THE news of Henry the Fourth’s decease was the occasion of a state of public excitement to which we should in vain look for a parallel in any dynastic or ministerial crisis of modern times. Rumour, with all her hundred tongues gabbling at once, flew hither and thither, announcing that the respectabilities were “out,” and the reprobates “in.” For a few brief hours Sir John Falstaff really ranked, in the popular estimation, as the most influential subject in the realm (and that distinction, however briefly enjoyed, is something for a man to look back to with satisfaction!) The knight’s “paper,” previously a drug in the money-market, was eagerly bought up by the Jews, calling themselves Lombards *, of the city. Traders, on the fair pages of whose ledgers the name of Sir John Falstaff had long stood as a blot and eyesore, ordered expensive dinners, and made rash presents to their wives and daughters. Others, who had issued writs for the apprehension of the knight’s person, called in those documents with breathless eagerness. Grave burgesses, lawyers, and even ecclesiastics, who had the day before commented severely on our hero’s irregularities, now boasted of his acquaintance, and quoted his witticisms. A spirited hatter in the ward of Chepe displayed, in front of his booth, a new falling hood-shape, labelled with the recommendation, “as worne by Sir John Falstatfe and ye Courte,” for copies of which he received an incredible number of orders. The “Old Boar’s Head” did such a morning’s stroke of business as had not been achieved within the memory of the oldest tippler. The principal wine-merchants of the Vintry obsequiously intimated to Mrs. Quickly that unlimited credit would be given to her at their respective establishments, and our worthy hostess’s landlord immediately doubled her rent.
The feeling of the Court may be summed up in one word—panic. The favourites of the late king thought of nothing less than packing up their portmanteaus, and making the best of their way to their several country seats. The opinion was universal that Sir John Falstaff would be raised to a rank, at all events, equivalent to what we call prime minister; and it was of course anticipated that our knight would select his companions in office from men of character and habits congenial to his own. It is needless to say that none such could be found amongst the lugubrious familiars of the late monarch. The princes of the blood themselves—the new king’s own brothers—were by no means free from the general apprehension. It seems rather odd that they should have believed in the possibility of gratitude existing in the bosom of one of their own blood; but it is nevertheless certain that they agreed to look on Sir John Falstaff in the light of “the coming man,” a prospect they regarded with considerable apprehension and alarm. For they were by no means jovial princes, these young fellows. “A man,” as Sir John himself had observed of one of them, “could not make them laugh.” The individual Prince here referred to was John of Lancaster, afterwards Duke of Bedford, whom we have already seen distinguish himself by treacherously butchering a band of generous foemen, who had trusted themselves unarmed to his honour—an achievement which he followed up later in life by a congenial experiment on the person of one Joan of Arc, at Rouen, in Normandy. A second was the renowned Duke Humphrey, whose social and hospitable qualities have grown into a proverb. These two will serve as examples of the entire stock. Such men could scarcely have felt much sympathy for, or hoped anything from the friendship of, Sir John Falstaff.
As for the Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, he no sooner heard of the old king’s death than he proceeded to make what, in modern colloquial parlance, is termed “a bolt of it.” He had been hanging anxiously about the palace during the morning, and on the confirmation of his worst fears took precipitately to his heels. He was detected in that sagacious but undignified act by the Earl of Warwick *, who detained him in conversation.
Gascoigne made no concealment of his terrors; and indeed the noble earl gave him no encouragement whatever to their mitigation. They agreed—with the Princes John, Humphrey, and Thomas, who, accompanied by the Earl of Westmoreland and other nobles of the Court, soon after joined their conference—that the common prospects of the late king’s favourites and admirers were decidedly unfavourable. It was the opinion of the Earl of Warwick that many nobles who “should hold their places” (meaning himself for one), would have to “strike sail to spirits of vile sort;” as a specimen whereof it is presumed he had the impudence to allude to the hero of these pages. The Chief Justice confessed himself prepared for the worst, admitting that the “condition of the time” could not look “more hideously” upon him than his imagination had pictured to him. It was admitted, on all hands, that his lordship’s only safe policy would be to adopt the unpalatable course of “speaking Sir John Falstaff fair.” This salutary piece of advice was first offered by the Duke of Clarence. And I am willing to stake my reputation as a historian upon the statement that the Lord Chief Justice was perfectly prepared to act upon it, had not things taken a wholly unexpected turn. For he was silent on the subject; and the case was evidently one of those wherein silence is consent.
