Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Reader, I’m off.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Lord Grey of Ruthin to the Prince of Wales

  [Mischief Night]

  Right high and mighty PRINCE, my good and gracious LORD, I recommend me to you as lowly as I can or may with all my poor heart, desiring to hear good and gracious tidings of your worshipful estate and welfare, which I pray to ALMIGHTY GOD as good might they be as ye in your gracious heart can best devise unto the pleasance of GOD and of you. And, gracious LORD, pleaseth it unto your high estate to wit that I have received our LIEGE LORD his privy seal with your own worshipful letters to me sent, commanding me to see, and to appease the misgovernance and the riot which ye hear that is begun here in the marches of North Wales. Pleaseth unto your gracious LORDSHIP to writ that I have done my power, and will do from day to day by our LIEGE LORD his commandment and by yours; but, my gracious LORD, please it you to wit that ye with advice of our LIEGE LORD his council must give me a more plainer commission than I have got, to take them in the KING’s ground, other in the Earl’s ground of the March, other in the Earl’s of Arundel, or in any lord’s ground of North Wales; and by the faith, that I owe unto my allegiance I shall truly do my power to do our LIEGE LORD the King’s commandment and yours: but, worshipful and gracious LORD, you must command the KING’s officers in every county to do the same. Also, my gracious LORD, there be many officers, some of our LIEGE LORD the KING his land, some of the Earl of the March his land, some of the Earl his land of Arundel, some of the Powys land, some of my land, some of other lord’s land here about, that be kin unto this meinie that be risen. And till ye put those officers in better governance, this country of North Wales shall never have peace. And if ye had those officers under your governance, they could ordain remedy, where through they should be taken. And, gracious LORD, please it you to wit that the day that the KING’s messenger came with the KING’s letters and with yours to me, the strongest thief of Wales sent me a letter, which letter I send to you, that ye may know his good will and governance, with a copy of another letter that I have sent to him again of an answer. And also, gracious LORD, I beseech you lowly that ye would vouchsafe to give faith and credence to a poor squire of mine, Richard Donn, of that he shall inform you by mouth touching tidings of this country, and that ye would take to you our LIEGE LORD’S council and ordain other remedy for them than we be of power for to do, otherwise truly it will be an unruly Country within short time. My gracious LORD, I can no more write at this time, but GOD that is our elder sovereign give you long life and well enduring. Written at Ruthin this xxiii day of June, 1400.

  REGINALD DE GREY,

  S. de Ruthyn

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Sir John Fastolf’s commentary on this exercise in the art of royal arse-licking.

  May Day

  Deo gratias. Ha! ha! Hey diddle diddle! And thank God that’s over, as the Abbess said to the eel.

  I think I’d have died of yawns if I’d had to copy that stuff out. Two grounds for rejoicing then:

  1. I didn’t have to;

  2. Scrope did. (Without apparent death though, more’s the pity.)

  This stepson of mine has proved curiously reluctant to enter into my book at all. Excuses, misuses, abuses. Always some reason why he wasn’t available. But yesterday I got him where he could not refuse. His crabbed hand copied out that spiel of Reggie Ruthin’s. He said he felt able to do that because it was a matter of fact, if you please, so he could assist me without prejudice to his immortal soul. All the same, when I reminded him that the same act of copying is an integral part of my Acta, constituting the contribution of the 31st Day, and that therefore I required the chapter dated at the top, as is my habit, and the date was 30th April, May-Day Eve, or Mischief Night, as we call it in these parts – oh, then, stepson Scrope comes out again with a bad attack of the scruples, and insists on putting square brackets round my superscription! Those bloody prissy brackets are Scrope’s mark. The mark of the scrupulous beast. Don’t ask me, madam, why I don’t get Hanson and Nanton to go back with their mutual rubber and rub the brackets from my text. [Mischief Night] is [Mischief Night]. I am a great believer in the way things turn out. I’m superstitious about these things. If a fly should drown in the ink, I’d write it in. I don’t blot a line, you know. It stands as I say it. No heel taps. No changes.

