IV WARLIKE STRATEGY OF SIR JOHN FALSTAFF:
HOW THE KNIGHT ASSISTED THE YORKSHIRE REBELS AGAINST THE KING’S FORCES.—REAPPEARANCE OF MASTER ROBERT SHALLOW.
COMPARISONS have already been made between the hero of these pages and Julius Cæsar, Henry Percy, the great Earl of Warwick, the First Napoleon, and other heroes of ancient, mediæval, and modern history. The resemblance to all or any of them would be incomplete could we not prove that on some one occasion, at least, our hero suffered a sense of personal wrong or interest to withdraw him from a cause whereunto he had sworn allegiance, and induce him to throw the vast weight of his valour and influence into the opposite scale. This is as common and natural a proceeding with the rulers of kingdoms and armies, as it is with vulgar persons to withdraw their custom from a shop, when they have been offended or ill-served—in favour of another where they expect greater civility or better bargains. It is true that the lives of thousands, and the welfare of entire communities, may be sacrificed by such conduct on the part of great leaders. But these commodities, to such people, are merely what shillings and pence are to the retail purchasers—the base counters by which the value of their connection is to be estimated.
Sir John Falstaff, as I have shown, had been slighted by the King, outraged by the King’s Chief Justiciary, and trifled with by the King’s son, (I have not thought fit to call attention to His Highness’s last practical joke attempted on our hero, on the occasion of the supper alluded to at the close of the last chapter; in which, by consulting the chronicle, it will be seen the Prince came off no better than usual in such matches). And in the face of this treatment, it was expected that Sir John would, at a moment’s notice and without a word of apology, come forward with his original loyalty unshaken to annihilate the King’s enemies—now assembled in large numbers in Yorkshire under the leadership of the Earl of Northumberland, the Archbishop of York, and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham and Lord Marshal of England—(son and successor to Sir John’s old lord and tutor—many years since exiled and cut to pieces by Saracen scimitars, in default of the privilege of having his ribs poked, his skull cleft, or his neck severed, comfortably, in his native land—the natural destiny and laudable ambition of every English nobleman of the period!) Briefly, Sir John resolved that he would do nothing of the kind.
It might be urged that Sir John—being in the main a good fellow, with a sense of justice lying somewhere or other at the bottom of his heart, and only a bit of a rogue upon expediency—in coming to such a resolution might have been actuated by other motives than such as we have suggested; that he might have thought the demands of the rebels were rather reasonable than otherwise (which they were), and that it might have gone against his conscience to aid and abet an intolerable crowned ruffian like Henry the Fourth, an assassin, an usurper, a kidnapper, a widow and orphan spoiler; and, to crown all, the man who enjoyed the distinguished honour of having introduced the practice of burning religious reformers (to which order he himself had once professed to belong) in this country—in his designs against better men and truer patriots than himself. To accept this theory would be a confession of weakness on Sir John Falstaff’s part, classing him among mere contemptible well-meaning persons—wholly destructive to those claims to the great souled or heroic CHARACTER which it has been my aim to establish for him from the very commencement of these pages. So I will follow the invariable custom of gentlemen of my calling, and adopt the view that best suits me.
It must not be supposed that Sir John FalstafF went, at once, over with all his forces to the enemy’s ranks. This would have been difficult, because, in the first place (which may forestal all further considerations), he had no forces. His general orders from head-quarters were that “he was to take up soldiers in the counties as he went.” Upon this Sir John built a most effective stratagem.
The reader who has not been lately at school (the remark will apply equally to the reader who has not yet gone there) is requested to cast his eye over a work, not so well-known in this country as it might be,—the map of England. Let him there study the relative positions of London and Yorkshire. If gifted with an intellect never so little logical, he will divine from his observations that the shortest way from the metropolis to the great northern county would not lie through Gloucestershire; and that the journey performed via that part of England would necessitate some considerable loss of time. Yorkshire being the centre of warlike operations, and the necessity for giving immediate battle to the rebels being imminent, it will be credited that reinforcements arriving via Gloucestershire would not be of material service to the Royalist cause—which, through having been relied on, their non-appearance, in time, might indeed be calculated to injure. Accordingly Sir John Falstaff, to whom a carte blanche of counties for his recruiting had been somewhat rashly given, decided that he would go round by Gloucestershire.
And Sir John did go round by Gloucestershire. That is certain. Also is it that he lost considerable time by so doing. This is proved by the fact that he did not come up with the King’s troops in Yorkshire till just at the close of the battle of Gualtree Forest (in which the rebels had been unaccountably routed without his assistance), and that in a “travel-tainted” condition. As we can only judge of men’s motives by their acts, we have a right to assume (as I have done) that Sir John Falstaff delayed his arrival purposely—to give advantage to the enemy, with whom he secretly sympathised—by withholding his terrible presence.
