Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Towards Christmas time, its governor was driven to attempt to relieve a desperate situation by expelling from Rouen twelve thousand non-combatants.

  Women and children.

  I think that this was one of the most pitiable things I ever saw.

  For Henry said he could not allow these refugees through our lines, and after we had given them a little bread, and done them no harm, he ordered us to drive them all back again into the ditch below the city walls. Some of them lingered there until the very end of the siege – but most did not. They died, and lay there, unburied in the waste land.

  Henry relented a little from the severity of his order on one day only – Christmas Day itself. On that day, a few priests from our side were allowed to venture into the ditch, taking food to the starving women and children who lay there. I asked to go with them, and was given the King’s gracious permission to do so. It was when I was in the ditch, with our priests, giving bread and wine to the starving, that I saw a baby born there, of a French woman expelled from Rouen pregnant. So terrible was her suspicion of us, that she refused to let any of our priests baptise it. The child was accordingly hoisted up in a linen basket to the top of the walls, duly baptised by a French priest, and then let down again to perish of hunger no doubt. I left that woman with enough burnt brandy to see her out of her misery in the cold.

  It snowed.

  Between two dead men in that no man’s land, you might see one still twitching.

  You would see a woman still holding in her arms her dead child, and singing to it.

  And you would see a living baby in a dead woman’s lap.

  King Henry V has been much blamed for the inhumanity he showed in this siege. I have nothing to say on the subject. It none of it surprised me. Hal was not cruel, but he was a King. He believed that France was his by right, and that Rouen belonged to him. He treated those besieged French as rebels. He was a soldier, and he was determined that the city should fall to him.

  As for the refugees dying in the snow in the ditch … I suppose he was determined to make an example of them, and to make things harder for Rouen by not allowing them to pass through our lines to freedom. Rouen had to watch them die, as we did.

  In the face of that death, who showed the greater inhumanity?

  Rouen, by its obstinate refusal to surrender, which would have brought immediate release to the poor people trapped between the armies?

  Or Hal …?

  The issue is not easy. I do not presume to judge it. Neither do I intend to applaud or criticise myself for a foolhardy action undertaken some few days before the siege finally ended, when I could stand the crying of a particular child no more – and crept down into the ditch and brought it out with me.

  It was a damnfool thing to do. The baby died in my arms as I came back into the English camp. I was arrested instantly. I expected that I would be hanged in the morning. Instead, I was brought before the King, who gave me a good cold dressing-down in his usual style, then asked if I had anything to say in my own defence.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Kneel down,’ he ordered.

  I did. ‘Arise, Sir John,’ I heard him saying.

  It was all like a dream! It is still.

  He knighted me as matter-of-factly as a man might wash his hands after doing a job which has made them dirty. He turned on his heel and was gone before I could say a word. Not that I had a word to say. I felt nothing. No joy. No grief. No triumph. I remember that I suffered an imagination for a while that I could still hear that child crying. And the newly knighted John Fastolf found the first task of his knighthood in digging a grave for the child, and finding a priest to give it Christian burial.

  Rouen surrendered three days later.

  On 22nd January, King Henry entered the city by the wide gate of Caux.

  Without pride.

  Without pipe.

  Without drum.

  Without blast of trumpet.

  Riding on a black horse clothed in black damask, with a breastplate of gold, and pendants behind him so long that they hung on either side to the ground, dragging as he rode.

  And those in Rouen who had never seen him before knew by his look which was he.

  And it was noticed – with much speculation as to the meaning of the symbol – that a page rode behind him, and the page bore a lance to which a fox’s brush had been attached after the manner of a pennon.

  Chapter Ninety

  How Sir John Fastolf was made Captain of the Bastille, & about the marriage of King Henry V & the Princess Katharine

  (4th Note by Stephen Scrope)

  30th September

  After that fraud of his death in London, he cheated me out of my inheritance.

  My mother had bequeathed to me money and land, by a deed signed with her first husband, Sir Stephen Scrope, my father.

  How this Devil persuaded my mother to set her signature to a new deed, which made over all her estates at Castle Combe to him, I do not know.

  But he did.

  And then, while I was still his ward, he handed me over to the Lord Chief Justice for a sum of £500.

  The deal was that I was being sold to marry one of Gascoigne’s daughters.

  I had to go and live in Gascoigne’s house.

  I was treated like a serf.

  I fell into a melancholia.

  It was there, in Gascoigne’s house, that I contracted the sickness which laid me low for thirteen years, and left me crippled as I am.

  Gascoigne did not even marry his daughter to me then.

  He tried to marry me off to a girl of inferior rank.

  My friends protesting, for such a marriage would have disparaged me, the Lord Chief Justice proceeded to sell me back to this Devil for another £500.

  He bought and sold me like a beast.

  Like a slave.

  Against all right and law.

  He cheated me out of more than a thousand pounds.

  As a consequence of which, I took that sickness, by which I am disfigured in my person, and shall be until I die.

  These are facts.

  I mention the little lies – the figs and the potatoes and the slugs – that you should perceive the big lie of the whole.

  He bought me and he sold me like a beast.

