Richard's is the most fulsome sneer of all. Tudor pro-war polemic managed its sustained attack on any remaining vestiges of Christian pacifism by means of a steady and usually high-minded appeal to its readers' sense of history, logic and common sense. Yet, as we have seen, the rhetoric involved in these treatises occasionally descended into simple invective, especially in the work of Barnabe Rich and particularly around issues of nationality and masculinity. Men were, it seems, becoming ‘effeminate’ and thus, somehow, ‘forgetting themselves’ and contributing to the trends that had led to the increasing vulnerability of their country. These writers considered the lack of a military apparatus as a fissure in the nation's defences, despite the coastal fortifications and naval might, and they also saw the absence of war as a threat to internal stability. While they were busy lamenting the decadence that accompanied peace, a figure stepped onto the English stage that apparently thought much the same as they did about the relationship between war, gender and nation. The opening lines of The Tragedy of Richard the Third are so familiar that we perhaps hear them without listening to the binary between gender and war, one that would have been very familiar to anyone in the audience even casually versed in the military writing of the immediate period: