THE FALSTAFF TROOPS DESCRIBED.

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support him in his expedition;— - moreover, he was to recruit forces as he went along.

The mode of raising soldiers in those days was very simple, and much more efficacious than at present. There was, then, no occasion for foreign legions, militia nurseries, and such tedious devices. The king, who could only do one wrong—namely, that of allowing himself to be kicked off the throne by the other king-when he was in want of soldiers, resorted to the simple expedient of taking them. That is to say, he appointed his officers—who, instead of having to ruin themselves in scarlet cloth, bullion lace, sabres, feathers, and horseflesh, as in the present day—were merely expected to find their own soldiers, a commodity as cheap as dirt, and treated accordingly. This the king's commission enabled them to do with great facility. Armed with the royal authority, the officer entered a parish or township, and said he wanted a certain number of men. The local authorities were compelled to furnish the number required, subject to the officer's approval; and the men selected were compelled to go, whether they liked it or not. This admirable system of recruiting, subjected to slight modifications, is still in vogue on the continent. Its discontinuance in our own country fully accounts for the fact

so often pointed out to us by our neighbours, who of course are more qualified to judge of us than we are ourselves-that we have long ceased to be a great military nation; a fact which, though humiliating, is incontrovertible-witness the notorious incapacity of our Guards in the late Crimean war!

Sir John Falstaff was empowered to press into the service of King Henry the Fourth a hundred and fifty men. Amongst them there may have been several who looked upon that monarch as an usurper, and might object to fighting against the partisans of Mortimer, Earl of March, who, if English law meant anything, was certainly their lawful monarch. This was no business of Sir John Falstaff's.

And how did Sir John speed with his recruiting? Admirably, as he did in most of his undertakings. His number was soon complete. Of the quality of his troops and his manner of raising them let him speak for himself. No description of mine could approach his own inimitable picture. (Let it be premised, in justification of this great captain's occasional regard of his own interest in the matter, that the commanders of regiments in those days had no such privileges as tailoring contracts, &c., and were fain to avail themselves of such advantages as offered.)

"If I be not ashamed of my soldiers I am a soused gurnet. I have misused "the king's press most damnably. I have got, in exchange for a hundred "and fifty soldiers, three hundred and odd pounds. I press me none but good

K

"householders, yeomen's sons: inquire me out contracted bachelors, such as "had been asked twice on the banns; such a commodity of warm slaves as "had as lief hear the devil as a drum; such as fear the report of a caliver worse than a struck fowl or a hurt wild duck. I pressed me none but such "toasts and butter, with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pins' heads, "and they have bought out their services; and now my whole charge. "consists of ancients, corporals, lieutenants, gentlemen of companies, slaves "as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton's dogs licked "his sores and such indeed as were never soldiers; but discarded unjust "serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters and "ostlers trade-fallen; the cankers of a calm world and a long peace; ten "times more dishonourably ragged than an old-faced ancient : and such have I "to fill up the rooms of them that have bought out their services, that you "would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals lately come "from swine-keeping, from eating chaff and husks. A mad fellow met me (6 on the way, and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the "dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I'll not march through "Coventry with them, that's flat :-Nay, and the villains march wide betwixt "the legs, as if they had gyves on; for, indeed, I had the most of them out "of prison. There's but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half "shirt is two napkins tacked together, and thrown over the shoulders like a "herald's coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from "my host at St. Alban's, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daintry; but that's "all one; they'll find linen enough on every hedge."

The above profound reflections (which every officer of irregular infantry would do well to lay to his heart) were made by Sir John Falstaff, on the occasion of a review of his troops near Coventry - at which the Prince of Wales and the Earl of Westmoreland assisted. I am inclined to fix the date of this important military display on the third day previous to the battle of Shrewsbury. The Royalist forces were proceeding towards that city by forced marches. Sir John Falstaff, as is well known, came upon the field in ample time to give battle to the rebels; and it is improbable that any system of forcing could have got him over sixty miles of ground in less than three days.

Whether or not the knight found the hedgerows of Warwick, Stafford, and Salop of such fruitfulness - in the matter of linen as he had anticipated, the historian has no means of ascertaining. The shirt in those days, it should be stated, was a comparatively recent invention-nor had the art of the laundress been brought to its present perfection.

