“How bloodily the sun begins to peerAbove yon bosky hill!The day looks paleAt 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 hadpossibly 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? Hehasbeen 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 Douglaswas 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.
The two plucky ones were in admirable condition. At first it might have been feared that the Westminster Boy, who had bolted from his training a short time previously, would not be able to come to the scratch; while it was presumed that the Northern Customer, having been for some weeks out of collar, and at grass, might have accumulated a troublesome superabundance of pork; whereas it proved——
But no! The penholder of Jones is too much for the grasp of my attenuated fingers. I cannot manage it. I may not attempt to particularise the various fibbings, sloggings, grassings, and chancery suits to which the conflicting champions subjected one another. I will confine myself to a statement in plain language,—that the gallant Percy, having more than once drawn claret from the heroic Plantagenet, and the latter mountain of courage having given birth to a ridiculous mouse under the left ogle of his opponent, both champions having repeatedly kissed the old woman *, and risen from that filial process in a piping condition, the future winner of the Agincourt belt had it all his own way, until the terror of the Scottish borders was eventually gone into and finished.
* Mother Earth. Vide “Tintinabulus.” London edition, 1857.
After all, there is nothing like plain, straightforward, intelligible, unadorned English!
Then, says Shakspeare, the Prince of Wales, having wiped his ensanguined sword, and, let us assume, briefly congratulated himself on being well out of a serious difficulty, delivered a funereal oration over the body of his late adversary, which proved his Royal Highness to be gifted with the most eminent qualifications for a popular lecturer. This burst of eloquence being terminated to his own satisfaction, he looked round with the pardonable vanity of a public speaker, to see if anybody had been listening to him. He was disappointed to discover no one but Sir John Falstaff, apparently dead, on the ground.
However, being in the oratorical vein, his Royal Highness was not to be deterred from speaking, by so contemptible a reason as the absence of a living auditory. He accordingly let off the following speech, addressed to what he considered a dead gentleman. A foolish proceeding, if you will, but princes are privileged:—
“What! old acquaintance! could not all this fleshKeep in a little life?Poor Jack, farewell!I could have better spar’d a better man.O! I should have a heavy miss of thee,If I were much in love with vanity.Death hath not struck so fat a deer to-day,Though many dearer, in this bloody fray.Embowell’d will I see thee by and by;Till then, in blood by noble Percy lie.”
Having delivered himself of this laboured composition, the Prince of Wales went away to tell his father what a clever thing he had done.
And then Sir John Falstaff—got up! He had had ample breathing time, and felt, upon the whole, much better. He had sufficiently recovered his faculties to overhear and understand the concluding phrases of the Prince’s soliloquy.
“Embowelled!” said Jack, rising slowly (the expression is Shakspeare’s);
“If thou embowel me to-day, I’ll give you leave to powder me, and eat me“to-morrow. ‘Sblood, ‘twas time to counterfeit, or that hot, termagant Scot“had paid me scot and lot too. Counterfeit! I lie; I am no counterfeit.“To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath“not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth,“is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. The“better part of valour is—discretion; in the which better part I have saved“my life.”
The unapproachable wisdom of these words, which have claimed the discussion of the subtlest modern commentators, it is too late in the day to dwell upon.
And then Sir John Falstaff looked round and saw the dead body of poor Harry Percy. He was frightened, and confessed himself so. But let it be borne in mindhe only confessed it to himself. The bravest are subject to fear. The faculty of apprehension implies comprehension. Lord Nelson had a dread of the sea to his dying day, because he knew it would be sure to make him sick for the first few days of a voyage. “You were frightened,” said a bantering subaltern, after the Battle of Inkermann, to a veteran whose cheeks had turned as white as his hair on entering the action. “Quite true,” said the brave old man, who had been nearly cut to pieces; “if you had been half so frightened as I was, you would have run away.”
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Let Sir John Falstaff speak for himself on the occasion:—
“Zounds! I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy, though he be dead. How if he should counterfeit too, and rise?”
Quite possible! Sir John knew very little of the defunct Percy’s character. How was he to divine that Hotspur had but been distinguished by the worser part of valour—brute courage? For aught he knew, the young Northumbrian might have been as sensible a man as himself. But let us not interrupt the knight’s soliloquy.
