by Robert Nye
But my friend Will Squele was there. At Bolingbroke’s banquet, I mean. Will had employment as a servitor before he wangled his way into the Inns of Court with some financial assistance from an indulgent (and widowed) aunt.
So, Will was there. And the scope and substance and variety of that feast was an endless item of remembrance for him. He must have gone on burping about it for years. And I must have chewed over and nibbled and gnawed and munched and masticated that meal a dozen times, dining on the smells and crusts of his description.
This was the menu:
First course: Brawn; a boar’s head served whole with all kinds of trimmings; cygnets from Richmond; capon; pheasant; heron. With a subtlety in sugar, paste, marzipan and jelly depicting the capture of Richard II at Flint Castle, and his journey to Chester on a donkey.
Second course: Venison; calves’ foot jelly; peacocks from Windsor; cranes; bittern; eels from the Tiber, said to have been carted across half Europe by Henry’s bastard half-brother, the Marquis of Dorset; tarts. A subtlety of Bolingbroke crowned, sans a single louse.
Third course: Quinces; egrets; curlew; partridges; quails from Wales; snipe; rabbits; fritters; iced eggs. A subtlety of the King’s sons – Hal, Thomas, John, Humphrey.
What a spread, even in imagination! I swear if I belch I can taste those iced eggs.
The feast took place in Westminster Hall. It was Richard II who rebuilt and redecorated that hall. Now Richard was a prisoner in the Tower and the guests sat down to dine to his damnation.
‘At the high table, set on a dais,’ Will told me, ‘the King was enthroned to eat alone. Just below him, the two archbishops, and seventeen other bishops. The Earl of Westmoreland at the bottom of that table, with the royal sceptre in his hand, a great bludgeon of authority.’
Did he carve his meat with it? Will never let on.
Five other tables – one for the Lord Mayor of London, and the Aldermen of the City, sheriffs, masters of the liveried companies, that shower.
The Earl of Arundel played butler.
King Bolingbroke knighted forty-six squires in honour of his crowning on that day. These new knights had another table, all to themselves. Each wore a lace on his left shoulder – a white silk cord doubled over – which was a kind of badge which he had to bear until some perceptible honour achieved allowed a lady to cut it off for him. The fledgelings looked fine in their trailing grass-green coats, Will said. Fur-lined sleeves too. Gifts from the King.
Seven minstrels played non-stop in the long gallery. Pipes and flutes and drums and cymbals. And jugglers juggled and acrobats tumbled.
The banquet lasted for five hours.
I remember also – I remember that golden straw in Ophelia’s golden tangle of – but I remember also (Will Squele told me) that when the feasting was at its height, a knight by the name of Dymmok – it would be Sir Thomas Dymmok, who had this service as royal champion by reason of his mother’s right to the manor of Scrivelsby in Lincolnshire – came riding into the hall on a war-horse, fully armed, girt with a sword with a golden hilt, and his steed barbed with crimson housings. In front of Dymmok came two squires – both bearing lances. Then a herald stepped forward and marched round the tables announcing, in the usual style of heralds (which is to say, offensively) that
‘if any man should say that his LIEGE LORD here present and KING OF ENGLAND was not the right crowned KING OF ENGLAND, he – (that is, Tommy Dymmok) – was ready to prove the contrary with his body, then, and there, or when and wheresoever it might please THE KING.’
‘So help me God if it wasn’t fun,’ said Will Squele. ‘And Dymmok’s horse tried to eat fitzAlan’s fritters.’
But Bolingbroke, having got his compact bum on the throne of England, was nothing if not determined to keep it there.
He wiped his foxy beard, so Will Squele told me, and then he said in a voice not at all blunted by quinces or capons or even the deposition of King Richard, his cousin:
‘If need be, Sir Thomas, I will in my own person ease you of this office!’
General cheering. More to eat and drink. Exit Dymmok on his naughty steed.
Ophelia bit my cock.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
About four princes & twenty-four islands
The Feast of St John
before the Latin Gate
Bolingbroke had Queen Dick moved to Pontefract, where his keeper was Sir Thomas Swynford, son of the same Kate kept as a mistress by John of Gaunt for thirty years. O stars. O destinies. I’ve heard various stories of how the ex-King met his death. Some say Swynford starved him. Others that Richard pined away all of his own accord, gazing in a looking-glass and wondering where his majesty had gone. The truth is that Bolingbroke put it into Pierce Exton’s head that he needed Richard out of the way.
‘Have I no faithful friend?’ he said one night at table. ‘Have I no faithful friend which will deliver me of him whose life will be my death, and whose death will be the preservation of my life?’
A very fancy way of inducing a man to commit murder. Exton didn’t need any more encouragement. He roared north with seven accomplices. They entered Richard’s cell at Pontefract all armed with axes. Queen Dick fought bravely enough in his last minutes. He got an axe away from one of them, and swinging it round and round his head, like a madman, he managed to get rid of four of his murderers, before finally being smashed down by two slashing blows in the middle from Exton himself.
All sorts of stories were flying about London as to what had happened, and there were those who refused to credit that Richard could be dead at all. That was the reason why Bolingbroke had the body brought to London – in order that the people might have certain knowledge of his cousin’s death.
The body lay in solemn state for one day and night in St Paul’s. Every outward mark of respect was paid to it. At the Requiem, Bolingbroke insisted upon personally carrying the pall. The body was then handed over to Dominican Friars to be buried in their church at Chiltern Langley. The Bishop of Chester was at that burying, and the Abbot of St Alban’s, and the Abbot of Waltham, and a few others from these parts.
I was one of those who filed past the catafalque in St Paul’s. Black pall. Six candles burning round it. I noticed that the trunk and limbs of the corpse were sealed in lead, leaving only the face uncovered from the brow to the throat.
This was to hide the terrible wounds inflicted by Pierce Exton.
I was never a great admirer of Queen Dick. He was altogether too beautiful to be a man, and too abrupt and unfortunate to be a king. Also, he was addicted to schemes of revenge which did the Kingdom no good at all. But, standing that day by his catafalque in Paul’s, and knowing that he had gone before a better Judge than any of us deserve, it came to me to think that the man was in his way as well endowed as Solomon, as fair as Absalom, as glorious as Ahasuerus. Such are the benefits and charities of a classical education. Poor Richard. In the end, he was like Chosroes, King of Persia, who was delivered into the hands of Heraclius. With all those talents, and with that appalling luck, he wasn’t suitable to be a king. That’s certain. I remember the yellow hair falling in broad rivers on either side of the waxen face in the candlelight, and the tiny soft moustaches which sprang from the corners of his girlish mouth.
Requiescat in pace.
Bolingbroke forked out £16. 13s. 4d for the saying of a thousand Masses, to give that prayer a decent start.
Richard’s murderer Exton thought he was a horse. I don’t mean that he had any aspirations to race round that saucer of a racecourse at Chester every Easter, winning prizes. But he thought he was a horse, and no mistake. His idea of fun was to strip himself naked, fit a bit between his teeth and reins around his neck, then go down on all fours with his mistress on his back, complete with saddle and crop of course. Exton then would trot and canter round the room, while the lady gave him a good few cuts across the flanks with her riding whip, and meanwhile frigged him with her busy toes. He’d whinney like Spumador when he came.
(Spumador was King Arthur’s horse. The name means foaming one.)
Whether Exton died of a surfeit of hay I do not know. I do know that this particular equine fancy of his is not as unique as you might think. I’ve seen a woodcut of the philosopher Aristotle being ridden in just the selfsame manner by a courtesan of Athens.
Whoa there, Bussard. God damn! Your pen, please, not your penis.
My narrative is circumstantial enough.
To the soul of Monsieur Arnauld de Villeneuve, of Languedoc, greetings! O great interrogator of nature. O good investigator more particularly of the mysteries of chemical science as they bear upon medicine. O glorious discoverer of sulphuric, nitric, and muriatic acid. O wise and venerable doctor, first of all alchemists to make alcohol and spirits of wine.
Burnt brandy is a food.
