Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  £2666. 13s. 5d.

  (The said traitor ‘unfortunately’ lost the King’s lands overseas by reducing their garrisons to next to nothing in lining his own pockets and smuggling the money back to England to build this fantastic folly of a castle, amongst other extravagances. Further, he was not joking about that bill for my meat and drink in my mother’s house, and in order to pay it, I, Scrope, was driven to contract a marriage which was not the most advantageous for myself. However, my wife died. However, the said monster then brought an action against me by means of which I was deprived of all the little property that my wife had brought me!)

  Item, the said Fastolf still has outstanding to him his portion and part for the recompense and reward that should be due to him for the taking of John, Duke of Alençon, at the battle of Verneuil, which ransom amounted to £26,666. 13s. 4d. Part of this ransom being claimed by Lord Willoughby, and part by the Duke of Bedford, there still remains, after the usual deductions by the Crown, that part due to the said Fastolf, to the sum of … … … … …

  £2666. 13s. 5d.

  (After living in poverty for three years from the death of my wife, I had to sell my daughter to meet my expenses. I got a very low price for her, too, since the buyer knew I had to sell, and the girl was so young.)

  Item, being due to the said Fastolf, by the execution of the last will and testament of John, Duke of Bedford (whose soul may God absolve from sin), for the said Fastolf’s expenses and other charges for safeguarding and keeping of certain fortresses, castles, and towns, and for other costs, wages, and charges borne by the said Fastolf in the said Duke’s service, as it may appear in certain articles written in a roll particularly of the same, the sum of … … … … …

  £3066. 5s. 6d.

  Summa totalis, or Grand Total of … … … … …

  £14,066. 6s. 7d.

  (Owing to me, Scrope, by the said Fastolf, another SUMMA TOTALIS or GRAND TOTAL of … … … …

  £14,066.

  He can keep the 6s. 7d.)

  Chapter Ninety-Five

  About the Battle of the Herrings

  St Etheldreda’s Day

  There have been seven great and decisive battles in the history of the world. These battles are, in chronological order:

  The Battle of Marathon, BC 490.

  The Battle of Syracuse, BC 413.

  The Battle of Metaurus, BC 207.

  The Battle of Chalons, AD 451.

  The Battle of Tours, AD 732.

  The Battle of Hastings, AD 1066.

  The Battle of the Herrings, AD 1429.

  I come now to the last – the peak, the zenith, the pinnacle, the utter acropolis of my military career. Yes, little Cyclops, my son, the moment you’ve been waiting for. I come to the famous Battle of the Herrings.

  The time was the season of Lent. The year 1429. The place of this celebrated action: Rouvray.

  Orleans, you will remember, was under siege by us. The occasion was critical. The city was hemmed in by English forces, and the fortune of the French was at its lowest ebb. But our gallant besiegers were fainting for lack of food.

  The Regent dispatched me to Paris to get provisions.

  I went. I got. I came back.

  I went to Paris.

  I got barrels of herring sufficient to occupy four hundred waggons.

  I was coming back when the French got wind of the matter.

  Your herring, your authentic Clupea harengus, that abundant fruit of the salt sea, is very suitable Lenten eating, and cheap besides. Unfortunately, he also stinks.

  A very great number of the French got wind of our coming.

  An enormous force of the French army was dispatched to intercept us. The Puzzell and the Marshal knew that if they could prevent that consignment of vital fish from reaching our troops, then the siege of Orleans would fail, and all England’s glory in the Hundred Years War come to nothing. Everything hinged on the herring.

  I fear that we presented an easy target to those Frogs. We were four hundred waggons, weighed down with barrels and crates and creels and cradles full of herrings.

  We lumbered.

  We bumbled.

  We came plodding and heavy with the funeral of all those fish, moving at a snail’s pace in early Spring sunlight towards the village of Rouvray-St-Denis. I remember I lay sprawled atop a heap of barrels, with a basket of my figs to hand, and a flagon of sherris sack – it being, though Lent, a Refreshment Sunday. Skylarks hovering briefly overhead, in the clear February day, like the dark specks in the eyes of my Dame Milicent. I felt, I confess it, sick for home, seeing the opening blossoms of the blackthorn along the way, and the early buds here and there in the hedgerows, and remembering days of the year like this in Caister, when I would go a-hunting after squirrels as a boy. That countryside down towards Orleans was not much like Caister – no snows to melt that year and put long leagues of flat land under water. But from the general feel of the month, and the disposition of the high clouds flying, and the primroses, and the cabbages, not to speak of the Yarmouth smell of all those herrings, under and around me, and my great nostalgia bred of the figs and the sack, I was not in a martial mood as we rolled down from Paris, and that’s the fact of it.

  We feared no attack.

  We anticipated none.

  Discipline was (shall I say) lax. A Refreshment Sunday in Lent is precisely the moment whan an army realises that it marches on its stomach. I had permitted my company the small dispensations I was allowing myself – that is, in their rank, cakes and ale. We trundled along comfortably enough with our waggons, the sun low but very bright and burning on the horizon, with a certain amount of singing which I tolerated. No, madam, your English soldier actually on the job does not sing the Agincourt Song. We were singing, if I recall it right, a certain speculative ditty regarding the number of balls possessed by a) the Dolphin, b) the Duke of Burgundy, c) Joan of Arc.

