VI. HOW SIR JOHN FALSTAFF WON THE BATTLE OF SHREWSBURY.
EVEN had the Royalist side been deprived of the immense weight of Sir John Falstaff’s counsels and support, the issue of the struggle could not have been doubtful. Fortune seemed to have declared against the rebels from the outset. The Earl of Northumberland was taken ill at Berwick, and unable to join his gallant son in the field. The Welsh under Glendower did not come up in time for the battle. All the efforts of their gallant and patriotic chieftain to bring his troops past the neighbouring cheese districts of the border county of Chester had proved ineffectual.
Nevertheless the rebels determined on giving battle, which was perhaps a superfluous piece of generosity on their part, as the king, the princes, and Sir John Falstaff had come determined to take it. Hotspur—the warmth of whose heels would not seem to have produced in him any remarkable coolness of head—sent, on the eve of the engagement, an epistle to the king, which is strikingly illustrative of the knightly courtesy of the period. In this document he accuses Henry of murder, perjury, illegal taxation, obtaining money under false pretences, kidnapping, and bribery at elections. * The crimes of garrotting and stealing drinking vessels from the railings of private dwellings were not then known, or it is more than probable that these too would have entered into the wholesale list of accusations. Such a document, it will be admitted, was not calculated to dispose the king to leniency or placability. He was a monarch of the bilious temperament, and not at any time remarkable for excessive amiability or good humour. A popular historian has informed us that “he was subject to fits, which bereaved him for a time of reason.” ** The effect of such a communication on a monarch so constituted may be imagined.
* Hall, folio 21—‘22, &c.
** Pinnock on Goldsmith—a work that has not come within
the sphere of my observation for many years. The passage
quoted, however, and many others from the same, were
indelibly impressed on my memory at the time of perusal by a
system of mnemonics now unhappily falling into disuse.—
Biographer.
Whether it was that the insurgent chieftains had formed a mistaken estimate of the king’s nature, and imagined that he required a great deal of provoking before he could be induced to give them the thrashing they seemed so ardently to desire, it would be difficult to say. At any rate, on the morning of the battle, Sir Thomas Percy, the Earl of Worcester, thought it advisable to look in on the royal camp, as he happened to be passing, with a flag of truce, and favour his Majesty with a viva voce resume of some of the heads of his nephew’s spirited epistle of the preceding night, which might have slipped the royal memory. To Percy’s address—which has been put into excellent blank verse by Shakspeare—the king replied with a proposal that the rebels should lay down their arms and go home quietly, which he knew would not be accepted. Percy departed, and the royal council of war at which he had been heard—and at the deliberations of which the Princes Henry and John, with Sir Walter Blunt and Sir John Falstaff, had assisted—broke up to prepare for action.
The rival armies were drawn up on a large plain near the town of Shrewsbury overlooked by Haughmond Hill. The character of the ground is indicated in the opening lines of the fifth act of the chronicle of “Henry the Fourth” (Part I.):—
“How bloodily the sun begins to peer
Above yon bosky hill!
The day looks pale
At his distemperature.”
Herein we have one of ten thousand proofs of Shakspeare’s fidelity to historic and natural truth on all occasions. Mr. Blakeway says that great author has described the scene as accurately as if he had surveyed it. “It still merits the appellation of a bosky hill.”
“Bosky” must be taken in its ancient and poetical sense, signifying “wood-covered,” and not in its more modern and familiar acceptation, which the presence of Sir John Falstaff, Bardolph, and other warriors of their way of living, might have rendered applicable to the aspect of the country.
The opposing forces were about equal in number, each army consisting in round numbers of twelve thousand men. In point of discipline and training the advantages were also fairly balanced. The light infantry, under Sir John Falstaff, consisted, as we have seen, of raw recruits, indifferently clad and nourished. But, as an offset to this must be taken into consideration the condition of the Scots under Douglas—large numbers of whom, being from the northern highlands, were, according to English notions, of necessity more imperfectly clothed than even the Falstaff troops themselves. For courage on either side there could not have been much to choose; Englishmen and Scotchmen could hit as hard, and were quite as fond of doing it, then as in the present day.
