Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  ‘O hyssop and Hyperion!’ he spluttered. ‘There never were such times! Prometheus had nothing on it. Cradock Briefbras was a flop compared with this. Lancelot, Orlando, Amadis de Gaule, my uncle Horsecock—’

  ‘Your uncle Horsecock?’ I said, interested. ‘What did he do?’

  Shallow blushed, which made his face look like a primrose. ‘It wasn’t so much what he did, as what he had. He fell to his death from the top of the Tower of London. He saw this girl adjusting her garter in the courtyard, and the sheer weight of his member unbalanced him, you know.’ Shallow shook his long head sadly. ‘Oh Jack, if only I could have done it!’

  ‘Fallen off the Tower because your cock got so big?’

  ‘No! No! Broken Skogan’s head!’ cried Shallow. He scrubbed his hands together, and wrung them out. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I think I’d give anything in the world to have just one exploit like that to talk of. A doughty deed, a feat, an achievement, a doings, a dolorous blow, a stroke! Something to tell my children of, and my children’s children, and my children’s children’s child—’

  At this point a little man with a long brown surcoat and a face like a debauched mole appeared at Shallow’s elbow. ‘Your prayer has been heard in the right quarter, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Come again?’ said Shallow.

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ said the mole. ‘Any time you like, sir. Every time you call, sir. But now, sir, on this particular matter, a soft word in your ear, if you please …’

  I stroked the beginnings of my beard as Shallow went aside with his new friend into Fetter Lane.

  There was a flourish of randy trumpets. The princes were coming. My own admirers flocked about me, chattering, slapping me on the back, refighting my fight in their own words. Like a nest of ninnies. I was half-drowned in apologies. I was buoyed up again on extravagant congratulation. For my part, I confess I was neither gratified nor mortified. I felt as a gentleman does on such occasions. I had fought with coolness and attention – but in reality I had suffered within all the agonies and the thousand little shocks which a keen sensibility must always experience in an encounter with violence, and physical danger, and brute force, and blood, and bad verse. I would have given anything for a glass of sherry sack.

  Skogan was carried off on a handcart to have his nob mended with vinegar and brown paper.

  The crowd parted. Like the Red Sea at the touch of Moses’ rod.

  The princes came. This was the first time I had seen them.

  You would have noticed Henry anywhere. He had a look like a hawk. No – like an eagle. Lord God! Eagles are a touch fanatical. Brown hair, thick and smooth. Straight nose, long oval face, bright complexion, teeth white as snow and evenly set, ears small and well-shaped, the chin with a noticeable indentation. He was taller than the common sort, with bones and sinews firmly knit together. His back was as straight as a bolt. His jaw was a hatchet. Only when you looked close-up, or when you saw further into him than his appearance, did you notice the less pleasing things. I saw on this first encounter that the heir to the throne of England had a way of pressing his lips together until all the vermilion went out of them.

  The second brother, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, was equally handsome, but with not quite such an air about him. No eagle in his eyes. Tall, though, and strong, with clear-cut features. There was something more spontaneous about Thomas, but something obstinate too, as all the world was to see when he married the widow of his uncle, John Beaufort, the Earl of Somerset, and quarrelled with Henry about the money which he had hoped to get by way of a dowry. In my view, the tussles between the two of them were much what anyone expects of brothers, blown out of all proportion by opinion simply because these two brothers happened to be princes. Beaufort this and Beaufort that, one party or the other, first Hal out of favour with his Dad, then Thomas; and Thomas of course favouring an alliance with the Orleanists against the Burgundians. But when it came to the crunch, and it was England or nothing, then this same Thomas, Duke of Clarence, showed his true mettle, and his English heart, soon mopping up the Earl of Cambridge and such traitors, and fighting gloriously at Harfleur. More of that in due course. It was to fall out that my own life grew entangled with the fortunes of Thomas, almost though never quite as much as with those of his brother Henry. The difference is that he was never Tom to me, where Henry was Hal.

  The third brother, John, Duke of Bedford, was a surprise. Where Henry and Thomas were plainly made from the same kingly mould, John looked quite different. They were sinewy. He was heavy. They had clear-cut features. He had tiny deep-set eyes and a great arched nose like a beak. He was, like them, a head or more above the common height. He looked as strong as an ox, but not much more resourceful than that animal either. He had what I would call a retreating forehead.

  Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was the joker in the pack. A pack of four princes, with this youngest one for dissolution’s sake. He had remained in England all through his father’s banishment, and I think this left a permanent mark on his character, for he never learnt to bow to any man’s authority. Hal loved him dearly, though, and at Agincourt I saw him stand astride young Humphrey’s prostrate body, and rescue the lad after he had been wounded and thrown to the ground by the Duke of Alençon. Later in life, crippled by debt, he married his mistress, Eleanor Cobham, who had a wart on her left buttock. Eleanor is now in prison on the Isle of Man, on account of that wart, which Harry the holy VI interprets as an outward and visible sign of an interior and invisible necromancy. They made her walk through the streets of London, from Queen’s Hive to St Michael’s Cornhill, barefoot, wearing a white sheet, and with papers advertising her sins pinned on her back. I hope she sleeps soft on that hard Isle of Man. She is no witch – unless good, honest loving is witchcraft, and I the most stiff-necked wizard that ever yet was since the world turned turtle. As for Humphrey, her husband, he died in custody a couple of years ago, the last of the four princes to leave this life. He’s buried at St Alban’s up the road. Some say he was poisoned. I say he was poisoned by what they did to his Eleanor, and by living on into an England which has no time for heroes any more. He was a great collector of books.

  A word to the historian: I give these men as they looked to me. You may be able to see them better, I don’t doubt it, with the advantage of a few centuries between your pen and their faces. Please note at the same time that I refer to them all by the titles with which they made their mark on history. It would be boring to have to keep adding notes for you to the effect that Humphrey wasn’t actually created Duke of Gloucester (and Earl of Pembroke too, if you want to know) until such and such. They were Henry, Thomas, John and Humphrey to me. I throw in their other styles for your convenience. Shallow’s Uncle Horsecock was really Mr Hudibras Hors de Kock, of Devonshire.

  Stories of the encounter that had lately been all the rage at the court gate must have travelled quickly through the crowd to the King’s sons. I was later to learn how efficient Henry’s spying service in particular could be. He had minions in any gathering, who would pay heed to the smallest detail and pass it back to him. Either from this source, or through the more popular acclaim, they had heard the news of my sport with Skogan, and his lack of sport with me.

  They stopped. The princes.

  ‘King Cudgel, my lords,’ cried a wit in the press.

  John and Thomas and Humphrey talked among themselves about me. Henry favoured me with a searching stare.

  ‘You put down a poet,’ he said. ‘Don’t you like books?’

  I looked at him earnestly. ‘Only those that can be read with one hand,’ I said.

  Prince Henry threw back his head and rocked with laughter. His laugh was something else again. It undid all the fanaticism of his eyes and mouth. It pulled the tail feathers out of that eagle.

  His brothers did not laugh. I could see that he would have to explain the joke to them later. Wiping tears of merriment from his eyes, he threw me a coin which I as promptly bit. Then the royal party swept on to
wards the tilt-yard, with a jackass bray of trumps.

  I think I may say that I sensed my own destiny was now in some manner bound up with this eldest son of King Harry IV’s, but naturally I could not know how. I was concerned to recommend myself further to him, if possible.

  The coin was good enough.

  When I followed in the wake of the princes, and arrived at the tilt-yard myself, I had to struggle with a great throng of men-at-arms in getting through that narrow gateway. I was swatting busybodys right and left when I felt my sleeve pulled from behind. An eager voice, like a thistle – I mean, it was keen yet shredding itself to bits in its piping over the din – cried out:

  ‘Jack! Wait, Jack! Don’t go in yet! I’ve done it! Look!’

  I turned round. It was Shallow. He was skipping about, treading on everyone’s feet – which didn’t matter so much, since this was at that time when the fashion was for shoes with pointed toes as long as knives. He was almost pink in the face. Having puppies in his breeches with excitement. His nose ran. His wan eyes dripped tallow tears of purest joy.

  He dragged a man behind him, by the collar. The collar of a long surcoat of shabby brown. I saw two mole eyes blink and glint, and above them a rough bandage wrapped round the man’s head and soaked with blood.

  ‘Like Ogier! Like Robin Hood!’ cried Shallow. ‘Fought and won, Jack, fought and won! Like Beowulf! Like King Arthur!’