  It was all very jolly.

  Luckily for me, for England, and for History, your average French army smells rather worse than four hundred waggons laden with herrings. Luckily, again, this particular French army massing to attack us was of a vast and therefore stinking character.

  I sat on top of my herring boxes. I brought the column to a halt.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, sniffing at the February air, ‘I smell France! I smell Frenchmen! I smell trouble!’

  And at just about the same moment, my scouts reported that astonishing forces of Frogs were coming up through the villages to our east and to our west, bent on waylaying us, and pinching our cargo.

  This information filled me with much fury.

  I saw in a flash, you see, that this French army intended the DESTRUCTION of my herrings. They could have no hope of taking the fish from us, and making their own way into Orleans thus encumbranced. They would not get through our troops circling the city. Nor was it likely that, having won a battle, they would then sit down and open up all the barrels and just eat the herrings. No. They would destroy them. They would waste them. They would overthrow and scorn my herrings. How disgusting. Unconscionable.

  I resolved on victory.

  Like Harry in the night before Agincourt, I surveyed my men, and visited them, and drew them up in an order consonant with both the terrain and our advantages and disadvantages, militarily speaking.

  The terrain was flat as a bowling green.

  Our advantages were four hundred waggons of herrings.

  Our disadvantages were the same thing.

  Now, the French, with their fetid allies, the Scots, chockablock with black puddings as usual, were under orders not to attack until the Count of Clermont, their leader, had elected to join them. Clermont (known to his friends as Cordelia) was a nancy, a pathic, a male varlet, a masculine whore. He wanted the pleasure of riding to an easy victory with his puce gloves on, and no danger of getting them wet with any of his own blood. This French fairy was jealous as all hell of Joan of Arc.

  These intricacies gave me precious
moments in which to prepare.

  I grouped my four hundred waggons to form an enclosure, two lines deep. Shown below:

  This enclosure will be seen to be open at two points only – so long as Worcester has drawn it exactly as I have told him. At one of these points, the larger – mark it with an X – I stationed my English bowmen. At the other – mark it with a Z – I put my French mercenaries, who always fight most enthusiastically against their own kith and kin. Both archers and mercenaries I arranged behind two palisades of sharpened stakes, and the odd barrel of herrings with the lid off. O Hal. O Agincourt.

  Now then, fig me, what do you think happened?

  The Scots and the French fell to quarrelling as to what we were up to. The Scots, because of Agincourt, were fascinated by Point X, but determined not to fall foul of the same fate that met the various cavalry charges on St Crispin’s Day. Hot as ever in the head and the stomach, they got tired of waiting for the Count of Clermont to prance up in his puce gloves. Leaving their horses behind (because of Agincourt), they rushed at my archers on foot, with swords and staves and clubs and daggers and suchlike apparatus. A few French idiots followed them – Scots and French alike to be met by a hail of well-directed English arrows. But for the most part, the French, still wavering, still without the perfumed benefit of the Count of Clermont, decided to attack our other entrance, the one marked Z. They came on their horses in deliberate defiance of Agincourt, and in scorn of the barefoot Scots.

  All this was just as I had hoped, and indeed planned.

  The Scots attack was well repulsed by the archers, firing from behind the safety of their palisade, up and over the stakes and down into the faces of the enemy as they came running.

  The French attack – their usual magnificent cavalry charge – ended with a great number of horses spitted on our spikes, and many more losing their feet and tumbling their riders vulnerably to the ground on account of the multitude of slippery herrings we had shovelled out of the barrels and cast about in the grass.

  But the beauty of my enclosure, from the victory point of view, lies in the proximity of Points X and Z, and their complete irrelevance.

  What I mean by the latter is that the enemy was fascinated by the openings. So fascinated that they concentrated their attack upon them, when if they had simply charged at any other segment of the circle no doubt they might have over-run us and destroyed us.

  What I mean by the former is that the proximity of Points X and Z – which a less brilliant general, admit it, sir, might have arranged at diametrically opposite sides of the enclosure – allowed my eager mercenaries to nip out quickly as soon as the cavalry charge was spent, and skip up round to their right and come up the backsides of those Scots who had got past the arrows and the stakes and were now engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with my bowmen.

  A keen and bloody battle ensued at that Point X.

  My archers, like Harry’s at Agincourt, threw down their bows and fought with their staves and their swords, to deal with the Scots who got through.

  My mercenaries came suddenly like thieves in the night, and since they then came shouting in French (because they WERE French, madam, really you have no head for these affairs of war!), the Scots were thrown into much confusion, not quite knowing if these were their allies or not.

  They soon found out.

  For my part, I directed operations from the top of the waggon on the Z side of Point X. (Mark it with a herring-bone arrow will you, Worcester? For the Lady Reader’s benefit!)