  Scrope is now part of my pattern. Maybe that’s the main thing.

  This is not just a book. It’s a conspiracy.

  I am your author. Agreed. But I am also their author: Worcester (written out for the time being), Hanson, Nanton, Bussard who has contrived a punctuation out of farts, Friar Brackley, and now my stepson Stephen Scrope. Do you know for certain that any one of them exists? (Wipe your nose.) Do you know for certain that I exist? That I don’t have an author? There was a Chinese Emperor I heard of once. He fell asleep and he dreamt that he was a butterfly. It was all green fields and flirting sunlight, and trees as delicate and soft as little wet pointed paintbrushes, and his wings beat sweetly together over his thoughts as he moved from stone to flower. And when he woke up, and saw the usual Chinese world about him, the Emperor said: Am I an Emperor who has just dreamt that he was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly which is now dreaming that it is an Emperor?

  That’s enough metaphysics for now. For ever. The good doctor Paracelsus told my uncle Hugh that the best thing metaphysics could do was suck its own prick.

  The book – these texts – the Acta – that is certainly real. You hold it in your hands, don’t you? I offer up a prayer to St George, patron saint of English warriors such as myself, that one day you will find it difficult to put down. You hold a man’s life in your hands, sir. You hold England.

  Robin the Bobbin, the big-bellied Ben.

  John Bull, John Smith, John Fastolf.

  Yes, madam, John Thomas too.

  Two swifts in my tower at Caister here today, May Day, and swifts mate on the wing, tumbling and turning, locked as they fall together through fathoms of air, breaking apart when the deed is done. Free spirits! Paradise!

  Scrope nettles me with his talk of ‘fact’. I have heard the chimes at midnight, and my belly is my fact. There is no better fact than that in England. I am England’s heart. And her undone womb. And her testicles. Her testicles? Sir, England is a Mystery.

  Fact? My belly gives me licence to give imaginative body to what is essentially sparse, even skeletal material: memories, biographies, jokes, histories, conversations, letters, images, fragments. I make patterns of my fragments. This book is the pattern I am making. But I give you also the fragments in giving you this book, my pattern – I give you the fragments to a great degree untrammelled by my pattern – so that you, the reader, are free to put upon them your pattern; or simply to find within them or beyond them another pattern, other patterns, an infinite series of possibilities. This must be so with any man’s life half-honestly recorded. And in my case bear in mind that we may not always be dealing with anything as relatively straightforward as honesty!

  Scrope can put his facts where he puts his forefinger.

  The freedom I allow myself – those bright swifts mating! – I extend it to you, and you, and you, my readers. Ideally, my listeners. The fantastic developments of my narratives are offered undogmatically, as a personal selection from an infinite number of alternatives.

  I don’t draw breath. That’s the general idea.

  And that’s enough aesthetics too, I think.

  Today, which is May Day, and of all days in the calendar one of those nearest and dearest to my heart and kidneys, I find myself having to provide some commentary upon that execrable exercise in the art of arse-licking which was Ruthin’s letter to get Hal on his side. Did you read it carefully? I bet all Lombard Street to a China Orange that you didn’t. And I don’t blame you.

  I’ll make my commentary brief. Like all such letters, what is most interesting is what it does not say. Reggie, Lord Grey, was out to diddle Glendower. He had seized upon some p
art of Glendower’s estate. Now he throws up all this obfuscation in the form of land belonging to March, land belonging to Arundel, land of Powys, and all the riddling rest of it, and the one thing missing from his letter to Prince Henry is any mention whatsoever of Mr Owen Glendower.

  The ‘meinie that be risen’ is our Reggie’s sly way of getting in a dig at Glendower’s supporters. (Meinie in this context being an old word for crew, or set, or generally unsavoury party.)

  The ‘strongest thief in Wales’ was not Glendower, but something even more Welsh, one of his chief bullyboys, a Mr Griffith ap David Griffith. This Mr double Griffith had already promised Reggie

  A rope, a ladder, and a ring

  High on the gallows for to hang!

  But that letter served its trick. Prince Henry’s arse was as susceptible as the next man’s to an oily and a servile tongue. We all ended up in North Wales, doing our duty, doing our bit. And all on account of a seller of tablecloths who wanted to pinch fields from his neighbours too.

  They were filthy fields at that. The usual Welsh variety. More stones than blades of grass.

  Don’t misunderstand me. Glendower went too far. He threatened the unity of the Kingdom, and England had to put him down. But the man was undoubtedly wronged in the first place by this robber Ruthin. I throw in this letter to show the cunning of our so-called masters of that time, and the deadly crawling BOREDOM of their ways. All those CAPITAL LETTERS and italics, incidentally, are just as scrupulous Scrope insisted on copying them from the original. He revels in that typography. He’s more than a bit of an S. de Ruthyn himself, when it comes to it, though a decent enough translator from the Greek.

  Mischief Night. On the last night of April, when I was a boy, we used to throw bricks down chimneys, and pull gates off their hinges – and later, in London, about the time I’ve reached in my wandering chronicles, little Doit and I once filled a barrel with stones, and sent it rolling down Gracechurch Street to London Bridge, making such a rackiling racket as it went that the people thought Glendower had arrived in person, complete with horns. The only protection an honest citizen could attempt on such occasions was to hang a brush or a broom or a shovel outside his house. If he took thought to do that, then we mischief makers let him be. It probably signified that his wife would give him hell if the gate was stolen.

  Mischief Night was last night, when we were entertained (if that’s the word) by Reggie pulling off Glendower’s gates, and then imploring the GRACIOUS and WORSHIPFUL Hal to come and chuck bricks down Glendower’s chimney for him. Apt, I suppose.

  But having to comment upon it, and offer that defence of my book against my stepson’s vulgar attacks (I’ll give him facts! I’ll fact him!) – that’s left me too tired tonight to do justice to the theme of May Day. I’ll write about May Day tomorrow. Which I daresay, metaphysically and aesthetically speaking, you know, will also be apt to the zig-zag progress and process of my Days.

  And after that, I promise you, LIEGE LORD my GRACIOUS READER, you who have even survived the sheer torture of my Chapter Thirty-One, after we have celebrated May Day with proper Englishness – which is to say, not heroically or imposingly, but with a real love for what is blunt and comic and familiar – after that I shall get back to the story.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Sir John Fastolf’s praise of May Day

  2nd May

  If you’re expecting me to do Morris dances for you, with bells on my balls, you’ve got another think coming.

  All the same, I grant you, praise be – May Day.

  That’s a good day, that’s a happy day, that’s a hey-go-mad carnival festival bloody day that I happen to like. I speak holiday. I smell May. If maypoles and May carols and May bonfires and May Molloch and Maybe and the Queen of the May ever should pass quite out of fashion, then it will be bad cess for England.

  May carols I love best of all:

  I been a rambling all this night,

  And almost all this day.

  And now I’m back to you again

  And I bring you a branch of the May.

  A branch of May I’ve brought for you –

  and so on, no great shakes as poems go, I know that, Piggybum, but there’s a something dark and bright in it that stirs the blood, and makes the prickly hairs on the back of my neck tingle, especially when you hear it as I did yesterday morning, sung by the girls as they danced from house to house, hand in hand, in and out, close chaplets on their heads, and with a doll all dressed in white in front of them, to stand for our Lady.

  May Molloch is The Maid of the Hairy Arms. She taught me how to cheat at dominoes.

  Masks of flowers and hawthorn branches mostly, brought home at sunrise, with horn and tabor playing. No fitter matter. That’s bringing home the May.

  In your teeth, hypocrite! Just stow your whids, or I’ll commit some more honeyseed!

