Part 6

For several roods they passed through the crops and woodlands of the ill-fated Ballard. The rebels had spared nothing.

“You see, gentlemen,” said Falstaff, appealing to the devastation on either hand, “to what they have reduced me.”

There could be no harm in Jack’s assuming right of property in the defunct Ballard’s possessions. In the first place, those possessions were no longer particularly worth having. In the second, it were unreasonable to suppose that their late proprietor could possibly have any further use for them.

The Fleming and the Lombard felt extremely sorry for their unfortunate guide and debtor. Nay; they even hoped that, in the upshot of things, he might prove still to be in the possession of something valuable, as an excuse for their assisting him with further advances.

As they neared the Falstaff Valley, Jack’s uneasiness increased visibly.

“It is my home, gentlemen,” he explained, “where I first saw light.* It may be that they have spared me that. I scarcely dare hope it. But we shall know anon.”

* See Book I. Chapter I. in explanation of this glaring breach of veracity.

They reached the summit of the hill overlooking the valley,--down which, fourteen years ago, Sir Thomas Mowbray, now Earl of Nottingham, had come, laughing and cantering with his friend Maître Jean, the Chronicler, now curé of Lestines, and a most respectable clergyman.

Falstaff gave a rapid glance in the direction of his paternal mansion, then drew a long breath.

“Enough! I know the worst,” he said; and seemed all the easier for the knowledge.

Not a trace of Falstaff Castle was standing except William of Wykeham’s Tower. The rest was mere smouldering dunghill.

Bardolph had been spared the crime of arson. The rebels had been before him. He had found the castle in the state I have described it, and----

Master Lambert, the Reve, hanging by the heels from a beech tree, with his skull cleft. The travellers discovered the faithful messenger contemplating this edifying spectacle with mingled philosophy and satisfaction.

At the sight of the steward’s corpse Falstaff uttered a piercing cry, and fled.

“Follow him!” cried Bardolph, eagerly (he had caught and appreciated a flying wink from his broken-hearted patron), “or he will do himself a mischief.”

The ruined landowner, after some search, was discovered in the orchard with his girdle slung to the arm of a pear tree. Into a noose, at the nether extremity of this, he was about to slip his neck, when his privacy was invaded. The rescuing party uttered a cry of thanksgiving for their timely arrival. They needed not to have hurried themselves. Our hero’s inherent good breeding would have induced him to wait for them under any circumstances.

The merchants tried verbal consolation.

Futile in the extreme! The intending suicide assured them that they had but frustrated his purpose for a time. He could have borne the loss of home and fortune--his friends might judge, from the sole remaining tower, of what a dwelling the rebels had deprived him (though, of course, they could have no conception of the extent of the family jewels, plate, &c.); but what he could not bear was the sight of his faithful steward, hung by the heels like an unclean beast, doubtless as a punishment for his fidelity!

“Bardolph!” sobbed the ruined man. “How we loved him!”

“Don’t speak of it, sir!”

Bardolph himself was so overcome that he did not venture to show his face, which he concealed within his palms. The latter, it should be stated, were more than capacious enough for the purpose.

“He loved you, Bardolph!”

“Like a mother, sir. But don’t!”

The Flemish merchant then tried vinous consolation from his private flask. Falstaff rejected it. Bardolph didn’t.

Falstaff--calmed in a measure, but determined--begged of his friends to make the best of their way to London, and leave him to die. He had now nothing left in the world but his sword. That, he was now too brokenhearted to turn to advantage. Would they be kind enough to go, leaving him their forgiveness for the trouble he had so unwittingly caused them. That was all! Stay--another boon--a dying man’s request. Would they promise to be kind to his faithful Bardolph, the last of a thousand devoted retainers?

“Don’t, sir!” that valuable relic gasped, kicking out his right leg spasmodically.

Now, the Lombard creditor, in spite of his being a trader in money, was a good-natured fellow. He hit upon a third and more efficacious means of consolation--to wit, the pecuniary.