V.

HOW SIR JOHN FALSTAFF WON THE BATTLE OF SHREWSBURY.

EVEN had the Royalist side been deprived of the immense weight of Sir John Falstaff's counsels and support, the issue of the struggle could not have been doubtful. Fortune seemed to have declared against the rebels from the outset. The Earl of Northumberland was taken ill at Berwick, and unable to join his gallant son in the field. The Welsh under Glendower did not come up in time for the battle. All the efforts of their gallant and patriotic chieftain to bring his troops past the neighbouring cheese districts of the border county of Chester had proved ineffectual.

Nevertheless the rebels determined on giving battle, which was perhaps a superfluous piece of generosity on their part, as the king, the princes, and Sir John Falstaff had come determined to take it. Hotspur-the warmth of whose heels would not seem to have produced in him any remarkable coolness of head-sent, on the eve of the engagement, an epistle to the king, which is strikingly illustrative of the knightly courtesy of the period. In this document he accuses Henry of murder, perjury, illegal taxation, obtaining money under false pretences, kidnapping, and bribery at elections.* The crimes of garrotting and stealing drinking vessels from the railings of private dwellings were not then known, or it is more than probable that these too would have entered into the wholesale list of accusations. Such a document, it will be admitted, was not calculated to dispose the king to leniency or placability. He was a monarch of the bilious temperament, and not at any time remarkable for excessive amiability or good humour. A popular historian has informed us that "he was subject to fits, which bereaved him for a time of reason."† The effect of such a communication on a monarch so constituted may be imagined.

Whether it was that the insurgent chieftains had formed a mistaken estimate of the king's nature, and imagined that he required a great deal of provoking before he could be induced to give them the thrashing they seemed so ardently to desire, it would be difficult to say. At any rate, on the morning

*Hall, folio 21-22, &c.

† Pinnock on Goldsmith- -a work that has not come within the sphere of my observation for many years. The passage quoted, however, and many others from the same, were indelibly impressed on my memory at the time of perusal by a system of mnemonics now unhappily falling into disuse.-BIOGRAPHER.

of the battle, Sir Thomas Percy, the Earl of Worcester, thought it advisable to look in on the royal camp, as he happened to be passing, with a flag of truce, and favour his Majesty with a vivâ voce resumé of some of the heads of his nephew's spirited epistle of the preceding night, which might have slipped the royal memory. To Percy's address-which has been put into excellent blank verse by Shakspeare-the king replied with a proposal that the rebels should lay down their arms and go home quietly, which he knew would not be accepted. Percy departed, and the royal council of war at which he had been heard-and at the deliberations of which the Princes Henry and John, with Sir Walter Blunt and Sir John Falstaff, had assisted-broke up to prepare for action.

The rival armies were drawn up on a large plain near the town of Shrewsbury overlooked by Haughmond Hill. The character of the ground is indicated in the opening lines of the fifth act of the chronicle of "Henry the Fourth" (Part I.) :

"How bloodily the sun begins to peer

Above yon bosky hill! The day looks pale
At his distemperature."

Herein we have one of ten thousand proofs of Shakspeare's fidelity to historic and natural truth on all occasions. Mr. Blakeway says that great author has described the scene as accurately as if he had surveyed it. "It still merits the appellation of a bosky hill." "Bosky" must be taken in its ancient and poetical sense, signifying "wood-covered," and not in its more modern and familiar acceptation, which the presence of Sir John Falstaff, Bardolph, and other warriors of their way of living, might have rendered applicable to the aspect of the country.

The opposing forces were about equal in number, each army consisting in round numbers of twelve thousand men. In point of discipline and training the advantages were also fairly balanced. The light infantry, under Sir John Falstaff, consisted, as we have seen, of raw recruits, indifferently clad and nourished. But, as an offset to this must be taken into consideration the condition of the Scots under Douglas-large numbers of whom, being from the northern highlands, were, according to English notions, of necessity more imperfectly clothed than even the Falstaff troops themselves.

For courage

on either side there could not have been much to choose; Englishmen and Scotchmen could hit as hard, and were quite as fond of doing it, then as in the present day.

Hume, writing of this decisive engagement, says :—

"We shall scarcely find any battle in those ages where the shock was more