  It would be charity to suppose him mad.

  He is not mad.

  Chapter Ninety-One

  About the capture of Meaux, & the death of King Henry V

  1st October

  The King took Katharine back with him to be crowned in the Abbey Church of Westminster. He left the Duke of Clarence as his Lieutenant General in France, and with a special charge as Governor of Normandy. Paris was under the care of the Duke of Exeter, as I told Scrope yesterday, with the Bastille my particular responsibility.

  Worcester, at last you have the advantage of me. You have one eye. But it seems that I am to have none. This morning I picked up the notes I gave to Scrope concerning the divers small charges borne by me in my service in the wars abroad. (These are mere crumbs – but to be added in due course to my great Bill of Claims against the Crown, which is now nearly ready for dictation.) Do you know, my Cyclops, I couldn’t make out a word that Scrope had written? Though I saw the sums there more or less, with underlinings where the totals came.

  I am blind, Worcester. My eyes have almost gone. The light is dying.

  Does he write a fair hand, stepson Scrope? Has he got it all right? Not just about those wages, but about Queen Ysabeau’s behaviour in the Church of St Peter at Troyes? About the murder of the Duke of Burgundy at the Bridge of Montereau? Dragged down. Overwhelmed. Stabbed (to death). Queen Ysabeau was in tears. But she could have had the Duke, her lover, killed, and cried disconsolately when the deed was done.

  Henry was hardly gone, when the Dolphin took the field again. He’d bought the service of seven thousand Scots, under command of the Earl of Buchan. My old master, Clarence – the one who’d told me we owe God a death, while hanged men thump
ed the wall – he was dining when the news came of these reinforcements marching to join the French. He left a perfectly good meat pie, with gravy, to go and get them.

  ‘Up them, gentlemen!’ they say he said.

  He was not in time to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces. He met two armies at a bridge across the River Coesnon. A terrible battle took place.

  Two thousand of Clarence’s troops were killed, among them the Lords Ross and Gray, and the Earls of Huntingdon and Somerset.

  Clarence himself, in rivalry or emulation of Hal’s style as usual, wore on his casque his ducal coronet. One William Swinton, a Scot, attacked him and dismounted him. Clarence got up to fight on foot, but Buchan brained him with his mace.

  This was a bad reverse for England, and the King knew it. When someone asked him if he was planning a tournament among the festivities to celebrate his marriage, he answered that they should have tilting enough, but that it should be tilting in earnest. On 10th June, he embarked from Dover with an army of four thousand men-at-arms and twenty-four thousand archers, arriving at Calais the same day at noon.

  He came first to relieve our difficulties in Paris. This was quickly done. Indeed, by this time, Henry’s name and fame stood so high among the French that his mere presence was enough to make our cause seem plausible again, and to make the Frogs start hopping in the opposite direction. He went down to Chartres, which the Dolphin had beseiged while the King was in England, and the French retired without fighting a battle as soon as they saw the English army approaching across that long, flat plain. I marched with the King to Chartres, and heard Mass sung in the cathedral there, and knelt before the fragment of our Lady’s dress which that most wonderful of churches is a house for.

  It took Hal just ten weeks to regain all the territory lost during his absence.

  The Dolphin and Buchan kept out of his way, collecting what forces they could as they went along. They retreated as far south as Bourges.

  Henry let them be there, for the moment. He lay siege to Meaux, since as long as this fortress remained in the hands of the Dolphin, Paris was not safe for us.

  Meanwhile, on (I believe) 6th December, in the year of the Second Adam 1421, while that village in Dutchland was being drowned by a flood in the night, Queen Katharine had given birth to a son. This event took place at Windsor. I heard from the King’s chamberlain that Hal was thrown into a strange fit of gloom when the news was brought to him. He said:

  ‘I, Henry born at Monmouth, shall small time reign, and get much. This Henry born at Windsor shall long, long reign, and lose all. But God’s will be done.’

  Meaux held out for seven months. It was ruled by a barbarian who went by the name of the Bastard of Maurus. This Bastard was such a bastard that he had no hope of any pardon should he capitulate – so, of course, he did not capitulate. He had broken every law and common usage of war. His allegiance to the Dolphin was the merest excuse for butchery. An elm grew outside the walls of his fortress. It bore a crop of bodies, winter and summer, of people he had murdered for the plunder’s sake.

  By April we had occupied a small island in the river, from which we were able to smash their walls down with our cannons. Before ordering an assault, the King invited Meaux to surrender. His invitation was answered with an insult. We went in then through the breach in the walls, and fought with them hand-to-hand for seven long hours. It was a particularly nasty encounter. When their lances were all broken, that garrison at Meaux fought with iron spits.

  Night was falling. Henry again offered terms.

  I find this worth mentioning, Worcester, since I want to be fair to his character as King. This offering of terms – when he could just have killed the lot of them in the morning – was a kingly act, seeing that Hal had been personally insulted during the siege. It shows that his temper was under absolute control. He showed neither anger nor pity. Which is what one should expect of a king, perhaps.

  Also: the terms offered (and accepted) were not unduly severe.

  Four persons, among them the Bastard of Maurus, with all English mercenaries, Scotch and Irish soldiers in his pay, were excepted from the King’s clemency. The rest were to be kept close prisoners until the end of the war.

  On 11th May, or thereabouts – I remember it was pissing down with rain anyway – Meaux was in Henry’s hands.

  I saw the Bastard of Maurus beheaded, and his body hanged up by the ankles on the elm tree where he had hanged so many others.

  It was my responsibility to march the captured English mercenaries, plus the Scotch and Irish, to the Bastille in Paris, where they were executed after proper trial.

  This capture of Meaux was the last military exploit of King Henry V.

  At the end of the same month of May, Queen Katharine landed at Harfleur, with her infant son, and accompanied by her brother-in-law, John the ox, Duke of Bedford. They journeyed from Harfleur to Rouen, and from Rouen on to Vincennes, where Henry met them.

  I witnessed their entry into Paris.

  It was magnificent. Katharine came with two mantles of ermine borne before her carriages, to symbolise her twin royalty now as Queen of England and of France.

  I had charge of the small command of foot-soldiers lining the route where the procession passed the Bastille.

  I knew that Henry knew that I was there.

  I brought my men to attention as he went by, and with one accord they cried the words that I had schooled them in:

  ‘God save your grace, King Hal!’

  And, for myself, I cried as I had cried before:

  ‘God save you, my sweet boy!’

  But as I said the words, I knew it was too late. God was not going to save him now. God had other plans for Harry Monmouth. The King’s face was drawn and sunken in. He was plainly dying.

  I don’t know whether he heard the words my soldiers shouted, or my own words. On reflection, now, I rather hope he didn’t. I would prefer him to have taken to the tomb – if I ever crossed his mind at all in those last days – the fact that on the night before Agincourt I had said more circumspectly, ‘God save the King!’ Or even, that on the occasion of my knighting at Rouen, when I had half expected rebuke or worse for what I had done in the ditch, and he had asked me what I had to say, I had answered, ‘Nothing.’

  GOD SAVE THE KING or NOTHING might well be better as words for King Henry V to remember me by.

  But, then, GOD SAVE YOU, MY SWEET BOY, were the words I felt again compelled to say.

  In any event, the matter is problematical only in my own heart. For, true to form, King Henry V gave no sign whatsoever of having heard a small party of English soldiery salute him with an unusual mode of address, or of having even noticed an old fat English knight by the side of the road, his cap in his hand, and tears blinding his eyes.

  Blinded now indeed, Worcester. My age and my blindness began in that Paris street, as the King’s death rode by me.

  Henry Monmouth died about two months later, on the last day of August, of a sharp fever with vehement dysentery, having just completed his thirty-fourth year on earth. He had demanded the truth of his physicians, and when they told him that it was impossible for him to live for longer than another two hours, unless it was the will of God to decree otherwise, he sent for his confessor, made his confession, and received the last sacraments of the Church. I heard that he then asked his priests to recite the seven penitential psalms, and that when they were chanting the 51st and came to the words, Build Thou the walls of Jerusalem, he interrupted them and said that he had intended, once peace was restored to France, to conquer the kingdom of Jerusalem. I heard also that when the priests went on with their devotions, he cried out once again, in the midst of them, ‘You lie! You lie! My part is with the Lord Jesus!’ But nobody knew who he might be speaking to.

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  How Sir John Fastolf was installed a Knight of the Garter

  St Faith’s Day

  Pigbum, there was a lot more History.

  It
doesn’t seem important any more.

  With Henry IV in his cradle – and at the height of his significance as a king, you might say – John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, and Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, had a great quarrel in the riverside gardens of the Temple, each of them plucking a rose from the bushes growing there, to serve as his badge. Somerset plucked the red rose. Plantagenet the white. I always liked white roses.

  I was made Master of the Duke of Bedford’s household in France. That was in the January of 1422. I think. O royalty. O responsibility. I remember a little shit-faced runt, Guillaume Raymond his name was, governor of Pacy. This Raymond agreed all the way to the bank to pay me 3200 salutes in gold by way of a decent ransom. My lord the royal ox of Bedford did me out of this prize. Very disgustingly, he claimed the same piece of French excrement as his, and carted him off on a shovel. May I say, little farter, that I regretted the duplicity of one who was a brother and uncle to Kings, now himself Regent of France, seeing fit to stoop so low as to cheat a soldier of his due.

  Miranda sucked me off last night. She made me put on my blue hood of the Garter, and lie back on pillows of red velvet. Then she took my weapon in her mouth. She tickled with her sweet little prickly tongue – like a vixen’s, it is – round and round the head of my cock. Then she started moving with her whole mouth up and down on me, and sucking, and pumping like mad. Her eyes blazed like meteors. Plainly, she was loving every moment of it as much as I was. She sucked and sucked. She put her fingers up my bum-hole too. Then, when she felt me starting to come, she squeezed at my balls as if she wanted every last drop of the precious stuff, and got as much of her mouth over my organ as she could, so that the head of it was rubbing against the back of her throat, and she could swallow the whole lot down in one go.