“Come, Master Falstaff’,” he said kindly, in the cosmopolite French of the period. “Things are not at the worst. You are young and strong, and, with a good name to back you, may recover lost ground. Who ever knew an outbreak of peasants last over a few days? If a few hundred marks will set you on your legs for a time, they are yours; and no questions about the past till you are ready to answer them. Remember you have promised to bring us to London and show us the Court. We are in your hands.”

Jack leaped to his feet and dried his eyes. He was rebuked. This was no time for selfish considerations. His eyes were opened.

“When I reflect,” he said, “that, without me, your lives are not safe; that those fierce Kentish rebels will spare nobody, unless guaranteed by the safe conduct of a true man of Kent; for, after all, they must respect my presence--come, gentlemen, I will see you safe to London, and the young king shall hear of your devotion.”

What a good sort of fellow this poor ruined, broken-hearted Jack Falstaff was after all!

They led him away from the scene of devastation. At a few paces from the ruins, he declared he must return for a minute or two. His friendly gaolers, for so they had constituted themselves, looked at each other. Was their prisoner to be trusted alone?

“Gentlemen,” said Jack, with much earnestness, and real tears starting from his eyes, “I give you my honour, as a man and a soldier, that I will return immediately.”

They let him go, and waited for him.

Jack scrambled hastily over a heap of seething fragments, what had once formed the right wing of his father’s dwelling, and found himself in a patch of ground sloping down towards the stagnant moat.

It was a wilderness of charred weeds. Nothing remained to tell that the spot had once been a dainty garden.

Yes. One thing. A hardy Kentish rose-bush still asserted its life above a mass of filth, bricks, and potsherds. It bore one flower.

Jack tore this fiercely from its stem, and concealed it in his bosom, as if he had been stealing a diamond. He hastened to rejoin his companions with the most unconcerned look he could assume.

“What’s afoot now?” growled Bardolph, _sotto voce_. The worthy henchman was merely anxious to catch the new order of the day, if any.

“Hold your tongue!” said his master angrily, and looking very much ashamed of himself, “Don’t speak to me!”

Lady Alice Falstaff had been dead four years. The long loved son who should have closed her bonny blue eyes, was away at the time;--never mind where, or what doing. The last flower of her pretty garden withered and dried up beneath Jack’s doublet. He never noticed its final disappearance: you see his time was so much occupied.

This was the way in which Master John Falstaff came into his property, the residue of which he disposed of some few weeks later for the price of three new suits and a couple of horses, but which he never ceased to speak of as a princely inheritance, of which the troubles in 1381 had deprived him. Of course he found great advantage in this; for such is the inestimable value of rank and possessions, that the mere recollection of them--nay, the bare assertion of imaginary claims to them--will often procure for a gentleman credit and esteem.

The manner of Sir John Falstaff’s attaining to the honour of knighthood, is a sequel to the same adventure.

He conducted his foreign guests faithfully towards London, as he had promised. On their way, they were beset by several companies of rebels, amongst whose numbers Jack recognised old acquaintances, to whom he made himself known, and who were glad to let him and his company pass free, for the sake of old times. On all such occasions our hero was careful to have it impressed upon the merchants that they owed their safety entirely to his countenance; and the gratitude of those poor travellers knew no bounds. Still, great precautions were necessary. In the first place, Jack counselled them strongly to destroy all written papers they might have about them; assuring them, that of all public evils, the men of Kent looked upon the art of writing as the greatest, considering it a Norman invention, to which they owed the bulk of their misfortunes. Admitting the policy of this precaution, the merchants destroyed Jack’s bonds before his eyes. Next to manuscripts, he assured them the most dangerous thing they could possibly carry about with them was money. He courageously took upon himself the onus of bearing their purses for them, of the contents of which he distributed a considerable portion as _largesse_ to the insurgents. The purses were faithfully restored to their owners.

At Blackheath our travellers came up with the body of the insurgent camp, commanded by Jack’s old master of fence, Wat Smith, who had assumed the name of Tyler. Here it was Jack’s good fortune to rescue the Princess of Wales, the young king’s mother, from the fury of the malcontents, whom their honest but mistaken leader was unable to control. Jack asserted himself as a man of Kent, and claimed immunity for the princess as a Kentish woman--for had she not been known in the heyday of her beauty as the Fair Maid of Kent? Was she not the widow of the Black Prince, who had humbled the pride of the haughty Frenchmen, to whom it was notorious that all such evils as taxes, game laws, bad harvests, and expensive beer, were attributable? The princess, he assured them, had just been on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, to pray at the shrine of St. Thomas à Beckett for an extension of the peerage, by which every man of the age of twenty-one would be entitled to landed property and a seat at His Majesty’s council. In conclusion, he would simply state, that, in order to prove her sisterly affection, the princess was anxious to kiss them all round--a proposition whereat the populace was highly amused, and to which the princess readily assented, only too glad to be let off so easily.

Thus did Jack Falstaff rescue the Princess of Wales from imminent danger, at no greater cost to her highness than a little sacrifice of personal dignity, and much subsequent expenditure of soap and water--all of which I have told briefly, seeing that the main incidents of the scene (doubtless taken down from the words of Falstaff himself) have been already chronicled by our old friend Maître Jean Froissart, curate of Lestines--and from his cheerful pages copied into the books of Hume and others.

For this good service to the royal family was John Falstaff knighted, on the same day which saw the like honour conferred upon one William Walworth, a fishmonger, for knocking out the misguided brains of poor Wat Smith--a much honester man than himself. Jack witnessed the perpetration of this murderous act of snobbishness, and took a deeply rooted dislike to Sir William Walworth ever afterwards.

Wat Tyler did not die unavenged. Sir John Falstaff dealt with Sir William Walworth for fish. When Walworth sent in his bill, he began to understand the meaning of Nemesis.

Bardolph greatly distinguished himself in the sacking of London by the Kentish rebels, several of whom he had the honour of bringing to justice on the pacification of society.

BOOK THE THIRD, 1410.

I. FOR THE MOST PART A TREATISE ON HEROES AND KNIGHTS-ERRANT.

Why should we call Time old, when we constantly find him playing tricks like a schoolboy? Here we have him at the beginning of the fifteenth century, amusing himself by rolling Sir John Falstaff down a hill, which men have agreed to call Life, like a snowball--Sir John getting rounder, and bigger, and whiter, at every push.

And now we approach that period in our hero’s life, when his acts are public history. Our task grows lighter, our responsibility heavier. Hitherto we have had to treat merely of Achilles in girl’s petticoats, Cæsar at school, Cromwell at the mash-tub, Bonaparte besieging snow castles. Now we are in sight of our hero’s Troy, Rubicon, Marston Moor, Toulon--whatever the reader pleases.

Sir John Falstaff will next appear in these pages as the ripe full-blown Falstaff of Shakspeare, the fat knight _par excellence_, the hero of Gadshill and of Shrewsbury; on the eve of the former of which great engagements we are supposed to resume the thread of our narrative.

And here it may be as well that the historian and his reader should at once understand each other as to the purport of this work.

It is impossible that a man should take the pains of research and compilation necessary for a voluminous biography without the preliminary inspiration of deep sympathy with, and exalted admiration for the character of his subject. This is, at any rate, indispensable to the satisfactory execution of his task. None but a man with a turn for such achievements as usually result in solitary confinement could have written the “Life of Robinson Crusoe.” The “Newgate Calendar” would not be the work it is, had not the last and present centuries been prolific in writers who, under a trifling depression of circumstances, might have changed places with their heroes.

I do not mean to say, that had I lived in the fifteenth century I should have been a Sir John Falstaff. Morally, in his position, I should have cut as sorry a figure as, physically, in his garments. Boswells need not be Johnsons. Sympathy and admiration, I repeat, are the necessary qualifications. I sympathise with, and admire the heroic character as developed in all ages; and I look upon Sir John Falstaff as the greatest hero of his own epoch.

Earthly greatness, like everything else to which the same adjective applies, is comparative--to be measured only by besetting difficulties.

The Italian captive, who blots down his autobiography on fragments of old linen, with his forefinger nail nibbed into a pen, and dipped in an exasperatingly gritty fluid of soot and water, is not to be tested by the same severe rules of criticism as the literary patrician, writing in his well filled library, to the mellifluous gurgle of his eastern pipe, and with every advantage that Bath post, gold pens, Webster’s dictionaries, and the most carefully annotated editions of Lindley Murray can offer. As just would it be to compare the struggling unguided crudities of a mere Shakspeare or Æschylus, with the more polished productions of a modern dramatist, in the enjoyment of private means, and a troisième on the Boulevard des Italiens, having a running contract with the nearest theatrical printer for the earliest first-proof sheets of his publications. Mr. Hobbs, the American locksmith, with his multifarious means and appliances of picklocks, “tumblers,” and what not, is entitled to our respect as a skilful mechanician; but placed in comparison with Jack Sheppard and his rusty nail, what becomes of Hobbs and his reputation?

It has been beautifully observed of Sir John Falstaff (by no less an authority than himself), that having more flesh than most men, he should be excused for displaying a greater amount of that frailty to which flesh is heir. On the other hand, having fewer advantages than most heroes, he may easily be proved to have displayed a more than proportionate share of heroism.

I consider it too late in the day to attempt a new definition of the word hero. The world has been agreed for ages upon the only acceptation of which it is susceptible,--namely, a man who takes a more than common advantage of his fellow-creatures in furtherance of his own interests, or those of his nation, county, township, street, row of houses, family, or self. Exclusive devotion to the latter interest marks the real hero. But this is a demi-god pitch of excellence rarely attained. Even Sir John Falstaff fell short of it.

Achilles was invulnerable (with a contemptible exception of which the oversight is a disgrace to the shoe-making science of the period), and had a supernatural mother to look after him. I think little of his heroism. Cæsar, as we have seen, had the vast advantage of almost unlimited credit. Cromwell had the majority of a nation at his back;--so had Napoleon.

Sir John Falstaff won a hero’s laurels, and attained a hero’s ends, (which may be briefly summed up as the privilege of doing pretty much as you like at the expense of other people), by the almost unaided exercise of his head and arm. Is he to be blamed for only having gained purses, where Cæsar or Alexander pocketed kingdoms? As ridiculous would it be to find fault with him for making no greater speed than four miles an hour from the disputed field of Gadshill, because swift travelling carriages had not been invented. Imagine Napoleon with fifty-eight years and thirty stone of flesh at his back, and none but pedestrian means of exit from Moscow before him! Who would ever have heard of Waterloo or St. Helena?

It may be objected, that of the recognised heroes I have cited for comparison, two at least (the last mentioned of the number) were originally actuated by the desire to free an oppressed people. Here, even, the parallel does not fail. Sir John Falstaff, too, had his subjects and followers, whose condition required ameliorating. It is true that these were limited in number, and that their most stringent oppressions were the severe debtor and creditor laws of the period, aggravated by a season of scarcity in the matter of wages. But, as I have said before, every thing in this world is comparative.

A great deal of misconception as to my hero’s real character, may be traced to a deplorable ignorance of the time in which he lived. Many celebrated writers on the Falstaffian era (that is to say, people who know nothing at all about it) have declared the age of chivalry, in that great man’s time, to have been extinct. This has led modern thinkers--who, according to the improved lights of their age, look upon speculations on the Stock Exchange, joint-stock banks, Samaritan institutions, cheap clothing warehouses, the adulteration of coffee, pickles, &c. &c., as the only legitimate means of plundering your neighbours--to apply harsh names to the more primitive mode of transferring capital adopted by our hero. The fact is, _Sir John Falstaff was a knight-errant_,--the only one of his time, perhaps--the last ray of the setting sun of chivalry, if you will; but its most gorgeous! To paraphrase the words of an eminent historian, “he was the greatest, as well as the last, of those mighty vagabonds who formerly overhauled the purses of the community, and rendered the people incapable of paying the necessary expenses of their legal prosecution.” He was, in short, the Earl of Warwick of knight-errantry.

Let us prove our theory by an extension of the parallel lines.

The knight-errant of antiquity rode out, armed at all points, to win renown. Even in the most Arcadian times, the acquisition of that commodity appears to have been contingent on the display of a certain amount of spoil, in the shape of weapons, prisoners, ransoms, and so forth. The public enemies against whom the knight-errant’s attention was chiefly directed, were--

1. _Giants_.

Which, I take to mean, people who had grown so big as to require more land and larger houses to live on and in than their neighbours.

2. _Magicians_; i. e. people rather cleverer than their non-conjuring fellow-citizens.

It will be admitted that Sir John Falstaff did a great man’s best to reduce the influence of these two varieties in his own favour.

The knights-errant had their esquires and men-at-arms, who were allowed the privilege of fighting under their leader’s banner. It was not customary for the chroniclers of the period to mention the names of these subordinate personages. The dawn of a more equitable state of things, in this respect, may be traced to the time of Falstaff. The names of his immediate followers have been honourably preserved.

The list is as follows:--

1. P. Bardolph, _Esquire_.

[The ancient title of Esquire has been recently much abused; being assumed by mere writers, painters, and even members of the legal professions. Though it originally meant nothing more than “ostler,” in those barbarous times, when manual labour was not a positive disgrace, yet, in the heyday of chivalry, it was promoted to an equivalent of “bearer of arms.” Esquire-ship was the brevet rank of knighthood. The esquire, in order to become a knight, having served his lord faithfully for a certain number of years, was expected to sit up all night watching the arms by which he had earned distinction. These, in the case of Bardolph, adopting the heraldic acceptation of the word “arms,”--may be described as a bottle gules, on an oak table proper, with a corkscrew trenchant, supported by thirst rampant. These Bardolph is known to have sat up watching, not merely all one night, but for several hundred nights in succession. And yet this gallant soldier never attained to the distinction of knighthood. It is true that gentle blood was an indispensable qualification for the honour. Bardolph’s blood was not gentle, but of the most obstinately opposite description. Coax it as he would, it persisted in flying to his nose.]

2. Pistol, _Ancient_.

[Ancient--pardon the apparent contradiction of terms,--is a comparatively modern expression, certainly not dating further back than the time of Falstaff. The term has been corrupted into “Ensign.” In those days, the most “ancient” and proved soldier in the ranks was supposed to earn the right of bearing the standard of the troop. I say “supposed,” because I would not have it imagined that, even then, folks were so uncivilised as invariably to promote common people for mere desert. Then, as now, a loud tongue, a timely service, or a family connection, were excellent substitutes for personal merit. The individual under notice was a striking example of this truth. The distinguishing mark of the ancient in Pistol’s time, was a white feather.]

3. Peto.

4. Gadshill.

[Two subordinate officers belonging to a class described by the convertible terms of “knaves,” “villains,” or “varlets.”]

5. Nym, _Corporal_.

[The Corporal in our time is distinguished by two stripes. In those days a deserving officer was more liberally treated; Corporal Nym having marks to show for a thousand. Neither Nym nor Pistol make their appearance till rather late in the Falstaff annals; each doubtless having his period of time to serve in another sphere of action.]

6. Robin, _Page._

[Also a late acquisition to the Falstaff forces, to be noticed more particularly in his fitting place.]

The knight-errant had the privilege of putting up, with his retinue, at the most hospitable mansion he found in his way.

_He never paid rent._