Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  7 Graces.

  7 Wonders of the World.

  7 Spirits of God.

  7 Stations of the Cross.

  7 Ages in the Life of Man.

  7 Sleepers.

  7 Divisions in the Lord’s Prayer.

  7 Churches of Asia.

  7 Sages of Greece.

  7 Phases of the Moon.

  7 Candlesticks.

  7 Stars.

  7 Trumpets.

  7 Eyes of the Lamb.

  7 Champions of Christendom.

  7 League Boots.

  7 Senses.

  7 Sisters.

  And as for me – I never diced more than seven times a week.

  And when I die – they’ll need no more than seven coffins knocked together to house me.

  And at the Resurrection – put me down for seven seats, please, at the Lord’s Round Table.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  About some things beyond numbers

  11th July

  Desdemona, there are numbers and numbers. There are numerals and ordinals. And there are some things beyond numbers and numbers and numerals and ordinals.

  The Prince said once to me:

  ‘Sir, do I owe you a thousand pounds?’

  And I said to the Prince:

  ‘A thousand pounds, Hal! A million. Your love is worth a million. You owe me your love.’

  And you know how he replied to that?

  By prattling on about my uncle Hugh’s ring being copper, and about how if my girdle should break my guts would fall out round my knees.

  God save your grace, King Hal! My royal Hal!

  God save you, my sweet boy!

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  About the march to Coventry

  12th July

  A charge of foot. I was entrusted with a charge of foot. That was my declension, my appointment, my custody. This charge of foot was procured for me by Prince Henry. Anarchy rode, disguised as Mr Glendower, a Welsh wizard. The revolting Hotspur, assisted by this fairy, and abetted by the Scots he had set free, all were now pitched against the English crown. There was to be a fight. And I was to command a charge of foot in that fight.

  Prince Henry, alias Hal embryo imperator, was staking a lot on this stinking little shindy, I can tell you. His standing with his father was not certain. The leper King still wanted to lead his armies in a crusade – to expiate the pale ghost of Queen Dick. No doubt he hoped in some vague way to atone for his own sins and to put an end to civil war by uniting the country against a foreign enemy. Civil war is often a disorder in the body of the King. But Hotspur was not easily ignored. Disadvantaged by the non-arrival of various promised troops, with Mr Glendower in particular lost on a dim mountain, he still pranced up and down at Shrewsbury. Gunpowder Percy. Earl Honour himself. When they told him So-and-so wasn’t coming to his side, or that What-do-you-call-him had decided to hang his bugle in an invisible baldric rather than come to the wars after all, he just shouted things like: ‘Our powers will serve! Die all, die merrily!’

  Shrewsbury. Sloppsbury. Salop. That’s where the rebels and the King’s force were encamped, awaiting my approach from London. Is it in order to speak of the place of battles as inevitable and pre-ordained? Fr Brackley concedes and confirms that there are more things in Heaven and earth (not to speak of Hell) than are mentioned in the Army Manual. The geography of war may be strangely spiritual. There are reflections in the stars of these our struggles. I wipe my sword on a blade of grass and a comet whizzes. Or do we reflect great cosmic wars down here?

  Prince Henry, needing to win, sickened at last of his role as self-defeating madcap, picked me to help him. (When a prince hates himself, let his most loyal, taxed and thieving subjects beware his love.) Still, he came expressly into Eastcheap to summon me to his banner. ‘The land is burning,’ he said. ‘I have procured you, Jack, a charge of foot,’ he said. I saw in this some small appreciation of the tactics and strategy I had taught him – and, above all, the great confidence I had inspired in him – by my action at the Battle of Gadshill.

  Better have a stab at a date – it must have been about this same day of July, a half a century ago, that I, John Fastolf, militis, marched off to gather troops on my way from the Boar’s Head tavern to the field of Sloppsbury. I went via the Midlands. The sun shone on my back and the flies buzzed in my beard.

  I had my own methods of recruitment.

  These may be explained by a simple piece of algebra.

  Thus:

  (X – Y) + Z = Z2 + X2

  In this mystery,

  X represents the number of selected soldiers able to buy themselves out;

  Y represents the amount of ready cash it took them to buy themselves out;

  Z represents the rubbish who could not afford to buy themselves out;

  And, thus,

  Z2 equals my company, while

  X2 equals my profit.

  Madam, I am sorry you are not in possession of a truly algebraic brain. If you will kindly cross your legs to allow me to concentrate the better on the matter in hand, I will spell the thing out in its human detail then.

  I marched into the Midlands, with Hal’s warrant in my hand, which gave me power to pick men at random for the King’s wars. I chose none but men of substance – good householders, yeomen’s sons, men about to be married, a whole commodity of warm slaves who no more wanted to hear a drum than to shake hands with the Devil. I chose fellows with plenty of toast-and-butter about them, and money in their pockets. I then allowed these same gentlemen to buy themselves out of my service. They were glad to be excused from an early death. I was glad of their paying for that privilege. In exchange for their rapid release from military service, I received £300 (Three Hundred Pounds). Or so. O Mars. O conscription.

  My bought-out men I replaced with such as were incapable of buying themselves out of a jelly, or indeed of fighting their way out of a paper bag. What a regiment! What an army!

  Slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton’s dogs licked his sores.

  Discarded, unjust serving-men.

  Revolted tapsters.

  Ostlers trade-fallen.

  One hundred and fifty men (of a sort) to fill the places of the one hundred and fifty men who bought their way out.

  One hundred and fifty tattered prodigals.

  No eye ever saw such scarecrows on the march.

  I met a mad boy on the road and he wanted to know if I’d been unloading all the gibbets and teaching the corpses to march.

  I say mad because anyone in his right senses would have seen – not necessarily that this army of mine was alive, but that it consisted not of hanged men, but of criminals just out of prison. You could tell that from the bandy way they marched. They hadn’t yet got used to not having irons on their legs.

  On reflection, I decided to make a detour round Coventry.

  Hal passed us on the road. Riding of course. Princes travel well.

  ‘Jack,’ he called out, ‘whose fellows are these?’

  ‘Mine, Hal, mine.’

  ‘I never saw such pitiful rascals!’ said the Prince.

  ‘Tut, tut,’ said I. ‘Good enough to die, Hal. Food for powder, food for powder. What more do you want? They’ll fill a pit as well as any. Mortal men, Hal, mortal men. They’ll do.’

  They did.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  About the Battle of Shrewsbury

  13th July

  The wind blew all day. We had to march against Hotspur over a field sown with peas, and that cunning bugger had been up in the night with his men binding all these pea-shoots together and entangling them, so that our advance was not as furious or straightforward as it might have been. So much for chivalry.

  Our side used tactics too. Henry IV directed several gentlemen of his company to wear armour bearing the royal insignia, and to decorate their heads with helmets just like this. That ruse bemused the Scots. They rushed about killing (as they thought) King after King afte
r King. Your Scotsman is never well clad, and in some parts of his Highlands he wears nothing at all in the natural state. So the more stupid of these victors tried on the royal insignia for size. And then, of course, they started killing each other.

  ‘Esperance! Percy!’ cried Hotspur all the time, advertising himself, as he roared up and down in search of Hal.

  I had seen the Prince in his tent just before dawn, and asked him – for friendship’s sake – if he would be so kind as to bestride and defend me, if he should see me fallen in the field.

  Again, the eagle flash. ‘Nothing but a colossus could do you that friendship,’ he snapped, buckling on his sword. ‘Say your prayers.’

  I did not need command from any princeling to do that.

  ‘You owe God a death,’ he added, going out.

  His brother had said the same. They all spoke alike, these sons of Bolingbroke. Spoke alike and thought alike. As for their philosophy of honour – my view of that had not changed since the days in Ireland. Up your honourable arse, your honour!

  Esperance! Percy! Who ever heard such rubbish?