But the new king made his appearance amongst the group (who were waiting in an antechamber like criminals to hear their sentence), and speedily changed the aspect of things. He threw off the mask at once. He had no. intention to alter anything. He had stepped into his father’s shoes, and meant to walk in his father’s footsteps. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! If they had really been taken in by his having falsely represented himself as a jovial good sort of fellow, why, he could only feel flattered by the compliment to his powers of personation. In reality, he had succeeded to the tyrannical and conquering business of his unlamented father, which he intended to carry on with spirit, accepting all the premises, bad-will, and fixtures as he found them. The princes and earls were, of course, delighted, as feeling assured of a lengthened tenure of Court favour and office. But the Lord Chief Justice was still uneasy. He had once committed the present King of England to prison, and monarchs are not in the habit of forgetting personal affronts.
I have before hinted at a possibility that this event was a matter of private arrangement between the prince and the judge, for purposes of mutual popularity. But to take a liberty with a prince, even at his own request, is always a ticklish business. If you exceed the limit of your instructions, woe betide you! I do not say that such was the case; but it is barely probable that the cell to which the Prince of Wales was confined on the occasion in question, may have proved rather more damp, and less comfortable, than His Royal Highness had intended. At any rate, it is certain that Gascoigne on this, his first meeting with King Henry the Fifth (in the royal capacity), was in a state of great trepidation, and evidently apprehended nothing less than immediate disgrace and suspension from office. Recovering, however, a little courage and composure at the new King’s indications of a disposition to carry out his late father’s policy—I was about to say principles—he ventured upon a little special pleading in defence of his conduct in the matter of the world-famous police case, which he judiciously mixed up with a little covert flattery—delicately hinting that Henry the Fifth himself might some day have a disreputable son, to whose vagaries a severe administration of the Common Law might prove a wholesome corrective. Acting on the old north-country proverb that “the old woman would never have looked in the oven for her daughter if she hadn’t been there herself,” His Majesty King Henry the Fifth (a sagacious man at all times) saw the wisdom of this suggestion, and at once confirmed Chief Justice Gascoigne in the permanent enjoyment of his dignities and emoluments.
I grieve to write it—but the deed was done, and it shall be chronicled. The first employment made by the Chief Justice of his new lease of power was to indulge in a dastardly act of vengeance. With indecent haste he rushed from the palace, and issued warrants for the apprehension of Mistress Helen Quickly, licensed victualler, and of Mistress Dorothea Tearsheet, spinster, on a frivolous and untenable charge. For what reason? it will be asked. I can find no better one than that the former was the friend, and the latter the beloved kinswoman, of Sir John Falstaff. Do you suppose the justice had forgotten the setting down he had received at the hands of our hero, the substance of which (transferred from the pages of “Shakespeare”), will be found in the second chapter of the fourth book of this history? And with the petty vindictiveness we have seen him employ on more than one occasion, is it probable that he was at all the sort of man to behave in the hour of his own triumph with magnanimity towards a fallen foe? We will waive the question of Gascoigne being possibly indebted to Mrs. Quickly for early board and lodging, as being, if not irrelevant, at any rate superfluous. The case is quite black enough against him as it stands.
At any rate, it is certain that the two ladies in question were ignominiously arrested by the warrant of the Chief Justice *, and to complete their disgrace (and Sir John Falstaff’s) transferred from the custody of the constables to that of the town beadle.
In proof that the arrest had been made under circumstances of extreme injustice and barbarity, it need only be urged that each of the fair captives was so violently provoked by her aggressors, as entirely to forget all her antecedents of good breeding and propriety, and to indulge in positively coarse and abusive language.
Mistress Tearsheet, for instance, was betrayed into the following decidedly unladylike outburst, addressed to a beadle in human form:—
“I’ll tell thee what, thou thin man in a censer! I will have you as soundly swinged for this, you blue-bottle rogue! you filthy, famished correctioner! if you be not swinged, I’ll forswear half kirtles.”
I have extracted this passage from the chronicle, not for the vulgar purpose of harrowing the reader’s feelings with the spectacle of lovely woman goaded by injustice and violence even to the pitch of unbecoming self-forgetfulness, but from motives purely archæological. The derisive term “bluebottle”—so frequently heard in the present day, applied to the guardians of the public peace by ladies and gentlemen in circumstances of trial similar to those of Mistress Tearsheet—is thereby proved to have had an origin at all events as early as the commencement of the fifteenth century,—a valuable antiquarian discovery, for which I trust some learned gentleman with capital letters after his name will be just enough to give me credit in the pages of some eminent scientific journal.
Ere the hour of noon had that day sounded Sir John Falstaff’s bills were again waste paper. His creditors, who had indulged in costly dinners, and given rash presents to their wives and daughters, countermanded their suppers, and withdrew their names from numerous charitable subscription lists. The writs were re-issued. The hatter in the Ward of Chepe altered his placard to “Ye Gascoigne Shape?,” and disposed of his invention more rapidly than before. By half-past three in the afternoon the sheriff’s officers were in possession of the “Old Boar’s Head” for a pitiful debt to a small ale brewer.
TRIUMPH OF THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE GASCOIGNE, AND DISGRACE OF SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.
THE coronation of Henry the Fifth took place immediately on his assumption of the royal dignity. Authorities differ as to the exact date of this imposing ceremony. Fleming, in his Chronicle, fixes it as late as the 9th of April, in which he is supported by Stowe and a host of respectable authorities. Rapin comes nearer the probable truth in assigning it to the first of the same month—a date which leaves us not without slight suspicion of a seasonable pleasantry intended by the lively French historian at the expense of his readers. The general balance of probabilities, supported by important circumstantial evidence, brought to light in the search after materials for this history, points out the 22nd of March as the day on which Henry the Fifth practically succeeded to the crown of his father’s cousin. In those days a king was considered no king until he had worn the crown; and as it was never in the least degree clear, even to the most discerning intellect, to whom the crown really belonged, the important claim of possession was naturally the first thing thought of by the individual enjoying the nearest prospect of its appropriation. It is hardly probable that a sagacious prince like Henry of Monmouth should have postponed the vital ceremony a single day longer than was absolutely necessary. Pressing necessities of state afforded a decent excuse for hastening the funeral of Henry the Fourth; and there can be no doubt that his successor’s publicly announced alacrity to walk in his father’s footsteps induced him to try on the paternal coronation shoes on the earliest possible occasion.
Should any doubts on this subject exist, they are at once dispelled by reference to the facts already in the possession of the reader—which it may bo as well to recapitulate. Sir John Falstaff received the tidings of the old king’s death on the 19th of March. On the third day after this our knight was in London. That the day of Sir John’s arrival in the metropolis was so that of Henry’s coronation is a matter of history.
The chronicler Fleming, speaking of the auspicious accession of Henry the Fifth to the throne of England, informs us that—
Differing with the learned and voluminous chronicler as to the absence of precedent in such matter of homage (the worship of the rising sun, on the appearance of his first rays of power, being older in England than Stonehenge), I can only say that there was no noble man or honourable personage whatever in the realm more eager to do to the new king homage, and swear to him due obedience, than Sir John Falstaff, Knight. Only that unfortunately Sir John was, as usual, a little too late with his homage. All the nice pickings of court favour and promotion had been snapped up before his arrival.
The coronation day, in the words of the venerable chronicler last quoted, was
To Sir John Falstaff it might have been interpreted to signify the cold blasts of adversity, icy ingratitude, flowery visions blown into the air, fair prospects nipped in the bud, the tree of Hope torn up by the roots and lying prostrate!
