Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  As for this matter of my temper – let it be said once and for all that I have a parcel of rogues about me, and that the Devil himself could not manage my estates with a grin on his face. Besides, if an Englishman is not permitted to kick the arses of his secretaries then whose arses can he kick?

  To let these bone-idle dogs get away with translating Basset into English would be to pay them good money for nothing. Not that I pay you in cash if I can help it, eh, my pretty twins? Patience: you will be rewarded in heaven, no doubt. St Michael was always on my side, and ever ready to lend a friend a pound. And before that, lads, if you are good lads, and write straight, there has to be the matter of my Will. Not that I intend to quit this my huge companionable outfit of flesh for nineteen years yet. I shall live to be a hundred, just as I served in the Hundred Years War, and shall tell my tale here for a Hundred Days, and as the Hundred River goes on flowing, flowing, flowing, until it meets the sea.

  It is my plan, then, Dear Attentive Reader – (and I trust Gentle too, for that is how clerks call you, is it not? yet for my part I should not object to fierceness in you, Reader … Go on, kick the cat, you bugger!) – It is my plan, sir, it is my design upon you, madam, to use this hound, Basset, as the merest guide, or prompting ghost, the thinnest, starkest skeleton to my history in France. Oh, the Basset’s records are fair enough, so far as they go. But they lack – what shall we call it? – a certain tone …

  Having Hanson read over to me the choicest passages of these Acta to date – more especially the final minutes of that Day when I had Miranda from behind while she bade the Pastons goodnight, O how she wriggled, and how our naughty Christopher’s voice went up and down in the recital –

  And having Bussard fart again to remind me of the rosy flavour of that twenty-second chapter, not to say its intricate music of punctuation –

  Yes, and making Luke Nanton read aloud the version stewed out of Mrs Quickly’s fertile fancy, of what I did with my late lamented wife in the snowy nuptials of St Hilary –

  All these simple pleasures have brought before me an immediacy, a zest, an abundance I rejoice in, and which I fear I would lose if I let my bastards earn their keep by copying out ten pages of Basset’s wretched scribble every day.

  Yet the Basset’s notes are history. (Hail Clio, ad infinitum, ad interim, ad libitum, ad literam, ad nauseam, ad quod damnum.) These were the jotting of an honest soldier, moved to record and recall the deeds of his captain and comrade, me. They must therefore be kept before the eye in this, my telling. Be sure then, Fierce or Gentle Reader, that when you read a chapter concerning my adventures in France, you are hearing my voice NOW – here, in Caister Castle, the year of Our Salvation 1459, and a very good year too, though England’s nearly gone to the dogs for ever, and nothing is what it used to be, save only my belly and my phallus, and even the latter may be a shade—

  No! By cock! Miranda’s not yet complained. Or asked for you two to come in and help me out, eh?

  What you are hearing, Dear Guests, is Fastolf on the day at each Day’s title, Fastolf here and now, remembering then – which is to say, at present, that autumn in Picardy, when, to quote Basset ‘his march with King Henry led him through the villages of Peronne, Albert, Bonnieres, and Frevent, until on 24th October he reached the village of Blangy, on the River of Swords, where our army crossed, and coming to the top of a hill we saw the French, in three great companies, about a mile in front of us, filling the whole plain like an innumerable multitude of locusts, their headquarters somewhere behind the village called Azincour or Agincourt.’

  In my remembering, then, I shall have Peter Basset’s chronicle of my wars in France before me. And you will be getting the benefit of Basset’s ghostly voice and my live one.

  Put it away, Hanson.

  I knew a dago called Iago once. He went blind through doing that as much as you do. Bit less than you do, as a matter of fact. Every time I so much as mention Miranda, out it comes, and you sit there in the corner so reflectively spinning off your distaff that a man could hear a garter drop without bothering with a Honi soit …

  One day, if you’re a really good boy, I’ll get her to play with it for you …

  There: that’s finished him off.

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  About the Battle of Agincourt

  The Seven Sorrows of the

  Blessed Virgin Mary

  All night it rained.

  We were camped in some orchards.

  I remember the smell of apples rotting underfoot.

  I picked two apples up – to juggle. But they were soft and squashy, and put me in mind of the knobs on Bardolph’s face. I threw them away, and sat with most of me in a huge hollow oak, eating my Cerne Abbas figs and spitting the pips. I ascribe no supernatural portion to these figs. There is no superstition in my swearing by them. But when princes as redoubtable as Thomas, Duke of Clarence, fell quaking in their breech with the abomination of the swamp disease, the appalling action of this fevered flux, I ate my fig a day and went quite clean.

  We were encamped so close to the French that, when darkness fell, we could hear them calling to each other. Word passed along through our lines that they were feasting on the other side, and already casting dice for us as prisoners. By the King’s command, there was no such merriment in the English camp. Not that there could have been. Harry, after all, was offering the Frogs incredibly good odds on a victory. There were about one hundred thousand of them, well-conditioned and well-appointed, to our emaciated five thousand nine hundred. Correction. To our emaciated five thousand eight hundred and ninety nine, plus me. Even allowing for me, things looked extremely favourable to the French.