  Hang me, I saw plenty of honour at Shrewsbury. I give you my word for it. My word of honour. My word for honour.

  My word for honour is CANT.

  Not cannot, sir. CANT.

  With an A, madam. An A for alive.

  O honour. O cut guts hanging out.

  I saw the knights lowered onto their horses by ropes chucked over the branches of trees, I saw the same knights ploughed into the ground, hacked down by axes, which made bubbling new lyric mouths from the sides of their necks to the bulb of their shoulderblades. I saw the same horses, their throat-vessels ripped, being eaten by rats before darkfall. Cages of skeletons, all so much smashed you couldn’t be sure whether the bits of bones had ever belonged to a man or a horse. Patches of flesh on snapped lances. Knotted veins crammed into mud like vermeil tape. Carrion picked at by crows.

  I saw honour at the Battle of Shrewsbury. His name was Sir Walter Blunt. His throat had been cut from ear to ear, and his legs chopped off.

  I saw honour at the Battle of Shrewsbury. He was no longer a man. This honour, this it, was all that was left of one of my poor ragamuffins plucked from the hedgerows near Coventry. It had no eyes. It had both legs and one arm torn off. It had been stabbed in the groin and the blade had cut up and round as it came, so that no bone would impede its progress. It smelt like vomit. Blood and brains in a pool in the mud. The flies thought it was turds. They buzzed about it.

  Three men survived of the hundred and fifty I brought to the Battle of Shrewsbury, not counting myself.

  2300 men of the Rebel party were killed.

  2000 of our Royalists.

  There were also 3000 wounded. Most of these died later.

  This battle was fought on a Saturday, the vigil of St Mary Magdalene, and those who were there say that there was never a fiercer battle. Men on both sides were still fighting when night came, although by then the victory was ours. Mingled together, weary, wounded, bleeding, I saw a Rebel and a Royalist stab each other to death in a strange embrace like love. And the crows were on their skulls and had their eyes out even before the bodies had ceased twitching.

  The site of this noble engagement was a plain overlooked by Haughmond Hill. King Henry IV had his post there, on top of the hill. This gave him a splendid view of the dead and the dying, and enabled his civil servants to tot up the score every now and again, to see who was winning, and then to declare that the King had eventually won.

  Poor Henry 4. Poor leprous, syphilitic Bolingbroke. He observed the Battle of Shrewsbury while his heart cried out to see Jerusalem. A religious bird was dining on his liver. I saw him ride by me at darkfall, a flourish of banners. His face looked like Westminster Abbey.

  And I?

  I was sad, madam. I killed one or two when I had to. But it gave me no pleasure to add to such meaningless carnage. All the same, I exposed my person in the thickest of the fight. Indeed, you might even say that I was the thickest of the fight. I provided the enemy with something of a target for their arrows. St Mary Magdalene looks after her own. Not an arrow touched me. Hal, on the other hand, got one in the left cheek. Of his face, sir.

  I fought, as I say, when I had to. For the rest – I drank sack. I went to the Battle of Shrewsbury armed with a sword and a bottle. You will recall my original use of alcohol in my first taste of warfare, at the Sea Fight at Slugs? I have sworn by it ever since. In war, as in time of plague, my uncle Hugh’s maxim has it about right:

  Neither drunk, nor yet too sober

  Is the way of getting over.

  I drank, as I fought, like a Turk. To be precise, like Turk Gregory, that great Pope, whom some call Hildebrand, whose valour in adversity was never in question, but who never (so far as I know) prattled on about honour. Honour, now I come to think of it, is a pagan virtue. I mean honour of the Hotspur kind, the Harry Monmouth breed. Look at Turk Gregory! He had to struggle all his pontificate against that Emperor Henry IV who was always harping on the honour string. In the end, the good Pope was driven from Rome. He died in exile at Salerno. Fr Brackley tells me that his last words were: Dilexi justitiam et odivi iniquitatem: propterea morior in exilio. Which, being Englished, is ‘I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; that’s why I die in exile’. Not a word there about HONOUR.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to pitch my last words as high as that. I’d be a damned fool if I tried. I have loved cakes and ale, and I don’t seem to be dying in exile. (I shall live to be a hundred.) But I’d rather be in exile with Turk Gregory, than at home with all that honour lying arse-upwards in the mud on Shrewsbury field.