  Listen. If I dared to lie, I would plead guilty. As it is – how lush and lusty the grass looks! How green! And the loveliest girl in Caister crowned with flowers, the Queen of the May. Why, once upon a time, and a very good time it was too, it was nothing for kings and queens themselves to go a-Maying. (Fat chance of seeing the pious Harry VI at such a caper!) Chaucer, though, who was something like a real poet – especially in those Canterbury Tales – if we’re going to allow poets, which I think Plato said we should not – but then if it’s a toss up between Messrs Chaucer and Plato I’ll take this:

  Forth goeth all the court, both most and least, to fetch the flowers fresh.

  That’s the Clerk of Works. Nice. That’s May Day as it should be.

  May Day: a milkmaid going through the young corn with her gown drawn through the pocket-hole of her petticoat. To keep it from the foggy foggy dew. That same dew … like round and orient pearls.

  May Day: Aphrodite born from a foam of may. Foxgloves on her fingers and bluebells on her toes. Attended by rainbows and foals and daisies (that are day’s eyes). Those emerald meadows trembling behind her.

  May Be: the key, Bussard, to our English genius.

  Oh ho, and the same milkmaid, Aphrodite, Queen of the May, my own Miranda, wading through shallow estuaries of hay. Red Admiral butterflies, soft-shipwrecked on bistort, turned pirate to plunder the argosies of her lips. Take treasure. Leave them more rich for what they yielded.

  Boys looking for birds’ nests. Especially the eggs of the yellowhammer. The yellowhammer drinks one hot drop of the Devil’s blood each May morning. Is that why he sings so sweet? No song so true but a touch of the old Adam can’t improve it.

  Rooks, bells, ringdoves, moon and stars, curds and whey, cheesecakes and custards, cream so thick you could cut it with a knife, strawberries, bees, mint, columbine, streaked gillyflowers (long before July, I promise you), lavender, marjoram, the darling buds of May.

  I begin to sound like something made up by a poet. Better shut up. That’s what your May Day does to a man of the most solid (I will not say sober) kidney.

  The darling nuts of May.

  England, little pigsney, was called the Land of Honey by her first discoverers. Imagine. There must have been times – centuries since – when the whole of this island was thick with forests, and those forests thick themselves with the eternal buzzing of bees. The amaranthine murmur of honey-makers. Culling from every flower the virtuous sweets.

  I think that there is nothing more lovely in this world than the long leagues of our English hedgerows white with May blossoms.

  Nothing that brings tears to the eyes more quickly and sweetly than the smell of May buds after a sudden shower of rain.

  (Except six pickles on top of cider.)

  O my Miranda. O rose of May! My more-than-May. Suppose the birds musicians. In a swashbuckling breeze, look, there, the grass is scabbards. It keeps my swords of green fire at your service. Miranda, May Queen, dance! And then become your dance, and go. When you do dance, I wish you a wave of the sea.

  All right. She’s somewhat deflowered for a rose. But the faire
r for it. The sky changes.

  A branch of May I’ve brought for you,

  And at your door I stand …

  Tin trumpets welcoming back home from the woods those who have gone a-Maying. Such thin throats. I’ve known them step through drifts of snow to get drifts of flowers for their garlands, which they’d twist into a round, like hoops, with hawthorn as I say, and sycamore, and any bits of green things, primroses, Mary blobs, eglantine, sops-in-wine. And the girls all washing their faces in the dew, in pursuit of beauty. And marsh marigolds on the doorposts. More matter for a May morning. And branches of silver birch, hung with cowslip balls. And I, so bedazzled with the sun, that everything I look on seems green. Green. The colour of lovers. The fields are fragrant and the woods are green. And grief is green. And memory is green. And I am a great green boy again.

  See! All the shining horses in the fields, with ribbons on their bridles and in their manes. To horse, you gallant princes! Straight to horse! Bardolph, look to our horses.

  But the maypole. That’s your man. Pine. Larch. Ash. It doesn’t matter which. So long as he’s long, and strong, and fine upstanding. The rod of peace.

  Which brings me to Jane Nightwork.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  About Mrs Nightwork & the night at the windmill

  Holy Cross Day

  There was the night I lay all night in the windmill in St George’s fields.