Part 12
Sir John Falstaff.--Not so, my lord; your ill angel is light; but, I hope, he that looks upon me will take me without weighing: and yet, in some respects, I grant, I cannot go, I cannot tell. Virtue is of so little regard in these coster-monger times, that true valour is turned bearherd. Pregnancy is made a tapster, and hath his quick wit wasted in giving reckonings: all the other gifts appertinent to man, as the malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry. You, that are old, consider not the capacities of us that are young: you measure the heat of our livers with the bitterness of your galls; and we that are in the vaward of our youth, I must confess, are wags too.
Chief Justice.--Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a decreasing leg? an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken? your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every part about you blasted with antiquity? and will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John!
Sir John Falstaff.--My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head, and something a round belly. For my voice,--I have lost it with hollaing, and singing of anthems. To approve my youth farther, I will not: the truth is, I am only old in judgment and understanding; and he that will caper with me for a thousand marks, let him lend me the money, and have at him. For the box o’ the ear that the Prince gave you, he gave it like a rude prince, and you took it like a sensible lord. I have checked him for it, and the young lion repents; marry, not in ashes and sackcloth, but in new silk, and old sack.
Chief Justice.--Well, God send the Prince a better companion!
Sir John Falstaff.--God send the companion a better prince! I cannot rid my hands of him.
Chief Justice.--Well, the King hath severed you and Prince Harry. I hear you are going with Lord John of Lancaster against the Archbishop and the Earl of Northumberland.
Sir John Falstaff.--Yea; I thank your pretty sweet wit for it. But look you pray, all you that kiss my lady peace at home, that our armies join not in a hot day; for, by the Lord, I take but two shirts out with me, and I mean not to sweat extraordinarily: if it be a hot day, an I brandish any thing but my bottle, I would I might never spit white again. There is not a dangerous action can peep out his head, but I am thrust upon it: well, I cannot last ever. [But it was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common. If you will needs say I am an old man, you should give me rest. I would to God, my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is: I were better to be eaten to death with rust, than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion. ]
Chief Justice.--Well, be honest, be honest; and God bless your expedition!
Sir John Falstaff.--Will your lordship lend me a thousand pound to furnish me forth?
Chief Justice.--Not a penny, not a penny: you are too impatient to bear crosses. Fare you well: commend me to my cousin Westmoreland.
I consider this utter defeat of my Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne one of the most brilliant triumphs of Sir John Falstaff’s victorious life.
“If I do, fillip me with a three-man beetle,” said Jack, looking after the retreating form of his defeated adversary with ineffable contempt. “Boy!”
“Sir?” said the small page.
“What money is in my purse?”
“Seven groats and twopence.”
“I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers it out, but the disease is incurable. Go, bear this letter to my Lord of Lancaster; this to the Prince; this to the Earl of Westmoreland; and this to old Mistress Ursula, whom I have weekly sworn to marry since I perceived the first white hair on my chin. About it; you know where to find me.”
And pray, who was old Mistress Ursula? We may chance to hear of her by and bye.
II. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED:
DEFENCE OF THE CHARACTER OF THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE GASCOIGNE: CHARITABLE CONSTRUCTION OF HIS CONDUCT IN THE CELEBRATED ACTION OF QUICKLY
I would that full justice to the greatness, wisdom, and magnanimity of my much calumniated hero could be accomplished without the painful task of censuring and exposing the conduct of those enemies to whose machinations he owed penury, neglect, and persecution in his lifetime--obloquy and misrepresentation after death. To censure at any time is a disagreeable task; more especially when the object of your strictures is a personage whose memory successive generations have held in reverential esteem. It is a thankless office to be the first to call attention to a stain on a reputation hitherto deemed spotless--as it is to be the first to tell your sleeping neighbour that his roof is burning. The raven is an honest bird and croaks the approach of bad weather with unerring truthfulness; but the raven is universally hated. I am aware that there are certain writers who have a taste for this kind of discovery, whose minds’ eyes may be compared to a solar telescope, finding out an unsightly mass of blots, blurs, and creases, when the world at large can see nothing but uniform, cheering light. These gentlemen--who, supposing the mind to have a nose as well as an eye, may be called the carrion crows of literary judgment--so keen is their scent for a decomposing reputation, and so intense their enjoyment of dead excellence that has turned bad--are not desirable models for imitation. Neither are their antipodes--the _couleur de rose_ critics, who deaden their mental nostrils to any “fly-blown” indications in a character they are compelled to digest; preferring to swallow the whole with hopeful self-persuasion that all has been good, wholesome, and nutritious. The conscientious and impartial writer will endeavour to observe a medium course between these two. But that course, how difficult to discover and observe! The soundest human judgment, like the strongest eyesight, is fallible. What we think are spots on the sun may but be the dazzling effect of more pure light than our imperfect optic nerves can sustain. We may think we are about to strip a masquerading daw, and at our first rude grip a heartrending cry will tell us that we have ruined the jewelled train of a majestic peacock!
The above I admit to be a specimen of that logical process known as “beating about the bush,” a proof that I am staggering, like the pencil-leg of a knock-kneed compass, round a point which I have much hesitation in coming to. The case of the obscure youth who acquired immortality by burning Diana’s temple, is a stale illustration, but I am fain to use it for want of better. It might be thought that I am aspiring to a renown like that of Erostratus, if the arguments of this chapter should result--as I hope and trust they will not--in a balance of probability to the effect that the venerated name of Sir William Gascoigne was really that of one of the most contemptible scoundrels that ever occupied his wrong place in a court of justice. I repeat that I hope my patient pursuit of truth in this very trying matter will not bring me to a standstill at so awkward a point. Nay, so terrified am I at the bare possibility of doing irreparable injustice to a great man’s memory, that I will lose no time in admitting that very probably Sir William Gascoigne was a ten times greater, wiser, and more immaculate being than even his eulogists have represented him, and that, in a still greater likelihood, I myself am an obtuse purblind personage, with no soul to appreciate the more exalted virtues, and with a deplorable squint in my critical vision. Having admitted this as a possibility--without asserting it as a fact--of myself, I may be surely allowed the same speculative margin quoad the hypothesis of the Lord Chief Justice now under discussion, not having been, to use the mildest expression, the man he has been taken for. At the same time the reader will understand that I do not wish him to attach to my opinion (should I succeed in forming one on this most trying subject) more weight than is due to the honest expression of a private individual’s most impartial judgment, the result of patient, untiring investigation of the most copious and incontrovertible facts, aided by a paramount thirst for truth and an intellect habituated to moral analysis.
I trust that it will now be felt I am prepared to do Sir William Gascoigne the amplest justice; and will lose no more time in enumerating the moral enormities whereof I am so anxious to prove he could not possibly have been guilty. The decision I have already been reluctantly brought to--explained in the last chapter--that his Lordship’s character was not free from a strong taint of envy, which only induces me to be the more careful. Let us shun prejudice above all things. Envy, as we all know, if not kept in check by the worthier attributes of our nature, will lead to the commission of every earthly crime, especially of offences such as those which I think--yes, I think--I am about to show you Sir William Gascoigne was incapable of meditating, or, at any rate, of putting into execution.
And now I have worked myself up into a perfectly sanguine condition. I am sure I shall be able to clear the Justice’s reputation from the last lingering blemish of suspicion. If I do not succeed I shall be very much disappointed.
In the first place it is improbable that any close degree of intimacy should have existed between a man of Sir William’s exalted position and an obscure person like Mistress Helen Quickly, widow and licensed victualler, proprietress of the Old Boar’s Head Tavern, Eastcheap.
It is true that the great legal functionaries of that period--as of many much later--were usually men of obscure birth, raised, in most cases (unquestionably in that of Gascoigne), to power and distinction by the exercise of their own talents and virtues; allowing for this, it is not unlikely that Sir William, in early life, may have been acquainted with, and even befriended by, Mrs. Quickly. There is even reason to believe that they were blood relations. A statement from Sir John Falstaff that the lady was in the habit of going about London asserting--with pardonable arrogance--that her eldest son bore a striking physical resemblance to the Chief Justice would lend some probability to this theory. A suspicion on Sir John’s part that this boast might have originated in mental hallucination may, or may not, be considered to weaken the evidence. We will pass this over, and confine ourselves to the supposition that Sir William Gascoigne, when a struggling law-student, was possibly greatly indebted to the maternal or sisterly hospitality of Mrs. Quickly. There would be no harm in his accepting gratuitous board--nay, even in his borrowing money--at her hands. Well! as a just man and a grateful, he would, of course, not forget his old benefactress in the days of his prosperity. Duty to his high position would not enable him to avow the acquaintance publicly (more especially if the by no means disproved relationship really existed). Still, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Sir William may have occasionally looked in at the Boar’s Head, for a quiet flagon and a confidential chat with his friend the hostess, to whom as a lone woman and a confiding innkeeper, his sage counsels--more especially on questions connected with the debtor and creditor laws of the period--would be in the highest degree serviceable. The fact of an illustrious legal dignitary having a marked predilection for tap-rooms and bar-parlours is by no means without parallel in English history. The great Judge Jeffries was given to that species of amusement. So was a celebrated Speaker of the House of Commons, in the reign of George the Second, whose name I read the other day in a penny morning newspaper, but which I am quite sure I have now forgotten.