This won’t do. Let me attempt a more philosophico-political style. The warlike Harry. This grace of kings. There, that’s got it going. That most renowned Prince, King Henry V, late King of England, during the life of his father was noted to be fierce and of wanton courage. All in a fury, all chafed, the royal creature, a very amiable monster, a splendid pageant, his glistening eyes, his velvet paws, like something in the zoo at the Tower of London …
Bugger that. Bugger the immediate heir of England stuff.
I’ll go back to my own point in Hal’s story. In the year after that little literary punch-up at the court gate.
Mr Poeticule Skogan continued to lurk in London with his verses. That broken head did nothing to mend his rhymes or quicken his rhythms. He was as ambitious as ever, too. Hell hath no fury like a poet reviewed in public with a cudgel. Skogan professed himself to be working on an epic which would be fifty thousand lines long but which would dispense entirely with the services of the letter E. This was supposed by the critics to be wonderfully modern. Nothing of the sort. Tryphiodorus, as a matter of fact, composed an epic poem on the adventures of Ulysses, twenty-four books long, the first book doing without the letter Alpha, the second without Beta, and so on. The Empress Eudoxia wrote a life of our Lord in lines taken entirely from Homer. There’s nothing new under the moon. Myself, I’ve no time for these wretched modernists. I remember Ravenstone taught me that the ultimate in modernism was achieved in the sixth century. I refer, of course, to the critical commentaries of the grammarian Vergilius Maro, who wrote a series of fifteen epitomae on the more unusual literary experiments of his contemporaries. Number thirteen is the best. Ars Scissendi. ‘The Art of Cutting Up’. According to Vergilius Maro, the prime produce here was delivered by one Galbungus, who chopped up a sentence until it began:
PPPP. PPP. RRR. RRR. LM. SSS.
No doubt there was nothing quite as astonishing as that in the ballad read by Henry Skogan to the four brother princes – Hal, Thomas, John, and Humphrey – on the occasion of their dining with Sir John Lewis, Master of the Vintners’ Company, at his house in the Vintry that night in June, the Eve of St John the Baptist, when the trouble occurred.
In vino veritas. Or should it be (rejoice!) in risu?
That was the night of the great stew in Eastcheap anyhow. I know. I was there. The scene at first was the Boar’s Head tavern. The King’s sons, all four of them, went on from the vintner’s table and Skogan’s poisonous poetry to take their pleasure of drink in a private room at the inn. The business I’m telling you about must have started just after the watch was broken up – between two and three o’clock in the morning.
Thomas and John got drunk in their different ways – Thomas doggedly, with a refractory fixed grin, John with the sheer thirst of an ox – and then the two of them fell into an extraordinary argument with Hal and Humphrey, who were also well on in their cups though not intoxicated. (I don’t think Hal ever allowed his body the pleasure of complete divorce from his head. He was not designed for that kind of holiday. As for Humphrey – he took his cue from his eldest brother in all things. If Hal had said, ‘We must get pissed!’ then Good Duke Humphrey would have got pissed with the best of them. As it was, I have seen Hal weaving about mightily among kegs and barrels in capacious cellars, but I never once saw him flat on his back and dead drunk. There was always a something canny in him that called him back from going too far into the wood in the direction of Dionysus. That same something, at work in his youngest brother, who lived so much longer, may account both for his great devotion to the Church in his latter days, and for the hospitality which ruined him.)
The two middle brothers got drunk, as I say, and fell into a crazy debate with Henry and Humphrey.
This debate was on the subject of islands off Africa.
The drunker that Thomas and John became, and the more shrewdly sober that Henry and Humphrey remained, the wilder this debate. It started in the tavern, but it ended in the streets. It must have gone on, in all, for over an hour. I never had a good head for geography. So I kept on the sidelines of it. But the princes had come to the Boar’s Head with the usual hangers-on, the bowers and the scrapers and the little trouble-makers. These fellows by their presence threatened to turn a slanging match into an outright regal brawl.
A viol played slowly in the smoky light. Its chords were iron-cruel, prolonged. Two lank greyhounds were curled at Henry’s feet. Humphrey sucked at an orange. Thomas and John drank from painted cups, and wiped their mouths on satin scraps. We were all seated about the enormous fireplace in which heavy logs crackled and glowed. Blue smoke. The smell of resin. Nimble shadows.