“I am afraid he would prove the better counterfeit. Therefore I’ll make him sure;yea, and swear I killed him. Why may not he rise as well as I? Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me.”
(This episode of the civil war may be supposed to have taken place in a sheltered ravine of the plain of Shrewsbury, then intersected by the numerous branches of a stream, the source of which—on the hill of Haughmond—is now dried up.)
“Therefore, sirrah, with a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me.”
Saying these words, Sir John Falstaff inflicted a gash upon the still warm body of Percy, which he proceeded to hoist on his shoulders. Not an easy task, considering our knight’s bulk; but he was born to face and conquer difficulties!
The native impetuosity of the Prince of Wales’s character cannot be better illustrated than by his impatience to procure a witness of some kind or another to his recent achievement. In the absence of a better, he pounced upon his little brother John, Prince of Lancaster, and possibly the most uninteresting character in English history. He dragged that mild prince to the scene of action, which they reached just in time to meet Sir John Falstaff bearing off the mortal remains of the illustrious Percy.
Bewilderment and utter confusion of the distinguished visitors—especially Prince Henry.
“Now then, Hal,” said Prince John (I translate the stilted versification of Shakspeare into familiar prose); “I thought you told me this stout party had gone to that thingamy from which no what-do-you-call-it returns?”
“Ahem! so I did,” replied the elder, stammering and blushing a little.
“I saw the individual in question in a positively door-nail condition, not ten minutes ago; and I can scarcely believe my senses——”
“Mr. Paunch—are you dead?”
No reply.
“Because, if you are, be so kind as to say so—like a man. Seeing is by no means believing in this exceptional case. I should be an ass, indeed, if I were to say I am all ears; but I listen attentively for your own testimony as to whether you are what you appear to be, or not.”
“No, that’s certain,” replied Sir John, throwing down his body (I now quote the chronicler textually). “I am not a double man. There is Percy: if your father will do me any honour, so; if not, let him kill the next Percy himself. I look to be either earl or duke, I can assure you.”
The Prince of Wales scratched his ear, and looked very uncomfortable. The Prince of Lancaster eyed his brother with an unmistakeable expression of opinion that the latter was the greatest humbug in the family—which was saying a good deal.
“Why,—” Prince Henry stammered awkwardly, addressing himself to Sir John Falstaff,—“Percy I killed myself, and saw thee dead.”
Prince John of Lancaster whistled a popular melody in a low key.
Sir John Falstaff lifted up his hands, and exclaimed—
“Didst thou? Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! I grant you I was down, and out of breath; and so was he: but we rose both at an instant, and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock. If I may be believed, so; if not, let them that should reward valour take the sin upon their own heads. I’ll take it upon my death, I gave him this wound in the thigh: if the man were alive and would deny it, I would make him eat a piece of my sword.”
Prince John of Lancaster continued to whistle, and implied that the story was, to say the least,—singular. It was evident he was inclined to attach more credit to the representations of Sir John Falstaff than to those of his elder brother. You see, they had been, at school together. No man is a hero in the eyes of the valet who takes off his boots when he is not in a condition to remove them himself; or in those of the little brother whom he has fleeced, fagged, and bullied at a public college.
Appearances were certainly against the Prince of Wales, and he was, at any rate, philosopher enough to make the best of the difficulty. For once, the conqueror of Agincourt—Englishman and warrior as he was—knew and confessed himself beaten. He felt that in this particular contest Sir John Falstaff had got decidedly the best of him, and morally yielded his sword with princely grace.
He contented himself with remarking to the Prince of Lancaster, “this is the strangest fellow, brother John.”
And then, addressing Falstaff,
“Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back.For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have.”
At this juncture a retreat was sounded, proving that the fortune of war had decided in favour of the Royalist faction. The two princes hastened to their father’s tent, Sir John Falstaff following, with the body of Hotspur on his back, soliloquising as follows:
“I’ll follow, as they say, for reward. He that rewards me, Heaven reward him! If I do grow great, I’ll grow less; for I’ll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do.”
