I. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF IN EXILE.
CONSEQUENT STAGNATION IN THE COURT OF HENRY THE FIFTH.—THE WINDSOR CAMPAIGN, ITS MOTIVES AND RESULTS.
THE accession of Henry the Fifth to the throne of England was not marked by such lavish and prolonged rejoicings as the people of that time were accustomed to on similar occasions. Things, indeed, seem to have been done on rather a niggardly and puritanical scale. For this there were doubtless many sufficient reasons. The royal treasury was impoverished. The nation had not been engaged in a civil war for several months, and the public mind was getting impatient for the recurrence of that indispensable necessary of national life—which indeed was kindly furnished them by certain patriots who (for lack of better excuse) pretended that King Richard the Second was still alive and a claimant to the throne—a contingency which the statesmanlike policy of the late King Henry had most effectually guarded against. Moreover the newly crowned monarch, having so publicly pledged himself to measures of reform, and the adoption of business-like habits, was in common consistency bound to show signs of moral amendment by setting about the invasion of a foreign country, and torturing to death certain dangerous persons who had ventured to differ with him in religious opinions. The body of Richard the Second had to be exhumed and exhibited for public inspection. The conquest of France had to be undertaken. The exacting spirit of the times, moreover, required that a reward of 337 L. 10s. should be offered by the crown for the apprehension of Sir John Oldcastle *, the supposed leader of a Protestant conspiracy,—a circumstance in itself sufficient, (considering that the accused might have been caught and the reward claimed,) in the then existing state of the exchequer, to indispose the monarch for any exuberance of mirth or expenditure. But unquestionably the arch reason why the coronation festivities should have gone off flatly and without brilliancy or eclat was the absence from court of the man whose gifts and antecedents would naturally have pointed him out as the arbiter elegantiarum for the occasion. The master of the revels—which did not take place—was at the time of their non-occurrence a languishing captive, on an illegal warrant, in the Fleet Prison. The idea of any merriment in the court of Henry the Fifth without the assistance of Sir John Falstaff is simply preposterous. But Henry the Fifth had forsworn merriment and Falstaff together, and taken up with invasion and Smithfield bonfires in their stead. The only remarkable public boons consequent upon the coronation were a wholesale creation of Knights of the Bath—from participation in which honour Sir John Falstaff was of course excluded—and a general jail delivery, whereof, equally as a matter of course, our knight took the most prompt and summary advantage. Sir John and his companions were liberated by royal amnesty after a confinement of twenty-four hours.
* Oldcastle was good enough to keep out of the way, in
return for which considerate behaviour he was let off with a
“grand cursing at St. Paul’s Cross.” He was captured four
years later, and “roasted to death by a fire kindled under
him” at Smithfield—the crown being then in better
circumstances and able to defray the expenses of his
prosecution.
But of what use was the so-called liberty to Sir John Falstaff? It was, after all, but the liberty which you grant to a gudgeon when you unhook him from the end of your fishing line and toss him contemptuously into the nearest corn-field. Was not Sir John an exile from the court? Had not the idol of his misplaced affections, “his king, his Jove,” forbidden him admission to the Olympian circle, where nectar and ambrosia were alone to be found? Had not Henry the Fifth commanded him
“Not to come near our person by ten mile?”
He had indeed! And that cruel radius was a rigid bar at the end of which Sir John was ruthlessly chained ten miles aloof from all that was life, and warmth, and breath to him. It was the very mockery of mercy. It was like saying to a man, “I will only keep your mouth and nostrils ten inches below the surface of the water, but above that altitude you shall never rise.” Mighty like drowning after all!
The present book, the last and saddest of our history! will be, of necessity, a short one. The public career of Sir John Falstaff may be said to have terminated with the catastrophe recorded in the last chapter. The remaining months of his existence he passed in retirement—would I could add in prosperity!—as a private gentleman. There is a completeness and consistency in the life of this remarkable man almost without parallel in history. He was born in difficulties; he lived sixty-three years in embarrassed circumstances; and died in hot water. And yet throughout the whole of this trying pilgrimage Sir John was never once tempted to depart from his guiding principles. What were Sir John Falstaff’s guiding principles? the inconsiderate reader may ask,—yielding to the popularly received opinion that the knight never had any, than which a greater mistake can scarcely be imagined. Who shall accuse of irregularity a man who, for upwards of three-score years, based his every act upon the rigid observance of two rules of life? These were, firstly, never to let his business interfere with his pleasure; secondly, on no occasion to suffer his income to exceed his expenditure; principles which, it will be admitted, Sir John adhered to in the teeth of no common or unfrequent temptations to their abandonment. It must not be supposed that Sir John Falstaff for a moment believed that King Henry the Fifth intended to fulfil his promise of allowing his banished associates a sufficiency for “competence of life” still less that his majesty, among his other “startling effects” of reformation, meditated keeping his word upon so delicate a matter. There is reason to believe that a nominal pension of three hundred pounds a year was conferred upon our knight, but not the slightest to suppose that any measures were ever thought of for paying as much as the first quarterly instalment. Henry the Fifth had at least profited by Falstaff’s training in this respect, that he managed through life to make his liabilities exceed his resources, and contrived to secure an immense deal of éclat and enjoyment without troubling himself to pay for it. He endowed his beautiful young wife, Katherine of Valois, out of the private fortune of his step-mother (whom he had previously incarcerated in Pevensey Castle on a charge of witchcraft). The whole of the young queen’s household, with numerous pensioners of her family, were suffered to help themselves out of the same convenient fund. In the year of his marriage Henry drew upon the treasury of the captive dowager for a hundred marks, which he graciously presented to the Abbess of Sion. Soon afterwards he provided for the maintenance of his dearly beloved cousin Dame Jake * (otherwise the Princess Jaqueline of Hainault) by the moderate allowance of a hundred pounds a month, also to be paid from the “profits” of the dower of Joanna, late Queen of England.