And yet there may have been another motive. Let us look at all possible sides of the question. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Sir John’s feelings towards the cause of Henry were not those of hostility but of mere indifference; and that he felt a not uncharacteristic preference for indulging in the gratification of his own pleasure and advantage, to swelling the victories of an ungrateful monarch. Let us suppose that he bent his northern course a little westward, for the purpose of touching at his favourite Coventry. Why his favourite Coventry? Because he once marched through that city with a disgraceful retinue? Reader, I am surprised at your ignorance. Do you not know that near to the city of Coventry stood the manor of Cheylesford, the private residence of Prince Hal, appertaining (Heaven knows why) to the Duchy of Cornwall, where the Prince and his comrades performed the wildest of their mad pranks; that it was “thither,” according to the chronicler Walsingham, “resorted all the young nobility as to a king’s court, while that of Henry the Fourth was deserted; that it was here the Prince and some of his comrades (of course, Falstaff among them) were laid by the heels by John Hornesby, the Mayor of Coventry, for raising a riot?” If you do not know all this, reader, let me tell you that I do; and it is of no consequence to you when I came by the information—whether years before I commenced this elaborate historical study, or only the day before yesterday.
Who then so likely to be a popular man in Coventry as Sir John Falstaff—the master, par excellence, of the Princely Revels? What town in the kingdom so likely to be endeared to Sir John’s affections as Coventry? Why, the knight’s repugnance to run the gauntlet of the gibes of his familiars, admirers, and butts, when at the head of his ragged regiment, is at once explained! What a joke for the pages and courtiers hanging about the inn-doors! What giggling from the tavern wenches! What grim chuckling and rubbing of hands from the long-account-keeping tradesmen! Above all, what triumph for the malignant soul of John Hornesby, Mayor of Coventry!
As I reflect on this view of the case, I find myself imperceptibly framing a new theory which tempts me to reject my former one. Yes, I have decided. I will assert an Englishman’s privilege of doing what he likes with his own, and throw it over altogether.
I am disposed, then, to maintain that, on this occasion, Sir John Falstaff entered Coventry more scantily, but more creditably attended than on the last; and took up his quarters at his favourite inn (the one where his bill was the shortest) with no intention of moving until the urgencies of war should absolutely compel him. Here he would be surrounded by old Cheylesford cronies, hangers-on to the palace—with their hangers-on and their hangers-on with the hangers-on of the latter—and so on dwindling into indefinite perspective. I can fancy Sir John, the true master of the situation—dispensing the last court scandal—retailing the last town jests—disposing of the rebellion, the King’s state of health, the Queen’s avarice and last rumoured act of sorcery, the Prince’s designs; in a word, laying down the law generally.
I can conceive him fighting the battle of Shrewsbury over again,—killing Percy by the cruellest of deaths, after the most protracted of sanguinary encounters,—and inflicting upon the absent Earl of Douglas what that gallant warrior, throughout his life, had never been accustomed to receive wounds aimed at him from behind his back. The rare honours Sir John found awaiting him on his return to London—the feasts prepared for him—and the precious gifts of gold, jewels, and costly raiment, showered upon him—all these would doubtless be displayed to the minds’ eyes of an admiring audience; their original value multiplied an hundredfold by the compound-interest afforded by the exhaustless bank of Sir John Falstaff’s golden imagination—in the mint attached to which establishment most of them had, indeed, been fabricated. Plow he would strike envy to the souls of exiles from the court—palace intendants, stewards, gentlemen-at-arms, and the like, sent to Coventry, and kept there, by duty or difficulties,—men stagnating for lack of news, and fain to follow the fashions “afar off like spies,”—how would he overwhelm them with glowing accounts of the last Venetian sleeve, the newest Saracenic hood, (for our Crusading fathers robbed the Paynims not merely of their heads but also of their turbans!) and the last Ferrarese device in armour—many costly specimens of which he would carelessly allude to as following him at leisure, with the bulk of his baggage, to be worn when the wars should be concluded—rough homespun, tough leather, and British iron being good enough for blood-stains and battle-smoke! How would he silence Detraction—wishing to know whereby Sir John Falstaff, after all his brilliant achievements, had escaped court preferment—by frowns and sighs, and mysterious innuendoes! Who knows but that the name of Queen Joanna of Brittany—a comely dame, scarce past her middle age, still capable of inspiring the tender passion—may have been covertly mentioned in connection with this delicate subject? Was not the king old, ailing, and jealous? Had not Duke Edward of York been already consigned, a hopeless captive, to the dungeons of Pevensey, for no greater offence than the inditing a not very brilliant copy of verses to her Breton and Britannic Majesty? Had not the bilious monarch, moreover, shown his mistrust of all persons favoured by his attractive (but supposed demon-leagued) consort—by the wholesale exile of “all French persons, Bretons, Lombards, Italians and Navarrese, whatsoever” * attached to the Queen’s establishment, with the exception of a cook, a few chambermaids, two knights, and their esquires (doubtless elderly and ill-favoured), and a strong body of Breton washerwomen? Is it improbable that the presence, about the court, of a personable and renowned warrior like Sir John Falstaff,—one who, even to the limits of maturity, retained so many of the graces of his youth,—should have been looked upon by the suspicious king as perilous to his conjugal felicity? At any rate, is it improbable that Sir John Falstaff should have thought so—or, whether he thought so or not, that he should have striven to impress his Coventry audience with a conviction that such was the case? Sir John may or may not have submitted such probabilities as these to the consideration of his hearers. Be this as it may, there is one topic he could not possibly, being situated as I have imagined him, have failed to enlarge upon. Depend upon it, the recent conduct of the Lord Chief Justice would be held up to such public scorn and indignation as to render that official’s next assize-visit to Warwickshire a somewhat perilous excursion!
* Parliamentary Rolls, 5 Henry IV., p. 572.
Let me consider what kind of an adventure would have been likely to happen to Sir John Falstaff at such a time. I have one.
I can imagine a quiet, cheery-looking old man, in a long, sober-coloured gown, of comfortable well-to-do aspect, with a shrewd wrinkled face, elbowing his way imperceptibly to a place at the table near Sir John (the guests making room for him with some respect), and taking advantage of a lull in the conversation to say, with a twinkling eye and a somewhat admiring smile,—
“We should know each other, Sir John—we have been friends ere now.”
“Aye, aye, sir? ‘Tis possible. There are more men see Paul’s church than the Beadle wots of. But you have the best of me.”
“Will you share my tankard while I make myself known. Nay!—‘tis a choice Rochelle that mine host broaches only for me on my monthly visits to Coventry. You will not match it in the town vintry.
“Now you speak, sir, I should know your voice. Save you, sir. Nectar, by all the Pagans!”
“It is long since we met, Sir John.”
“Do you tell me that, sir? Twenty years at the least; if not nigher thirty. In Brittany, was it not?”
“Not so—not so.”
“In Flanders then, or Spain? * I have seen both countries.”
* Observe that I merely imagine Sir John Falstaff to have
said he had visited Spain. The annals of that country afford
no trace of his presence at any period of history.
“Nay, sir—no further off than Clements’ Inn. I was reading the law when you were page to Sir Thomas Mowbray—father to—”
“Him whose father’s son I now march against. The chances of war have so willed it. By our Lady, I know the trick of your face—well.—Nay, if you will an’ it be another of the same.—‘Tis excellent, i’ faith. And you have thriven well in your calling, Master——?”
“Doit—Thomas Doit, to serve you, Sir John.”
“The name was at my tongue’s end. Of Oxford, as I think?”
“Of Stafford, sir.”
“Stafford, I would have said. A new health to you, Master Doit. Why we are boys again. I would I needed a lawyer for your sake. But a trusty knave (no offence to the calling, sir) cares well for my estate—and to displace an old servant—”
“Nay, sir. I have enough—enough, sir. The world has dealt kindly by me. I have a snug home, with a crust and flagon for a friend. My boys and maidens are well cared for. I labour now but for pastime.”
“Say you so, Master—Joit. We must be better acquainted. And yet that can hardly be with old friends like us.”
“You have grown great since then, Sir John.”
“An old man, sir, and still plain Sir John! Those were brave times, Master Quoit.”
“Will you recall them with me, Sir John, over a supper? I have a more potent voice in the kitchen here than many of the Prince’s gentlemen.”
“I would have asked you, Master—ahem?—Thomas. But, be it as you will, sir, so that we part not company. We have seen nights together, sir!”
“And days, Sir John! It is a boast of mine that I witnessed your first great feat of arms.”
“Aye, indeed? Which call you that?”
“Have you forgotten cudgelling Skogan, the rhymer, at the Court Gate?”
“Skogan! To be sure. Why now I have it all! You were the brave fellow that fought the fishmonger on the same day! or a tanner’s man—which was it? Talk not of my deeds after that, Master Thomas. I think I see him now with his skull cleft. Why John of Gaunt, Gloucester, and the old King himself, all lauded your prowess, sir. I rose in court esteem through knowing you.”
At this, I can conjecture Master Thomas Doit would throw himself back in his chair and laugh till the tears streamed down his merry, wrinkled cheeks.
“Ha! ha! ha! Why this is most excellent! See how well you know me, Sir John, with all your friendship and remembrance. I thought not to live sixty-nine years to be taken for such a gull as lean Bob Shallow!”
“Shallow!”
Having made this exclamation, we may suppose that Sir John Falstaff would repair his not very flattering mistake by a plausible apology, or turn it off with a timely jest——either being always at his command at a moment’s notice. Having pacified the by no means implacable Doit, he would muse upon old times—old forms and deeds growing into shape and colour through the fog of years on the dead level of an old man’s memory—like cows and windmills through the morning mist on a Flemish landscape.
“Shallow! to be sure!”—this to himself—sighing and putting his hand to his pocket. “He was the man to know! He paid all! He was a very oyster that would grow fat on the shell again, with a string of pearls round his neck directly you had swallowed him.” Then, aloud, with a deeper sigh—“I would he were living now, Master Lawyer!”
“Why he lives, Sir John.”
“Say you so?—where?”
“Hard by, in Gloucestershire, scarce a day’s ride from hence.”
“In good health and case, I trust?”
“The best. For his bodily health, he is of those men whose backs will never break under the weight of their brains. It is long ere the dock withers or the ass dies. For his outward case, Heaven, in its mercy to helpless creatures, hath sent two kinds of crawling things into the world with good houses to cover them—the snails and the fools, Sir John. Master Shallow is in the Peace: he hath his father’s broad lands and some twenty thousand marks in money.”
“You rejoice me! Master Shallow alive and prospering! Well! Master David Shallow was it not?”
“Robert.”
“True. You called him Bob a while ago. From that you have let fall, it would seem he hath not grown in wisdom as in years and possessions?”
“He! Can you make silk purse out of swine’s ear, Sir John; or wash blackamoors white? A greater gull than ever!”
“Bardolph.”
“Sir John.”
“Leave tippling, sirrah, and see to the horses. We’ll ride into Gloucestershire before daybreak. ‘Tis the county of lusty soldiers—and the rebels chafe for their beating. Another health, Master Doit.”
I am convinced that it was some such accident as this that induced Sir John Falstaff to turn aside, temporarily, from his designs against the northern rebels in the King’s interest, and direct his forces to the immediate subjugation of Mr. Justice Shallow on his own account. And, indeed, in deciding upon this course, he can scarcely be said to have exceeded or departed from his duty. For in those times of primitive warfare, (especially in the reign of Henry the Fourth, who, in spite of his numerous successful robberies, was not always able to pay his bootmaker, let alone his generals,) the right of private plunder and forage formed in a manner a portion of the soldier’s payment. And it was surely excusable that Sir John Falstaff should have been drawn a little from the track of the public game he was pursuing by so tempting a cross scent as that of his former acquaintance Shallow.
Sir John did not at once march on the Shallow stronghold, on the principle of the “hook-nosed fellow of Rome,” as he pleasantly described his illustrious prototype of antiquity, merely “to come, to see, and to conquer.” No. His first visit was one of mere reconnoitre, rather founded on the policy of another great man whom he resembled—William Duke of Normandy—who, it will be remembered, having made up his mind to conquer England, if he should find it worth his while, paid a friendly visit to the monarch of this country, by whom he was most hospitably received, in order to form his opinions on the subject; parted on the most amicable terms with his entertainer; and promised to look in again the nest time he happened to be passing—which he did, taking the liberty of bringing a few friends with him. The parallel will be found striking.
The Shallows were a very ancient county family, tracing their descent almost as far back as the Falstaffs themselves. Common politeness to a great name suggests, at this stage of our researches, the propriety of a retrospective glance at the origin, achievements, social position, and distinguishing traits of a line so illustrious. In order to induce a perfect appreciation of the subject, the historian must (for once in a way, and contrary to his habit) avail himself of one of the most sacred privileges of his order—the right of digression. We of this age and country are too apt to ridicule the stringent and, as it seems on the surface, unnatural regulation of the Egyptians, Peruvians, and other nations of antiquity, and observed by certain Asiatic peoples even to the present day, which forbade a man to engage in any other pursuit, occupation, or calling, than that of his fathers. This was only recognising and enforcing by law the observance of an inherent principle in human society which we see voluntarily obeyed in all communities. Thus, we all acknowledge the claims of certain families who are obviously sent into the world for the purpose of ruling their fellow creatures, and living comfortably on the emoluments arising from that lucrative occupation. In proof of the definite and exclusive mission of such people, it need only be observed, that when, through some exceptional hitch or convulsion in the natural course of things, any one of their order happens to be thrown out of his legitimate employment, he can by no effort reconcile himself to becoming a useful or pacific member of society in a humbler sphere. On the contrary he will move heaven and earth to regain his forfeited position, which he will feel to be so indisputably his right, as to consider no sacrifice of the-lives and treasures of other people too great for its recovery; and there will always be found a large portion of the population to abet and justify him by cheerfully making for him the sacrifices he requires. These he will accept without thanks or emotion, just as a spider accepts flies, or a pike titlebats. They are his right—that is sufficient. Leave such beings in the quiet possession of their birthright, and you may hardly be aware of their existence—so little noise or exertion they care to make while all goes on smoothly—and you may be apt to underrate their importance to the social machine. But once dislodge the most insignificant of them from his proper place, and a terrific crash, explosion, loss of life, and utter suspension of progress, will convince you that you had much better have left him where he was, and had better lose no time in putting him back again. We are told that a sacred Brahmin, though permitted, in cases of emergency, to engage in warlike or mercantile pursuits * must, on no account, descend to manual labour. For the Brahmin so descending, and for the inferior castes permitting or necessitating him to do so, it is pronounced by the sacred Vedas perdition in this world and the next. Therefore is the rule never infringed. The inferior castes, no matter what the scarcity of seasons or the extortions of their rulers, are careful for their own sakes that the sacred Brahmin shall not be tempted by necessity to the commission of the unpardonable crime of work. In civilisations of more modern fabric this principle of caste is equally recognised—none the less thoroughly that its recognition is the result of spontaneous obedience to a great natural law, rather than abject submission to the terrorism of a degrading superstition. We Europeans need no sacred Vedas to threaten us with torments if, in the event of a Kaiser or King having more sons than he can provide with kingdoms or principalities (their common necessaries of life), we decline to shed our blood in quarrels, the object of which is to supply the deficiency. We meet such claims upon us with the same matter of course cheerfulness as that with which the hunter scales the perilous cliff, or the fisherman launches his frail boat in stormy weather, to provide food for a helpless family. We recognise the principle in its widest ramifications—to its remotest edges. In Peru (anterior to the intrusion of that highly objectionable Reform Association of which Pizarro was the President) every descendant of an Inca, in the remotest degree, was as much an Inca as his greatest ancestor; and every Inca was entitled to a certain share of command, and gold and silver, of which luxuries it need scarcely be hinted their order enjoyed an exclusive monopoly of possession. Let not the irreverent simile of the sow with a litter of too many pigs to correspond with her number of teats, be incautiously hazarded. The increase of Incas caused no difficulty whatever. The people knew the favoured class must be provided for, and in what manner. All they had to do was to acquire more territory—that new vice-realms and governorships might be established—and to find out fresh mines of gold and silver. We in Europe do much the same thing. When there is a little unwonted increase in the castes of Princeps, Dux, Comes, Markgraf, Landgraf, Law-ward, Armiger or Hidalgo, what do we do? Do we insist that such valuable materials shall be utilised for base purposes? Do we tell Meinherr Herzog, Monsieur le Marquis, or the noble Earl, that we have already as many of their progeny as we can provide for in the regular way, and that the residue must be absorbed into the community as philosophers, artists, writers, traders, handicraftsmen, and husbandmen? As readily would we think of cutting up armorial banners and brocaded tapestries for door-mats and ploughboys’ inexpressibles, merely because we had happened to accumulate a greater stock of those dignifying treasures than our ancestral walls would accommodate. In such an emergency, all our thoughts and energies would be directed to the one mighty object of extending our premises, that we might have a sufficiency of rooms for the display of our priceless hangings. Such an enlargement might subject us to some inconvenience at the time—necessitating much straitening, a little chicanery perhaps, and a trifling matter of bankruptcy. But we would not be deterred by such ignoble considerations. We would extend our premises—honestly if we could—but we would extend them. I suppose it was a rule in ancient Egypt, that since certain men came into the world expressly and exclusively to be shoemakers and feather-dressers, the community to which they belonged was bound to wear out a sufficiency of shoes, and spoil a sufficiency of feathers, to keep them in profitable employment. It would have been very unfair otherwise. Just so when, by common consent, we declare that a certain branch of the community shall do nothing but govern empires, kingdoms, principalities, provinces, or departments, we are bound, at whatever cost, to provide them with a sufficiency of empires, kingdoms, principalities, &c., to govern. It may be expensive; but it is only commonly just. If we have decided that our pet spaniel shall eat nothing but nightingales’ tongues, why, in justice to the poor dog, we must go out and shoot enough nightingales to keep him in condition—even though we neglect our business, and live ourselves, while hunting, upon pig-nuts.
As there are families born to command, so are there families born to serve. I know the representatives of one or two highly respectable lines (they are not very fond of me by the way, and never invite me unless some better-bred person has disappointed them—which I also generally manage to do in my turn, one way or another), who can point to splendid galleries of ancestral portraits, each one the counterfeit presentment of an individual who has distinguished himself as the faithful and devoted servant of some royal or otherwise illustrious, personage. One will have been Gold Shaving Pot in Waiting to such a monarch—another Groom of the Dirty Clothes Bag to such another—and so forth. All have worn livery of some kind or another, with pride to themselves and satisfaction to their employers. I honour these men, not as the unthinking do, for the reflected glories cast upon them by the great names with which theirs have been associated, but for their own merits as honest flunkies, who accepted their earthly mission and fulfilled it with diligence and civility; and who, having completed their time of servitude in this down-stairs world, have gone to better themselves elsewhere, provided with the best of characters. There have been great men in these lines—warriors who have won difficult battles as the subservient aides-de-camp to incapable princes; statesmen who have saved or ruined empires, as part of their professional duties* for the immortalization of their honoured employers; gifted authors who have lived to see statues erected to their patrons, due to the fame of books which they themselves had written ungrudgingly for a secretary’s wages or a toady’s perquisites. The offshoots and collaterals of these illustrious houses have doubtless included, in their number, artists of the highest ability, who have passed their lives cheerfully on small salaries, painting backgrounds and draperies, for such of the governing castes as may have drifted into the field of fashionable portraiture and are naturally fitted for command there as elsewhere; mute inglorious Mozarts and Beethovens who have retired contentedly to workhouses, when they have completed their life-labour of preparing some operatic automaton for opulence and fame; and so on, down through grades innumerable, to poor old Figaro, who weeps tears of joy when he hears that the wig his skill has prepared has been mistaken for the natural growth of the Count Almaviva’s bald and wrinkled pate, and Betty, who is reconciled to short commons and irregular wages, when she listens stealthily at the halfopened ball-room door to hear Belinda praised and envied for taste that was Betty’s own. My Lord Gold Stick in Waiting, the Grand Duke’s hereditary Bootjack, Mr. Boswell the biographer, Mr. Wagg the dining-room jester, Mr. Wenham the confidential secretary, faithful Caleb Balderston, and supercilious John Thomas—they are all of the same race. The prosperous may repudiate the unsuccessful members—as Jocelyn Fitzmyth of Belgravia ignores John Smith of Deptford, or as Sir Morris Leveson the city millionaire cuts the acquaintance of poor Moses Levi of Petticoat Lane,—a kind of meanness which, en passant, would be effectually prevented by the adoption of the old Egyptian principle—whereby the cobbler was bound, as with the stoutest of thongs and waxed-ends, to stick to his last. Under that dispensation Fitzmyth would be kept to his cabbage garden, and Sir Morris would have to wear a Jewish gaberdine—just as Mr. Wagg would be sentenced to perpetual cap and bells, and my Lord Goldstiek, Bootjack, Wenham, and all the rest of them, to wear plush and powder, whether they liked it or not. But the sumptuary distinction is unnecessary. They are all born footmen, let them disguise themselves as they will. You have only to ring a bell within their hearing—seeing that it be of gold, silver, or baser metal, according to their relative grades of servitude—and they will speedily jump up to answer it; betraying their natural propensities like the cat in the fairy tale, who had been changed into a beautiful princess, when she caught sight of a stray mouse on the palace floor. So much for the caste of servants.
I have shown early in this work that the Falstaff family were a race of courtiers, with a tendency to one or two other callings not necessary here to particularise. My hero was—alas! that I should have to say it—the last of his line. Did any descendant of Sir John’s happen to be living in the present day, no doubt he would be found hanging about the aristocratic clubs, in debt to the very waiters, “tabooed” by strait-laced members for his frequent scrapes, chronic dissipation, and irreverent jests, never respectable and never prosperous, given dreadfully to low life, but always sure of some countenance and protection as the boon companion of some influential personage, and careful to keep within the pale of good repute, so far as to retain his entrée to St. James’s Palace—preserving through all difficulties a handsome court suit and stock of court behaviour for state occasions. Supposing any descendants of our old acquaintance Wat Smith, the Maldyke demagogue, to be living (and the prevalence of the family name renders the supposition more than probable), they are, doubtless, to be found among the radical iron-workers of the Midland Counties, or those turbulent Sheffield knife-grinders, whom nothing short of a Royal Duke’s presence can awe into loyalty and respect. There are families of actors, who have been histrios from a date earlier than Gammer Gurton’s Needle, and who stick to the family calling, whether on the stage, in the cabinet, the senate, the mart, or the pulpit. There are born farmers, born authors, born warriors, born sailors, born jewellers, born publicans, and born hangmen. I have known even hereditary grocers and undertakers. But perhaps there is no instance in which we so thoroughly recognise the sacredness of caste as in the case of the born labourer. The contentment with which people of that class will submit to the most incredible hardships rather than make an effort to emancipate themselves from their normal sphere, added to the indignant opposition with which any rare effort of the kind on their part is invariably met by the classes above them, is surely a convincing proof that they were brought into the world for the purpose of remaining exactly whore they are.
We have also born beggars—in various stages of society—who pursue their traditional calling—
“Some in rags
And some in bags,
And some in velvet gowns,”
but who are all beggars alike, and could under no circumstances exist, except by the charity of the industrious and productive portions of the community. We have also hereditary thieves, who are protected in their various guilds and corporations, and enjoy innumerable legal privileges.
I have now traced the various defined strata of our social geology almost to the lowest formation. My philosophical excavations have occupied some time, but not a stroke of the moral pickaxe has been unnecessary. It was absolutely indispensable that I should get to the very bottom of the pit. I have now all but reached it. Having cut my way through the beggars and thieves, there is but one step lower I can take. I will accordingly proceed to the consideration of country justices.
The family of the Shallows had been in the commission of the peace from time immemorial. I have not such authorities at my elbow as can inform me under what honorary title the earlier Shallows—at the time when Keingelt Felstaf was getting into squabbles with Ceorles and Welshmen, and pecuniary difficulties with his Sodalitium—exercised their judicial functions. It is of little consequence whether a judicial assembly be called a Wittenagemote or a Petty Sessions—so that the spirit of its justice be the same. Suffice it that the hereditary vocation of the family, in all ages, has been to supply the ranks of that inestimable and truly British body—the unpaid magistracy. Of the advantages to the community of such a class of public officials it would be idle to speak; so obvious is it that a judge whose services are gratuitously rendered, and are therefore protected by the common rules of politeness from impertinent investigation as to their quality and value, must be enabled to administer justice in a far more independent and manly fashion than the hireling who is amenable to public criticism, and bound to interpret the law according to the opinions of others; whereas, the unfettered volunteer need only consult his own conscience and enforce such a construction of the statutes as he may determine to be the right one. One great result of this system is the preservation, in a state of vital activity, of many fine old laws, which the apathy or sycophancy to the public approval of less disinterested but more immediately responsible magistrates might suffer to fall into disuse. The Shallows, from the remotest period, have distinguished themselves as conservators of the law in this respect. In the time of the Anglo-Saxons, members of the race had been remarkable for their diligence in the conviction of malefactors by the process of red-hot ploughshares, the ordeals of hot and cold water, and similar unerring and time-honoured tests of criminality. Long after these cherished features in the national jurisprudence had been formally abolished, through the vexations meddling of effeminate Norman legislators, and nominally superseded by moveable Courts of Assize, the Shallows of Gloucestershire had the hardihood and patriotism to adhere to their practice in the teeth of all Royal Commissions of Inquiry and threats of suspension whatsoever. It was one Simon Shallow who, early in the reign of Edward the First, had the honour of executing the last assassin ever convicted in an English Court of Justice, by the flowing of blood from the body after death on its being touched by human fingers. The event was long remembered in the county, and its records are still preserved with excusable pride by the descendants of the Shallow family. It was, indeed, a masterly expression of the great English spirit of resistance. A murder had been committed—at least a dead body had been found at the foot of a precipice with the skull shattered. The reigning Shallow proceeded to try the case according to the immemorial custom of his ancestors. He at once caused all suspicious characters in the neighbourhood to be arrested. This he effected by ordering his own keepers to seize upon all persons suspected of poaching and other practices dangerous to the stability of the community, and by soliciting all adjacent landowners in the commission to come to the rescue of law and order, by causing to be arrested all similarly disaffected persons within their jurisdiction. Master Shallow’s keepers did their duty, and the neighbouring justices responded to the appeal. A goodly array of prisoners were brought into the presence of the body, which was laid on a table, tilted at a proper angle. The county justices assembled in strong force, in order to witness the vindication of the majesty of Old English law, threatened with undermining by divers royal messages. Two or three of the suspected criminals (against whom there was nothing particular beyond a pheasant’s nest or so, and who had been considerately warned not to lay too violent a hand on the body, lest they should cause a movement of the head which might be fatal) had passed triumphantly through the ordeal. A hardened malefactor was about to be tried, upon whom the gravest suspicion rested. He was the most accomplished deer-stealer in the neighbourhood. There was not a justice present through whose preserves the cause of law and order had not suffered by his depredations. It was in vain that this fellow pleaded with tears in his eyes that he had loved the deceased as a brother, and called witnesses to prove that he had parted with him amicably at the door of an alehouse; that they had taken different directions, and that the prisoner had spoken to divers persons at a distance of five miles from the scene of the supposed murder at the very moment when, if at all, it must have been committed. He was smartly reprimanded, with a counsel to remember what presence he stood in, and bidden to “lay on firm, and not touch the clothes * instead of the flesh, as their worships wotted well of that device.” The man raised his hand fearlessly, and was about to lay it on the body when a breathless messenger rushed into the justice hall, announcing that a troop of King’s officers were riding fast from Oxford with a view of putting a stop to the proceedings, tidings of which had reached that city, where His Majesty then held his court; and threatening the terrors of the law to any magistrate who should be convicted of participation in the illegal course of procedure now in progress. The justices rose in mingled wrath and fear, and in so doing managed to shake the table. Simultaneously with their movement the hand of the accused fell mechanically upon the body, the head of which rolled from its supports, causing an effusion of blood. “Lo, he is guilty!” cried the justices, triumphant in the moment of their apparent defeat. “Men of England!” said one of them (whose park had suffered dreadfully within the past month), “will ye see the laws of your fathers trampled on by a set of evil advisers—chiefly Frenchmen—who have falsely obtained the ear of His Majesty, whom heaven preserve! Will ye have your sons and brothers murdered in cold blood? Ten minutes more and the murderer will be rescued from justice by a set of French lawyers, who will set him free by quirks and quibbles. Now or never is your time to assert your rights. To the nearest oak with him, ere yet the blood is dry, according to the custom of your fathers!” The mob murmured approval: a superstition a thousand years old was dear to them. The keepers and constables clamoured—not one of them but had known the taste of the prisoner’s cudgel. The prisoner himself protested, appealed to the King’s justice, finally lost his temper and called the justices a pack of murderous noodles. The prisoner had his friends; but they were a disreputable minority of poachers and sheep-stealers. The bulk of the auditory were tenants or retainers of the justices. The approach of horsemen galloping at top speed was announced from a neighbouring hill. If ever a blow could be struck in defence of the old English laws, now was the time. Then, as now, it was a recognised principle that Britons never, never would be slaves, and where is the personal freedom in a country where you cannot hang a man in your own most approved fashion? Briefly, the prisoner was hanged on the nearest oak; and the Royal Commission appointed to investigate the matter, arrived just in time to cut him down and bury him with his lamented friend. Master Shallow was a timorous but by no means an inhuman or an unjust man. He had proposed sparing the culprit—whose guilt could scarcely be considered established, seeing that the body had been shaken by the rising of the court, and the flow of blood might have been accidental—provided he (the culprit) would make an ample confession of his crime and express his obligation to the magistrates who had tried him, before the King’s Commissioners. But this suggestion was overruled by the majority, who declared that there was no time for the consideration of trifling personal interests when they had a great principle to establish. So the convicted murderer was hanged with Master Shallow’s full warrant and approval.
* A common expedient resorted to by the consciously guilty
in the Trial of Ordeal by Touch; similar to that practised
by the ignorant of the present day, who think that by
“kissing the thumb” instead of the book in a court of
justice they evade the legal and sacred responsibilities of
an oath.