The above is the Shakspearian account, and—as I have already stated—in consistency I am bound to adopt it. But what I want to know is this,—why, if the Prince of Wales really killed Hotspur, the paid chroniclers of the period have not reported it? I admit I can come to no definite conclusion upon the subject, and will confine myself to the expression of an opinion thatthe death of Hotspur is still an open question,—with the supplementary reminder that Sir John Falstaff, being only a private gentleman of limited means, could not hope for the historic recognition of an honour disputed with him by the heir-apparent of England. And—to come to the point at once—I really believe that Sir John Falstaffdidkill Hotspur, and that his royal patron bore him a grudge on that account to his dying day. It is the only logical explanation of Henry the Fifth’s notorious ingratitude to his former boon companion, whom it would have been so easy and natural for him to load with honours.
The Earl of Douglas, as we have seen, was punished by being sent back to Scotland. Sir John Falstaff, contrary to his reasonable expectations, was not made either Duke or Earl, in recompense of an achievement for which, whether really performed by him or no, he at least obtained credit in the opinion of many impartial persons. Herein we find not merely an illustration of the proverbial ingratitude of monarchs, but also one, by implication, of the personal jealousy of Prince Henry towards Sir John Falstaff, whom, as the sequel will show, the Prince of Wales treated with the most pointed malignity from the date of the Shrewsbury action to that of the knight’s death.
I will merely remark that Henry Plantagenet—fifth English king of that name—was not a man to do anything without a motive.
What Sir John Falstaff really gained by his glorious victory of Shrewsbury shall be seen in future chapters. It will be found that he was not a loser by the transaction. I will conclude the present chapter by a quotation from our knight’s expressed opinions before entering the field of battle:—
“Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour pricks me off when I“come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No.“Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery“then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour?“Air; a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday?“Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible, then?“Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why?“Detraction will not suffer it;—therefore, I’ll none of it. Honour is a“mere scutcheon, and so ends my catechism.”
I think the above observations prove that Sir John Falstaff knew rather more about honour than most people of his time, and therefore deserves a prominent position amongst the honourable men of the age he lived in.
THERE is reason to believe that Sir John Falstaff remained for some months in the north-west of England, doubtless employed in pursuit of the scattered remnants of the rebel forces. Some considerable time must have elapsed from the date of the battle of Shrewsbury to that of his next appearance in London of which we have any positive record. Sir John was most favourably received on his return to the metropolis, where he was more than compensated for the ingratitude of the court by the hospitable treatment of the citizens, at whose expense he and his retainers feasted in great profusion for many weeks, solely on the strength of the glowing accounts received (never mind from what source) of our knight’s achievements in Shropshire.
But a warrior like Sir John may not long rest on his laurels. A new enemy had to be faced, arising in an unexpected quarter.
One of the most eminent men of the reign of Henry the Fourth (after Sir John Falstaff) was William Gascoigne, Knight and Chief Justice of England. The biography of this wise and excellent judge will be found in Master Fuller’s work upon English Worthies; a book which would be irreproachable but for the culpable and glaring omission of a personage so eminently entitled to prominence in such a collection as the hero of these pages. The anecdote of Sir William’s courageous committal of the Prince of Wales for contempt of court—in the celebrated criminal action of the KingversusBardolph—is too well known to need recapitulation here. It is true that, bearing as it does on two of the most conspicuous characters in this narrative, some slight discussion might be opportunely employed on the occurrence; for instance, as to the nature of the offence which originally got our rubicund friend “into trouble,” and what was the real extent of the magnanimity displayed by the Prince, on the one hand, and the Lord Chief Justice, on the other. It would be valuable to the cause of historic truth to make quite certain whether the whole affair was, or was not, what, in the parlance of modern criminal jurisprudence, is called a “put up concern” between the two distinguished actors, having for its object a harvest of mutual popularity. The fact that Bardolphwas at libertyin an incredibly short space of time after the event, lends a slight colour of such suspicion as I have hinted at to the transaction; but the rights of the matter are involved in such hopeless obscurity as to render all investigation on the subject worse than idle.
Though in the enjoyment of much and well-merited court favour, and public approbation, and being a man of modest integrity, it is still not unnatural or inexcusable that Sir William Gascoigne should feel some little jealousy of the more brilliant attainments and more enviable renown of a warrior, statesman, wit, and scholar like Sir John Falstaff.
The weakness of envy is perhaps the most difficult of all Adam’s legacy for the best of us to rid ourselves of. History, ancient and modern, abounds in illustrations of the tenacity of this vice, even in the noblest natures. Dionysius the elder, and the great Cardinal Richelieu, though the one an absolute monarch of the fairest island in Greek colonised Europe, and the other the virtual master of the most warlike and polished realm of the seventeenth century, were both jealous of the pettiest scribblers of their respective days. The author of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and “The Citizen of the World,” could not see a mountebank throw a summerset but he must risk the scattering of his valuable brains in an attempt to do the same thing better. To seek an illustration nearer our own time, have we not the celebrated little boy of the United States of America, who, though he had carried away the prizes for writing and arithmetic, committed suicide because an inferior mathematician of his own class defeated him in the correct spelling of “phthisic!”?
Is it then a great wonder that the Lord Chief Justice of England (an office which, after all, was then of little more importance than that of a police magistrate of the present day) should have felt envious of a man so vastly his superior in every way (except in the trifling matters of solvency and conventional honesty), as Sir John Falstaff, and should have sought to annoy his brilliant rival by every means in his power; of which, considering the official position of the one man, and the habits of the other, there could have been no scarcity?
Amongst other illustrations of what must be calledpetty persecution—(for, in a work of this serious description, things should receive their right names without respect to persons)—on the part of Sir William Gascoigne towards Sir John Falstaff, it may be mentioned that the former chose to consider the Gadshill expedition as a grave offence, punishable by the defective criminal code of the period. He summoned Sir John to appear before him to answer the charge. Sir John treated the invitation with the contempt it deserved, and went off to kill Percy—stay, that is a slip of the pen—I should say, to distinguish himself in the glorious field of Shrewsbury.
It will hardly be supposed that the tidings of Sir John Falstaff’s safe return from action under a perfect forest of fresh-grown laurels were particularly agreeable to Sir William Gascoigne. Gall and wormwood, on the contrary, may be assumed to have been the flavour imparted by them to the chief judicial mind. At any rate, it is indisputable that his lordship had not many days heard of our hero’s safe arrival and honoured treatment in London when he took a walk, attended only by a single follower, for the express purpose of taking Sir John Falstaff into custody. There is but one consideration which makes such a proceedingwholly inexcusable—namely, that the Justice should have nursed his vindictiveness for a period of so many months. This, it must be admitted, argues a relentless and unforgiving nature.
The Chief Justice was an artful man, as will be believed from his having risen to high rank in the legal profession. He thought it prudent to veil his malignant design even from his attendant.
“What’s he that goes there?” He enquired, breaking off a general conversation to point towards a stout gentleman whom he saw walking leisurely down the street followed by a diminutive page.
“Falstaff, an’t please your Lordship.”
His Lordship affected absence of mind.
“He that was in question for the robbery?”
Therobbery! You observe, reader? There was but one robbery present to his Lordship’s mind, and that one committed possibly more than a twelvemonth back.
“He, my Lord: but he hath since done good service at Shrewsbury; and, as I hear, is now going with some charge to the Lord John of Lancaster.”
“What, to York?”
The countenance of his worship fell considerably. These tidings were baffling to his hopes of vengeance. Sir John Falstaff was once more in the king’s commission, and consequently not liable to arrest. Still Sir William was loth to let his prey slip wholly away from him.
“Call him back,” he said to his servant.
There was some difficulty in getting the knight to arrest his course.
In the first place, he was afflicted with a sudden deafness. This temporary obstacle overcome, he showed an obtuseness of understanding as to what was said to him that was really surprising in a man of his intellectual antecedents. At length the Justice attacked him personally, with—
“Sir John Falstaff, a word with you.”
The Chief Justice had his wish—rather more than his wish, in fact. Sir John Falstaffs manner of gratifying it shall be given in the exact words of the chronicler *:—
* “Henry IV” (Part II.) Act I. Sc. 2.
Sir John Falstaff.—My good lord! God give your lordship good time of day. I am glad to see your lordship abroad; I heard say your lordship was sick: I hope your lordship goes abroad by advice. Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, hath yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time; and I most humbly beseech your lordship, to have a reverend care of your health.
Chief Justice.—Sir John, I sent for you before your expedition to Shrewsbury.
Sik John Falstaff.—An’t please your lordship, I hear his majesty is returned with some discomfort from Wales.
Chief Justice.—I talk not of his majesty:—You would not come when I sent for you.
Sir John Falstaff__And I hear, moreover, his highness is fallen into this same villainous apoplexy.
Chief Justice.—Well, heaven mend him! I pray you, let me speak with you.
