Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Item, one riding hood of red velvet.

  Item, one tippet, half russet and half black velvet.

  Item, two beaver hats.

  Item, one knitted cap.

  Item, one blue hood of the Garter.

  Aliae res necessariae ibidem

  Inprimis, one canopy of green silk, bordered with red.

  Item, five pieces of scarlet for horses’ trappings, with red

  crosses and white roses.

  Item, one piece of St George’s livery.

  Item, one piece of red satin, embroidered with Me faunt

  fere.

  Item, one piece of green worsted, thirty yards long.

  Item, one dagger.

  For instance, his pillows …

  Inprimis, five pillows of green silk.

  Item, one white silk pillow embroidered with blue lilies.

  Item, five pillows of red velvet.

  Item, one little green silk pillow, full within of lavender.

  Item, one pillow of purple silk, and gold.

  Item, two pillows of blue silk, with a shield.

  Item, seven long pillows of fustian.

  For instance, his tapestries …

  Inprimis, one cloth of arras, called the Adoration of the Shepherds.

  Item, One arras of the Assumption of our Lady.

  Item, one new banker of arras, with a bear holding a spear in the middle.

  Item, one tester of arras with two gentlewomen and two gentlemen, and one holding a hawk in his hand.

  Item, one tester of arras with a lady crowned and a great roll about her head, the first letter N.

  Item, one cloth of seven conquerors.

  Item, one cloth of the Siege of Falaise for the west side of the hall.

  Item, one arras cloth with three archers shooting a duck in the water with crossbows.

  Item, one cloth of arras with a gentlewoman harping by a castle in the middle.

  Item, one cloth of arras for a bed, with a man drawing water out of a well in the middle.

  Item, one red banker, with three white roses and the arms of Fastolf.

  For instance, his pots, et cetera …

  Item, three great brass pots of French making.

  Item, one great brass chamfron for a war-horse.

  Item, thirty-eight arrows swan-feathered.

  Item, one wicker basket.

  Item, seven feather beds.

  Item, one bolster, covered with green satin, and a scene depicting an upstart who shakes a spear.

  Item, many blankets.

  Item, many curtains.

  Item, sheets.

  Item, a pair of tongs.

  Item, carpets.

  Item, a pair of bellows.

  Item, quilts.

  Item, one iron bar.

  Item, fifteen steel crossbows.

  Item, twenty-five spears.

  Item, one green chair.

  Item, seven thousand pipes of red wine.

  Item, dishes.

  Item, carving knives.

  Item, trencher knives.

  Item, silver cruets.

  Item, goblets.

  Item, spoons of silver, with their knaps gilt like pearl.

  Item, seven great silver basins, gilt borders inscribed Me faunt fere.

  Item, missals.

  Item, one cauldron.

  Item, one dripping pan.

  Item, spits.

  Item, one flesh hook.

  Item, vinegar bottle.

  Item, a lure for hawks.

  Item, the Bible.

  Item, the encyclopaedia of Bartholomew the Englishman.

  Item, Vegetius on Chivalry.

  Item, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers.

  I, Scrope, translated the last, for his ‘Contemplation and Solace.’

  He made me write that at the end.

  In fact, I translated it because he stood over me with the dagger and one of the twenty-five spears above mentioned. It was his vanity that wanted it. In himself, he has always preferred the stroking of girls’ spines to the stroking of the spines of books.

  And yet, tonight, St Luke’s Night, he begins at last to look dry and yellow and broken, and every part about him blasted with antiquity.

  So?

  Shall we see the Devil young again?

  Fie, fie, fie, Sir John!

  To Hell with you, where you belong!

  Chapter Ninety-Seven

  About the reverse at Patay, & the fall of France

  St Crispin’s Day

  Damn it all, Worcester, the fall of France was not my fault.