Mind, I am very far from asserting that Sir William Gascoigne ever saw the inside of a tavern. The only positive record of a personal meeting between him and Mrs. Quickly represents them as utter strangers to each other. But to assume this attitude--supposing the idle suggestions I have propounded (with a view to their ultimate refutation) to have the slightest foundation in probability--would be their most obvious policy. Let that pass: I merely think it remarkable that on _the very day after the conversation recorded in the last chapter_, good, kind-hearted Mrs. Quickly, who had known Sir John Falstaff twenty-nine years come peascod time, who, as we have seen, was one of our knight’s most devoted admirers, and to whose nature an act of voluntary severity was a moral impossibility, should, at the moment when Sir John was husbanding all his resources for his second campaign against the northern rebels (a position indicated in the conversation just alluded to), from which he might never come back alive, suddenly belie the purport of her whole existence by arresting her ever-honoured guest for a pitiful sum of a hundred marks. Mrs. Quickly did this; and the act would be incomprehensible, but for a light thrown on its motives by the unerring luminary of Sir John Falstaff’s intellect. He explained it in eight syllables:
“I know thou wast set on to this.”
I do not state that Mrs. Quickly was “set on” by Sir William Gascoigne. But I should very much like to know who else could possibly have been her instigator in the transaction? I do not suppose Mrs. Quickly would have known where to find Messrs. Fang and Snare--representatives of the Sheriff of London--without some legal advice on the subject. And allow me to ask, without prejudice, _What was Sir William Gascoigne doing, hanging about the neighbourhood woth a strong posse of retainers at the moment of Sir John Falstaff’s attempted arrest, unless to promote, and exult in, the discomfiture of his victor of the preceding day?_ Perhaps the learned judge’s personal biographers can clear up this matter on honourable grounds. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction. But, till something of the kind be really done, the thing certainly wears an unfavourable aspect.
Leaving the motives of the case an open question, and wishing to give them the most charitable construction, I will confine myself to the facts. Sir John Falstaff, returning from the city, where he had been making purchases for the coming campaign, was waylaid by Messrs. Fang and Snare aforesaid, who attempted to arrest him at the suit of Quickly, that lady being present in person. The terror of Sir John’s name had been almost enough to keep the myrmidons of an oppressive law from entering upon their dangerous mission. That of the knight’s presence spread a panic amongst their craven forces. Sir John Falstaff was not alone. He was accompanied by the formidable Bardolph--more than a match for any bailiff, as countless well-contested actions had proved--and the less terrible personality of little Robin, the page, before whom Master Fang’s boy quailed abjectly. After a brief engagement, the troops of the Sheriff were routed. Victory, as usual, declared herself on the side of Sir John Falstaff--when, also as usual, invidious destiny interfered to deprive him of the fruits of conquest in the shape of the Lord Chief Justice, who suddenly made his appearance, “attended,” (observe the precaution) from round the corner--quite by accident, of course!
The Lord Chief Justice, after a brief show of wishing to keep the peace (I wonder if Lord Chief Justices then, any more than now, were in the habit of doing duty as _common policemen_, unless for some private purpose), enquired the grounds of dispute. He certainly said or did nothing to prove that lie had any previous knowledge of them; but he fell to abusing Sir John Falstaff, for being then detained in London instead of being on his way to York with his troops, with something like indelicate precipitancy--displaying a predisposition to quarrel unpleasantly suggestive to the modern reader of the fable of the wolf and the lamb.
It may have been a fault of the defective judicial science of the period, and no proof of personal bias, that Sir William conducted himself throughout the hearing of this case more as an advocate than as a judge. At any rate he sided with Mrs. Quickly from the outset, and “summed up” dead against Sir John Falstaff before he had heard a word of the evidence.
Mrs. Quickly stated her complaint in a rambling, disconnected speech, in which I do not say she was absolutely prompted by her learned friend (there is no offence in the designation; if Gascoigne were really what he pretended to be, to call him the friend of the poor, the widowed and the oppressed, is surely a compliment), but which--from the looseness of the speaker’s diction--was clearly a got-by-rote affair, and in no instance an expression of the heart’s feelings. The first count in the verbal indictment was a matter of money lent, and debt incurred for board and lodging. The second was one of breach of promise of marriage.
Falstaff appealed to the _Justice_, in words, the purport of which I have already quoted.
“My lord, this is a poor mad soul: and she says up and down the town that her eldest son is like you: she hath been in good case, and the truth is poverty hath distracted her.”
I have said that I decline giving an opinion as to the foundation of this report. I will only say, now, that the Lord Chief Justice had no better reply to make to it than a quibble. _He did not contradict it. Moreover, he suddenly became civil to Sir John Falstaff, and recommended a friendly compromise_. Curious, was it not?
Sir John Falstaff took Mrs. Quickly aside. The result of their _tête-à-tête_ was an almost momentary reconciliation, proving the shallowness of the artificial soil on which the exotic plant of the hostess’s animosity had been forced by the subtle devices of her legal adviser, _whoever that may have been_. Scarcely fifty seconds had elapsed, and ere the same number of words could have passed between them, the following colloquial fragment was audible:--
Sin John Falstaff.--As I am a gentleman.
Mistress Helen Quickly.--Nay, you said so before--
Sir John Falstaff.--As I am a gentleman; come, no more words of it.
Mistress Helen Quickly.--By this heavenly ground I tread on, I must be fain to pawn both my plate and the tapestry of my dining chambers.
The Knight---Glasses, glasses is the only drinking; and for thy walls,--a pretty slight drollery, or the story of the Prodigal, or the German hunting in water-work is worth a thousand of those bed-hangings and those fly-bitten tapestries. _Let it be ten pound if thou canst_. Come, an it were not fur thy humours, there is not a better wench in England. Go, wash thy face, and draw thy action. Come, thou must not be in this humour with me; dost not know me? Come, come, I know thou wast set on to this.
The Lady.--Pray thee, Sir John, let it be but twenty nobles; i’ faith I am loath to pawn my plate in good earnest, la!
The Brave.--Let it alone; I’ll make other shift; you’ll be a fool still.
The Fair.--Well, you shall have it, though I pawn my gown. I hope you’ll come to supper. You’ll pay me altogether?
The Invincible.--Will I live?
And what was the upshot of this colloquy? Simply that Mrs. Quickly returned placidly to her home, under the friendly convoy of Bardolph and Robin, the former commissioned by his master to look well after the poor lady, and to see that no designing persons should a second time wean her from obeying the dictates of her better nature. It is worthy of remark that Mrs. Quickly did not say so much as “good morning” to the Lord Chief Justice. I suppose there was some motive for this, as for every other impulse of human action. For my part, I will maintain that course of dispassionate reserve I have so scrupulously adhered to throughout this trying inquiry, and offer no opinion whatever on the subject.
Mind, there is one thing I cannot, and will not, and do not intend to, allow anybody else to believe. I will not have it supposed, for a moment even, that Sir William Gascoigne could have been interested in the issue of this action on any grounds so contemptible as pecuniary commission in the event of recovery. Emphatically--No! If personal feeling _had_ anything to do with his interference, it must have been a feeling far nobler than that of mere avarice--to wit, revenge! He had been baffled, discomfited, eclipsed by Falstaff, and he was human. That he may have wished to blight the prospects of Falstaff, is, alas! for our fallen nature, but too possible! But I cannot believe that he would even have accepted so much as a clerk’s fee from Mrs. Quickly,--in spite of the notorious corruptibility of judges in the Middle Ages, and the absence of any proof of such greatness of character in the subject of these remarks as should have placed him above the besetting weaknesses of his race and order.
And now I trust I have performed the difficult task I proposed to myself of doing the fullest justice to Sir William Gascoigne’s character. More; I flatter myself that when mere barren justice has failed to reestablish the memory of that great man in a sufficiently favourable light, I have at times even soared into chivalry. As his champion defender I have fearlessly grappled with all the accusations that could be brought against him in connection with this critical portion of his career. If I have failed in refuting them, the fault is mine.
It may be asked why I have taken all these pains in clearing up the character of a man who forms but a passing accessory to my main subject? In the first place, reader, let justice be done though the heavens fall. In the second place, if I had not satisfactorily proved--(for I have proved it, have I not?)--Sir William Gascoigne’s innocence of those charges, of which he might otherwise have been believed guilty, there are certain matters connected with the close of my hero’s public career which it would have been impossible for me to explain away, except on grounds which I will here say nothing about, and which I hope it will not be my painful duty to allude to on a future occasion.
III. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF AN AUTHOR.
FRAGMENTS OF HIS CORRESPONDENCE.--EPISODE OF THE FAIR DOROTHEA AND ANCIENT PISTOL.
Let us turn awhile from the sickening horrors of war, and the scarcely less revolting machinations of statecraft, faction, and personal rivalry, to contemplate Sir John Falstaff under the soothing influences of the arts and the affections.
With the valour and generalship of Hundwulf Falstaff, the necessities of Roger, the thirst of Hengist, the humour and, alas! the ill-luck of Uffa,--our hero inherited the literary tastes of his celebrated ancestor, Peter. A deficiency in that poet’s praiseworthy attribute of industry may have been one reason for his not having enriched the literature of his country by any legacy of first-class importance. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that the principle of encouraging authors to composition by adequate pecuniary rewards--defectively understood even in the present day--was, at that time, not even recognised; and the bare idea of aimless labour to a logical intellect like that of Sir John Falstaff would be naturally revolting.