Sib John Falstaff.—This apoplexy is, as I take it, a kind of lethargy, an’t please your lordship; a kind of sleeping in the blood, a rascally tingling.
Chief Justice.—What tell you me of it? be it as it is.
Sir John Falstaff.—It hath its original from much grief; from study, and perturbation of the brain: I have read the cause of his effects in Galen: it is a kind of deafness.
Chief Justice.—I think you are fallen into the disease; for you hear not what I say to you.
Sir John Falstaff.—Very well, my lord, very well: rather, an’t please you, it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal.
Chief Justice.—To punish you by the heels would amend the attention of your ears; and I care not, if I do become your physician.
Sir John Falstaff.—I am as poor as Job, my lord, but not so patient; your lordship may minister the potion of imprisonment to me, in respect of poverty; but how I should be your patient to follow your prescriptions, the wise may make some dram of a scruple, or, indeed, a scruple itself.
Chief Justice.—I sent for you, when there were matters against you for your life, to come speak with me.
Sir John Falstaff.—As I was then advised by my learned counsel in the laws of this land-service, I did not come.
Chief Justice.—Well, the truth is, Sir John, you live in great infamy.
Sir John Falstaff.—He that buckles him in my belt cannot live in less.
Chief Justice.—-Your means are very slender, and your waste great.
Sir John Falstaff.—I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater, and my waist slenderer.
Chief Justice.—You have misled the youthful prince.
Sir John Falstaff.—The young prince hath misled me: I am the fellow with the great belly, and he my dog.
Chief Justice.—Well, I am loath to gall a new-healed wound: your day’s service at Shrewsbury hath a little gilded over your night’s exploit on Gads hill: you may thank the unquiet time for your quiet o’er-posting that action.
Sir John Falstaff.—My lord?—
Chief Justice.’—But since all is well, keep it so: wake not a sleeping wolf.
Sir John Falstaff.—To wake a wolf is as bad as to smell a fox.
Chief Justice.—What! you are as a candle, the better part burnt out.
Sir John Falstaff.—A wassel candle, my lord: all tallow: if I did say of wax, my growth would approve the truth.
Chief Justice.—There is not a white hair on your face, but should have his effect of gravity.
Sir John Falstaff.—His effect of gravy, gravy, gravy.
Chief Justice__You follow the young prince up and down, like his ill angel.
Sir John Falstaff.—Not so, my lord; your ill angel is light; but, I hope, he that looks upon me will take me without weighing: and yet, in some respects, I grant, I cannot go, I cannot tell. Virtue is of so little regard in these coster-monger times, that true valour is turned bearherd. Pregnancy is made a tapster, and hath his quick wit wasted in giving reckonings: all the other gifts appertinent to man, as the malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry. You, that are old, consider not the capacities of us that are young: you measure the heat of our livers with the bitterness of your galls; and we that are in the vaward of our youth, I must confess, are wags too.
Chief Justice.—Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a decreasing leg? an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken? your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every part about you blasted with antiquity? and will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John!
Sir John Falstaff.—My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head, and something a round belly. For my voice,—I have lost it with hollaing, and singing of anthems. To approve my youth farther, I will not: the truth is, I am only old in judgment and understanding; and he that will caper with me for a thousand marks, let him lend me the money, and have at him. For the box o’ the ear that the Prince gave you, he gave it like a rude prince, and you took it like a sensible lord. I have checked him for it, and the young lion repents; marry, not in ashes and sackcloth, but in new silk, and old sack.
Chief Justice.—Well, God send the Prince a better companion!
Sir John Falstaff.—God send the companion a better prince! I cannot rid my hands of him.
Chief Justice.—Well, the King hath severed you and Prince Harry. I hear you are going with Lord John of Lancaster against the Archbishop and the Earl of Northumberland.
Sir John Falstaff.—Yea; I thank your pretty sweet wit for it. But look you pray, all you that kiss my lady peace at home, that our armies join not in a hot day; for, by the Lord, I take but two shirts out with me, and I mean not to sweat extraordinarily: if it be a hot day, an I brandish any thing but my bottle, I would I might never spit white again. There is not a dangerous action can peep out his head, but I am thrust upon it: well, I cannot last ever. [But it was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common. If you will needs say I am an old man, you should give me rest. I would to God, my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is: I were better to be eaten to death with rust, than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion. ]
Chief Justice.—Well, be honest, be honest; and God bless your expedition!
