Part 21
Master Silence (dimly reminded of a forgotten ballad, sings’)_“By’r lady, I think ho bo, but goodman Puff of Barson_.”
Pistol (at once discerning that Master Silence is a man who may be safely bullied).--Puff? Puff in thy teeth, most recreant coward base!--Sir John, I am thy Pistol, and thy friend, and helter-skelter have I rode to thee; and tidings do I bring, and lucky joys, and golden times, and happy news of price.
Sir John Falstaff.--I pr’ythee now, deliver them like a man of this world.
Pistol.--A foutra for the world, and worldlings base! I speak of Africa, and golden joys.
Sir John Falstaff.--O base Assyrian knight! what is thy news? Let king Cophetua know the truth thereof.
Master Silence (sings seraphically).--“And Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John.”
Pistol.--Shall dunghill curs confront the Helicons? And shall good news be baffled? Then, Pistol, lay thy head in Furies’ lap.
Master Shallow (rising, with magisterial assumption of sobriety).--Honest gentleman, I know not your breeding.
Pistol.--Why then, lament therefore.
Master Shallow.--Give me pardon, sir:--if, sir, you come with news from the court, I take it, there is but two ways, either to utter them, or to conceal them. I am, sir, under the king, in some authority.
Pistol (drawing a rusty rapier) Under which king, Bezonian? speak, or die.
Master Shallow.--Under King Harry.
Pistol.--Harry the fourth? or fifth?
Master Shallow.--Harry the fourth.
Pistol.--A foutra for thine office!--Sir John, thy tender lambkin now is king: Harry the fifth’s the man. I speak the truth: when Pistol lies, do this; and fig me, like the bragging Spaniard.
Sir John Falstaff (leaping to his feet like a colt).--What! is the old king dead?
Pistol.--As nail in door: the things I speak are just.
Sir John “Falstaff (quivering with excitement).--Away, Bardolph! saddle my horse.--Master Robert Shallow, choose what office thou wilt in the land, ‘tis thine.--Pistol, I will double-charge thee with dignities.
Master Bardolph--O joyful day!--I would not take a knighthood for my fortune.
(He drinks and exits.)
Pistol (smiling sardonically).--What! I do bring good news?
Sir John Falstaff.--Carry Master Silence to bed.--Master Shallow, my Lord Shallow, be what thou wilt, I am fortune’s steward. Get on thy boots: we’ll ride all night__O sweet Pistol!--Away, Bardolph.--Come, Pistol, utter more to me; and, withal, devise something to do thyself good.--Boot, boot, Master Shallow: I know, the young king is sick for me. Let us take any man’s horses; the laws of England are at my commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends, and woe unto my lord chief justice!
Pistol:
Let vultures vile seize on his lungs also! Where is the life that late I led say they; Why, here it is! (snaps his fingers.) Welcome those pleasant days.
Scene closes. ]
* It will be observed that Shakspeare almost invariably makes Pistol speak in a kind of mongrel blank verse-- apparently in remote imitation of the masques, pageants, and miracle plays then recently introduced into this country from Italy--fashionable amusements, whereat the worthy ancient (in his capacity of hanger-on of all dirty work to the upper classes) doubtless frequently assisted, in a supernumerary capacity. Sir John Falstaff answers him playfully, from one of the earliest known specimens of this kind of composition--See Payne Collier’s History of Dramatic Poetry, and other works to be met with in the admirable and compendious catalogue of the British Museum, which will amply repay perusal.
The time long hoped for had then arrived. There was no more thought of drowsiness or dissipation for that night,--no more of debt or difficulty for the future. Henry of Monmouth--Sir John’s pet pupil, his “tender lambkin”--was king; and surely, if such feelings as gratitude and goodfellow-ship existed in the hearts of princes, no man had greater right to look forward to emoluments and dignities under the new _regime_ than Sir John Falstaff. He himself was incapable of forgetting old friends in his prosperity, and he could not suspect such baseness in others. We have heard him declare that he would double charge Pistol with dignities, that Master Shallow might choose what office he would in the land--it should be his! Bardolph, knowing his master’s disposition, would not take a knighthood for his fortune. Not one present was omitted from the circle of Sir John Falstaff’s comprehensive benevolence. Even to poor Master Silence he performed the only kindness which that vocalist was just then capable of benefiting by,--he ordered his inebriated worship to be carried up to bed!