It turned out—on the evidence of two cowboys, who had witnessed the event, but apparently not thought worth alluding to it until questioned—that the supposed murdered man, being under the obvious influence of malt liquor, had himself staggered over the precipice at the foot of which he had found his death. Master Shallow as chief of the sitting justices (what, we should call Chairman of Sessions) was tried by the Royal Commission, and found guilty of murder for putting a man to death by a process long since declared illegal by royal edict. Master Shallow was himself sentenced to suffer the extreme penalty of the law, but King Edward happening to be in one of his periodical money difficulties, the sentence was commuted to a heavy fine—which, to the honour of magisterial loyalty and good-fellowship, be it stated, the Gloucestershire justices nobly subscribed to meet. Master Shallow retained his judicial appointment, with a caution to abstain from the trial of criminals by exploded Saxon ordeals for the future, which he carefully observed. Nevertheless he earned lasting renown in the county, as the man who at the imminent risk of his own life had stood up for the maintenance of a great national institution. The Shallows, on the establishment of coat armour by Edward the Third, assumed in honour of this event the device of a man pendant on an oak branch, salient, in a field of green, proper. But some misconception arising in the public mind as to this being meant to represent an episode in the personal history of one of the family, the design was abandoned, and the traditional “dozen white luces,” (the origin of which is enveloped in mystery,) by which the house is still identified at the Heralds’ College, adopted in its place. It may not be irrelevant to state that the two over-officious cowboys were speedily selected, on the press-warrant of Master Shallow, to supply a deficiency in King Edward’s army—and perished nobly, fighting their country’s battles, in one of that monarch’s numerous expeditions against the disaffected Scots.
The Shallows continued to merit renown by their resistance on all possible occasions to anything like innovation in the administration of justice. Our own Robert Shallow, at an advanced period of life, was only induced by serious remonstrances from King Henry the Fifth (for whom he was wont to express the strongest regard, having been very intimate with his grandfather) to desist from the ancient practice of trying aged women for the crime of witchcraft by launching them in deep water upon sieves,—when, if they went to the bottom and proved their earthly nature by remaining there for five or ten minutes, they were pronounced innocent and permitted to come to the surface and return to their homes at their earliest convenience: on the other hand, if they did not immediately sink, they were considered to be in league with the powers of darkness and taken out to be burnt. Throughout subsequent reigns the Shallows were remarkable for their indefatigable enforcement of the Game Laws, and of the measures enacted for the punishment of “masterless men,” that is, of persons wandering in search of employment—an offence which even in the present day is treated by their descendants with greater rigour than any other.
Representatives of the house of Shallow—with the name variously modified—abound in our own time. They are to a man somehow connected with the amateur administration of justice. They are to be found in the country digging up obsolete enactments for the committal to imprisonment and hard labour of agricultural journeymen who may be disposed to treat themselves to a day’s holiday. They are the terror of itinerant showmen, unemployed mechanics and poachers, by whom they are hated. On the other hand they have the enthusiastic support of the genuine criminal population, to whose professional exertions they are by no means obstructive. They are learned in the rights of rabbits—and know a greater variety of legal torture for avenging the unlicensed death of one of that favoured species than a French cook could invent receipts for disguising its carcase. You will find them trying strange experiments with pet convicts in model prisons, and actively throwing impediments in the way of government inquiries into the conduct of brutal governors of those institutions—too often the hot ploughshares and ordeals by touch of modern criminal jurisprudence. Little opportunities of serving a friend like this are of course due to the country Shallows as an offset to their gratuitous services. As one of the earliest of the family counsellors has expressed it, “Heaven save but a knave should have some countenance at his friend’s request; an honest man, Sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave cannot.” Their worships are further privileged to carry out this principle by limiting, within their jurisdiction, the knavery of keeping open houses for the sale of injurious tipples at exorbitant prices, to such knaves, only, as they may consider “entitled to some countenance at their friends’ request.” In London—where some of the fraternity are permitted to exercise their functions within certain limits—their most conspicuous public achievements are an annual out-door masquerade of obsolete meaning, strongly reminding us of their ancestor Robert’s appearance as “Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s Show”—and certain frantic but hitherto unsuccessful attempts to put down pitch-and-toss, polkas, and suicide—practices which still continue prevalent in the British metropolis.
Of the personal character of Master Robert Shallow, the worthy representative of this race and order in Sir John Falstaff’s time, some glimpse has possibly been obtained from an early chapter of this work. Sir John at the advanced period of life to which I have now brought him, remembered the justice “at Clement’s Inn, like a man made after supper of a cheese paring; when he was naked he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife: he was so forlorn” (I am quoting Sir John’s own words) “that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible; he was the very genius of famine; he came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the over-scutched huswives that he had heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his good-nights. And now is this Vice’s dagger become a squire; and talks as familiarly of John of Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him; and I’ll be sworn he never saw him but once in the Tilt-yard; and then he burst his head for crowding amongst the marshal’s men. I saw it, and told John of Gaunt he beat his own name; for you might have trussed him and all his apparel into an eel skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court, and now he hath land and beeves!”
Considering that, when Sir John Falstaff made these reflections upon the past and present of Master Robert Shallow, nearly fifty years had elapsed since the events alluded to, it will be admitted that our knight’s recollection of the passage in the Tilt-yard (with which my readers are familiar) and the substance of the witticism it evoked from him at the time, prove his memory to have been at least unimpaired. It is strange that Sir John should marvel at Master Shallow’s possession of land and beeves. It will be found through all ages that the Shallows have had an eye to the main-chance, which it is very rarely indeed you find a fool neglecting. A mole may have very small eyes, but he is not quite blind. He is dazzled by pure daylight, it is true, and may never see a flower. But he is an excellent judge of dirt, which is to him the great necessary of life, and he will never lose sight of the importance of keeping a sufficient heap of it about him.