  Not a cry from our camp all night, as I say. That was the order. We were promised that any gentleman who broke the rule would lose his horse and harness, and any common man would lose his left ear.

  We kept quiet.

  We listened to the rain.

  And in the early hours of St Crispin’s Day, in the dark before dawn, Hal went about among our men, encouraging them, and himself.

  One of the officers, warming his hands at a brazier, remarked to the King that he rather wished some of the brave fellows now safe asleep in England were here to help us.

  ‘No,’ said the King. ‘I would not have one man more. If we are defeated, we are too many. If God gives us the victory, we shall have the more honour.’

  I reckoned this a superb reply – and will not even quibble over that word honour in such a context.

  The King sent a Welsh captain, called David Gam, to reconnoitre. When he came back, and the King asked him how things looked in the French camp, Mr Gam replied: ‘There are enough to be killed, enough to be taken prisoners, and enough to run away.’

  These sayings passed in whispers through our army until, about an hour before first light, you could sense a strange excitement growing in us. Perhaps it was because our chances looked so hopeless, and we all knew that we could rely on each other utterly, to fight till we dropped down dead, because there was nothing else to do. Perhaps it was because the King had infected us – not so much with confidence that we were going to win (which would have been a mad confidence), but with faith in ourselves, as a band of brothers, who might just be capable of rising to any occasion God was going to allow. Perhaps it was also because of the rain and the enforced silence. There is nothing like listening to the beating of your own heart, and some consistent adversity of weather, to make a man determined to prevail.

  Doing his rounds, the King did not confine his conversation to the officers. Observing this, from my throne in the hollow oak, I reflected with no little satisfaction that it was at my court in Eastcheap that Hal had learnt his manners and the common touch.

  Thin light grew.

  Crows began to fly from tree to tree, between the woods of Agincourt and Tramecourt. Your crow does not discriminate between English eyes and French eyes, when battle is done, and it comes to dinner time.

  I did not expect
Hal to speak to me, and he did not.

  I was a ghost to him now. A fat phantom. A great lubberly wraith. An amplitudinous vision. A memory.

  Not, though, a memory he had quite forgot.

  As he strode back to his tent to arm himself for battle, I knew and he knew that he could choose either to walk in front of the hollow oak or behind its back, and that if he chose the latter path he would not even need to be seen not seeing me.

  He chose to walk straight in front.

  His eyes did not stray from the way he was walking.

  ‘God save the King,’ I said.

  Without breaking step, without so much as a glance in my direction, he lifted his right hand as he passed the hollow oak, and flicked something small and bright and round at the unmissable target of my belly.

  I clapped my hand to it, and caught it there.

  My eyes filled with tears. The sun was just below the rim of the horizon. The King disappeared into his tent.

  I knew what it was, of course, before I opened my palm and looked into it, before it even hit my belly …

  The seal-ring. Given to me by my uncle Hugh, the admiral. Picked from my pocket so long ago while I slept behind the arras in the Boar’s Head tavern. The same seal-ring which the Prince (as he then was) never tired of telling me was only made of copper. And which I once under-valued at forty pounds. In fact, as I realised, blinking at it in the early light of Agincourt, copper or not, that ring was worth about a million.

  After the rain all night, the dawn of the 25th day of October, 1415 of our Lord, came bright and clear. It was the feast day of St Crispin and St Crispinian.

  Henry had learnt from a prisoner that the arrogant French intended to ride our little band into the ground by repeated cavalry charges. They were drawing themselves up in three thick lines, a forest of horses and lances and plumes and shining helmets. We learnt later that the first line alone, under the command of the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, consisted of some twenty thousand men. Behind this came another line, unmounted men-at-arms. And behind this again, a third, chiefly cavalry like the first, commanded by the Duke d’Alençon.

  Our English army consisted of one single line. The men-at-arms were posted in the centre. To their right and left, Henry positioned his archers. Each archer had a sharpened stake, which he planted in the ground in front of him, pointing outwards slantingly towards the enemy. The baggage was placed at the back, under my command. Don’t laugh, madam. This turned out to be a more important factor in the battle than you would expect.

  Henry was not one of those kings who go into a battle disguised. Or perhaps I should more truly say: Suddenly, here was Hal, disguised as a King, displaying himself conspicuously in the centre of our line. He rode a small grey horse while seeing to it that we were all in the correct positions. He wore a surcoat suitable to his claim to the thrones of England and of France, for it was complete with our leopards and their lilies. His helmet was circled with a crown of gold.

  The job of marshalling done, the King dismounted.

  I stress this point because it is an unusual one, and because in my opinion it played a significant part in what was to come.

  Bear in mind two things:

  First, it had rained very heavily for more than twelve hours, and the ground was soaking wet.

