Falstaff

by Robert Nye

Rahere was court fool to King Henry I.

  All those jugglers and jesters and tumblers and clowns.

  The charlatans and posturemasters, the gipsies and the pantaloons.

  Jack Adams. Jack-a-dandy. Jack-a-dreams. Jack-a-drogues. Jack Brag. Jack Fool. Jack Sauce. Jack Pudding. Jack Straw. Jack Frost. Jack Sprat. Jack the Giant Killer. Jack-a-napes and little Jack-a-lent.

  I think that England’s Christian name is Jack.

  I saw him all at Bartholomew Fair.

  I saw him eat fern seed at Bartholomew Fair. But he did not disappear to my eyes. (Though some about me said he did.)

  I saw him wash his hands in molten lead at Bartholomew Fair.

  I saw him riding on a unicorn.

  I saw him turning a parcel of rabbits loose in the crowd.

  I saw him selling salamander cloth.

  I saw his salamander too. He threw it in the fire. It swelled and swelled, and then spat out a great spew of thick slime, which quite extinguished all the coals. The same Jack then plunged his lizard into spirits of wine. It seemed none the worse for its burning.

  Deo gratias.

  Hee-haw, Hee-haw, Hee-haw.

  The Bishop of Worms condemned the Feast of Fools.

  Rahere saw the apostle Bartholomew in a vision, and turned monk.

  But didn’t we laugh because we could not understand?

  And after the Fair, that moment, in Osier Lane, walking, our shadow long before us, didn’t we have this knowledge that our laughter had been stolen from us? – That those fools had feasted on it for some secret of their own?

  Do not suppose that the fool’s folly conceals wisdom.

  Ducdame!

  Nothing so simple.

  It is wisdom, if only we knew how to fathom it.

  I think St Dismas is the patron saint of fools.

  The other thief, called Gismas, was the reasonable man. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘do us a favour. If you’re really the Christ, save yourself and us as well.’

  I once kissed a woman with three breasts at Bartholomew Fair.

  Father, has anyone ever worked out why – of all those one hundred knights who set out from King Arthur’s court to seek the Holy Grail – it was that Parsifal who found it?

  Parsifal.

  The name means Perfect Fool.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  How Sir John Fastolf went as a nun to a nunnery

  (2nd Note by Stephen Scrope)

  St Giles’s Day

  For instance, he died.

  The King had killed his heart.

  He died shouting out for drink and women in that Cheapside brothel, the Boar’s Head.

  I heard this from several reliable sources.

  I hurried to London, rejoicing.

  I met him on the road. Dead drunk, but not dead. His story was that he had staged some kind of death to escape from his creditors.

  What are we to believe? All reason says the false death must be true. There he sits, I see him with my own eyes, in that gold cauldron of a tub, taking his bath, before the fire, on this St Giles’s Day 1459 AD (and all the time telling me some gross tale of a time he took refuge in a convent disguised as a nun. Absolute nonsense. I would cut off my hand rather than let it write down a word of his filth.)

  Reason says he did not die.

  Yet I say reason cannot cope with this great Devil.

  I say that of course he was not born in the way he says he was born.

  I say that this is a monster. That this is like someone’s dream. That he is a made-up man. That this made-up monster uses words I never heard on any living tongue. That he is a lie. That he is a lie that lies and lies and lies. About his wars and amours. About his battles and companions. About all and everything.

  For instance, figs.

  There is no fig tree on the giant of Cerne Abbas. There are no figs growing anywhere in England. I, Scrope, state this for a fact. I have not travelled as he claims to have travelled, but I have heard that the fig tree is indigenous to Asia Minor and to Syria, and to most of the countries around the Mediterranean Sea. Perhaps, if he travelled in those parts ever, he saw a fig tree and this was the source of his dream. (Certainly he has figs sent to him for his bowels, but these do not come from Cerne Abbas, and he gets them through the usual trade of merchants.) I trust that is enough to kill the whole lie which constitutes the first of his so-called ‘Days’. The fig being untrue, you can take it from me that the rest is as false as the fig.