Hume, writing of this decisive engagement, says:—
“We shall scarcely find any battle in those ages where the shock was more
“terrible and more constant. Henry exposed his person in the thickest of
“the fight: his gallant son, whose military achievements were afterwards so
“renowned, and who here performed his novitiate in arms, signalised himself
“on his father’s footsteps; and even a wound, which he received in the face
“with an arrow, could not oblige him to quit the field. Percy supported that
“fame which he had acquired in many a bloody combat; and Douglas, his
“ancient enemy, and now his friend, still appeared his rival amongst the
“horror and confusion of the day. This nobleman performed feats of valour
“which are almost incredible: he seemed determined that the King of England
“should that day fall by his arm: he sought him all over the field of battle;
“and as Henry, either to elude the attacks of the enemy on his person, or to
“encourage his own men by the belief of his presence everywhere, had
“accoutred several captains in the royal garb, the sword of Douglas rendered
“this honour fatal to many: but while the armies were contending in this
“furious manner, the death of Percy, by an unknown hand, decided the victory,
“and the royalists prevailed. There are said to have fallen on that day, on
“both sides, near two thousand three hundred gentlemen; but the persons
“of greatest distinction were on the king’s: the Earl of Stafford, Sir Hugh
“Shirley, Sir Nicholas Ganoil, Sir Hugh Mortimer, Sir John Massey, Sir
“John Calonly. About six thousand private men perished, of whom two-
“thirds were of Percy’s army. The Earls of Worcester and Douglas were
“taken prisoners: the former was beheaded at Shrewsbury; the latter was
“treated with the courtesy due to his rank and merit.”
The above account is substantially correct. To the list of killed and wounded it is necessary to add the names of Sir Walter Blunt amongst the two thousand three hundred gentlemen, and amongst the six thousand private men, one hundred and forty-seven hapless warriors whose particular fate will be presently mentioned. Sir Walter Blunt was one of the several captains whom the king had “accoutred in the royal garb,” with the view “either to elude the attacks of the enemy on his person, or to encourage his own men by the belief in his presence everywhere.” The reader may accept which theory he pleases. I myself incline to the former, having the greatest confidence in Henry Bolingbroke’s wisdom as a general and sense of his own value as an individual.
Of the violence of the shock between the conflicting armies, one circumstance alone is sufficient corroboration. Sir John Falstaff, emulating his royal chieftain, also “exposed his person in the thickest of the fight”—nay, may very reasonably be asserted to have been “the thickest of the fight himself.” We will not pause to dwell upon the magnitude of risk incurred by Sir John—much greater in proportion to his bulk than that of the slender and dyspeptic monarch—in exposing so vast a target to the arrows of the enemy. Our knight’s heroic achievements are too numerous to need any stress to be laid on one solitary instance. Suffice it, that Sir John, at an early stage of the battle, conducted his troops to a position of the greatest danger, where they perished almost to a man. In his own light-hearted words, uttered amidst the most terrible carnage and peril, “he led his ragamuffins where they were peppered!”
“There’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive!” said Sir John, wiping his brow, that was clotted with dust and blood, “and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.”
And with this historic fact staring them in the face, there are not wanting people to pronounce Sir John Falstaff a coward! Well, well! Sir John himself has told us what the world is given to!
The heroism of the Douglas and his gallant Scots has not been exaggerated by their compatriot historian, in whom exaggeration on the subject might well be pardoned. Those intrepid warriors—their movements, for the most part, unencumbered with nether garments—performed prodigies of valour and ubiquity. It was said of the field of Shrewsbury in the fifteenth, as of the four quarters of the globe in the nineteenth century, “You found Scotchmen everywhere!”
