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.
* 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.
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 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 _viva voce resume_ 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.