Sir John Falstaff.—Will your lordship lend me a thousand pound to furnish me forth?
Chief Justice.—Not a penny, not a penny: you are too impatient to bear crosses. Fare you well: commend me to my cousin Westmoreland.
I consider this utter defeat of my Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne one of the most brilliant triumphs of Sir John Falstaff’s victorious life.
“If I do, fillip me with a three-man beetle,” said Jack, looking after the retreating form of his defeated adversary with ineffable contempt. “Boy!”
“Sir?” said the small page.
“What money is in my purse?”
“Seven groats and twopence.”
“I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers it out, but the disease is incurable. Go, bear this letter to my Lord of Lancaster; this to the Prince; this to the Earl of Westmoreland; and this to old Mistress Ursula, whom I have weekly sworn to marry since I perceived the first white hair on my chin. About it; you know where to find me.”
And pray, who was old Mistress Ursula? We may chance to hear of her by and bye.
DEFENCE OF THE CHARACTER OF THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE GASCOIGNE: CHARITABLE CONSTRUCTION OF HIS CONDUCT IN THE CELEBRATED ACTION OF QUICKLY
IWOULD that full justice to the greatness, wisdom, and magnanimity of my much calumniated hero could be accomplished without the painful task of censuring and exposing the conduct of those enemies to whose machinations he owed penury, neglect, and persecution in his lifetime—obloquy and misrepresentation after death. To censure at any time is a disagreeable task; more especially when the object of your strictures is a personage whose memory successive generations have held in reverential esteem. It is a thankless office to be the first to call attention to a stain on a reputation hitherto deemed spotless—as it is to be the first to tell your sleeping neighbour that his roof is burning. The raven is an honest bird and croaks the approach of bad weather with unerring truthfulness; but the raven is universally hated. I am aware that there are certain writers who have a taste for this kind of discovery, whose minds’ eyes may be compared to a solar telescope, finding out an unsightly mass of blots, blurs, and creases, when the world at large can see nothing but uniform, cheering light. These gentlemen—who, supposing the mind to have a nose as well as an eye, may be called the carrion crows of literary judgment—so keen is their scent for a decomposing reputation, and so intense their enjoyment of dead excellence that has turned bad—are not desirable models for imitation. Neither are their antipodes—thecouleur de rosecritics, who deaden their mental nostrils to any “fly-blown” indications in a character they are compelled to digest; preferring to swallow the whole with hopeful self-persuasion that all has been good, wholesome, and nutritious. The conscientious and impartial writer will endeavour to observe a medium course between these two. But that course, how difficult to discover and observe! The soundest human judgment, like the strongest eyesight, is fallible. What we think are spots on the sun may but be the dazzling effect of more pure light than our imperfect optic nerves can sustain. We may think we are about to strip a masquerading daw, and at our first rude grip a heartrending cry will tell us that we have ruined the jewelled train of a majestic peacock!
The above I admit to be a specimen of that logical process known as “beating about the bush,” a proof that I am staggering, like the pencil-leg of a knock-kneed compass, round a point which I have much hesitation in coming to. The case of the obscure youth who acquired immortality by burning Diana’s temple, is a stale illustration, but I am fain to use it for want of better. It might be thought that I am aspiring to a renown like that of Erostratus, if the arguments of this chapter should result—as I hope and trust they will not—in a balance of probability to the effect that the venerated name of Sir William Gascoigne was really that of one of the most contemptible scoundrels that ever occupied his wrong place in a court of justice. I repeat that I hope my patient pursuit of truth in this very trying matter will not bring me to a standstill at so awkward a point. Nay, so terrified am I at the bare possibility of doing irreparable injustice to a great man’s memory, that I will lose no time in admitting that very probably Sir William Gascoigne was a ten times greater, wiser, and more immaculate being than even his eulogists have represented him, and that, in a still greater likelihood, I myself am an obtuse purblind personage, with no soul to appreciate the more exalted virtues, and with a deplorable squint in my critical vision. Having admitted this as a possibility—without asserting it as a fact—of myself, I may be surely allowed the same speculative margin quoad the hypothesis of the Lord Chief Justice now under discussion, not having been, to use the mildest expression, the man he has been taken for. At the same time the reader will understand that I do not wish him to attach to my opinion (should I succeed in forming one on this most trying subject) more weight than is due to the honest expression of a private individual’s most impartial judgment, the result of patient, untiring investigation of the most copious and incontrovertible facts, aided by a paramount thirst for truth and an intellect habituated to moral analysis.