The day, however, so inauspiciously commenced would seem to have cleared up, as upon the conclusion of the coronation ceremony (with the details whereof it is not the present writer’s business to encumber his pages) the royal party proceeded on foot in solemn procession from the gateway of Westminster Abbey to Richard the Second’s great hall, in the neighbouring palace. It is true that the royal party might have got wet in so doing—the umbrella not having been yet invented, and the cab-stand being an institution undreamt of even by the most Utopian imagination. But I am inclined to think that if Henry the Fifth’s first public appearance as a crowned head had been made under circumstances so unfavourable to dignity as a pelting shower, some adverse chronicler would have taken care to mention the circumstance. If the newly-placed crown, for instance, had been blown off into the mud, or if the gartered leg of majesty had got over its ankle in a puddle of the period, depend upon it we should have heard of it. There were plenty of literary men present, who would not have failed to report such a circumstance. There was John Lydgate, the monk of Bury, for one, who had come to town expressly to superintend the rehearsal of a coronation anthem (composed, it was whispered, by the king himself), to which the worthy ecclesiastic had adapted words. John, as a faithful courtier and professional laureate, would infallibly have immortalised any such calamity in sympathetic verse. And we should most likely have had the subject treated from a facetious point of view, for the coronation guests of that day had from North Britain; one James Stuart, in fact, a shrewd humorist, an excellent poet, and a man of genius generally, but who having made the mistake of coming into the world some five hundred years before his time, and wishing to force upon an independent Scottish nobility the glaring anachronism of an enlightened government in the fifteenth century, was very properly shown the error of his ways, and duly assassinated at midnight in his own chamber, according to the custom of that country and period. Altogether I prefer adhering to Mr. Cruikshank’s pictorially recorded opinion of the weather on the occasion of Henry the Fifth’s first emerging a crowned monarch from the portals of Edward the Confessor’s venerable minster. The wish is father to the thought, I admit. If only for the sake of the fair spectators in the balcony, I must strive to believe that the day turned out fine. I cannot bear to think that those dainty creatures—many of whose effigies may doubtless be found, at this day, in the neighbouring cloisters, lying on their backs, with crossed hands and chipped noses (attributed, by the vergers of the abbey, as a matter of course, to the iconoclast malice of Oliver Cromwell)—should have had their hoods, kirtles, and day’s pleasure spoiled by the “wind, snow, and sleete” of a “ruggie and tempestuous day.” Depend upon it that, towards ten o’clock in the morning (the hour at which, according to the early habits of the period, the coronation ceremony would have come to a close), the sky began to clear up.
In a literal and physical sense only, be it understood. Metaphorically, as far as Sir John Falstaff was concerned, the sun was never destined to shine more; for the sun of poor old Jack’s existence was Henry Plantagenet, fifth king of England by that name, and the face of that sun Jack Falstaff was never to see but once again. And then—oh, Nemesis, Parcæ, and all unkind heathen deities whatsoever!—with what clouds before it?
Clouds of coldness, of displeasure, of—yes, I will say it, and quite in earnest—of cruelty. Aye, and a yet more impenetrable obstruction to the desired rays than any such clouds—the presence of a powerful enemy! On the brief and only occasion of Sir John Falstaff being brought face to face with King Henry the Fifth (as a crowned monarch) Chief Justice Gascoigne was at His Majesty’s elbow, the most favoured servant of the realm. Alas! poor Jack!
Let us particularise the scene.
Sir John Falstaff—with Master Shallow, his friend; Bardolph, his henchman, maître d’hotel, valet, and factotum; Pistol, his indefinite subaltern; and Robin, his page—reached the gates of Westminster Abbey just as the ringing of bells and the harmonious swelling of many hundred voices within the sacred edifice, almost drowned by the shouts of the populace outside, announced that the ceremony was at an end. Sir John had ridden post, his impatience scarcely allowing him to sleep during the whole of his three days’ journey. He was untrimmed, draggled, jaded, and travel-stained. He was nervous, breathless, excited. I am not prepared to assert positively that he was quite sober; and, indeed, it may be slightly palliative to the conduct of Henry the Fifth, which I am about to describe in terms of the severest reprehension, that—for a newly-crowned monarch of doubtful antecedents, anxious to stand well with the more respectable portion of the community—to be hailed as a bosom friend, in the presence of kings, princes, and ambassadors, by a group composed of Messrs. Falstaff, Shallow, Bardolph, and Co., under the influence of a three days’ journey, having been for the most part performed in bad weather, in the course of which frequent attempts had doubtless been made to replace the important necessity of sleep by recourse to refreshment of a widely different character,—would naturally be rather a trying business. However, let us to the facts.
Of course Sir John Falstaff had sufficient influence with the guards and retainers to force his way through barriers of every description. He was treated with negative respect on all sides; but he certainly did not meet with the enthusiastic reception he had anticipated. As he glanced anxiously round on the many familiar faces present, he noticed an expression of awkwardness and constraint upon each. Many old acquaintances averted their heads. Such as were bound to recognise the knight did so in terms of studied formality. Sir John began to feel the raw March atmosphere absolutely oppressive. He strove to crush his rising misgivings.