Hal began it, with a proclamation:
‘There are forty islands in the Greek Sea,’ he said.
‘Liar,’ said Thomas amiably.
‘Forty is right,’ said Humphrey.
‘Barbarian,’ said John.
Hal’s fists stiffened on his knees. He leant forwards with a dogmatic grunt. ‘Part of the eighty islands called the Isles of the Cyclades,’ he said. ‘Lying between Venice and Rhodes towards Jerusalem.’
A string broke on the viol.
‘Another drink,’ said John, yawning, showing his sewer of a throat. The potboy hurried forward.
Thomas was making a prodigious effort to concentrate. ‘King Phenius of Arcadia,’ he began.
‘Whose philosophy was mere antics,’ snapped Hal.
‘King Phenius of Arcadia,’ went on Thomas, ‘that King Phenius, in the verses of Virgil which begin – which commence—’
‘“Bugger off to Italy”,’ said Humphrey, winking at Hal.
‘“Bugger off to Italy”,’ said Thomas obstinately. ‘King Phenius—’
Hal slapped his thighs. ‘Put away your Phenius,’ he advised his younger brother. ‘I will name you the names of these forty islands.’
‘He will,’ said Humphrey. ‘He will name you their names.’
I chuckled in the chimney corner. Humphrey clapped his hands and glared in my direction.
‘I am laughing at my rheumatism,’ I explained.
Hal had not even noticed the interruption. ‘There is Madeira,’ he declared, ‘and the isle of Porto, which is twenty miles from Madeira, and the isle of St Mary which is a day and a half’s sailing from Madeira, and another day and a half’s sailing from St Mary island to the north there are two islands—’
John, always a hefty sniffer at offences, said: ‘The whole world, the whole dumb sky, must be a day and a half away in the cosmology of my brother the Prince of Wales.’
‘A Welsh cosmology,’ said Thomas.
But Hal continued, unabashed: ‘One called Pico, one called the Isle of Hawks, where in still green water—’
‘What about the Azores?’ demanded Thomas.
‘That is the Azores,’ said Hal.
‘What is?’
‘The Isle of Hawks and Pico.’
Thomas rubbed his thick neck with his thumb. His brows came together like two claws over eyes that ached with alcohol and fraternal rivalry. ‘There is no hawks in the Azores,’ he protested. ‘No hawks and no Pico.’
Hal smiled at him. ‘There are hawks, ther
e are hang-nails, and there are angels and lemon-bushes and the mewing of cats in Pico,’ he said softly. ‘There is also the Grace of God, and a few jackdaws.’
There was a pause. Thomas was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon these possibilities.
‘The Trinity of the Africans,’ he said slowly, his jaw barely supplying the needs of his vocal chords, ‘is such that angels and other ministers have no more chance of survival there than a snowball in hell.’
‘Don’t spoil your immortal soul for the sake of a feeble witticism,’ Hal instructed him.
Humphrey nodded approval. Tears filled his eyes.
‘Hog! Nightingale!’ cried John. ‘Give us the truth!’ His head slumped. ‘God will pardon Thomas,’ he mumbled. ‘But whether he will pardon Mr Skogan is another matter.’
‘Let’s have another drink,’ suggested Thomas. And the potboy was at his elbow immediately.
I was beginning to see eight princes. Their faces all screwed to the size of a single fist.
Hal resumed his litany, unoiled by any further wine:
‘Verde island, St Jorge island, the isle of Teneriffe, the Grand Canary island—’
Thomas sighed. He closed his eyes.
‘A grocer’s list,’ he said. ‘The childish recitation of an old nurse woman. The beating of an empty drum.’ He put down his bowl with much deliberation and gave his elder brother a look that was like the flick of a lash. ‘The Azores,’ he said, ‘are simply those islands in the south of the world – no Christian soul disputes it – in the land or province of the kingdom of Guinea in West Africa – as one goes eastward or as one goes southward – with St Miguel island, which is north of the island of Jesus Cristo—’