by Robert Nye
Chapter Fifty-Eight
About a play at the Boar’s Head tavern
6th July
Truth, as I told you yesterday, is various. But all the same, in its infinite variety, the truth is the truth, and men don’t like it. The night after the Battle of Gadshill, gathered in our usual court at the Boar’s Head tavern, in Eastcheap, with Hal and Poins and Bardolph and Peto and Cuthbert Cutter – Francis the potboy ferrying sack between us when he could avoid Poins’ fingers prying and pinching at his buttocks – it fell to the Prince of Wales to show another side of his character by calling me names for his own amusement, and no doubt to cover his confusion at several sharp answers which I gave him when he asked me how that battle had gone.
Woolsack, he called me. And
You whoreson round man, he called me. And
Villain, he called me. And
Gross as a mountain, he called me. And
A clay-brained guts;
A knotty-paled fool;
A whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch;
A sanguine coward;
A bed-presser;
A horseback-breaker;
A huge hill of flesh –
Enough was enough. Especially when Hal and Poins sat down, one on each side of me, and started talking to me about REASON and COMPULSION. If there are two things I hate in this bad world it is REASON and COMPULSION. Reason is the rogue that will one day cut kings’ heads off, and then try and stick them on again the next for another reason. As for Compulsion. When I hear the word compulsion, or feel its presence, I smell poor Badby burning in his barrel.
‘Come,’ minces Poins, ‘your reason, Jack, your reason.’
I kicked at him under the table. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Upon compulsion? Give you a reason upon compulsion? If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I’d give no man a reason upon compulsion.’
Hal looked uneasy. He knew I knew he knew I knew he knew. If you see what I mean. Both about Badby and buckram.
I turned on him next. ‘There is something in you, Hal,’ I said, ‘that reminds me quite distinctly of an eel-skin. Or is it a bull’s pizzle?’
Hal liked that last comparison. He had worked so hard on his prick, of course, to make it long enough to rule a kingdom with. And to have your member compared with a bull’s is no disgrace. He started to laugh. So then Poins started to laugh – or, rather, giggle. And Bardolph made his noise like a kind of cannon. And Peto sniggered. And Cuthbert Cutter grinned.
I laughed myself. I, I, I, Jack Fastolf, to whom laughter is a sort of familiar spirit, never failing to come at my call. ‘Shall we be merry then?’ I cried. ‘Shall we have a play?’
‘Yes,’ said the Prince. ‘Let its theme be your running away!’
But I turned that aside with a splash of two fingers dipped in sack and offered to his royal highness thus:
Which, being translated from Old English, madam, means more or less:
‘No more of that, Hal, if you love me.’
Mrs Quickly entered. Our hostess looked more like a good pint-pot than ever. Just now she was frothing over with fresh tidings too.
‘O Jesu, my lord the prince – There’s a nobleman of the court at the door – He says he comes from your father.’
‘What sort of man?’ I asked.
‘An old man,’ said Nell.
‘Gravity out of his bed at midnight,’ I mused. I turned to Hal: ‘Shall I send him packing?’
‘Please do, Jack.’
Now that was a more agreeable music. I went.
I found at the door an antique turd called Bracy. Sir John Bracy. Of the Bracy family seated at Madresfield, Worcestershire, from the time of King John. Seated is the word. This ancient was one of the few who had ever stirred far from the fire-side. He brought bad news now. Hal was to present himself at court in the morning. Hotspur had joined forces with his Scotch prisoners, placed himself at their head, and was marching south-westward to join up with Mr Glendower. Devil-lotion wasn’t the word for it. This was open rebellion. They were after the English crown.
I gave the fellow sixpence, and returned with this news to the Prince.
If Hal was disturbed or distressed by the prospect of war, he did not show it. His courage rode high from his great success at Gadshill. (Clio, ask England to be one day just a little bit grateful to me for my part in that.)
I was inspired, though, to suggest that we should improvise a play, in which Hal could practise answers for his interview with his dad. The Prince, with his flair for the dramatic, and his half-fear of the leper King, agreed on the instant.
The whole tavern gathered.
I was to be the King. I seated myself on a chair on top of the table. I put on a saucepan for my crown. I called for more sack to make my eyes red, as though from weeping at the misdemeanours of my son.
‘Nobility,’ I said, to a somewhat surprised Poins, caught playing smell-finger with the potboy. ‘Stand aside.’
Mrs Quickly was already rocking with laughter. ‘O Jesu, this is excellent sport!’ she cried, tears trickling down her cheeks.
I cleared my throat, and spoke like Bolingbroke: ‘Weep not, sweet queen, for trickling tears are vain.’
‘The spit and image,’ shrieked Nell.
‘For God’s sake, lords,’ I said – to Bardolph and Peto and Cuthbert Cutter – ‘convey my tristful queen … For tears do stop the flood-gates of her eyes.’
‘Eh?’ said Bardolph.
‘Shut her up!’ I hissed.
‘He’s just as good as any of those bloody actors!’ screamed Nell, roaring with laughter, before Peto got his hairy fist over her maw.
Hal bowed. He knelt before me on a cushion.
‘Harry,’ I said, ‘you seem to be my son. I have partly your mother’s word for it, partly my own opinion, but chiefly that villainous look that sometimes comes into your eye, and the way your lower lip droops when you’re not busy shutting both lips tight together so that all the blood rushes to your boots. If, then, you are my son – and here’s the point – why do you go around pinching blackberries? Worse. Why does the son of England prove a thief and steal purses?’
I fixed him with a tiger’s burning eye, and adjusted my saucepan by the handle. ‘There is a thing, Harry, which you have often heard of. It is known to many in our land by the name of pitch. This pitch defiles. My son, I have heard reports that you touch it, that you play with it, that you keep company with this pitch. Harry, it’s not the drink talking. It’s the tears.’
I was so carried away by my impersonation of Bolingbroke that I managed to shed a few tears at this point. The whores shrieked with laughter – Nell had all her girls in for the fun.
‘And yet!’ I said sternly, wiping my cheeks and beard dry. ‘And yet there is also one virtuous man whom I have often noted in your company, though I do not know his name.’
‘What manner of man,’ asked Hal, ‘if it please your majesty?’
‘A goodly portly man,’ I said, ‘and a corpulent. Of a cheerful look. Of a pleasing eye. Of a most noble carriage.’
(‘Hear! Hear!’ shouted one of the whores, my dear Doll Tearsheet.)
I beamed upon her, and then glared at Hal. ‘Ah, now I remember,’ I said solemnly. ‘His name is Fastolf.’
Hal opened his mouth, but I was too quick for him.
‘There is virtue in that Fastolf,’ I said. ‘Him keep with. The rest banish.’
Hal was on his feet now, grinning, but grim-eyed as ever, pulling me down from my improvised throne and quickly establishing himself in the majesty of government.
For a moment it must have crossed his mind that – in his case – this was not so much of a joke. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here I am set.’ And as he said it the words hung heavily upon the air, for he knew that one day he would be.
He sat as though he had a ruler down his back. ‘I hear,’ he said gruffly, ‘that there is a devil that haunts you in the likeness of an old, fat man.’
I bowed my head mode
stly.
(‘Not so much of the old, ducky,’ called my dear Doll loyally.)
‘A trunk of humours,’ went on Hal in his new role as my father and my judge. ‘A bolting-hutch of beastliness. A swollen parcel of dropsies. A huge bombard of sack. A stuffed cloak-bag of guts. A roasted Manningtree ox with a pudding in his belly. A reverend Vice. A grey Iniquity. A Father Ruffian. Would you mind telling me what this fellow is good for, except to taste sack and drink it?’
‘I would your grace would take me with you,’ I murmured politely. ‘Whom means your grace?’
Hal said: ‘That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Fastolf, that old white-bearded Satan.’
(‘There ain’t a white hair on him, darling,’ cries my Doll, waving her bottle. ‘Save one. In a place you won’t have seen!’)
I drew myself up to my full height.
‘My lord,’ I said, ‘the man I know.’
The whores roared. Bardolph rubbed his nose with delight. Poins kissed the potboy when he thought no one was looking. Mrs Quickly and my dear Doll performed a little jig.
I held up my hand, and at a wave of it the revels ceased. I stuck my thumbs in my belt and looked Hal straight in the eye. Straight through the eye. Suddenly I saw Hal, and he saw me.
‘The man I know,’ I said. ‘But to say I know more harm in him than in myself were to say more than I know.’
There was a silence. I could see that Hal was working out whether I meant that I was saying this in my role as him, penitent before his father, or as myself, impenitent before princes or any other sons and fathers outside Heaven.
Outside, in the street, the wind was rising. A shutter creaked. I heard a sound far off like the beating of a drum. But perhaps it was just my heart.
I said: ‘If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! No, my good lord – banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins. But for sweet Jack Fastolf, kind Jack Fastolf, true Jack Fastolf, valiant Jack Fastolf – banish him not your Harry’s company. Banish him not your Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.’
There was a terrible knocking at the door. A whore cried out, ‘The sheriff! The watch!’
More knocking and banging. General confusion. Tables turned over. People escaping through windows and hiding in cupboards and under trapdoors.
But, amidst all the uproar, there was a moment when Hal and I stayed looking at each other, kept on gazing steadily at each other, and that eagle in his eyes was suddenly as cold as death, and I was the only person in the Boar’s Head tavern who heard him say, the future King of England, Henry V:
‘I do. I will.’
Chapter Fifty-Nine
About the picking of Sir John Fastolf’s pocket
7th July
I do. I will.
I do not remember much else about that evening. Those promises, those thunderbolts knocked out my wits. I remember Bardolph running here and there, looking in vain for some disguise for his nose. I am sure that Nell Quickly was crying O Jesu, my lord, my lord! – but then she always was, even when she was dancing with her heels. Certainly, Hal kept his head. ‘The devil rides upon a fiddlestick!’ he said, meaning that here was nothing to make a great fuss about. He told me to hide behind the arras. The rest went upstairs. I suppose he bluffed it out with Poins for company, browbeating the sheriff.
I expect he lied on my behalf. And that I should be grateful.
I know I fell asleep behind the arras, worn out with analysis of the Battle of Gadshill, and that subsequent cross-questioning by the Prince and Poins, and then the play in which I had to be both King and Hal by turns. Not to speak of a deal of sack with too much lime in it.
And I know that my pocket was then picked, and that I was robbed of three or four bonds of £40 (Forty Pounds) apiece, and a seal-ring given to me by my uncle Hugh. I suspect that Mr Poins was the pocket-picker. I am only glad that he found nothing else there to his liking.
A deal of papers were taken from me at the same time by Prince Henry – later, he more or less confessed to it. These consisted of memorandums of bawdy-houses (I still liked to know, pace Mr R. Shallow, where the best bona-robas were to be found) and certain tavern reckonings.
The Prince kept one of these to mock me:
Item, A capon … … … … … … … 2s. 2d.
Item, Sauce … … … … … … … … 4d.
Item, Sack, two gallons … … … … … 5s. 8d.
Item, Anchovies and sack after supper… … 2s. 6d
Item, Bread.… … … … … … … … ob.
(Ob signifying an obulus, which is to say a halfpenny.)
It was Prince Hal’s delight to dangle this bill in front of my eyes when he wanted to jibe at my habits.
‘Monstrous!’ he’d cry. ‘But one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack.’
Man cannot live by bread alone. Besides, my bread-basket was full enough.
As for the sack: two gallons never drowned anyone, did it?
I’m surprised his royal highness missed the sugar-candy. More likely, Edward Poins would have had it. It is of use to fighting cocks such as myself in that it prolongs the breath. To such as Poins it had another use.