“Stand here, by me, Master Robert Shallow,” he said, lugging that magistrate through the last layer of the king’s Cheshire archers that stood between them and the royal pathway. “I will make the king do you grace. I will leer at him as he comes by, and do but mark the countenance that he will give me.”
“Bless thy lungs, good knight!” said the valiant Pistol, who had already shown himself publicly in his ancient haunts, and, indeed, turned a pretty penny by the acceptance of peace-offerings from myrmidons of the law, his former enemies and oppressors.
“Come here, Pistol; stand behind me,” said Sir John. Alack, how nervous he was getting! He twirled and plucked at the ends of his beard till he winced with pain. He gnawed his finger nails. He played the old gentleman’s tattoo with his mud-stained boot on the steaming rushes beneath him. He twisted buttons off his just-au-corps. His breath was short, his under lip drooped, and his teeth chattered.
“Oh, if I had had time to have made new liveries, I would have bestowed the thousand pounds I borrowed of you!”
Master Shallow winced. He, too, was nervous.
“But ‘tis no matter; this poor show doth better; this doth infer the zeal I had to see him.”
“It doth so.” Master Shallow breathed his answer thickly.
“It shows my earnestness in affection.”
“It doth so.”
“My devotion.”
“It doth, it doth, it doth.”
(Heavens! how Master Shallow must have twiddled with his chain or chewed at the cape of his riding hood as he repeated these words in rapid crescendo!)
“As it were, to ride day and night, and not to deliberate, not to remember, not to have patience to shift me.”
“It is most certain.”
“But to stand stained with travel and sweating with desire to see him; thinking of nothing else; putting all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him.”
“‘Tis semper idem for absque hoc nihil est” put in Pistol. “‘Tis all in every part.”
“‘Tis so, indeed.” Master Shallow gasped out these words, which were scarcely audible. He was in a high state of trepidation, and it will be admitted that he had exactly one thousand reasons for feeling so.
The moments seemed hours. Would the king never come? Sir John almost dreaded that he should die with his eyes unblessed by the sight of his royal pupil and favourite, clad in the attributes of majesty. His gaze was riveted on the cathedral door. He was deaf to all sounds in his eager listening for one well-known footstep. Pistol vainly attempted to enlist his sympathies by a narrative of the wrongs of the Fair Dorothea. Sir John mechanically promised to deliver the captive princess from her oppressors, but his words scarcely conveyed a meaning.
The anthem swelled. The shouts were resumed. Officious retainers bustled forth to clear the way. Sir John Falstaff’s heart beat almost audibly. He felt sick and giddy as a dazzling vision burst upon his sight—round which all other objects on the scene, animate and inanimate, seemed whirling like weird shapes in a demon dance about a magic fire. King Henry the Fifth, in all the pride and splendour of newly anointed majesty, stood before him!
I dare be bound Henry of Monmouth never more thoroughly merited Master Stowe’s simple panegyric on his personal graces than at that moment. “This prince,” says the worthy old Cockney, “exceeded the mean stature of men; he was beautiful of visage, his neck long, bodye slender and leane, and his bones small; nevertheless he was of marvellous great strength, and passing swift in running.”
I have no doubt that His Majesty, on reaching the open air, would have been but too happy to exercise his skill in the latter accomplishment so as to avoid the compromising recognition of Sir John Falstaff and his friends, had circumstances permitted; but it was an ordeal not to be avoided.
“Save thy grace, King Hal! My royal Hal!” Sir John shouted at the top of his voice.
It is possible that Sir John Falstaff’s muddy boots, drenched doublet, three days’ linen and all, might have been tolerated on the score of gentle birth and past services. But there was no getting over the bodily presence of Bardolph, Pistol, and a dilapidated, draggle-tailed country justice from the wilds of Gloucestershire.
“The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!” was the salutation of Pistol.
“Save thee, my sweet boy!” added Falstaff.
Henry the Fifth was certainly a great man. The opportunity for exercising his “passing swiftness in running” failing him, he was fain to fall back upon his “marvellous great strength” of moral assurance, and appear to deny all knowledge of his former associates. He drew himself up to his full height, “exceeding the mean stature of men,” and, turning to the illustrious dignitary at his side, said coldly—
“My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.”
Which of course my Lord Chief Justice was only too eager to do, in his own chosen terms.