Amongst the Royalist gentlemen with whom the gallant Scotch leader had the honour of crossing swords in the course of the day, but to whom the reciprocal honour was not “fatal,” as Hume has told us it had been to so many, we must class Sir John Falstaff. The fact that the hero of these pages was sought out for single combat by the “hot, termagant Scot,” is a proof of the high estimation in which our knight’s valour was held even by his enemies. The Douglas could not have mistaken him for the King, of whom he was in such active pursuit. Sir John’s costume and personal appearance must have placed that out of the question. At any rate, they met and fought. After a brief encounter—in which the training of poor Wat Smith, the Maldyke cudgeller, was doubtless not forgotten—the fortune of war decided against our hero. He fell wounded,—not dangerously, or even severely, but wounded. The Douglas seeing his formidable enemy hors de combat, and—let us assume—espying one of the King’s counterfeits in the distance, retreated without following up his advantage. I might revive national jealousies, which had better be left at rest for ever, were I to hint that the unquestionably brave Caledonian had possibly had enough of it, and had found his stalwart English adversary rather more than he had bargained for. I will content myself with the statement that the Earl of Douglas quitted the scene of action abruptly, leaving Sir John Falstaff alive,—not seriously injured, but for the moment incapable of doing mischief.
And now I approach what I confess to be a most delicate question, and one whereof the solution causes me much perplexity. The question is—“Who killed Hotspur?”
Hume, as we have seen, asserts that the young Northumbrian fell by an unknown hand; Shakspeare, as the world knows, represents him to have been slain by the Prince of Wales, after a brief hand-to-hand combat.
Which is the truth? Is either the truth?
As I have professed to abide by the representations of Shakspeare on all occasions, in preference to those of other historians, consistency bids me to adopt his views on this momentous problem. But I hesitate. After all, even Shakspeare was but a man. May not the wish to glorify a popular favourite have lulled his conscience to sleep just for once, and induced him to crown one hero with another’s laurels? He has been known to falsify history for the gratification of popular feeling—in one instance most glaringly. Has he not loaded the shoulders of Richard the Third with more hump and iniquity than that monarch is historically licensed to carry? And why? Because he happened to be writing in the time of Henry the Seventh’s granddaughter, and the name of the last Plantagenet was still execrated in the land; just as was that of the now respected Cromwell in the fine old English reign of the great and good King Charles the Second.
Let us, however, calmly consider Shakspeare’s view of the case in point, and sum up the probabilities before coming to any definite decision.
According to Shakspeare, at the moment when the Earl of Douglas was running away from Sir John Falstaff—I repeat that I impute no unworthy motives to that possibly intrepid act on the part of the noble Earl—while the Earl of Douglas was running away, and Sir John Falstaff lay panting and bleeding (the Prince of Wales saw him bleed) on the field of battle, the two young Henrys, Percy and Plantagenet, had met, at a short distance from the scene of the last recorded struggle, and were exchanging formal civilities previous to the laudable operation of cutting each other’s throat, after the chivalrous manner of our prize-ring gladiators, derived traditionally from the practice of the Dacian Pet and the Herculaneum Slasher, as chronicled in the writings of Tintinabulus. * The Game Chicken, from the wilds of Northumberland, complimented the Larky Boy—champion of the Westminster Light Weights—with some irony rather implying a regret that the latter bantam should be in a recently hatched and inadequately-fledged condition, and scarcely entitled to the honours of immolation at the hands, or rather the red-hot spurred heels of himself, the Northumberland Chicken, which he declared the Larky One was nevertheless foredoomed to undergo; to which Larky replied by advising his adversary not to crow prematurely, nor too loudly, nor yet to waste arithmetical calculation upon chickens whose incubation was at least problematical. He admitted that he was not an old bird, but at the same time implied that he was not to be caught by the peculiar species of conversational bait of which his opponent was so over liberal. Briefly, they flapped their wings, and, without further cackling, flew to the attack.
* Vita in Roma... De Pugnatoribus. Cap. I.
“The pen of Homer” has been worn by myself and others into a rather stumpy condition for the recital of warlike encounters. Let me borrow the pen of Jones, the latest London successor of the graphic Tintinabulus, to describe the event in question, which Shakspeare represents as having “come off” at Shrewsbury.