Chapter Sixty
About the Hotspur & Mr Glendower, with an interruption
8th July
Hal patched things up with his father. Bolingbroke was mustering an army to deal with Glendower and Harry Hotspur, and when Hal heard his father comparing him with King Richard, Queen Dick, the skipping king, and lamenting all the time that he, Hal, Bolingbroke’s own eldest son, was now his nearest and his dearest enemy, he got the wind up.
It had been Hal’s style to sneer somewhat at Hotspur.
‘He that kills some six or seven dozen Scots at breakfast,’ he used to say, ‘and washes his hands, and says to his wife, “Bugger this for a quiet life! I want work.”’
Harry Monmouth’s own approach was always oblique, less workmanlike. But, once roused, once touched, he could be plumes and flags as much as any man.
‘I shall redeem myself on Hotspur’s head!’
That’s what they say he told his dad.
I can believe it. Hal always liked to make a quarrel personal. He would fight his father, he would fight the Chief Justice, he would fight me, he would fight the Dolphin of France. But the adversary had to be an individual.
Perhaps Bolingbroke knew this, and practised great cunning in holding up Hotspur in front of his son’s eyes as a rival Prince. If that is so, then Hal gulped down the bait. It was to be the gallant Hotspur against the unthought-of Harry? Very well then. Hal had no doubt as to which was the better man. He was brimming over with confidence from Gadshill, remember.
Thank you, Clio. Tell England, will you?
Soon the royal drums were drumming and the first of the King’s armies marched west towards Wales – towards Glendower and Hotspur, the Welsh magician with the eyes like leeks, and the human volcano who was perhaps the embodiment of that Honour I once debated with Prince Thomas. Hotspur had honour all right. He was composed of honour from his poll to the soles of his feet. He was all impatience and cold baths. I think he had constructed a kind of theology upon courage. ‘If you don’t come back with your shield, then come back on it.’ That was the mentality and motto of those Percies.
I did hear that when Hotspur and Glendower met at Bangor, a few sparks flew. Mr Glendower was a great one for portents and magics. Hotspur, as you might imagine, was not. ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ the Welshman boasted. To which, the Hotspur:
‘Why so can I, or so can any man – but will they come when you do call for them?’
A scepticism which I liked. But the two rebels were soon hand-in-glove in their devil-lotionary ambitions. They carved up Britain on a map. This for me, that for you. Another clue to Hotspur – when it was proposed that the River Trent be used as a boundary for his share, and he disliked its inroads into fertile land, he seriously put forward the notion
of changing the course of the river.
God save England from fanatics and magicians alike!
Hal was entrusted with a wing of the army proceeding against Hotspur. Sir Walter Blunt—
Enough. Miranda’s insisting that I suckle her. She’s taken my head in her arms and slipped her breast out of her dress and her nipples are as erect as my prick and—
Worcester, I give you the gist of it, of England’s destiny at this point just prior to the Battle of Shrewsbury. I mean – how the Devil can a man remember dates and factions when his niece has a grip of his weapon, and is trying to make it discharge?
And when he is now in fact in bed with her, busy futtering, with his secretary scribbling on a parchment by the pillow while he jerks out the memories from that corner of his mind not directly engaged with the young lady’s satisfaction? Damned if it isn’t too much even for your author. History is being interfered with. Time is being somewhat buggered up. By these sudden inventions of my niece Miranda in singularly sportive mood.
And if Miranda becomes a character in these annals, why not? O sweet. O interruption. What author was ever more pleasantly misled by an alternate Muse?
Madam, my lord, dear readers: the final paragraphs of today’s Day must constitute the first section or stitch of History ever put into a book by an English gentleman and knight when on the job.
Chapter Sixty-One
Bardolph’s tale
9th July
Bardolph. My man Bardolph. My friend. Hey now. His face was my memento mori. Every time I looked at it I thought of Dives – there he was, still in his purple robes, but burning, burning. Bardolph. If he had been in any way given to virtue, I would have sworn by his face, and my oath would have been, By this fire, that is God’s angel! But Bardolph and virtue had long ago gone their separate ways. He was altogether given over to virtue’s posteriors. He was, as a matter of fact, always excepting the light in his face, the son of utter darkness.