  For instance, potatoes.

  What are these ‘potatoes’? I never heard this word. Does it represent some infernal magic? Worcester, Bussard, Hanson and Nanton, his hoggish henchmen, they write down every word he utters out of fear of him, barely daring to lift their eyes from the writing. But I refer posterity – if posterity ever sees these papers – to that absurd story in which he claimed to win a battle at Kildare by the employment of an article which does not exist. There are no such things in this world as potatoes.

  For instance, Slugs.

  In some other early part of this book he is pleased to call his ‘Acta’, he gives a ridiculous account of winning a sea fight at a place called Slugs. I never heard of this Slugs. There was once a sea fight at a place called Sluys, off Flanders, in which the English defeated the French. But not, of course, in the cowardly and drunken way which insults history in his version of a sea fight at ‘Slugs’. And, besides, Our Glorious Victory at Sluys was in the Year 1339. In the time of the Black Prince. That is to say, many years before this Devil who calls himself ‘Fastolf’ was even born, if you are to believe his own account of how he came into the world.

  I will leave on one side his base suggestion that Sir Thomas Erpingham was a traitor, and worse. (Why he should wish to imply that, I cannot imagine. Erpingham played a prominent part in the Agincourt campaign, and gave the signal for the English attack, by throwing his truncheon in the air and shouting, ‘now!’)

  I will leave until later his disgusting fantasies about the women he has known. I shall have much to say on this subject when another opportunity occurs.

  He insults my mother.

  He insults me.

  I am destroying his ‘Acta’.

  Worcester knows, of course, and Friar John Brackley, and I know from the eyes of the others that they know too. But they will not dare tell him. The knowledge that one of his precious ‘Days’ has not been done – that Scrope has ignored his dictation, and written down something else altogether, and that something else the Truth – that would throw him into such a rage that it would kill him. Or he would kill them.

  He is going blind. He cannot see for himself what I have written.

  He lives for these ‘Days’ of his, and they come so hard to him now that there are long lapses between one and the next.

  If anything is ever to rid the world of this great Devil, it will be a realisation of how I, Stephen Scrope, am destroying his life’s work!

  Which might be the way to do it …

  He is ill.

  He will not live to be a hundred.

  Unless he is already a hundred? Or more?

  He is as old as his sins.

  ‘John Fastolf’.

  He calls himself that.

  But I have heard that in his days with Prince Henry they called him ‘Falstaff’, and that his real name might even be ‘Oldcastle’, a Lollard, a brand plucked from the burning.

  And that he was a Knight already in those days, as well as already an old man, so that whatever he intends to say in these pages about how he eventually came by his knighthood will again be lies.

  Lies about a living lie.

  Fastolf.

  Falstaff.

  What does it matter what he calls himself.

  The Devil is the Devil under any name.

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Pistol’s tale

  5th September

  At about the same time that red-haired Mother Superior caught me in the cellar with those seven novices, the Dolphin sent King Henr
y V a bag of tennis-balls. Hal was not amused. No more was the Mother Superior. I was expelled from the convent. England declared war on France.

  Hal was resolved to recover the inheritance of his predecessors. He wanted Normandy and Maine and Anjou for a start, plus Aquitaine and half Provence. He also wanted the arrears on the ransom of King John which, with interest, now amounted to about £1200,000 (Twelve Hundred Thousand Pounds). He also wanted the Princess Katharine of Valois, the youngest daughter of the mad French King, to marry, with a dowry of £2000,000 (Two Million Pounds) thrown in.

  These tennis-balls from the Dolphin were by way of an answer. The French heir-apparent evidently thought that he still had a madcap prince to deal with. He soon learnt otherwise. (The Dolphin’s own name, incidentally, was Lewis. But his friends called him Monsieur Basimecu – from the French, madam, baise mon cul, which is in good round English, Kiss my arse.)

  As for me, I did not go reluctant from that nunnery. It was not so much the dispensations with Sister Emilia. It was all those penances which Sister Perdita demanded of me. Mother Superior was just the last straw.

  All that Spring the hammers rang. Ships were summoned to Southampton water. All round the port, in the countryside, horses and engines of war were massing in the fields, awaiting the order for embarkation.

  I’ll say this for Hal. He spared no expense in making his army an efficient machine. First, he imbued all England with his military enthusiasm. Then, he got the Privy Seal to make contracts with different lords and gentlemen, who bound themselves to serve with a certain number of men for a year from the day on which they were mustered. The pay wasn’t bad. Dukes got 13s. 4d. a day. Earls got 6s. 8d. Barons and bannerets, 3s. 4d. Knights, 2s. Esquires, 1s. Archers, 6d. Better still, the pay, or a security for its amount, was delivered by the Treasury a quarter in advance – and if you hadn’t received all your pay by the beginning of the fourth quarter, then you could consider the engagement at an end. As a bonus, each contractor got £100 for every thirty men-at-arms he brought with him. A duke was to have fifty horses, an earl twenty-four, a baron or banneret sixteen, a knight six, an esquire four, an archer one. The horses had to be furnished by the contractor, but most equipment was provided by the King. Other terms in the contract were that all prisoners taken in the wars were to be regarded as the property of the captor for purposes of ransom – unless they happened to be kings, or sons of kings, or officers holding personal commissions from kings, in which cases they were to belong to the Crown, but only on payment of a reasonable recompense to the captors. All booty taken was to be divided into three parts: two parts for the men in the company; the third again divided into three parts, of which the leader of the company took two, leaving the third for the King.

  Under the terms of this contract, and keeping my ten miles’ distance quite religiously, acting through intermediaries, I signed on to provide myself, ten men-at-arms, and thirty archers. My company included Pistol, Peto, Nym, and Bardolph. We rode down from Windsor to Southampton in a cloud of butterflies.

  Ah, ha, Worcester, Worcester, the days of war! The dogs we were!

  As we rode, I heard the tale of my ensign Pistol.

  Now Pistol was a fire-eater. His scarlet cloak and his spiked moustaches made him conspicuous in any gathering. Yet he was not all turgidity. Such heart as he had was capable of something more than rant. He married Nell Quickly before setting forth for France. We’d all been saying we would for years – I mean, in my own case, before the knotting of my nuptials with Dame Milicent. But Pistol actually went and did it. Committed that Sacrament! Put his head in that noose of matrimony! And with what a handful of quicksilver to wife! Poor chap. His last words to her, before swinging his leg across his horse and leaving for the wars, had to be an anxious,

  ‘Keep close! I command it!’

  And I don’t need to tell you that he wasn’t referring to keeping her purse or her mouth shut.

  Anyhow, as we rode down from Windsor to Southampton, we heard:

  PISTOL’S TALE

  ‘You will know that at Walsingham, not far from our Lady’s shrine, there is a cave where a hermit lives in great seclusion. There is only ever one hermit living there, and he prays night and day and is usually a man of much goodness. All the same, human nature being what it is, there was once one hermit of Walsingham who did not come up to the standards set by the others. I suppose he might be forgiven if you take into account the peculiar temptations besetting a man seeking to live such a solitary life. Personally, I forgave him long ago.

  This third-rate hermit was, in effect, as lecherous as an old monkey, and three times as cunning. But existing, as I say, in such isolation in his cave, he found it difficult to do much more with his desires than merely entertain them.

  Then he got word – you know how some of these bad friars rub noses and wink – that down in Walsingham there was a very beautiful girl whose mother was a simple-minded widow of extremest piety. This sounded promising. The hermit equipped himself with a long hollow cane, and waited for a dark and stormy night.

  In due course, about St Agnes’ Eve, there came a dark and stormy night. The hermit came with it, down from his cave, bearing his long hollow cane. He made his way, under cover of the rain and the dark, to the hut where the girl and her mother lived. The walls were not thick. It was an easy job for the hermit to bore a little hole with his tool in one of these walls, not far from the bed where the simple widow lay sleeping. Then he inserted the long hollow cane into the hole, poked it through until it was close to the widow’s ear, and whispered three times:

  “I am an angel of the Lord!”

  Silence. But he could hear from the woman’s changed breathing that he had woken her.

  “I am an angel of the Lord!” he whispered again, a little more urgently.

  Still silence.

  “Answer me softly to show that you hear!” the hermit commanded. “I am an angel of—”

  “Amen, amen,” said the widow woman. “It’s just that I don’t know the proper way of addressing angels.”

  “The form,” said the hermit, “may be modified by the occasion and the degree of acquaintanceship.”

  “Amen,” said the widow woman.

  “Your Holiness,” said the hermit.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Your Holiness will do,” whispered the hermit. “For you to address me with.” Then he remembered the desirable daughter asleep somewhere else in this same hut, and his member grew hot and hard, and he lost all interest in correct ecclesiastical usage in modes of address for angels, and he said: “I have been sent to you by the Lord. I have a message for you. The message is this. The Lord wishes to reform his bride the Church by means of an heir of your flesh – in a word, your daughter.”

  “Fancy!” said the widow woman. “Your Holiness,” she added.

  “This is how the great deed shall be done,” said the hermit down the tube. “You must take your daughter up to the cave of the holy hermit of Walsingham. Then you must tell him the message that God has given you through me. The hermit will know what to do. I tell you, O chosen one, that from their union will come a son who is destined by God to be Pope.”’—

  ‘Wait a bit,’ cried Bardolph, as I remember, at this point. ‘If you’re intending to tell us the tale of Nicholas Breakspear, you’ve got it wrong. He didn’t—’

  ‘This is not the tale of Nicholas Breakspear,’ said Pistol grandly. ‘This is my tale. Lend me your ears! Listen!’

  And he went on –

  ‘The pious widow woman was amazed and delighted with this message. In the morning, she told her daughter the angelic good news, and asked her what she had to say about it. The girl replied:

  “Thanks be to God!”

  “That’s my girl!” cried the mother. After all, it’s not every day that a woman is presented with the prospect of being grandmother to a Supreme Pontiff. “Put on your hat,” she told her daughter. “We shall go up to the cave and see the holy hermit of Walsingham
, just as His Holiness the angel ordered.”

  The hermit saw them coming. He knelt down, so as to be found at prayer. The widow coughed. He looked up. She took him aside and told him the story. When she had finished, he said:

  “God be praised! We could all do with a good Pope!”

  Then he pretended to hesitate. He said:

  “But, my good woman, can you be quite sure that what you heard in the night was not a dream?”

  “I don’t think it was a dream,” said the widow woman. “It was an angel.”

  “And what was the angel’s name?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well,” said the hermit, “it seems to me that we should sleep on it.”

  “Sleep on it?”

  “Have I not vowed my chastity to God?” said the hermit indignantly. “This is no light or easy thing which you require of me, you and your daughter. Go home. Say your prayers. We shall see what tomorrow brings.”

  Bitterly disappointed, but impressed in her heart by the hermit’s apparent goodness, the old woman went home to her hut with her daughter. And that night, of course, the dirty old hermit came down from his cave again and gave exactly the same message to her through the long hollow cane. Only this time, as he was finishing, the widow asked,

  “What’s your name, Your Holiness?”

  “Malvolio,” said the hermit.

  Next day, up early, the woman and her daughter rush to the hermit’s cave. Again she gave him a long and circumstantial account of the message which had been delivered to her by the angel. “And he said his name is Malvolio,” she concluded.

  “Malvolio, eh?” mused the hermit. “Well, he’s certainly a top angel.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” said the old woman impatiently.

  “Truth comes in threes,” said the hermit. “Go home. Say your prayers. If the angel speaks again to you tonight, then we will do his bidding.”