  Jack Napes, the Duke of Suffolk, sold us all along the line. I am too old and tired to recite his manifold villainies. Suffice to say that he was never much of a soldier. He got the quickshits at Harfleur, and came home before seeing two swords crossed in anger. He danced about at Verneuil, but some distance to the rear. After Salisbury’s death, he succeeded to the chief command of our English forces in France. God and the Duke of Bedford alone know why. Jack Napes it was who captured Margaret of Anjou, and quickly bedded her, and then arranged for her to marry prickless Harry VI and remain his mistress.

  What a shit. There is nothing to compare with your Suffolk shit. Here was a prime shit out of Suffolk.

  He lost our castles and our garrisons in France.

  He threw away Anjou and Maine.

  Worse, it was Suffolk who had Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, murdered, and his wife Eleanor banished to the Isle of Man for sorcery. Poor Humphrey. He was a bit of an idiot. He only ever wanted to be like Hal. The resemblance is now complete, since both are clay.

  Damn Suffolk! He cheated me out of my property at Dedham.

  He got what was coming to him, that Jack Napes, when the pirates caught him off Dover – Nicholas of the Tower, the pirate ship was called – and beheaded him at sea.

  His body was washed up headless on Dover Beach.

  Henry, our holy wonder, goes and has it buried at Wingfield.

  May God have mercy on that Suffolk for his villainies. I cannot.

  In the days before Suffolk, in the days about the time of my finest hour –

  O glory. O herrings.

  We were young lions.

  I’ve burnt more French haystacks than I’ve had hot dinners.

  And drink …

  I remember a session in Bordeaux. Myrtles, lemon-trees, and ilex: why not? I captured this castle and had the pick of its cellars. They had to set me for seven hours head-down in a waterfall to cool me off from the sampling session. And then my head made the spring boil like a volcano, and steam came hissing out of the green growing wheatfields in the valley below.

  I had my licence from the Crown also. I took much wine by way of ransom, and shipped it home here to Caister in my private fleet. It was not all building materials came wallowing up the Hundred River. France has fallen, and God rot the so-called Englishmen responsible for that, but we can still drink the glory of those days. It lies in the pipes in the cellar beneath our feet.

  Here’s to the Lord of Soubooze, and all his kind!

  So.

  A glory was gone out, or going.

  Packets of jewels. My best the spear-pointed diamond set in a collar called in English a White Rose. This was bought by Richard, Duke of York, for £3000 (Three Thousand Pounds), and given to me in part repayment of a loan, in part as recompense and for my labours and vexations when he was the King’s Lieutenant in France. That is the most valuable jewel in England outside the royal treasure. The collar is too tight for me to wear. Sometimes I wear it round my wrist. Sometimes I let Miranda wear it when we are in bed together.

  I have also from that time, of course, this cross and chain. Inside the cross is a piece of the Holy Cross Itself embedded. I never take that off.

  Tell Bartolomeo—

  No, no. I know. He is dead now.

  They are all dead.

  John Sack is dead.

  Was the Count of Clermont queer? Madam, any queerer and h
e would have been a Lesbian.

  Worcester, you bugger, I remember another party of French lads that I captured in the Côtentin. Very pretty lads they were. I made them strip. They were all a-tremble with anticipation. What could the gross English milord desire or require of them?

  ‘Madamoiselles,’ I said, ‘s’il vous plaites –fart!’

  ‘Pardon?’

  I demonstrated.

  They thought I was joking. Till I got my little chopper out, and had them all standing on one leg, and trying very hard indeed.

  ‘C’est difficile, milord!’

  ‘FART!’

  They did. A hard little, pert little, prissy little fandango of farts in the French morning.

  Those were the days.

  I marched. I marched vastly all those years. I was worn out with marchings. For an Englishman – and it is my content that no man ever lived more English than I am – for such a man, I have spent too many of my days under a foreign sun, biting on outlandish foods, drinking inferior ale. Yet the French harvests of the vine had many good years in those years. So from all that marching at least I have the bottled sunlight in the cellar as a token of my triumphs.

  I refer only briefly, little Cyclops, to the talk which buzzed at my reputation for a time. Regarding, that is, the surrender of certain of my towns and castles when disaster beset the armies of England under government of my lord the Shit of Suffolk. Gossip is the biting of so many little fleas. I returned my castles to the French only when their return became inevitable. I have always been a firm believer in the inevitability of the inevitable.

  Besides—

  Home—

  Home is—

  Home, my home is—

  England.

  This day is called the feast of Crispian.

  England.

  Crispin. Crispinian. Those were their real names, those two saints. They were cobblers, martyred at Soissons. There’s an altar bearing their name in the parish church at Faversham. The shoemakers round here still keep up the feast of their patron saints. Keep it, indeed, with such a fierceness that there’s a rhyme:

  The 25th of October –

  Cursed be the cobbler

  That goes to bed sober.

  I have other reasons for remembering it, and for not going to bed sober.

  This day is called the feast of Crispian.

  Thus Harry, before Agincourt, when he promised a band of brothers, of which I was one, that those of us who outlived a particular St Crispin’s Day, and came home safe, would stand a tip-toe when this day is named, and rouse him at the name of Crispian.

  I do. I do indeed.

  Old men forget, but I have not forgotten Crispin Crispian yet.

  And today, for my sins, Worcester – it would have to be today – it so falls out in these my Acta that I have to tell the story of my latest and my last defeat. I refer to the most unfortunate matter of the slight reverse at Patay.

  It was as a result of this that certain unjust accusations were made against my courage. I still taste bitter in my mouth from the memory of them. I am going to set down here nothing but the facts. And let the truth speak for itself.

  In June of the year of our Lord’s harrowing of Hell 1429, responding to a request from John Talbot, first Earl of Shrewsbury, I was dispatched from Paris with a force of about six thousand men. Our object was to relieve the English besieged in Beaugency on the Loire. We joined with Talbot, only to learn that Beaugency had already surrendered. We were now uncertain what to do. Rather, Talbot was. For my part, I had no doubt what I thought we ought to do.

  Seven weeks before, Joan of Arc had ridden into Orleans. She was at the height of her strange career. The French, red with success, were rushing in all directions behind her banner. Now we had word that Joan, at the head of an army numbering between 20,000 and 23,000 men, was marching down to meet us.

  We held a council of war.

  ‘We are outnumbered nearly four to one,’ I said. ‘Yet allowing that one Englishman is worth about three Frenchmen, the odds are not so bad against us. However, there is the matter of the Maid.’

  ‘You mean the Witch?’ said Talbot.

  ‘If you like,’ I said. ‘Maid or Witch, Pucelle or Puzzell – she is very hard to understand.’

  Talbot bit his nails and looked at me impatiently.

  ‘I make her out clearly,’ he said. ‘She has inspired the French by some sorcery.’

  ‘You may well be right,’ I said. ‘It depends what you mean by sorcery. I have seen her just the once. She rides in company with the Marshal of France—’

  ‘De Retz? A gallant soldier!’

  ‘He has other attributes,’ I said.

  Talbot scowled. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean,’ I confessed. ‘All I know is that there is some strangeness we are faced with here, over and above and beyond the usual encounters of war. I don’t know what happened at Orleans. It seems the siege was relieved by the Maid. A siege which by all the known rules should never have failed. Could never have failed. The Marshal de Retz and the Maid together turned that siege of Orleans into something else. It was as though Orleans became their private trysting place.’

  Talbot snorted. He was a furnace of a man. The Bastard of Orleans liked to call him ‘the fiend of Hell’, and I’ve heard that to this day when a nurse or a mother in France wants to frighten or pacify a fractious child she will say ‘Be quiet, or Lord Talbot will come and get you!’ But with this fieriness went a certain scepticism also, an impatience with anything that could not be explained in terms of the here and now. I should tell you that Talbot had been imprisoned by Henry V on suspicion of Lollardy tendencies, owing to his being a friend and companion-in-arms of that disreputable Sir John Oldcastle, the heretic burnt alive in chains at Welshpool. He had survived such suspicions, and distinguished himself in Ireland and in France as a good soldier. But ‘good soldier’ about defines his limits. He could not see for the life of him what I was driving at in regard to Joan of Arc.

  ‘We must face the French,’ he said stubbornly.

  ‘No doubt,’ I said. ‘But be sure it is not only the French we are required to face.’

  ‘You are frightened?’ he sneered.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not of the French.’

  ‘Of the Witch?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Of some power she possesses?’

  ‘Or which possesses her,’ I said.

  At this point, our debate was concluded by the arrival of a messenger who informed us that the avant garde of the enemy – some 1500 Frogs on horseback – were approaching at speed.

  We took up improvised positions. It was the best we could do in the circumstances, but to someone who had fought at Agincourt and the Battle of the Herrings you will understand that our lack of proper tactical array was somewhat shocking. The vanguard, the baggage, and the artillery were all drawn up in higgledy-piggledy fashion alongside the hedges. The main body of our chaps tried to fall back to take up their stand between a bosky little wood and the fortified church of Patay. It was a difficult manoeuvre. To be frank, Talbot did not much help by charging and blustering about, and urging contradictory orders upon us all. The upshot of these orders was that we were to prepare ourselves to die. Now that has always seemed to me to be the wrong thing to tell soldiers going into battle. Better to tell them to prepare themselves for a fine old age by fighting like wildcats to give themselves a chance of attaining it.

  Talbot reminded me of Pistol, if you want to know. A different quality of man, no doubt. But a similar fire-eating bull-headedness. A similar absurdity.

  He had command of five hundred archers. These were excellent archers, and it was his job to hold the road along which the Frogs were coming at us. This road was as narrow as a good nun’s cunt. We should have held it.

  We did hold it, for a brief while. But only because the French could not locate in growing dusk exactly where the main body of our bowmen were position
ed. Then it was their good luck to start up a white roe-deer – as it seemed, by accident.

  And it was our bad luck to have that ass Talbot in the front line, for he immediately ups and betrays our position by shouting out, ‘A stag! A stag!’

  Think on these things.

  In warfare, as in life, there are really only incidents.

  The French happened to start up a roe-deer. That need not have been to their advantage, or our disadvantage. But in the revelation of human character epitomised by Talbot hurling himself stupidly forward down that lane, crying ‘A stag! A stag!’ you see a battle lost.

  Foolhardy impetuousness is not courage.

  The French horsemen fell on Talbot. They came at us suddenly from both sides, now certain where we were, outnumbering us completely. Even so, the battle raged for three hours. Talbot was taken prisoner. I fought on. The Lord Scales was taken prisoner. I fought on. The Lord Hungerford and Sir Thomas Rampston were taken prisoner. Still, I fought on.

  When I say fought I do not mean hacking and smacking about with swords on the ground like any common butcher.

  I was a captain, remember. I was conveniently positioned in an oak tree, from which I directed our English operations.

  Hopelessly outnumbered, with all our other captains captured, we might still have saved that day, but for the following incident.

  Darkness fell. The moon came up. Our archers kept firing, firing. Our men-at-arms fought as bravely and as well as at Verneuil. The French came at us in one long wave after another. And with each wave, it seemed that now, surely, we must be beaten. But we were never quite driven back beyond the fortified church. We were holding on …

  And then, in the moonlight, I saw Joan of Arc for the second time.

  She was standing on a little hill about two hundred yards from the tree where I was hidden.

  The moon shone down on her, and on De Retz beside her.

  She was standing as if exhausted, leaning on a short sword half-buried in the earth, her head bent down. Not a very beautiful or remarkable posture. But in that moment it was not so much that a light shone about her. For a second or two, she was the light. And De Retz disappeared.