  ‘In short,’ I said, ‘like Fastolf.’

  ‘Precisely!’ screamed my friend.

  ‘Well, well,’ I said, looking at the mole.

  Shallow poked me in Ophelia’s coat. ‘Mind you say you saw it,’ he spluttered. ‘Mind you remark on it now.’

  ‘Remarkable indeed,’ I said. I wiped my coat.

  ‘Sampson Stockfish,’ said Shallow.

  ‘Bless you,’ I said.

  ‘But I didn’t sneeze,’ protested Shallow. ‘That’s his name. Sampson Stockfish. My opponent. My victim.’

  I sniffed at the mole man. ‘Does he?’ I said. ‘Stock fish, that is. His first name certainly suggests unusual strength. The heavyweight champion of Israel indeed. But is the man a fishmonger?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Shallow grumpily. ‘He’s a fruiterer. I made him come here to show his broken head. I can tell you – I threatened him with another!’

  ‘Does he stock heads too?’ I said.

  The crowd were making further conversation difficult. Not that I had any great urge to continue this one.

  ‘Let me go, sir,’ whined the bloody mole. ‘Ain’t you done enough damages to my person for one day?’

  ‘Jack! Jack! You heard him?’ crowed Shallow. ‘You heard him confess?’

  I heard him confess. Unfortunately for Robert Shallow, though – who was at that point somewhat whacked on the head by loony old John of Gaunt making his own way to the tilt-yard – I came home along Fetter Lane that afternoon, and saw him still pursued by the mole in the brown surcoat. The mole had the bandage in his pocket, where the sheep’s blood on it had made a bit of a mess.

  ‘I’ll need a new coat,’ I heard him say to Shallow, as I dodged into the doorway of a shop.

  ‘One more silver mark then,’ said Shallow. ‘And that’s your lot.’

  ‘You can stuff your silver mark up your silver arse,’ cried the well-known fruiterer. ‘I want forty.’

  ‘Forty!’ shrieked Shallow.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the fruiterer. ‘Moses was forty days in the mountain. Elijah was forty days fed by ravens. It rained for forty days when the Flood came. And it took forty days before Noah opened the window in the ark.’

  ‘You sound as though you were there at the time,’ moaned Shallow.

  ‘Maybe I was,’ hissed the mole. ‘Shall I tell you some more forties, my friend? The law gives a man exactly forty days to pay the fine for manslaughter. And it takes no more nor less than forty days to embalm a corpse to a turn …’

  ‘Enough,’ said Shallow. ‘I’ll pay you forty.’

  ‘That’s better,’ said the mole. ‘You owe me for the imagination too, you realise?’

  ‘The imagination!’

  ‘That it was my idea, my plan, my bargain.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the mole. ‘There’s an account we can leave for a rainy day. Or for forty rainy days. And, don’t never forget, if I don’t have what I ask, I’ll blow the gaff.’

  Shallow gave him thirty and an I.O.U.

  Shallow went on boasting for years of this epic battle of his with the fearsome Sampson Stockfish. Eventually he came to believe it himself.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  About swinge-bucklers & bona-robas

  26th April

  My considerable knowledge of the law was not acquired exactly by reading it as a subject at Clement’s Inn. I think I should admit this. My knowledge of most matters in this world has been won in the University of Experience.

  All the same, I had many friends among students who were reading law. There was John Doit, of Staffordshire, and Black George Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squele, a Cotswold man, who was forever belching and remembering something that he had eaten at King Harry IV’s crowning banquet. These four were interesting swinge-bucklers.

  Doit was little. He was clever too, with a fair beard and a short cloak. He liked to swagger on high days and holidays, up and down West Smithfield, swashing and swinging with his buckler, making a great show of fury, but seldom hurting even the flies that buzzed there at noon. Doit had a monkey for his pet.