Depend upon it, there was no time lost in booting and saddling for the townward journey. Be sure that the command to “take any man’s horses” was carried out to the letter, and backed by the legal warrant of Justice Shallow--(for were they not on His Majesty’s service? could the government of the realm possibly go on without the immediate presence in the capital of Sir John Falstaff?)
What a terrible distance was that which separated Sir John from London and the young king! How he wished for the power to annihilate time and space! Alas! he was born in a wrong age for locomotive purposes. Half-a-dozen centuries earlier, a knight-errant of his vast merit and renown, wishing for a rapid mode of transit, would but have had to summon his guardian fairy, and that obliging genius would have ordered her griffins to be put-to for his accommodation, with a lift in her enchanted car, immediately. In the present day, four hundred and forty years later, the thing would be scarcely more difficult. A post-chaise to the Tewkesbury station, and a special train thence to London, would settle the matter in three or four hours. But the task of conveying Sir John Falstaff, rapidly, over the vile roads of the fifteenth century, by mere horse-power, would be a difficulty which the mind of a Pickford alone could be qualified to grapple with.
And yet, incredible as it may seem, Sir John Falstaff actually contrived to reach the metropolis on the third day after his departure from Master Shallow’s residence. I am not prepared to say that no magic power was employed in effecting this apparently miraculous transit. On the contrary, the aid of a rather potent magician appears to have been successfully invoked for the occasion--one, at whose bidding, the roughest roads become level, the stoutest doors fly open, the veriest griffins, tigers, crocodiles, and Cerberi of gate-keepers become docile as lambs; an enchanter, at whose very aspect, or even name, horses saddle themselves, inn-tables spread themselves, corks fly out of self-pouring wine-bottles, pigs spit themselves, larks, pheasants, and wild duck stop in their mid-air course, and fall, ready-stuffed and roasted, on to eager travellers’ plate. Need I say that I allude to the evil, but fascinating necromancer, King Money?
Sir John Falstaff borrowed a thousand pounds of Master Robert Shallow!
I would have it printed in letters of gold, would the arrangements of the printing-office admit of such distinction, for I am proud to chronicle so meritorious an achievement, the glory of which is doubled by the moral certainty that Master Shallow never received a single farthing of the money back again. On one account only can I be brought to regret the transaction: I am sorry the amount was not two thousand.
IX. INAUGURATION OF THE NEW RÉGIME.--MALIGNITY OF THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE.
The news of Henry the Fourth’s decease was the occasion of a state of public excitement to which we should in vain look for a parallel in any dynastic or ministerial crisis of modern times. Rumour, with all her hundred tongues gabbling at once, flew hither and thither, announcing that the respectabilities were “out,” and the reprobates “in.” For a few brief hours Sir John Falstaff really ranked, in the popular estimation, as the most influential subject in the realm (and that distinction, however briefly enjoyed, is something for a man to look back to with satisfaction!) The knight’s “paper,” previously a drug in the money-market, was eagerly bought up by the Jews, calling themselves Lombards *, of the city. Traders, on the fair pages of whose ledgers the name of Sir John Falstaff had long stood as a blot and eyesore, ordered expensive dinners, and made rash presents to their wives and daughters. Others, who had issued writs for the apprehension of the knight’s person, called in those documents with breathless eagerness. Grave burgesses, lawyers, and even ecclesiastics, who had the day before commented severely on our hero’s irregularities, now boasted of his acquaintance, and quoted his witticisms. A spirited hatter in the ward of Chepe displayed, in front of his booth, a new falling hood-shape, labelled with the recommendation, “as worne by Sir John Falstatfe and ye Courte,” for copies of which he received an incredible number of orders. The “Old Boar’s Head” did such a morning’s stroke of business as had not been achieved within the memory of the oldest tippler. The principal wine-merchants of the Vintry obsequiously intimated to Mrs. Quickly that unlimited credit would be given to her at their respective establishments, and our worthy hostess’s landlord immediately doubled her rent.
* Precaution necessitated by the rigour of the existing statute law, which excluded the Jewish people from residence on English soil. Two unredeemed “obligacions,” in the handwriting of Sir John Falstaff, for considerable sums advanced,--one by Cosmo di Levi, the other by Ichi di Solomoni,--are still in existence, to attest the observance of this rule.--_Vide Strongate MSS._
The feeling of the Court may be summed up in one word--panic. The favourites of the late king thought of nothing less than packing up their portmanteaus, and making the best of their way to their several country seats. The opinion was universal that Sir John Falstaff would be raised to a rank, at all events, equivalent to what we call prime minister; and it was of course anticipated that our knight would select his companions in office from men of character and habits congenial to his own. It is needless to say that none such could be found amongst the lugubrious familiars of the late monarch. The princes of the blood themselves--the new king’s own brothers--were by no means free from the general apprehension. It seems rather odd that they should have believed in the possibility of gratitude existing in the bosom of one of their own blood; but it is nevertheless certain that they agreed to look on Sir John Falstaff in the light of “the coming man,” a prospect they regarded with considerable apprehension and alarm. For they were by no means jovial princes, these young fellows. “A man,” as Sir John himself had observed of one of them, “could not make them laugh.” The individual Prince here referred to was John of Lancaster, afterwards Duke of Bedford, whom we have already seen distinguish himself by treacherously butchering a band of generous foemen, who had trusted themselves unarmed to his honour--an achievement which he followed up later in life by a congenial experiment on the person of one Joan of Arc, at Rouen, in Normandy. A second was the renowned Duke Humphrey, whose social and hospitable qualities have grown into a proverb. These two will serve as examples of the entire stock. Such men could scarcely have felt much sympathy for, or hoped anything from the friendship of, Sir John Falstaff.
As for the Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, he no sooner heard of the old king’s death than he proceeded to make what, in modern colloquial parlance, is termed “a bolt of it.” He had been hanging anxiously about the palace during the morning, and on the confirmation of his worst fears took precipitately to his heels. He was detected in that sagacious but undignified act by the Earl of Warwick *, who detained him in conversation.
* Immediately after the death of the king, Warwick stops Gascoigne in a “room in the palace,” with the questions, “How now my Lord Chief Justice? Whither away?” The prevaricating responses of the learned justice betray his nervous anxiety to be off.--_Vide_ Henry IV. Part II. Act v. Scene 2.
Gascoigne made no concealment of his terrors; and indeed the noble earl gave him no encouragement whatever to their mitigation. They agreed--with the Princes John, Humphrey, and Thomas, who, accompanied by the Earl of Westmoreland and other nobles of the Court, soon after joined their conference--that the common prospects of the late king’s favourites and admirers were decidedly unfavourable. It was the opinion of the Earl of Warwick that many nobles who “_should_ hold their places” (meaning himself for one), would have to “strike sail to spirits of vile sort;” as a specimen whereof it is presumed he had the impudence to allude to the hero of these pages. The Chief Justice confessed himself prepared for the worst, admitting that the “condition of the time” could not look “more hideously” upon him than his imagination had pictured to him. It was admitted, on all hands, that his lordship’s only safe policy would be to adopt the unpalatable course of “speaking Sir John Falstaff fair.” This salutary piece of advice was first offered by the Duke of Clarence. And I am willing to stake my reputation as a historian upon the statement that the Lord Chief Justice _was perfectly prepared to act upon it_, had not things taken a wholly unexpected turn. For he was silent on the subject; and the case was evidently one of those wherein silence is consent.
But the new king made his appearance amongst the group (who were waiting in an antechamber like criminals to hear their sentence), and speedily changed the aspect of things. He threw off the mask at once. He had no. intention to alter anything. He had stepped into his father’s shoes, and meant to walk in his father’s footsteps. _Le roi est mort, vive le roi!_ If they had really been taken in by his having falsely represented himself as a jovial good sort of fellow, why, he could only feel flattered by the compliment to his powers of personation. In reality, he had succeeded to the tyrannical and conquering business of his unlamented father, which he intended to carry on with spirit, accepting all the premises, bad-will, and fixtures as he found them. The princes and earls were, of course, delighted, as feeling assured of a lengthened tenure of Court favour and office. But the Lord Chief Justice was still uneasy. He had once committed the present King of England to prison, and monarchs are not in the habit of forgetting personal affronts.
I have before hinted at a possibility that this event was a matter of private arrangement between the prince and the judge, for purposes of mutual popularity. But to take a liberty with a prince, even at his own request, is always a ticklish business. If you exceed the limit of your instructions, woe betide you! I do not say that such was the case; but it is barely probable that the cell to which the Prince of Wales was confined on the occasion in question, may have proved rather more damp, and less comfortable, than His Royal Highness had intended. At any rate, it is certain that Gascoigne on this, his first meeting with King Henry the Fifth (in the royal capacity), was in a state of great trepidation, and evidently apprehended nothing less than immediate disgrace and suspension from office. Recovering, however, a little courage and composure at the new King’s indications of a disposition to carry out his late father’s policy--I was about to say principles--he ventured upon a little special pleading in defence of his conduct in the matter of the world-famous police case, which he judiciously mixed up with a little covert flattery--delicately hinting that Henry the Fifth himself might some day have a disreputable son, to whose vagaries a severe administration of the Common Law might prove a wholesome corrective. Acting on the old north-country proverb that “the old woman would never have looked in the oven for her daughter if she hadn’t been there herself,” His Majesty King Henry the Fifth (a sagacious man at all times) saw the wisdom of this suggestion, and at once confirmed Chief Justice Gascoigne in the permanent enjoyment of his dignities and emoluments.
I grieve to write it--but the deed was done, and it shall be chronicled. The first employment made by the Chief Justice of his new lease of power was to indulge in a dastardly act of vengeance. With indecent haste he rushed from the palace, and issued warrants for the apprehension of Mistress Helen Quickly, licensed victualler, and of Mistress Dorothea Tearsheet, spinster, on a frivolous and untenable charge. For what reason? it will be asked. I can find no better one than that the former was the friend, and the latter the beloved kinswoman, of Sir John Falstaff. Do you suppose the justice had forgotten the setting down he had received at the hands of our hero, the substance of which (transferred from the pages of “Shakespeare”), will be found in the second chapter of the fourth book of this history? And with the petty vindictiveness we have seen him employ on more than one occasion, is it probable that he was at all the sort of man to behave in the hour of his own triumph with magnanimity towards a fallen foe? We will waive the question of Gascoigne being possibly indebted to Mrs. Quickly for early board and lodging, as being, if not irrelevant, at any rate superfluous. The case is quite black enough against him as it stands.
At any rate, it is certain that the two ladies in question were ignominiously arrested by the warrant of the Chief Justice *, and to complete their disgrace (and Sir John Falstaff’s) transferred from the custody of the constables to that of the town beadle.
* If not by his warrant, by whose? What less dignified functionary would have presumed to put so large a construction on the English laws of the period as that manifested by the arrest in question? I would cheerfully pause for a reply, were not the printer’s boy in such an abominable hurry.
In proof that the arrest had been made under circumstances of extreme injustice and barbarity, it need only be urged that each of the fair captives was so violently provoked by her aggressors, as entirely to forget all her antecedents of good breeding and propriety, and to indulge in positively coarse and abusive language.
Mistress Tearsheet, for instance, was betrayed into the following decidedly unladylike outburst, addressed to a beadle in human form:--
“I’ll tell thee what, thou thin man in a censer! I will have you as soundly swinged for this, you _blue-bottle rogue!_ you filthy, famished correctioner! if you be not swinged, I’ll forswear half kirtles.”
I have extracted this passage from the chronicle, not for the vulgar purpose of harrowing the reader’s feelings with the spectacle of lovely woman goaded by injustice and violence even to the pitch of unbecoming self-forgetfulness, but from motives purely archæological. The derisive term “bluebottle”--so frequently heard in the present day, applied to the guardians of the public peace by ladies and gentlemen in circumstances of trial similar to those of Mistress Tearsheet--is thereby proved to have had an origin at all events as early as the commencement of the fifteenth century,--a valuable antiquarian discovery, for which I trust some learned gentleman with capital letters after his name will be just enough to give me credit in the pages of some eminent scientific journal.
Ere the hour of noon had that day sounded Sir John Falstaff’s bills were again waste paper. His creditors, who had indulged in costly dinners, and given rash presents to their wives and daughters, countermanded their suppers, and withdrew their names from numerous charitable subscription lists. The writs were re-issued. The hatter in the Ward of Chepe altered his placard to “Ye Gascoigne Shape?,” and disposed of his invention more rapidly than before. By half-past three in the afternoon the sheriff’s officers were in possession of the “Old Boar’s Head” for a pitiful debt to a small ale brewer.
X. CORONATION OF HENRY THE FIFTH.
TRIUMPH OF THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE GASCOIGNE, AND DISGRACE OF SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.
The coronation of Henry the Fifth took place immediately on his assumption of the royal dignity. Authorities differ as to the exact date of this imposing ceremony. Fleming, in his Chronicle, fixes it as late as the 9th of April, in which he is supported by Stowe and a host of respectable authorities. Rapin comes nearer the probable truth in assigning it to the first of the same month--a date which leaves us not without slight suspicion of a seasonable pleasantry intended by the lively French historian at the expense of his readers. The general balance of probabilities, supported by important circumstantial evidence, brought to light in the search after materials for this history, points out the 22nd of March as the day on which Henry the Fifth practically succeeded to the crown of his father’s cousin. In those days a king was considered no king until he had worn the crown; and as it was never in the least degree clear, even to the most discerning intellect, to whom the crown really belonged, the important claim of possession was naturally the first thing thought of by the individual enjoying the nearest prospect of its appropriation. It is hardly probable that a sagacious prince like Henry of Monmouth should have postponed the vital ceremony a single day longer than was absolutely necessary. Pressing necessities of state afforded a decent excuse for hastening the funeral of Henry the Fourth; and there can be no doubt that his successor’s publicly announced alacrity to walk in his father’s footsteps induced him to try on the paternal coronation shoes on the earliest possible occasion.
Should any doubts on this subject exist, they are at once dispelled by reference to the facts already in the possession of the reader--which it may bo as well to recapitulate. Sir John Falstaff received the tidings of the old king’s death on the 19th of March. On the third day after this our knight was in London. That the day of Sir John’s arrival in the metropolis was so that of Henry’s coronation is a matter of history.
The chronicler Fleming, speaking of the auspicious accession of Henry the Fifth to the throne of England, informs us that--
“Such great hope and good “expectation was had of this man’s fortunate successe to follow, that within “three daies after his father’s decease diverse noble men and honorable “personages did to him homage and sware to him due obedience, which had “not beene seene done to any of bis predecessors kings of this realme, till “they had beene possessed of the crowne.”
Differing with the learned and voluminous chronicler as to the absence of precedent in such matter of homage (the worship of the rising sun, on the appearance of his first rays of power, being older in England than Stonehenge), I can only say that there was no noble man or honourable personage whatever in the realm more eager to do to the new king homage, and swear to him due obedience, than Sir John Falstaff, Knight. Only that unfortunately Sir John was, as usual, a little too late with his homage. All the nice pickings of court favour and promotion had been snapped up before his arrival.
The coronation day, in the words of the venerable chronicler last quoted, was
“a sore, ruggie and tempestuous day, with wind, snow and sleet, that “men greatlie marvelled thereat, making diverse interpretations what the “same might signifie.”