“Have you your wits? know you what ‘tis you speak?” his lordship inquired, in his most withering, commit-you-three-months-for-contempt-of-court tones.
“My king! my Jove!” Falstaff had eyes and ears for the monarch alone. “I speak to thee, my heart.”
It was no easy matter “to cut” Sir John Falstaff. He would make himself heard; and nature had provided him with the amplest resources for making himself seen. The future conqueror of Agincourt was for a moment nonplussed. But, with characteristic promptness, he rapidly decided on the part he should play. Taking Sir John’s last greeting as his cue to speak, he gave utterance to one of the most remarkable royal speeches on record. The only assumed verbatim report of this oration extant is from the pen of Shakspeare, by whom it was, doubtless, slightly modified, as to verbal construction, in obedience to the rules of versification usually observed by writers of his school and epoch. But there is no reason to believe that any undue advantage of the reporter’s prescriptive licence to correct, harmonise, and embellish, was taken on the occasion. That the substance of the speech was as follows we have the amplest corroborative evidence in the pages of various contemporary historians:—
As one entertaining an excusable professional jealousy on behalf of the much-maligned and decidedly unprofitable calling of “fool and jester”—(which I was so injudicious as to take up with, very early in life, and have already an “ill-becoming” sprinkling of premature “white hairs” amongst my black ones, to show as a natural consequence of that error)—I dwell with malicious pleasure on the fact that, at this juncture of his homily, his no longer jocular majesty, Henry the Fifth, was suddenly “pulled up” by a reminder, on the countenance of his senior whom he had presumed to lecture, that he, the king, had unconsciously slipped back into his old habits, and, while reprimanding levity, had committed himself by making a joke upon Falstaff’s bulk, as in the jolly old days of the Boar’s Head fraternisation. In the words of an able commentator upon this historical passage:—“He saw the rising smile and smothered retort upon Falstaff’s lip, and he checks him with—‘Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.’”
The very thing he was afraid of! He had rashly challenged old Jack with the knight’s own weapons, and was fain to plead benefit of royalty to sneak out of the combat in which he knew he must be worsted. To impose silence on his adversary was his only chance.
He continued:—
And then King Henry the Fifth, with his crown on, followed by his brothers, cousins, nobles, ambassadors, clergy, mace-bearers, sword-bearers, pages, retainers, and what not—by no means forgetting James the First, poet and King of Scotland (who, I am sure, cast a glance of sympathy at the paralysed figure of Sir John Falstaff, kneeling aghast and open-mouthed among the damp rushes of the courtyard), and Master John Lydgate, the laureate monk of Bury (who also, I am willing to believe, was rather distressed at the turn things had unfortunately taken)—took the arm of the triumphant Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, and proceeded to dinner in the hall of Richard the Second, as though such a person as John Falstaff had never had existence. .
Sir John, after a moment’s stupefaction, started to his feet. He pressed his hand over his burning eyeballs. A convulsive shudder passed through his entire system; and one brief sob escaped him. It was over. Sir John relieved his oppressed lungs of a long-pent-up breath; wiped his smoking forehead, and looked composedly at Justice Shallow. Justice Shallow looked at Sir John Falstaff. Not composedly though, by any means.
“Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds,” said Sir John Falstaff. It was a fact at all events, and, therefore, worthy of mention.
“Ay, marry Sir John,” the justice faltered, “which I beseech you to let me have home with me.”
“That can hardly be, Master Shallow,” was the reply. “Do not you grieve at this; I shall be sent for in private to him! Look you, he must seem thus to the world. Fear not your advancement; I will be the man yet that shall make you great.”
“I cannot well perceive how, unless”—imminent pecuniary danger had lent the worthy justice unwonted smartness,—“you should give me your doublet and stuff me out with straw. I beseech you, good Sir John, let me have five hundred of my thousand.”
“Sir, I will be as good as my word: this that you heard was but a colour.”
“A colour, I fear, that you will die in, Sir John.”
“Fear no colours; go with me to dinner. Come, Lieutenant Pistol *; come, Bardolph; I shall be sent for to-night.”
Sir John Falstaff had not to wait until nightfall ere he was sent for. Scarcely had he spoken when the Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, accompanied by Prince John of Lancaster (whose grudge against our knight, for the Gualtree affair, was, if possible, stronger than that of the justice himself), reappeared on the scene with a posse of constables. These men had even quitted a royal dinner table for the gratification of private vengeance. Could the force of malignity go further?
The lord chief justice, not trusting himself to an accusation which might have led to discussion, wherein he would inevitably have been discomfited, ordered Sir John Falstaff and his companions to be conveyed to the Fleet Prison!
Sir John naturally attempted to protest against a persecution so unprecedented.
“My lord, my lord,——”
“I cannot now speak,” said the chief justice. “I will hear you soon. Take them away.”
And they were taken away—Bardolph, Pistol, and poor little Robin included—aye, and even Master Robert Shallow, of Gloucestershire, in the commission of the peace, custos rotulorum, whose only offence was one against the laws of ordinary human judgment; to wit, that he had lent Sir John Falstaff the sum of one thousand pounds under the impression that he would one day get it back again.
Now I should be very much obliged to any individual learned in the antiquities of English law, who will inform me by what then existing statute Sir John Falstaff, with his friend and retainers, were committed to the Fleet Prison? If, after all I have been at the pains of writing in the course of this publication,—since the acknowledged failure of my attempt to make out a case in favour of the Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne—there should remain any apologists for the character and conduct of that eminent justiciary, I should also feel thankful to them if they can inform me how they intend reconciling the behaviour of their protégé, on this occasion, with his hitherto established reputation as an upright judge. With regard to Prince John of Lancaster, afterwards Duke of Bedford, I trouble myself but little. History can have left him no friends. No amount of apologetic whitewash would serve to frost over the thick coating of smut from the funeral pyre of Joan of Arc, by which his memory must stand blackened to all eternity.
Apropos des bottes. I am happy to be able to convict Henry the Fifth in a glaring falsehood. He did not banish, “on pain of death,” the whole of his early associates in debauchery and misdemeanour, nor forbid them all “to come near his person by ten mile.” Master Edward Poins, a discreet, timeserving young gentleman, continued in the enjoyment of court favour, and received the dignity of knighthood on the very day of his majesty’s coronation.
CONSEQUENT STAGNATION IN THE COURT OF HENRY THE FIFTH.—THE WINDSOR CAMPAIGN, ITS MOTIVES AND RESULTS.
THE accession of Henry the Fifth to the throne of England was not marked by such lavish and prolonged rejoicings as the people of that time were accustomed to on similar occasions. Things, indeed, seem to have been done on rather a niggardly and puritanical scale. For this there were doubtless many sufficient reasons. The royal treasury was impoverished. The nation had not been engaged in a civil war for several months, and the public mind was getting impatient for the recurrence of that indispensable necessary of national life—which indeed was kindly furnished them by certain patriots who (for lack of better excuse) pretended that King Richard the Second was still alive and a claimant to the throne—a contingency which the statesmanlike policy of the late King Henry had most effectually guarded against. Moreover the newly crowned monarch, having so publicly pledged himself to measures of reform, and the adoption of business-like habits, was in common consistency bound to show signs of moral amendment by setting about the invasion of a foreign country, and torturing to death certain dangerous persons who had ventured to differ with him in religious opinions. The body of Richard the Second had to be exhumed and exhibited for public inspection. The conquest of France had to be undertaken. The exacting spirit of the times, moreover, required that a reward of 337 L. 10s. should be offered by the crown for the apprehension of Sir John Oldcastle *, the supposed leader of a Protestant conspiracy,—a circumstance in itself sufficient, (considering that the accused might have been caught and the reward claimed,) in the then existing state of the exchequer, to indispose the monarch for any exuberance of mirth or expenditure. But unquestionably the arch reason why the coronation festivities should have gone off flatly and without brilliancy or eclat was the absence from court of the man whose gifts and antecedents would naturally have pointed him out as the arbiter elegantiarum for the occasion. The master of the revels—which did not take place—was at the time of their non-occurrence a languishing captive, on an illegal warrant, in the Fleet Prison. The idea of any merriment in the court of Henry the Fifth without the assistance of Sir John Falstaff is simply preposterous. But Henry the Fifth had forsworn merriment and Falstaff together, and taken up with invasion and Smithfield bonfires in their stead. The only remarkable public boons consequent upon the coronation were a wholesale creation of Knights of the Bath—from participation in which honour Sir John Falstaff was of course excluded—and a general jail delivery, whereof, equally as a matter of course, our knight took the most prompt and summary advantage. Sir John and his companions were liberated by royal amnesty after a confinement of twenty-four hours.
But of what use was the so-called liberty to Sir John Falstaff? It was, after all, but the liberty which you grant to a gudgeon when you unhook him from the end of your fishing line and toss him contemptuously into the nearest corn-field. Was not Sir John an exile from the court? Had not the idol of his misplaced affections, “his king, his Jove,” forbidden him admission to the Olympian circle, where nectar and ambrosia were alone to be found? Had not Henry the Fifth commanded him
He had indeed! And that cruel radius was a rigid bar at the end of which Sir John was ruthlessly chained ten miles aloof from all that was life, and warmth, and breath to him. It was the very mockery of mercy. It was like saying to a man, “I will only keep your mouth and nostrils ten inches below the surface of the water, but above that altitude you shall never rise.” Mighty like drowning after all!
The present book, the last and saddest of our history! will be, of necessity, a short one. The public career of Sir John Falstaff may be said to have terminated with the catastrophe recorded in the last chapter. The remaining months of his existence he passed in retirement—would I could add in prosperity!—as a private gentleman. There is a completeness and consistency in the life of this remarkable man almost without parallel in history. He was born in difficulties; he lived sixty-three years in embarrassed circumstances; and died in hot water. And yet throughout the whole of this trying pilgrimage Sir John was never once tempted to depart from his guiding principles. What were Sir John Falstaff’s guiding principles? the inconsiderate reader may ask,—yielding to the popularly received opinion that the knight never had any, than which a greater mistake can scarcely be imagined. Who shall accuse of irregularity a man who, for upwards of three-score years, based his every act upon the rigid observance of two rules of life? These were, firstly, never to let his business interfere with his pleasure; secondly, on no occasion to suffer his income to exceed his expenditure; principles which, it will be admitted, Sir John adhered to in the teeth of no common or unfrequent temptations to their abandonment. It must not be supposed that Sir John Falstaff for a moment believed that King Henry the Fifth intended to fulfil his promise of allowing his banished associates a sufficiency for “competence of life” still less that his majesty, among his other “startling effects” of reformation, meditated keeping his word upon so delicate a matter. There is reason to believe that a nominal pension of three hundred pounds a year was conferred upon our knight, but not the slightest to suppose that any measures were ever thought of for paying as much as the first quarterly instalment. Henry the Fifth had at least profited by Falstaff’s training in this respect, that he managed through life to make his liabilities exceed his resources, and contrived to secure an immense deal of éclat and enjoyment without troubling himself to pay for it. He endowed his beautiful young wife, Katherine of Valois, out of the private fortune of his step-mother (whom he had previously incarcerated in Pevensey Castle on a charge of witchcraft). The whole of the young queen’s household, with numerous pensioners of her family, were suffered to help themselves out of the same convenient fund. In the year of his marriage Henry drew upon the treasury of the captive dowager for a hundred marks, which he graciously presented to the Abbess of Sion. Soon afterwards he provided for the maintenance of his dearly beloved cousin Dame Jake * (otherwise the Princess Jaqueline of Hainault) by the moderate allowance of a hundred pounds a month, also to be paid from the “profits” of the dower of Joanna, late Queen of England.
The historic parallel to these liberal disbursements suggested by Sir John Falstaff paying Bardolpli arrears of wages, liquidating tavern scores for Ancient Pistol, and bestowing money on new liveries for little Robin (with perhaps a gallant souvenir for old Mistress Ursula, and some pretty toys for the young Whittingtons) out of the unfortunate Master Shallow’s thousand pounds, is most striking. A few years later we find Sir William Bardolf, lieutenant-governor of Calais, complaining bitterly in a letter to the king, that his garrison had only received 500 L.. in the two last years, himself having had to make up the deficiency requisite for their maintenance. There is still extant a letter, apparently written by a public scrivener of the time, in the name of one Francis, a drawer at the “Old Boar’s Head” tavern, addressed to Sir John Falstaff, at the sign of “YE NAKED LADYE ON HORSEBACK” at Coventry, praying the knight to transmit by carrier the sum of forty-eight marks seven shillings and three-farthings, the price of lodging and entertainment afforded to Corporal Nym and others of “the worshipful knight his following,” which the said drawer asserts he has been compelled by his mistress * to pay out of his own earnings. History delights in these startling coincidences!