  Fr Brackley tells me that Aquinas taught that honour (like glory) is only good and to be lawfully sought if charity is its principle and if the love of God or the good of one’s neighbour is its object.

  You could have looked all night through scraps of bodies, ditches of blood, hacked-off heads, torn-out innards, whole hillocks of corpses slung together awaiting the cart to Dead Men’s Dump, that night at Shrewsbury, the vigil of St Mary Magdalene, and if you’d found one man – or part of a man – that died or was killed for such a principle or towards such an object, then may I never spit white again.

  Esperance! Percy! Honour!

  Give me life!

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Who killed Hotspur?

  14th July

  The wind blew all day. When night came it had flecks of blood in it, like rain, and they struck you in the face and got stuck to your beard. Most of the flags had fallen, or were so besmeared with mud and blood that it was hard to tell who was who.

  The battle was over. The day was ours. A solitary drum—

  Well done, William Worcester!

  I’ve been waiting for that.

  I thought no one would ever get round to asking me …

  The vital question. The question that decided the Battle of Shrewsbury. The thing that did it.

  In other words (Worcester’s, just now):

  Who killed Hotspur?

  Reader, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, and a pretty nasty time it was too, even by the standards of the Roman Empire, there was an unpleasant little fellow called Heliogabalus. Ate pickles. Elephant troubles. That’s right. This Heliogabalus was the Emperor, remember. His two chief pleasures in life were dressing himself up as a woman – flowing toga, tiny jewels, fingers dripping with rings – and drinking hot blood out of golden goblets. I might have called him the Empress. There was a lot of doubt on the subject. He liked to declare himself Brother of the Sun and Sister of the Moon. Most of all, he liked to dance in his palace, with a wreath on his head, calling himself Terpsichore, Queen of the Dance. Well, one day, dear reader – I call you dear because I presume you are being patient with an old man whose wits you suppose to have wandered a long way away from the subject in hand, namely Who killed Hotspur? – one day the Emperor/Empress Heliogabalus invited all the leading citizens of Rom
e to a great banquet. ‘It is in your honour,’ he said. ‘For you are all men, all honourable men.’ He plied them with food and drink, in the Roman manner, and then he pulled at a silken cord by the side of his throne, and behold, roses started raining down upon them. ‘I shower you with roses,’ cried Heliogabalus, clapping his smooth hands together. ‘In your honour, gentlemen. In your honour.’ His throne was situated on a dias some twenty feet above the main couches and tables where his guests were dining. It rained and rained roses. At first, people smiled politely. How harmlessly quaint of the soft, effeminate youth! The roses reached their ankles, the floor was covered. How strange, how novel! The roses fell thicker and thicker. They filled all the air. They buried the tables. Men started to get up, but found that it was difficult now to move for roses. To wade through roses is no easy matter. And now the roses came faster and faster out of the dozens of canopies which the Emperor Heliogabalus had ordered his slaves to supply in the roof for his fun. It went on raining roses for seven hours. It went on raining roses and roses and roses and roses and roses and roses and roses until the petals finally reached the feet of the Emperor’s throne, and every single one of his honoured guests had been buried and smothered beneath them. Then Heliogabalus stood up, yawned, scratched himself, remarked on how boring even this little Roman Imperial treat had turned out to be, and had himself crushed to death by his favourite eunuch.

  Or, at least, that’s one version.

  Another has Heliogabalus drown in the roses himself.

  And another has Heliogabalus die of pure pleasure.

  Which do you prefer?

  Worcester, my one-eyed son, I’m inclined to agree with you. I couldn’t care less. So long as the little shit bought it.

  And, thus, to your question: