Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Ophelia poked her tongue in my ear and rubbed her breasts against me. She had breasts like tennis balls. Then she whisked her tongue out again, jumped off my lap, and said: ‘You know what they are driving at, you rascal. You have friends in high places, Jack. You have one friend, as Pickbone says, who will one day be England. It’s Harry Monmouth. It’s Prince Hal. He wants you back. He’s the certain person who has sent us.’

  And so it was.

  We drank a lot more sack to my good fortune in that upper room before we made our way to the Duke of Clarence. Then a letter with a great heavy seal on it was passed from Pickbone’s hands into the Duke’s. The letter was read at a glance – I’ll say this for Prince Thomas, he was always a quick reader. Then torn up. Then thrust into a candleflame. Shoulders were shrugged, and a door slammed. Our party were left grinning at each other.

  I was given a Spanish horse.

  And I set forth for England again, for London, my heart high, my head singing, in company with my two friends and my dear Ophelia.

  Along the way, about half way across St George’s Channel, I learnt the sad, glad news that Ophelia was to marry. That is to say: I was happy for her, for she married a man of substance, although their union was not blessed with children, and she died some seven years after, of a fever in what would have been her first childbed had she and the infant survived. Ophelia had come to bring me back to begin one of the greatest and happiest periods of my life, a time of pure high carnival, and the most full of events and wisdoms. She had come to do this out of the sheer goodness of her heart, and from the love she bore me, for she knew of my misery in Ireland and that a sight of her dear face and the knowledge coming from her sweet lips that I was summoned by Prince Henry back to England, would be the greatest pleasure to me and the best inducement. Not that I needed inducing. Or seducing. I was curious as to why the Prince required me back at this particular time, but not surprised. There was some spark between us, some St Elmo’s Fire such as you see blaze up and down the masts of ships before a storm, and I guessed that Hal had known and felt this as acutely as I had on the occasion of that first encounter when Skogan’s head was cleft at the court gate. The ships were about to engage. The storm was about to break.

  As we rode up from Holyhead, I heard from Barnes and Pickbone that the Prince had been mixing anonymously, and not so anonymously, in the merry crowd that had been my crew, my gang, my company when I was camped in London. It was from the way the name Jack Fastolf cropped up in every tavern in Eastcheap whenever cakes and ale were mentioned, that he had conceived for himself this desire to have me at hand to help him consume them. ‘He’s fallen in love with Dame Mischief, and wants you to marry him to the heifer,’ was how Black George put it.

  ‘I’ve no doubts concerning the validity of my unholy orders,’ I said piously.

  ‘He’s hell-bent on setting up court among thieves, and he needs a court jester,’ said Pickbone.

  ‘You mean,’ I said proudly, ‘a king.’

  Chapter Fifty

  About heroes

  28th June

  Having more flesh than most men, I beg to be excused for displaying a greater amount of that frailty to which flesh is heir.

  Pass the figs.

  What is a hero?

  Having dealt with that important question – What is honour? – it is time to address ourselves to its brother.

  Achilles, you say.

  Caesar, you say.

  Alexander, you say.

  Reader, I did not say WHO. I said WHAT. I wanted a definition of this word hero. But, since you’ve brought these fellows up, sir, let’s take a look at their credentials.

  Achilles certainly rushed about a good deal at Troy Town, after his boyfriend Patroclus was killed. But some of that was hysteria, and the rest dysentery. Besides, Achilles had a supernatural mamma, and you can bet she Pulled Strings for him. Demi-gods don’t count. Even demi-gods with weak ankles. I dismiss Achilles.

  Caesar is a marginally more interesting case. Certainly he won 320 triumphs, but I wouldn’t want to go too deeply into his triumphs with Nicomedes of Bithynia (known as Knickers Bitters to his friends). Besides, Caesar had unlimited credit and didn’t make much of a job of invading Britain – high water at Dover on the 27th of August, in the fifty-fifth year before God’s Death, being at 7.31 a.m., by which miscalculation Caesar landed eight thousand men in eighty galleys bang in the middle of Romney Marsh. Hail, Pheezar. You won’t do.

  But Alexander, you insist – I must allow Alexander to be what the world means by a hero. Sir, I concede only that he was a pretty good master of war. But he aimed at conquering the whole world (which I regard as childish), and he demanded to be worshipped as a god (which is worse). I can’t take Alexander very seriously.

  There does remain KING ARTHUR.

  And there you have me. I will never say a word against King Arthur, or King Arthur’s sword, or King Arthur’s spear, or King Arthur’s shield, or King Arthur’s dog. (His dog was named Cavall.) You will never hear a word from these lips in criticism of the great Round Table of that English King.

  Has Bussard gone to Yarmouth for those hog’s lice? There’s a stone in my bum-gut. As a matter of fact, there’s a Stonehenge in my bum-gut. We’ll need twenty drops of tincture of salt tartar as well.

  A hero is a knight errant with knobs on.

  How’s that?

  We are a dying breed, madam. Like unicorns.

  O once and future King. O Camelot. O my piles.

  Think of the Round Table.

  I AM THE ROUND TABLE.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  About Prince Hal

  St Peter’s Day

  He was in the days of his youth a diligent follower of idle practices, much given to instruments of music, and one who, loosing the reins of modesty, though zealously serving Mars, yet fired with the torches of Venus herself, and, in the intervals of his brave deeds as a soldier, wont to occupy himself with the other extravagances that attend the days of undisciplined youth.

  Worcester’s translated that for me. It’s from the Gesta Henrici Quinti.

  And, allowing for monkish reserve, it gets Hal about right.

  I mean: I recognise in that description the lad who was twice sick in my hat.

  Some think the Gesta was written by Jean de Bordin, but it wasn’t. I can tell you the author. It was Thomas Elmham, sometime a Benedictine monk at Canterbury, then a Cluniac, and prior of Lenton Abbey, near Nottingham. He died in the year of Man’s Redemption 1420, or thereabouts, anyway I had pimples on my bum that year, owing me £4. 5s. 11d and a shirt, but I forgive him his debts as I trust that he will forgive me mine. This Elmham was the King’s chaplain in France. He was at Agincourt. He knew him well.

  I throw in this bit of authentic History from a disinterested but well-instructed source, just to prepare you for the high jinks which must follow. Without it, you might not believe me.

  I put it in also to introduce HAL in the days when he was HAL.

  My diligent follower of idle practices.

  My undisciplined youth.

  My mad lad, sweet lag, most comparative, rascalliest, sweet young prince, mad wag, the young prince that misled me.

  King Hal! My royal Hal!

  I was the fellow with the great belly. And he my dog.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  About some other villains

  30th June

  Other principal villains in the chapters that now follow.

  BARDOLPH, Esquire. Bardolph was the most esquired esquire I ever knew. His chances of knighthood were always nil. He lacked the necessary gentle blood. Bardolph’s blood was the opposite of gentle. Coax it and reason with it and dilute it as he would, it persisted in inhabiting his nose. My knight of the burning lamp. His face was his misfortune. It was full of meteors. It was covered with bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames of fire. He assisted in the development of my soul. Whenever I looked at him I thought upon hell-fire.

  PIST
OL, Ancient. My ensign. An old soldier. A swaggerer. Known as Peesel to Mrs Quickly, who must have known, because he married her. I mean to say: this less-than-affectionate nickname can only have derived from Pistol’s failure to discharge upon her.

  PETO. An inefficient thief and tell-tale-tit.

  GADSHILL. Not to be confused with Gadshill. But see the next few chapters.

  NYM, Corporal. A humorous bloody villain. Betrothed at one time to Mrs Quickly – weren’t we all? – but was lucky enough to lose her to Pistol. Served in France, as did Bardolph, and was hanged with him for looting churches. To nim is to steal. Corporals generally have a stripe or two. Nym was distinguished by a lot.

  POINS, Mr Edward. A friend of Prince Hal’s. A practical joker. A scoffer. A shit. Fortunately disappears without explanation in Chapter Seventy-One.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  About the preparations for the Battle of Gadshill

  1st July

  London was in a turmoil when I returned. This new word Devolution danced on every tongue. It seemed to mean something to do with deflowering the kingdom. Bolingbroke pronounced it Devil-lotion and proposed taking an English army on a new crusade to cure it. But Bolingbroke had put on centuries of guilt in putting on the crown, and besides that he was suffering from leprosy and syphilis and a gangrene. When you add to these complaints the fact that Wales was in revolt and doing rather well at it – Mr Glendower had just defeated Lord Mortimer in the Welsh Marches – and that the Scots were knocking holes in what was left of Hadrian’s Wall, you see why Henry IV was not a happy man. Even the good news turned bad in his head. Hotspur, scourge of the Scots, managed to dispatch ten thousand of them to a warmer climate at the Battle of Holmedon. But he took some valuable prisoners too, and he wanted to keep these for himself for the ransom money. Bolingbroke was furious. Scotch earls were worth a lot. He summoned Hotspur to London to settle up.

  Meanwhile – in another part of the Palace of Westminster, in a private apartment of the Prince of Wales’ – other affairs of war were being planned. From the moment when I set foot again in London, Hal and I had been inseparable. We stuck together like Hercules and Iolaos, like Amys and Amylion, like Alpha and Omega. Or like flies and a jampot, if you want to know. He was the flies.

  I do believe our bantering never ceased.

  ‘What’s the time?’ I’d say – I mean, something as simple and civil as that, but he’d turn a decent question on its head and make a sod of it …

  ‘You! What the devil have you to do with the time of day? Hours would only interest you if they were cups of sack. Minutes if they were capons. Clocks if they were bawds’ tongues. Dials if they hung them up outside the brothels to advertise the shape of what they were selling. The sun itself wouldn’t interest you unless it turned into a hot girl in flame-coloured taffeta. Don’t be superfluous!’

  I undid a league of buttons, and grinned. ‘You have me there,’ I admitted. ‘But then the time of day has nothing to do with me. I’m a night-worker.’

  Hal grimaced. We were alone. He rolled down his boots and planted one foot on the table. Then he poured three drinks with a lazy but careful hand, using his elbow as a kind of pivot, watching his own wrist with the fascinated attention that always comes into a man’s eyes when he is half-drunk and his wits are more or less following his body’s actions. One of the drinks was for him.

  ‘When you are King,’ I said, taking the other two, ‘will you hang thieves?’

  ‘No,’ said Hal.

  I drank to the abolition of the death penalty.

  ‘I shan’t hang thieves,’ said Hal, observing me narrowly, that hint of the eagle hovering in his hooded eyes. ‘You will!’

  I drank to myself from the other cup. ‘Shall I?’ I said. ‘That’s nice. Well, I’ll make a good judge.’

  ‘You’re a lousy judge already,’ said Hal. ‘I didn’t mean I’d make you a judge. I’d make you my hangman!’

  I drank to him from both cups at once.

  ‘Where did you learn that trick?’ he demanded, for I prided myself on the fact that hardly a dribble of wine ran down my shirt front during the exercise.

  ‘In the service of a great Prince,’ I said. ‘Only a great Prince deserves such double toasting,’ I added, between gulps. I smacked the empty cups down on the table. ‘Before I knew you,’ I concluded, wiping my beard meticulously with the back of my hand, ‘I knew nothing.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I am little better than one of the wicked,’ I said. I sighed. Across my mind’s eye for a moment flashed an image of my friend Duncan, my brother oblate, laying cold and stiff among the candles in that monastery where the walls were always wet. ‘I must give over this life,’ I muttered. ‘I must. And I will.’ I belched. ‘By the Lord,’ I said, ‘if I don’t, I’m a villain.’ Buttons on my belly were now undoing of themselves. I watched one of them pop off, and Hal flick out his hand to catch it like a cat a mouse. So he was not that drunk, I thought. It was usually this way. He liked to get me seven times as drunk as he was. He always liked to revel in my revels.

  I said (and I think I meant it): ‘I don’t intend to be damned for any King’s son in Christendom.’

  Hal sipped his sack. He flipped the little button up and down in the palm of his free hand. Then he leant forwards suddenly, spilling his drink on my sleeve. ‘Where shall we take a purse tomorrow, Jack?’

  His excitement was infectious. So was his malice. And his comedy. ‘Wherever you like, lad!’ I cried. ‘Wherever you like!’

  ‘Hm!’ the Prince teased me. ‘I see you are suddenly reformed. But from praying to purse-taking!’

  He flicked the button in my face.

  I laughed. ‘It’s my vocation,’ I said solemnly. ‘It’s no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.’

  Upon this particular morning, or afternoon, or evening – it was always twilight in the corridors of power at Westminster, and especially behind locked doors in the Prince of Wales’ private apartments, and besides Hal never did answer that perfectly reasonable question I had asked him – upon this occasion then, while poor old Bolingbroke was holding council in another part of the palace, and feeling torn to pieces what with the Welsh and the Scots and his erysipelas, not to speak of Hotspur hanging on to those rich prisoners, we were waiting for the arrival (by a side-door) of a squire of Prince Hal’s, a greasy little prick called Poins.

  I never liked Ned Poins. He didn’t like me either. He had nicknames for me: Monsieur Remorse, Sir John Sack, Sugar Jack. Nothing to write home to the Devil about. Talking of the Devil, this Poins fancied also to insinuate that I had sold my soul to that roaring lion, and on a Good Friday too! His libel was that I had struck this terrible bargain in return for a cup of Madeira and a cold capon’s leg. Now, I ask you, would I have done such a stupid thing on the strictest of fast days?

  Poins was a poof. I refrain from telling you the worst thing about him, but the second worst thing I heard from Nell Quickly. Poins had spent the night with her, just to win a bet with another masculine whore. It was a night full of ‘tirrits and frights’ (Nell’s own words), Poins being scared out of his wits by the sight of her bird’s nest and shitting the bed when (to quote Nell again) she ‘tried to make his pulsidge beat’. Then, in the morning, standing in front of the looking-glass at the Boar’s Head, she just lifted her arms to pin up her hair, and –

  ‘St Sebastian save me!’ screams Poins. ‘Two more!’

  And he jumped in the buck-basket to hide from the terrors of female anatomy!

  ‘My harm pits, O Jesu!’ Nell told me. ‘The bastardly rogue thought that harm pits were for canvass too!’

  Ah well. Buzz, benedicite, buzz. Every man to his own. These male milliners like to shave every part of their bodies. They emulate eggs. Not that Edward Poins ever had to lather or scrape at an inch of his perfectly hairless person, if you ask me. Though I am glad to say this is opinion, not observation.

  Poins was a toady and an eaves-dropper, as we
ll as a refugee from ladies’ armpits. He was addicted to practical jokes, which I regard as quite the lowest form of wit. Stupid too. He thought Aquinas was a mineral water.

  But enough about the Prince of Wales’ male varlet. Sufficient to say that it will give me great pleasure to write him right out of my book when we reach Chapter Seventy-One. No, I shan’t kill him off, sir. Because I didn’t, madam, that’s why, and I’m not going to start telling lies at my time of life. Allow me to indulge myself in one of the little incidental pleasures of authorship. Namely, forgetting a character.

  Poins brought us news that a plan of mine for a little work in Kent was coming along splendidly. This concerned a crossroads at Gadshill, just outside Rochester, about twenty-seven miles from London. The beauty of this place was that it saw a lot of two-way traffic. On the one side, you had pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings for the shrine of St Thomas Becket. On the other side, you had travellers returned from abroad and riding up to London with fat purses. It was an ideal spot for some robbery, and robbery was the Prince’s present sport.

  I did not begin these Acta with the intention of devoting a large part of them to an analysis of the character of Harry Monmouth, and I am not going to change my mind now and fall into that trap. All the same, while I cannot explain Hal, or any man, and while he has now passed before the one Judge who knows all the secrets of a man’s heart, so that any further sentence of mine is uncalled-for, I have to say that at this stage in his life the Prince was playing the part of the Prodigal Son with more resource and enthusiasm than I have ever seen it played before or since. It was a complicated Prodigality. He was capable of striking Gascoigne, the Chief Justice, just for the hell of it, and using as excuse the fact that Gascoigne had been obliged to imprison my man Bardolph on account of a rape. On the other hand, in the opposite mood, this young weathercock of a Prince was capable of coming before his father, in Westminster Hall, penitent, dressed in his old student’s gown, with the needle and thread still stuck in its collar, and kneeling before the King and offering his own dagger from its sheath and held pointed towards his own heart, begging Bolingbroke to plunge it in immediately if he thought that there could be any feelings but those of love and loyalty in the same organ. Then again, a few nights later, he would be back with me in Eastcheap, weaving about among wine-butts in the cellars of the Boar’s Head, roaring drunk at that carnival court where I was King Riot for him, plotting with me and urging me on to do robberies in which nothing delighted him more than to take cash from his own tax-collectors. ‘It’s the King’s coin,’ he said. ‘But let some of it be the Prince’s!’ I confess I never worked out the extent to which these vagaries and varieties and wildnesses and intricate wildernesses in Harry Monmouth’s character could be attributed to