I trust that it will now be felt I am prepared to do Sir William Gascoigne the amplest justice; and will lose no more time in enumerating the moral enormities whereof I am so anxious to prove he could not possibly have been guilty. The decision I have already been reluctantly brought to—explained in the last chapter—that his Lordship’s character was not free from a strong taint of envy, which only induces me to be the more careful. Let us shun prejudice above all things. Envy, as we all know, if not kept in check by the worthier attributes of our nature, will lead to the commission of every earthly crime, especially of offences such as those which I think—yes, I think—I am about to show you Sir William Gascoigne was incapable of meditating, or, at any rate, of putting into execution.
And now I have worked myself up into a perfectly sanguine condition. I am sure I shall be able to clear the Justice’s reputation from the last lingering blemish of suspicion. If I do not succeed I shall be very much disappointed.
In the first place it is improbable that any close degree of intimacy should have existed between a man of Sir William’s exalted position and an obscure person like Mistress Helen Quickly, widow and licensed victualler, proprietress of the Old Boar’s Head Tavern, Eastcheap.
It is true that the great legal functionaries of that period—as of many much later—were usually men of obscure birth, raised, in most cases (unquestionably in that of Gascoigne), to power and distinction by the exercise of their own talents and virtues; allowing for this, it is not unlikely that Sir William, in early life, may have been acquainted with, and even befriended by, Mrs. Quickly. There is even reason to believe that they were blood relations. A statement from Sir John Falstaff that the lady was in the habit of going about London asserting—with pardonable arrogance—that her eldest son bore a striking physical resemblance to the Chief Justice would lend some probability to this theory. A suspicion on Sir John’s part that this boast might have originated in mental hallucination may, or may not, be considered to weaken the evidence. We will pass this over, and confine ourselves to the supposition that Sir William Gascoigne, when a struggling law-student, was possibly greatly indebted to the maternal or sisterly hospitality of Mrs. Quickly. There would be no harm in his accepting gratuitous board—nay, even in his borrowing money—at her hands. Well! as a just man and a grateful, he would, of course, not forget his old benefactress in the days of his prosperity. Duty to his high position would not enable him to avow the acquaintance publicly (more especially if the by no means disproved relationship really existed). Still, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Sir William may have occasionally looked in at the Boar’s Head, for a quiet flagon and a confidential chat with his friend the hostess, to whom as a lone woman and a confiding innkeeper, his sage counsels—more especially on questions connected with the debtor and creditor laws of the period—would be in the highest degree serviceable. The fact of an illustrious legal dignitary having a marked predilection for tap-rooms and bar-parlours is by no means without parallel in English history. The great Judge Jeffries was given to that species of amusement. So was a celebrated Speaker of the House of Commons, in the reign of George the Second, whose name I read the other day in a penny morning newspaper, but which I am quite sure I have now forgotten.
Mind, I am very far from asserting that Sir William Gascoigne ever saw the inside of a tavern. The only positive record of a personal meeting between him and Mrs. Quickly represents them as utter strangers to each other. But to assume this attitude—supposing the idle suggestions I have propounded (with a view to their ultimate refutation) to have the slightest foundation in probability—would be their most obvious policy. Let that pass: I merely think it remarkable that onthe very day after the conversation recorded in the last chapter, good, kind-hearted Mrs. Quickly, who had known Sir John Falstaff twenty-nine years come peascod time, who, as we have seen, was one of our knight’s most devoted admirers, and to whose nature an act of voluntary severity was a moral impossibility, should, at the moment when Sir John was husbanding all his resources for his second campaign against the northern rebels (a position indicated in the conversation just alluded to), from which he might never come back alive, suddenly belie the purport of her whole existence by arresting her ever-honoured guest for a pitiful sum of a hundred marks. Mrs. Quickly did this; and the act would be incomprehensible, but for a light thrown on its motives by the unerring luminary of Sir John Falstaff’s intellect. He explained it in eight syllables:
“I know thou wast set on to this.”