Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  ‘You mean the whole two handfuls?’ says our Mick.

  The price for catching old moles in Ireland at that time was two shillings a hundred. Young moles were 1s 3d a hundred. Rats were a farthing each. Not that I saw any rats you could call a rat in Desdemona’s hearing. But then the Irish poets practise their poems on the rats in the fields, and rhyme most of them to death.

  At that time, when I was in the country in the retinue of Prince Thomas, Ireland was in an even more unsettled condition than usual. There was rioting and murder and cannibalism and paedophilia and a superabundance of fleas. Finding themselves in such difficulties in a singularly unpleasant island, the Irish had turned patriots. This is always a consequence of ill fortune, and only to be expected I daresay, but emblems and flowers tell all and where England has a rose and Wales a leek, what does Ireland have?

  A sham rock, –

  i.e. a shillelagh.

  The King’s forces were often hard put to it to keep a semblance of order and control. I have always believed in law and order, but the Irish are notoriously indifferent to those virtues.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  How Sir John Fastolf conducted the militia at the siege of Kildare

  13th May

  Not long after our arrival in Ireland, we found ourselves in Kildare. We were quite without funds, cut off, and beleaguered by a gaggle or bubble or squeak of bog Irish of various species. The town itself had a cathedral which these brigands were forever burning down or building up again. I gathered that this burning and building of the cathedral of Kildare had been the local sport for centuries. In Ireland, a little arson goes a long way. But a great deal of arson is considered holier. There is some tutelary local deity or patroness called the Fair Maid of Ireland, or Ignis fatuus. I confess I have never quite grasped the mystery of her worship. This Agnes Fatuus must be some kind of fatuous fire. I saw her running once up Gadshill in the night to catch my horse. The Boglanders themselves appear to set fire to each other in her honour.

  Kildare is from the Irish Kill dara, which for a change is not at all violent in implication, meaning simply ‘church of the oaks’. This church, the cathedral, was St Bridget’s Fane, founded by her in the fifth century. You might have thought the Irish would have liked it better than they did. There was this fire, sacred to the memory of the saint, inextinguishable, because the nuns never let it go out, and because every twentieth night St Bridget herself would pop in with some coals or a few slices of peat to make sure it was still on the go. It was kept burning in a small chapel called the Fire House.

  I remember standing by that flame on a winter morning in the first December of my tour of Ireland, and cursing my luck in being sent to this sainted yet God-forsaken dump. There were some hundred of us stationed in the castle hard by. When the local rebels attacked, we withdrew into the castle. Leaning from the battlements, I passed down a discreet enquiry as to what our assailants were after.

  ‘Devolution!’ came the answer.

  I had never heard this word before, nor have I heard it since. I take it to be some Irishism to do with a rolling motion in a bog, from the Latin devolutionem, to descend or fall like a ball. Seeing that at Gadshill the Ignis fatuus rolled distinctly uphill in pursuit of my horse, perhaps this Devolution may be a fatuous fire that rolls downhill in pursuit of a jakes. But I leave this to later students of etymology and the Home Rule question.

  In the siege that followed I displayed for the second time my genius for military affairs.

  It was customary, as everyone will know, to cast down upon invading troops all manner of unpleasant material, chiefly hot and wet, or lumps of iron. (Some martial manuals still recommend this tactic, despite what I might call Fastolf’s Principle, now to be revealed to you in practice.)

  This traditional behaviour of besieged persons struck me at the time, and still does, as a singularly crude and wasteful exercise. A dropped bar of iron, or a poured out vat of boiling oil, will certainly kill or maim or deter a man or two – possibly six, if they happen to be standing close enough together and disposing themselves conveniently to await your ammunition’s most lethal arrival.

  But in a flash I was tapped on the shoulder by St George with the notion that true-born thirsty Irishmen would be far better deterred by potations.

  For potations read

  POTATOES and POTEEN.

  POTATOES.

  POTEEN.

  In other words, I saw to it that we cast down from the battlements of Kildare Castle great heads and hogskins of poteen and other inflammatory liquid of an interior character.

  And potatoes too. O how I made it rain potatoes.

  Your Irish peasant is a great eater of potatoes. He will always lay down his sword and his banshee to pick one up.

  In this manner, assailed and assoiled by alcohol and vegetables, the insurgent besiegers soon lost heart. They set to in the ditch and enjoyed some kind of wake or bounty, or as they called it, a kaley, at the foot of the castle walls. There were fiddlers and jugglers and Hibernian acrobats. There were toasts –

  ‘To St Patrick!’

  ‘To the snakes driven out by St Patrick!’

  ‘To the drum beaten by St Patrick in driving out the snakes!’

  ‘To the hole knocked in the drum by St Patrick in his fury at the snakes!’

  ‘To the angel that appeared to St Patrick and mended St Patrick’s drum!’

  ‘To the patch which the angel patched on that holy drum!’

  And so on.

  One or two weedy stalwarts attempted another assault, when fully flushed with the drink, but we deterred them easily enough with sausages. I recall one fellow in particular, a young man rather like a question-mark in shape, whose battle-cry was something about History being a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. An Irish proverb, no doubt.

  At last, when the greater number of these Boglanders lay drunk and fast asleep, we fell upon them from our great height and killed them off with very little fuss. I made myself responsible only for collecting the unconsumed bait.

  This second taste of the ardours and pleasures and enterprise of soldiering taught me that it was to my kidney. Those who have never been to war may find it difficult to understand – but those who have enjoyed that privilege will recognise that there was nothing small or ignoble in the skirmish or siege I have just described. War is a chance business, and a chancy occupation, and a battle takes whatever course a captain’s imagination can provide it with. I fancy the writing of verses is much the same, only easier. You think of a rhyme and then find words to fit the rhythm in between. In a battle, you conceive a stratagem which will achieve your object, and then find an advance or retreat which will lead you to it.

  The secret is not to choose an impossible object.

  Like a rhyme for SCARCE.

  In this siege of Kildare I was hardly a captain – yet I can claim that the notion of the poteen and the potatoes was my idea (with a little help from St George), and it brought me immediate fame with my master, Prince Thomas. It was clear that I was marked out for some great role in the fields of Mars.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  About leprechauns & St Boniface

  14th May

  I stayed on in Ireland for some little while after the siege of Kildare, and to tell you the truth that period remains in my memory as a very fair image of eternity. I do not say a good eternity, or a bad eternity. Just bloody eternity.

  Whenever any metaphysician asks me how to picture or conceive of the idea of our eternal existence, our life in the world next door, where some will enjoy the beatific vision in Heaven and some will have to put up with less than that in Hell, I summon up remembrance of time past in Ireland in the first decade of this fifteenth century. To be sure, the fields were green, and I have always had a fondness for green fields. To be sure, the sky was blue, when you could see it, which was not often, on account of the rain, which is a good deal wetter and more opaque than English rain. I remember Ireland as sitting w
aiting for the rain to stop and the Irish to stop burning the cathedral in Kildare, or alternatively to stop trying to rebuild it. If I had had my way, I would have let them play whatever wildfire games they liked with their unfortunate cathedral, and amused myself kindling the local girls more kindly. Colleens, they called them. Not to be confused with collywobbles.

  There were enough of these colleens to pass the time between sieges, though hardly enough to satisfy the requirements of a man in his prime.

  No – my prime came later. At primero. Until I foreswore myself, and never prospered after. But here was my preparatory prime – and I could have done with a few score more women.

  Instead of women, God blast it, there was rain, and sieges, and then the leprechauns.

  There was also, some say, an earthquake – but it can have been no great shakes, since I slept through it.

  On this question of leprechauns, I have a word to say. I have met men who profess not to believe in them. These were not wise men, or men with any roundness to them, let alone bottom. In my view, no man has a right to say that leprechauns do not exist until he has seen them not existing. Which is a very different thing from not seeing them existing.

  I have myself seen seven leprechauns, but not one of them had a single word of any interest to say. The word leprechaun, by the way, is the Irish for a cobbler who makes only one shoe. That is what these leprechauns do. They sit about idly making odd shoes, never completing a pair. They dine on toadstools, which is again a damn fool thing to do.

  Still, I would rather meet a leprechaun any day than an Irishman. Let the leprechauns inherit Ireland, I suggest, and that unhappy, saint-soaked island will be at last a place of peace and plenty. And odd shoes.

  Today is St Boniface Day. St Boniface is one of my favourite saints. I pray to him to help save England in her present mess. Because Boniface is one of our most English saints.

  He was born at Crediton, in Devon. When he was seven he went to school in the monastery at Exeter. As soon as he became a priest he made it his task to convert the heathen Germans. He had the help of Pope Gregory II. One of his problems was that many of the German tribes considered themselves already Christians – but the job of their conversion had been done by Irish monks, some of them more Irish than orthodox, and Boniface had to teach them their catechisms all over again, which is harder than starting from scratch. Of the out-and-out pagans left, the chief sects were the Hessians and the Thuringians. The Hessians worshipped an enormous oak tree, which stood in the forest at Geismar, near Fritzlar. A trial of strength was proposed and accepted. Boniface said he would cut down the tree. The Hessians said that their gods would never permit it. A great crowd gathered. Boniface took up his axe, licked his finger, held his finger up to the wind, and then brought the axe down with crashing blows in the direction in which the wind was blowing. The oak tree fell. It was smashed into seven pieces. Woden was conquered. The Hessians all got baptised.

  It is that licking the finger and holding it up to the wind which is so English. Your English saints believe in miracles, but they like to help them along.

  Fr Brackley tells me that only one Englishman has ever been Pope, and that his name was Nicholas Brakespear.

  All the same, there was a Pope Boniface who did something else very English – and if he was not the same Boniface the woodcutter then I’ll try intercoursing with leprechauns again! For this dear Pope Boniface instituted a special indulgence to those who drink his good health after grace, or the health of any Pope. St Boniface’s cup, they call it.

  Father, if you please, how many Popes have we had since St Peter?

  Chapter Forty-Five

  About Sir John Fastolf’s nose & other noses

  Midsummer Eve

  How many Popes since St Peter?

  It is more than a month since I gave those words to Hanson – or was it Nanton? I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter. What counts is that the conduct of my 100 Days’ War, the cut and thrust and cannonade, the onslaught, the bombardment, the storming energy of my attack on the citadel of my life, has been interrupted.

  By what? Better go the whole hog. Better confess it. By INDULGENCES then, in the first place. I vowed to take advantage of the mighty spiritual benefits offered to such drinking-men as myself by the blessed Pope Boniface. (Oh, Mother Church takes care of all her sons, including hogs and cormorants!) Seeing that some time off in Purgatory was promised for each toast drunk to the Pope, living or dead, I had Fr Brackley draw up a list for me, and Macbeth and his minions running up and down the steps from the cellar with gallons and gallipots and general gallimaufries of sack, and burnt brandy, and double beer, and wine, and cider, and hydromel, and alcohol of all sorts, little merry bottles full of foretastes of eternity, stirrup cups of paradise, drink in such abundance that you could paddle where my waiters walked, deep potations, caldrons, casks, O noggins and firkins and pipkins and jugs, jorums and pitchers and saucepans and BUCKETS of the stuff – and then I, I, I, John Fastolf, myself sometimes, sat down and set to and started to drink my great sequence of Toasts to the Bishops of Rome, Supreme Pontiffs of the Universal Church.

  Ladies and gentleman, I give you, the POPE!

  St Peter –

  St Linus –

  St Cletus – (some say Anacletus, so here’s to him as well) –

  St Clement I –

  St Evaristus –

  St Alexander I –

  St Sixtus I –

  St Telesphorus –

  St Hyginus –

  St Pius I –

  St Anicetus –

  St Soter –

  St Eleutherius –

  St Victor I –

  St Zephyrinus –

  St Calixtus I –

  St Urban I –

  St Pontian –

  St Antherus –

  St Fabian –

  St Cornelius –

  St Lucius I –

  St Stephen I –

  St Sixtus II –

  St Dionysius – (two for him!)

  St Felix I –

  St Eutychian –

  St Caius –

  St Marcellinus –

  St Marcellus I –

  St Eusebius –

  St Miltiades –

  St Silvester I –

  St Mark –

  St Julius I –

  Liberius – – – – –

  I drew the line at Liberius. For a while. Here, after all, was the first Pope left in an uncanonised condition by his children. I felt sorry for Liberius. Not being a saint. Amongst all those other Popes in Heaven. And him being the only one the angels called Your Holiness. Instead of Your Saintliness. I got curious about this unworthy-of-sainthood Liberius. I asked Fr Brackley about him, and was told that he was the bugger who approved of the condemnation of St Athanasius, and went hand-in-glove with the Emperor Constantius, and was himself a sort of semi-Arian. But then, Providence is a wonderful thing, and you have to have some bounders at the top, otherwise certain other histories wouldn’t follow, and in the case of Liberius maybe St George wouldn’t have made it as Archbishop of Alexandria—

  But then I remembered that was the wrong George. The Cappadocian article.

  I totted up this little lot, anyway, and realised that it came to thirty-six. Thirty-eight, if you count Cletus being Anacletus as well, and let me have two toasts for Dionysius.

  Thirty-eight Indulgences, according to the Ebrietatis Encomium.

  After that, I was interrupted by May. May, you understand, the month. May is Mary’s month, and the Spring’s beginning, even at Caister Castle, even here where you can sometimes hardly tell the difference between the sea and the sky.

  By May and sap rising and Miranda my niece.

  By the affairs of a busy lord of the manor, with estates to manage, deeds to sign, suits to fight, rents to collect, food to eat, coins to count, ships to despatch, visits to make, guests to receive, clauses to revoke, items to include in his household inventory, wounds to l
ick, time to kill, and all the rest of it, all the weary wearying rest of it.

  It was the pressure of time to kill that surprised me most. In my days, in my own Spring, in my prime, before that unfortunate incident at primero – (it is a game of cards, madam) – I have not been one of those sly, discontented fellows mooning about in cloaks, with boils on their arses, ever rich-picking at their beadle noses with complaints that time has to be killed. Not a bit of it. I am none of your murderers of the clock. My life has raced, has galloped, has gone a great rate always. Yet here – in this month that is now dead and as though it had never been, May, Mary’s month, now gone and green – I never returned to these pages, these wazerys, this making of the substance of my life, these words, these works, this testament and testimonial, my redemption, my justification, my confession, my truth.

  And because I have not written, I might as well have been dead. What a curious discovery. At my age, at my stage, to learn that there could be such power in language, such mortal magic in words. Faced with the discovery, you might have thought I would have returned to the assault like a shot. Like one of the arrows at Agincourt – ah, wait till I come to Agincourt, that Crispin Crispian glory! You might have thought I would have rushed back to my telling of my life, but I did not. Why not?

  Not altogether because of Miranda’s et cetera, though that is very nice. The day after the dictating of my opinions about the leprechauns and the beastly Irish rain – which is forever falling on the beastly Irish, softly, falling, ever, and on the Irish sea, so that you’d think the Irish sea fell upwards and then down again upon the island, softly of course, softly falling – the day after that my saucy young niece invented a new game for me. Such sport. Tossing her on the bed and spanking her in mid-air as she bounced. Then stripping dress and under-garments from her as she kicked her legs and tickled my now very eager fellow with her pretty little toes. Twice I came between her big toe and the busy little ones a-rubbing and a-mousing at me. This little pig went to market – this little pig stayed at home – this little piggy had roast beef—