston.