And the king said unto Esther the queen, The Jews have slain and destroyed five hundred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of Haman; what have they done in the rest of the king's provinces? now what [is] thy petition? and it shall be granted thee: or what [is] thy request further? and it shall be done.
Ver. 12. And the king said unto Esther the queen] He would needs be the messenger himself, as presuming the news would be most welcome to her, whom he desired to gratify, rather out of affection of love than desire of justice; else he would never have so little respected the slaughter of his subjects, armed by his own command.
What have they done in the rest of the king's provinces?] This he should have uttered with grief and regret; accounting the blood of his subjects dear and precious, and not making light of so many men's lives, lost by his default. But many kings make as little reckoning of their subjects' lives as Charles IX did of the Huguenots in the French Massacre; or as the Grand Signior doth of his Asapi, a kind of common soldiers, born for the most part of Christian parents, and used by him in his wars, for no other end but to blunt the swords of his enemies, or to abate the first fury, and thereby to give the easier victory to his janizaries and better soldiers. This the Turkish tyrants hold for good policy. How much better that Roman general, who said, that he had rather save one citizen than slay twenty enemies? and Edward the Confessor, who, when his captains promised, for his sake, they would not leave one Dane alive in his land, thought it better to lead a private and unbloody life than to be a king by such bloody butcheries?
Now what is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee, &c.] An uxorious prince, not propitious only to his queen, but morigerous and obsequious. He was only her clay and wax; and had she been an Eve, a Jezebel, or an Eudoxia, what might she not have done with him or had of him? Our King Edward III was wholly possessed and ruled by his mistress, dame Alice Pierce, an impudent woman, who so wrought upon the king's impotencies, that she caused the speaker of the parliament to be committed to perpetual imprisonment at Nottingham. At length she grew so insolent, that she intermeddled with courts of justice, and other offices, where she herself would sit to effect her desires. But though holy Esther was none such; yet it behoveth kings to be less prodigal of their promises, and not to leave the lives and estates of their liege subjects to the lusts of that weaker sex especially; as having less of discretion and more of immoderation.