  Black George Barnes was a great hairy fellow. But he had this strange longing deep inside him – he wanted to know what it was like having a baby. He went for advice to Bolus, the apothecary in Duck Lane. Bolus plugged up George’s arse with wads of wool, very tight and secure, and then gave him some Angel Pills. These consisted of aloes, chicory, endive, fumitory, damask roses, rhubarb, agaric and cinnamon, and George was instructed to wash them down with a quart of castor oil. He did just as he was told and was lying on his bed in agony, but enjoying every minute of it, telling himself that this was just what his mother had felt, and his mother’s mother, and so forth, when Doit’s little monkey leaps into bed with him, right at the moment when the wads shoot out of George’s bum. George grabs the monkey and kisses it. ‘That’s my boy!’ he says. ‘Ugly and covered in shit, but mine, all mine!’

  Come on, Nanton, don’t turn up your nose at what I make you write. Go and knog your urinals! Just because it’s not your idea of heaven. Every man to his own nonsense. I am a traveller in temperaments, an explorer of human nature. There’s a lot of it about.

  Bolus that apothecary was also the inventor and sole salesman of the Everlasting Pill, which according to his claims possessed the property of purging as often as it was swallowed. The Duchess of Exeter, John of Gaunt’s daughter, she took it and got dreadfully alarmed when it didn’t appear to have passed through her anatomy. Back she goes to Bolus. ‘Madam,’ says he, ‘have patience. That very same pill I gave you has passed through half the aristocracy of England.’

  A small globule of metallic antimony. The Everlasting Pill.

  My swinge-bucklers. Francis Pickbone. Ah, now, Francis, my Frank, he had developed the most foolproof technique for obtaining fish for nothing which it has ever been my pleasure to run across. He would saunter down to Billingsgate and select a pannier of the best, saying that it was for his master, Sir John Clifton, Sir John Norbery, Sir John Oldcastle, or who you will, and that the fish-porter would be paid as usual on delivery. Frank would then accompany the fish-porter up through the city, taking care to pass St Paul’s. Once in sight of the cloisters, he would step aside, excusing himself from the fish-porter for a moment, giving some religious reason for his defection. He’d then nip speedily into the nearest confessional, and explain to the priest that he had with enormous difficulty brought his nephew along with him, a miserly, miserable lad, far too fond of money, and that he’d like the friar to co
nfess and shrive the fellow with all haste. ‘Praise be to God,’ says the priest, more or less, and Frank then hurries out, takes the pannier of fish from the porter, and tells him that as it happens his master, Sir John Clifton, Sir John Norbery, Sir John Oldcastle, or whoever, is just inside St Paul’s and wanting to settle with him. In goes the porter, out comes the priest looking for the sinning miser, and away goes Francis Pickbone with the basket of fish.

  I suppose there would then be some such choice exchange:

  The Porter. ‘Confess? Begging your pardon, father, but I was shriven just this Easter.’

  The Priest. ‘What is it you want then, my son?’

  The Porter. ‘Money! That’s what I want! I want my money!’

  The Priest. ‘Ah yes. I understand. Your uncle has explained this lust of yours to me. Step inside here, my son. A little less love of money, if you please, and a little more penitence and love of God.’

  Frank was a fine upstanding fellow. An impassive sort of exterior, but a fiery heart. A good man to have at your side when it came to a fight. A volcano covered with snow.

  Will Squele of Cotswold was different all again. Neat and plump, very small feet and hands, a full brown beard, a high and rounded forehead, a great grasper at straws, a mighty slipper through loopholes, an endless swinger on ropes hung between heaven and earth, or earth and hell, or something. His talk was mostly odoriferous. At the time I am talking of, Will was unmarried. Later, like most of us, he came to wive. When he did, he saw fit to introduce his wife to me: ‘A poor thing, Jack, but mine own.’ At which his wife chirped up severely, her thumb in his direction: ‘A poorer thing, Jack, but mine owner.’

  Poorer than poorest, my poor friend Shallow. Shallow, now, he would have liked to have been a swinge-buckler, or a swashbuckler, or indeed anything that buckled, or bucked, or would even have gone in buckram or a bucket – but the fact is that he was a dead loss, a nonny, a noodle, a doodle, a goose. Well, more owl than goose. And more stick than owl. He would have liked to have been a swinge-buckler, but his wit was too slow and his sap too cool. He advised us to call him Mad Shallow, and Lusty Shallow – indeed, he advised us to call him anything at all. And some obliged. But, for his part, this was the merest and most frantic and pathetic attempt at liveliness. So far as I was concerned, I liked the man, but he was Shallow through and through, to the foreseeable bottom.