  Second, we were positioned in a narrow space, as it were at the bottom end of a funnel, with trees to our right and our left. Here, I will draw the shape of it –

  In this representation,

  Now, I think what would strike any great general or captain of the Art of War, looking at this diagram, is that the force superior in strength and number (i.e. the French) is placed at a considerable disadvantage unless the smaller force comes to it. The further the French advanced down that funnel of trees, the less their overwhelmingly larger number of men was any use to them. If we had gone up at the French, and spent ourselves in attacks upon them, it would all have been over in half an hour, and instead of talking to you I should now be a biggish quantity of Christian dust at the position marked

  Further, consider the heaviness of the ground – all that rain, all night – and the trees and tall hedges and wilds of briar and brushwood which made the sides of our funnel for us. And further consider the fact that the field sloped down towards us …

  Harry Monmouth, who had learnt a thing or two that night on Gadshill, taking into account all these aforementioned factors, had issued the unheard-of order that his knights were to fight on foot. He had perceived the worse-than-uselessness of horses on that sticky pitch. His task now was to persuade the French to come thundering down the funnel at us.

  This he achieved by the simple actor’s stratagem of waving his sword above his head, shouting

  ‘St George!’

  and moving forward …

  All those silken Frenchmen in the first line needed no more excuse or encouragement. Supposing that we were on the way, and keen to start winning, they set spurs to their horses and charged.

  Henry, meanwhile, and the whole English line with him, had taken no more than a dozen strides up the field.

  He halted.

  We all halted.

  He signalled to the archers. The archers stepped across in front of us, driving their stakes into the ground, and then knelt down, kissed the earth, and springing to their feet shot arrows sharp and straight into the French line as it came.

  Such terrible rain of arrows! Such a snowstorm!

  Your English longbow can be used to fire twelve arrows in a minute when the right hands hold it. (The French crossbow, admittedly more powerful, fires never more than two in the same time.)

  We had the right hands at Agincourt.

  All the same, the sheer weight and ferocity of that first French charge nearly carried the day for them. In one or two places they burst through. But then our men-at-arms, led by the King himself, and all on foot, moved about nimbly cutting the horses down, pounding at the French with axes, encircling little clumps of them and slaughtering them.

  Stage two.

  The archers pluck their stakes out of the ground and again, with the King conspicuous at our head, bang in the middle of the line, we feint to advance up the field.

  Snap!

  The fool Frogs, the second line, the unmounted men-at-arms, come rushing at us!

  Once more, the archers halt, stick their pikes in the ground along our front, and pour forth another deadly hail of arrows.

  I’ll say this for the French – they kept on coming …

  Stuck through with arrows like hedgehogs with prickles, or pin-cushions with pins, so it seemed, they kept on coming down the field … The charge was so sustained, and there were so many of them charging, that it might be thought that nothing could have stopped them.

  What stopped them was themselves.

  And the mud.

  And the clay.

  And all those horses dead or impaled upon our pikes.

  And all their own knights, fallen in the first charge, who were floundering about on their backs like topsy-turvy tortoises, the weight of their armour making it impossible for them to get up.

  That second French line found itself in dreadful trouble. Apart from the unceasing rain of English arrows, it had to contend with the fallen underfoot, and what remained of the first French line of cavalry, now trying to wheel about in the narrow space between the trees. I have heard it said that more Frenchmen died of suffocation in the press than were killed by English swords or English arrows. That is an exaggeration. But it gives you some idea of the heaving mass of men and horses, dead and alive and dying, which was Agincourt, so far as the French were concerned.

  Only those in the very front of their attack, you see, were able to lift their hands to strike a blow at us.

  And all the time the archers kept on firing, firing, firing … It must have seemed that the skies were spewing arrows. French corpses lay in mounds at the bottom of that funnel. They mounted higher and higher, so that you had the spectacle
of their soldiers having to try to scale the ramparts of their own dead to get at us.

  There remained the French third line, under the command of the Duke d’Alençon. You will remember that this also consisted of cavalry, so in the circumstances it was powerless to press down between the trees and come to the aid of its predecessors. Alençon, who was no fool, sized up what was already a desperate situation for his side, and decided that the only thing which might reverse the day for them was to kill the King himself. He fought his way bravely to where Henry was, using a small company of men-at-arms, avoiding the morass of mud and dead and horses. He succeeded in thrusting the King’s youngest brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, to the ground, and getting his sword into his groin below the metal plate-armour which covered the Prince’s torso. But then Hal rushed forward and stood astride Humphrey, and fought the Frenchman off again. A slice of Henry’s coronet was cut right off by a battle axe. But he fought over his wounded brother like a man inspired, and Alençon soon fell dead, cut down before he could get in another proper blow at either Henry or Humphrey.

  Alençon gone, that third French line seems to have split up into three separate factions.

  The first, taking its defeat for granted, decided that its position in the rear was ideal for a little exercise in the old art of Running Away. So it did just that.

  The second, braver, or more foolhardy, depending on how you look at it, managed to thread its way down the side of the funnel, through the orchards, and come in to make a final desperate charge at the King behind the line of our archers. This party, consisting of about a hundred men-at-arms on foot, under command of the Lord of Fauquemberg, fought very fiercely. But Hal was not to be denied or conquered now. He hacked and he thrust and he swung his sword round and round so that he looked for all the world like a star falling headlong on those French. Fauquemberg’s faction were killed or made prisoners to a man.