  From this position, my contribution to the victory was several thousand herrings thrown with devastating and demoralising accuracy in the faces of the Scots.

  What a day! What a strategy!

  It was all over in fifteen minutes.

  Then the waggons rolled on. We proceeded down to Orleans with our Lenten glory.

  Laugh if you like. I tell you that your laughter betrays your ignorance of the details that usually go to win a glorious battle. We used our resources (id est, herrings). The French and the Scots used nothing except their capacity for falling into a properly baited trap.

  And the Count of Clermont?

  Cordelia came late, madam. When she saw what had happened, she burst into tears. I hadn’t the heart to kill a pretty little thing like that. So I had my men strip her (save for the puce gloves) and shove her half-pickled in a barrel of herrings, her head sticking out of the top, do you see, and her hands and arms out of the sides. Thus carapaced in fish, and with holes in the bottom of the barrel for her legs and her feet, we drove the Count of Clermont down the road to Orleans before us.

  That is the true story of the Battle of the Herrings.

  My finest hour. Well, fifteen minutes.

  Chapter Ninety-Six

  An inventory of Caister Castle

  (Compiled by Stephen Scrope)

  St Luke’s Day

  An Englishman’s castle is his home.

  No!

  I wrote down what he said.

  I will not write down what he says!

  I, Scrope, am none of his ghosts. Let him say on. I shut my ears to him. I am deaf to the old fool. I ignore the ancient Devil. Scrope is no part of his pattern. Scrope is outside the cobweb.

  All that nonsense about herrings.

  As if there was ever a battle in France calling itself the Battle of the Herrings!

  It is all lies and stories.

  It is all things that are not.

  I tell you things that are.

  I tell you the truth.

  Worcester says that I must write at his dictation. Worcester says we are to humour him.

  I’ll humour the monster! Worcester misses a vital difference between me and the rest. I am not a servant in this house. Scrope serves no man.

  Friar Brackley says he may be dying.

  Him? Die? That Devil?

  I’ll believe it when I see him in his coffin, and that coffin planted deep in the earth, and an anchor on it.

  The Devil is not capable of death.

  I think.

  Yet tonight, being St Luke’s Day, I am pleased to report some change in his condition. These days of hectic fever, during which he has scarcely once stopped talking, have left him looking like a hodge-pudding.

  A bag of flax.

  A puffed man.

  He is old. He is cold. He is withered.

  His intolerable entrails must be giving him the Hell he deserves.

  Tonight, also, being St Luke’s Day. He has called me in here to make an inventory of his goods. This could be construed as the act of a man growing conscious that he stands on the edge of the grave.

  I shall prepare as much of an inventory as interests me.

  I shall ignore his self-interruptions on the usual themes – of fornications, and taverns, and sack, and wine, and metheglins, and drinkings, and swearings.

  (What is ‘Sack’? It is like his ‘potatoes’. It does not exist.)

  How can a man claim to have spent his life drinking a drink which does not exist?

  That would be alchemy. Or witchcraft.

  Who is he?

  He is staring at me!

  But his eyes are blind now. He cannot see me. He cannot see what I write. He cannot see anything.

  He pribbles and he prabbles about his Tower which is ninety feet tall, and the twenty-six chambers here at Caister, and the Chapel with its gilt candlesticks, and its pyx and its cross, and its ewers and its chalices, likewise all gilt, and its images of St Michael and our Lady. He chatters about his six acres of gardens.

  Enough of all this.

  It is a trap.

  It is the Devil’s trap.

  He is not going to shut me up in the fiction of his castle.

  I will confine my inventory to what defines him.

  I will confine my inventory to facts.

  For instance, his clothes …

  Togae remanenciae hoc tempore in Garderoba Domini

  First, a gown of cloth of gold, with side sleeves, like a s
urplice.

  Item, another gown of cloth of gold, with straight sleeves, and lined with black cloth.

  Item, half a gown of red velvet.

  Item, one gown of blue velvet upon velvet long furred with martyrs, and trimmed with the same, sleeves single.

  Item, one gown, cloth of green, three yards long.

  Item, one side scarlet gown, not lined.

  Item, one red gown, of my Lord Cromwell’s livery, lined.

  Item, one chammer cloak of blue satin, lined with black silk.

  Item, one gown of French russet, lined with black cloth.

  Item, one buckram suit.

  Tunicae Remanentes ibidem

  Item, one jacket of blue velvet, lined in the body with linen cloth, and the sleeves with blanket.

  Item, one jacket of russet velvet.

  Item, one jacket of black velvet upon velvet.

  Item, one jacket of chamletts.

  Item, one jacket of fustian.

  Item, one doublet of red velvet upon velvet.

  Item, two doublets of deer’s leather.

  Item, one pair of hosen bound with leather.

  Item, one pair of scarlet hosen.

  Capucia et Capellae

  Item, one russet hood, without a tippet, of russet satin.

  Item, one black velvet hood, with a tippet, half damask

  and half velvet.

  Item, one hood of deep green velvet, the tippet black.