****
“The king, when he had studied on the matter, made answer, that the Earl of March was not taken prisoner for his cause, nor in his service, but willingly suffered himself to be taken, because he would not withstand the attempts of Owen Glendower, and his complices; therefore he would neither ransom him nor release him.
“The Percies, with this answer and fraudulent excuse, were not a little fumed, insomuch that Henry Hotspur said openly: ‘Behold, the heir of the realm is robbed of his right, and yet the robber with his own will not redeem him.’ So in this fury the Percies departed, minding nothing more than to depose King Henry from the high type of his royalty, and to place in his seat their cousin Edmund, Earl of March, whom they did not only deliver out of captivity, but also (to the high displeasure of King Henry) entered in league with the foresaid Owen Glendower.”
The rapidity with which I have dashed off the foregoing paragraphs convinces me that I must have a vocation for what is called the higher walk of history. It is true that this, my first attempt of the kind, has been favoured by great facilities such as I might not always be so fortunate as to meet with; seeing that the whole of the above—quotations from Hollinshed included—has been copied out of a printed book now lying open before me (the name of which I see no necessity for divulging), with but few interpolations and excisions. Perhaps if I were to push on a little further in the same path, I might be able to surmount greater difficulties than have yet presented themselves. I say nothing. But time and the publishers say something to me,—namely, that I have no business to trouble myself with writing the History of England in these pages, at all events except so far as it concerns Sir John Falstaff. Therefore, I must reserve myself for a future occasion.
However, as Sir John Falstaff took a most active part in the civil dissensions excited by the feud above alluded to, the Knight’s biographer must be permitted to dwell awhile upon the merits of that quarrel, ere resuming the thread of his personal narrative.
The “merits” of the case, in one sense of the term,—namely, according to the logic of the young naval officer who was ordered to report upon the “manners” of a barbarous people, may be briefly summed up, in the words of that marine authority, as “none whatever.” It was simply a carboniferous contest between the forces of King Pot on the one side, and those of the revolted chieftain Kettle (aided and abetted by divers of his brother Smuts) on the other. Do not suppose me capable of wilfully depreciating great names and achievements below their legitimate value. Only, let us have justice. My especial business is with the reputation of Sir John Falstaff. If, in spite of my convincing arguments and unanswerable facts, certain wrong-headed moralists will adhere to the opinion that my hero was a mere thief, and as such to be reprehended, I, in defence of my own position, must insist—upon the showing of my adversaries—that King Henry the Fourth, Hotspur, Glendower, and Company, only differed from Sir John Falstaff as pilchards do from herrings, “the pilchard being the greater.” * Hold me my knight virtuous; accept me the moonlit field of Gadshill as glorious; and I will honour Bolingbroke, glorify Shrewsbury, and weep over Percy with the most orthodox among you. But I will have no two laws,—one for the rich, the other for the poor. If Sir John is to hang, he shall make a fat pair of gallows. All the Harries of the period—old Harries and young Harries—shall hang with him!
* Vide the Clown in Twelfth Night, an Illyrian wit of the
Middle Ages, who was indebted for most of his bons mots to
an acquaintance with Sir Toby Belch, an English émigré of
the period, and, obviously, a personal friend of Sir John
Falstaff. A companion work to the present (in two volumes
octavo, on thick paper, with plates), to be entitled Sir
Toby Belch; his Life and Difficulties, with his Inducements
to Foreign Travel, has not yet been commanded by the
publishers. The author bides his time.
Have the kindness, with all your dignity of History and what not, to show me the difference between the Gadshill expedition and the war of the Percy rebellion. What is it but one of magnitude? The King and the Percies had been in league to take advantage of certain Scotchmen—a people who, at that barbarous period, (however incredible it may appear now-a-days,) were not very well able to protect themselves—just as had been the King’s son and the Falstaff fraternity, quoad the helpless Kentish travellers. The Percies took all they could lay their hands on, and wanted to keep it. The King was jealous, and would’nt let them. History delights in these bizarre coincidences. At the same time, it is remarkable that the chief bone of contention should have been the right of proprietorship in a few Scotchmen,—a commodity which must have been much more scarce, and proportionately precious, in England at that period than in our own favoured time, when the supply of the article may certainly be pronounced equal to the demand.
The story abounds in instructive morals. In the first place, the Earl of Douglas ought not to have attempted to return to his own country. It was an unnatural proceeding in a Scotchman; and the Nemesis of his people overtook him accordingly. It is but just to state that on his being made prisoner he remained in England as long as was practicable, even on the condition of fighting under the banner of his late conqueror; and only recrossed the Tweed upon compulsion. But the atonement came too late.
Enough of these wholesale dealers in the general Falstaff line for the present. Suffice it that the Percies were in the field at the head of a powerful army; and were known to all loyal subjects (i.e. cautious people waiting to see the issue of hostilities) as “the rebels” an offensive epithet, but they were used to it. They had been rebels more than a dozen years before, when they had stolen a crown for Henry Bolingbroke, who was then a rebel with them. Henry was a king now, and had turned round on them; just as his son was foredoomed to turn round upon Falstaff, Bardolph, &c., a few years later. It was in the blood, you will say? Possibly. Still it is a plague when princes and warriors cannot be true to one another.
The leaders on the Royalist side were the King himself, the Prince of Wales, some more princes, dukes, and earls, whose names are of no importance, and SIR JOHN FALSTAFF!
It will readily be believed that under these terrible circumstances the rebels had their work cut out for them.
Sir John Falstaff stood in need of warlike excitement. In his own words, “he had fallen off vilely since the last action.” Many things had occurred to sadden him. In the first place, the Prince of Wales, with characteristic meanness, had refunded the spoils of Gadshill to its original owners; and Sir John “liked not that paying back,” properly considering it “double labour.” He had grown hypochondriac, and took strange fancies. Amongst others, he preposterously imagined that he was becoming thin. Mistress Quickly, hostess of the Boar’s Head Tavern, knew better than this, having recently taken the knight’s measure for a dozen holland shirts, at eight shillings an ell, provided at her own expense, and supplied to Sir John on the faith of his knightly promise to pay. These shirts were a sore subject with Mistress Quickly. Let us respect the memory of her feelings, even at this distance of centuries. None but a sailmaker, who has equipped, on credit, an Indiaman, which has gone down with all the wealth of its owner on board, could fully appreciate them. Altogether, Sir John was out of sorts: he lacked society. The Prince of Wales—an amusing young man enough in his better moments—was busily preparing his programme for the future astonishment of the world. Mr. Poins was, of course, in close attendance upon his highness, and rarely showed. Gadshill and Peto were uninteresting plebeians, only to be used when wanted. Bardolph was very well in his way; but his way was not an enlivening one, at the best of times; he so rarely opened his mouth, except to put something into it. With regard to Mrs. Quickly, she was becoming intolerable: she wanted her bill.
Also, with regard to Mrs. Quickly, at this juncture of our narrative (when I say “our” reader, I mean yours and mine—I have no intention of adopting the mysterious “we” of conventional literature) it behoves the writer to digress and apologise. The latter let us consider done. The former process I will get over as rapidly as possible.
I professed, a few pages back, to have done with Mistress Quickly’s husband for good and all. Justice to my view of the lady’s character—which is one Of high admiration—compels me to allude to that shadowy person once more. I have stated that I believe him to have been ailing, giving the most probable cause of his indisposition. At this period, I believe his malady was approaching the final crisis, and that he lay on his deathbed babbling, not like Sir John Falstaff, some years later (in the same chamber who knows?) of green fields, but of black cats and other flitting shapes phenomena, I am informed, frequently witnessed by sufferers in the last stages of a complaint caught in the dangerous atmosphere of a spirit cellar too easy of access. I am sure there was some such domestic calamity harassing poor Mrs. Quickly at this time. There were heavy apothecaries’ bills to be met; and, perhaps, tradesmen’s accounts, (for which she had given her husband the money months ago, believing it duly paid,) pressing upon her. Otherwise she would never have troubled Sir John Falstaff as she did—for pitiful dross. Poor lady! it was not in her nature to give pain, and she knew how distasteful such questions were to the sensitive organisation of her illustrious guest. But that she had pressed him somewhat warmly is evident. For had not Sir John been compelled, in self-defence, to ward off her importunities by something in the shape of un-knightly fiction, as to certain valuables abstracted from his pocket in her house? There was no way else. The woman would not be appeased save by money or plausible excuses. If Sir John had possessed plenty of the former, and not had the slightest occasion for its immediate use, he would doubtless have paid her, in coin, and honourably commenced a fresh account. Having none, he could only offer her the substitute alluded to. The loss of “three or four bonds of forty pound a piece, and a seal ring of my grandfather’s,” is surely a fair reason for a gentleman of moderate means being temporarily straitened. After all, there was some truth in the matter. Sir John Falstaff’s pocket had been picked (by those miscreants, the Prince and Poins—vide Shakspeare), and in Mrs. Quickly’s house. The details of the robbery are of secondary importance. Nothing can be justly called a lie save that which is utterly divested of truth!
Worthy Dame Quickly! I regret to find that it is the custom to consider her a very ridiculous and improper personage. I think she was a very good woman in her own foolish way. If Hero Worship be a true creed, she deserves honour amongst the foremost ranks of the faithful. She believed, rightly or wrongly, in one whom she considered a great man; and clung to him till the last, suffering for her faith in purse and credit, like a simple-minded, illogical, immoral, ungrammatical martyr, as she was. I believe myself that she was right. Her powers of perception were limited, but correct, as far as they could range. She had just wit enough to see the good that was in Sir John Falstaff—no more; and obeyed him like a slave or a soldier, pandering with unquestioning loyalty to his very vices, on the principle that the king can do no wrong.
To dispose of Mrs. Quickly’s husband at once and for ever. I have already said that nothing certain can be ascertained about him; but a well-supported theory on the subject may be some consolation to those restless Shakspearian commentators who spend their lives in hunting after the unpublished facetiæ attributable to Juliet’s nurse’s husband—who write folios upon the probable birthplace of the undertaker’s journeyman in Richard the Third, who doesn’t want the Duke of Glocester to interfere with his professional duties,—and the like. It is, then, my confident opinion, that Mrs. Quickly became a widow at about the time of the battle of Shrewsbury—that is to say, if a lady can be said to become a widow who has never been legally married. That Mrs. Quickly had believed herself married let us hope. She was the most likely person in the world to be imposed upon, in this, as in other matters. But, assuming a legal contract to have taken place, how could she have preserved her maiden name? That Quickly was her maiden name is certain. For, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakspeare introduces us to a second Mistress Quickly, housekeeper to the celebrated Dr. Caius, who wrote the well-known treatise on English dogs *, a spinster, and most obviously the sister of our hostess—the family likeness being, indeed, so strong between them, as to have led to a confusion of their identities by the ignorant and unobserving. It is no doubt in search of sisterly consolation from this second Mrs. Quickly, in a time of great tribulation, that the heart-broken hostess of the Boar’s Head, in the third scene of the second act of the history of King Henry the Fifth, implores to be “carried to Staines,” near Windsor.
* First printed in the reign of Elizabeth—with
interpolations: hence the erroneous belief that Dr. Caius
was a physician of that later period.
Ha! an unexpected solution to the moral difficulty! one that may remove the last taint of suspicion from the lady’s reputation. May not our Mrs. Quickly have been celebrated as the hostess of the Boar’s Head in her spinsterhood? May she not have taken to herself a husband, changing her name, to the church and the law, but not to her customers, according to the practice of queens, opera singers, poetesses, and other celebrated women? The conclusion is at least charitable; and those who like, are at liberty to adopt it. For my own part, I cling to the belief that her husband, “the vintner” of the first part of Henry the Fourth, was a sponge and an impostor, one who probably made a trade of marrying unprotected landladies for their taps and cash-boxes, who most likely had half-a-dozen wives living, whom he had fleeced and ill-treated, of which fact Mistress Quickly, his latest victim, had full knowledge; but was, nevertheless, kind to her betrayer, in an upbraiding, petting, devoted, inconsistent, womanly fashion, to the very last. I may be doing gross injustice to the memory of a most harmless and respectable citizen; but I am supporting my theory of Mrs. Quickly’s character admirably. Argument, like progress, according to a modern imperial authority, cannot march without its martyrs and its victims. If the vintner, in his lifetime, were really a good man, he would have forgiven me. So that upon the whole, we may consider the matter settled.
Sir John Falstaff, at the suggestion of Prince Henry, was entrusted with a charge of foot. It was all very fine to laugh at Sir John in time of security. When danger made its appearance, they were only too glad to rush to him for assistance. Prince Henry had staked his future reputation on the issue of the coming struggle, and chose his officers accordingly. Historians fix the date of the battle of Shrewsbury on the 21st of July, 1403. I am inclined to regard this as a proof that historians know nothing about it. At that period, the Prince Henry (who, it must be admitted, distinguished himself honourably in the action), could not have been more than fifteen years of age. Was this the sort of person, likely, not only to inspire the renowned and terrible Hotspur with jealousy of his fame and valour, but, moreover, to have previously obtained advantages, however temporary, over a man like Falstaff? I think not. Besides, the historians betray their habitual looseness in making Hotspur himself thirty-five years of age at the same period. This is simply preposterous. Would a weather-beaten warrior, whose spur had ne’er been cold since his thirteenth year, at a time of life approaching that, when, in the words of a chivalric bard, “grizzling hair the brain doth clear,” express thus passionately his eagerness for a personal encounter with an unfledged stripling:—
“Come, let me take my horse,
Who is to bear me, like a thunderbolt,
Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales;
Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse,
Meet and ne’er part till one drop down a corse...”
Who says the above speech is not historical? I tell you, I find it in Shakspeare, who is for me the most authentic of historians. He may be wrong, occasionally, in a date or a name, and may, perhaps, at times allow his imagination to run away with him. What then? if in nine cases out of ten, as I believe to be the case, his imagination, in two or three bounds, carries him nearer to the truth than the plodding foot-passengers of history can ever reach in their life’s time, encumbered as they are with their thick-soled shoes, clumsy staves, and ponderous knapsacks? In matters of remote history, we must take many things for granted, and can only sift the true from the false by our own instinctive sense of probability. When I compare a history of Shakspeare’s with a more prosaic record of the same events, the odds of verisimilitude are infinitely in favour of the former; and—as the less must be contained in the greater—when I find a man invariably right upon matters of real importance, why should I suppose him wrong upon trifles? Never tell me that a great mind will not stoop to the consideration of petty details, however essential. That is a weak invention of the incapable, who dread an invasion of the giants in their own little territory. The great mind knows that the world is made up of atoms, and can see a fly as well as a dragon. Virgil, in the present day, would have been a better authority upon steam ploughs and liquid manure than Mr. Mechi, of Tiptree Farm; Herodotus could have written a better sixpenny catechism of geography than Pinnock; I warrant Raphael Sanzio knew how to sharpen a crayon in less time, bringing it to a better point, and with less damage to his penknife, than any School of Design boy of the present century.
And so, upon the whole, I have decided to pin my historical faith—for great and for small, for positive and for doubtful—upon the representations of Shakspeare, as many wise men have not been ashamed to confess, in solemn assemblies, they have done before me.
This decision leads me to fix the date of the battle of Shrewsbury at the 21st of July (I yield the day of the month to Hollinshed and Co.), in the year 1408. At this time the Prince of Wales—history is generally pretty correct as to the birth of princes—was in his twenty-first year, and being a handsome youth, well trained to warlike exercises, with of course a princely command of ornamental outfit, would justify Sir Richard Vernon’s glowing description:—
“I saw young Harry, with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm’d,
Rise from the ground like feather’d Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat,
As if an angel dropp’d down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,
And witch the world with noble horsemanship.”
Sir John Falstaff at the same date would be (alas!) in his sixty-second year. Hotspur, according to the new reading I am sanguine of establishing, could not have been born earlier than the year 1382.
It must have been on or about the 10th of the same month (.e. July, 1408) that Sir John Falstaff, having got the nucleus of his troops in marching order, prepared to lead them against the enemy, proceeding from London in a north-westerly direction.
The departure of the Falstaff troops from the metropolis, though an event, judged by its results, worthy of celebration by the historic pencil, was not, per se, one of sufficient importance to call forth any such public demonstrations as the closing of shops, the erection of triumphal arches, or of balconies for spectators, the turning out of municipal authorities, the reading of addresses, &c. &c. The Lord Mayor of London on that day attended to his business, cuffing his ‘prentices and mixing his wines, stretching and powdering his broadcloth, washing his stale ribs of beef with fresh blood, or prematurely ripening his hides with marl and ash bark,—according to the civic chair in that year happened to be filled by vintner, clothier, butcher, or tanner,—just as though nothing were going forward. There was not even so much as a procession of virgins to scatter flowers before the warriors’ footsteps; not even a band of music to play before them; not so much as a wooden barrier to keep off the crowd that did not come to look at them!
There were two good reasons for this apparently contemptuous indifference on the part of the public. In the first place, it was not then customary to celebrate great victories until after they had been obtained. In the second place, the Falstaff troops were not, at their setting forth, conspicuous either by numbers or equipment. They amounted altogether to certainly not more than fifteen warriors, for the most part indifferently armed and clad. Of these, two were our friends Bardolph and Peto, the latter holding the rank of Lieutenant, to Captain—or, as he would now be called, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir John Falstaff. The exact grade of Bardolph in the expedition is not easy of definition: it is to be presumed he officiated as a sort of aide-de-camp, varying his titular distinction according to his audience. * The remainder of the troop were, it is true, men of some considerable renown, but owing their celebrity to achievements which made their gallant leader by no means over anxious to be seen in their company; so that the march from London was commenced in an unobtrusive, not to say straggling manner, Sir John Falstaff himself not taking horse till his forces had been some half-hour before him on the road to glory.
* A distinguished member of the Shaksperian Society has, I
am informed, a quarto in preparation devoted to the solution
of the following vital question:—“Was Gadshill killed at
the battle of Shrewsbury? and if not, how is it we hear no
more of him after the date of that action?” I can answer the
question in two lines. Gadshill was hanged at Dulwich, ten
days before the setting out of the expedition, for robbing
an aged farmer of two geese, and a pair of leathern
inexpressibles.
And was this intrepid chieftain actually about to risk the chances of battle against the armies of Percy, Douglas, and Glendower, with such fearful disadvantages of number and discipline as these? No, reader. Let us guard against exaggeration. There are limits to everything—even the heroism of Sir John Falstaff. We must not lose sight of the fact that our hero would have a king, with several princes and noblemen, with their followers, to support him in his expedition;—moreover, he was to recruit forces as he went along.
The mode of raising soldiers in those days was very simple, and much more efficacious than at present. There was, then, no occasion for foreign legions, militia nurseries, and such tedious devices. The king, who could only do one wrong—namely, that of allowing himself to be kicked off the throne by the other king—when he was in want of soldiers, resorted to the simple expedient of taking them. That is to say, he appointed his officers—who, instead of having to ruin themselves in scarlet cloth, bullion lace, sabres, feathers, and horseflesh, as in the present day—were merely expected to find their own soldiers, a commodity as cheap as dirt, and treated accordingly. This the king’s commission enabled them to do with great facility. Armed with the royal authority, the officer entered a parish or township, and said he wanted a certain number of men. The local authorities were compelled to furnish the number required, subject to the officer’s approval; and the men selected were compelled to go, whether they liked it or not. This admirable system of recruiting, subjected to slight modifications, is still in vogue on the continent. Its discontinuance in our own country fully accounts for the fact—so often pointed out to us by our neighbours, who of course are more qualified to judge of us than we are ourselves—that we have long ceased to be a great military nation; a fact which, though humiliating, is incontrovertible—witness the notorious incapacity of our Guards in the late Crimean war!
Sir John Falstaff was empowered to press into the service of King Henry the Fourth a hundred and fifty men. Amongst them there may have been several who looked upon that monarch as an usurper, and might object to fighting against the partisans of Mortimer, Earl of March, who, if English law meant anything, was certainly their lawful monarch. This was no business of Sir John Falstaff’s.
And how did Sir John speed with his recruiting? Admirably, as he did in most of his undertakings. His number was soon complete. Of the quality of his troops and his manner of raising them let him speak for himself. No description of mine could approach his own inimitable picture. (Let it be premised, in justification of this great captain’s occasional regard of his own interest in the matter, that the commanders of regiments in those days had no such privileges as tailoring contracts, &c., and were fain to avail themselves of such advantages as offered.)
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“If I be not ashamed of my soldiers I am a soused gurnet. I have misused
“the king’s press most damnably. I have got, in exchange for a hundred
“and fifty soldiers, three hundred and I press me none but good
“householders, yeomen’s sons: inquire me out contracted bachelors, such as
“had been asked twice on the banns; such a commodity of warm slaves as
“had as lief hear the devil as a drum; such as fear the report of a caviler
“worse than a struck fowl or a hurt wild duck. I pressed me none but such
“toasts and butter, with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pins’ heads,
“and they have bought out their services; and now my whole charge
“consists of ancients, corporals, lieutenants, gentlemen of companies, slaves
“as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton’s dogs licked
“his sores: and such indeed as were never soldiers; but discarded unjust
“serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters and
“ostlers trade-fallen; the cankers of a calm world and a long peace; ten
“times more dishonourably ragged than an old-faced ancient: and such have I
“to fill up the rooms of them that have bought out their services, that you
“would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals lately come
“from swine-keeping, from eating chaff and husks. A mad fellow met me
“on the way, and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the
“dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I’ll not march through
“Coventry with them, that’s flat:—Nay, and the villains march wide betwixt
“the legs, as if they had gyves on; for, indeed, I had the most of them out
“of prison. There’s but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half
“shirt is two napkins tacked together, and thrown over the shoulders like a
“herald’s coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from
“my host at St. Alban’s, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daintry; but that’s
“all one; they’ll find linen enough on every hedge.
The above profound reflections (which every officer of irregular infantry would do well to lay to his heart) were made by Sir John Falstaff, on the occasion of a review of his troops near Coventry—at which the Prince of Wales and the Earl of Westmoreland assisted. I am inclined to fix the date of this important military display on the third day previous to the battle of Shrewsbury. The Royalist forces were proceeding towards that city by forced marches. Sir John Falstaff, as is well known, came upon the field in ample time to give battle to the rebels; and it is improbable that any system of forcing could have got him over sixty miles of ground in less than three days.
Whether or not the knight found the hedgerows of Warwick, Stafford, and Salop of such fruitfulness—in the matter of linen—as he had anticipated, the historian has no means of ascertaining. The shirt in those days, it should be stated, was a comparatively recent invention—nor had the art of the laundress been brought to its present perfection.