The Real Falstaff

Sir John Fastolf and the Hundred Years War

Stephen Cooper

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848841239
• eBook ISBN: 9781844687749
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

This historical study examines the life and military accomplishments of the medieval knight who inspired one of Shakespeare's most beloved characters.
One of the most famous English knights of the Hundred Years War, Sir John Fastolf is widely thought to be a model for Shakespeare's immortal character, Sir John Falstaff. In The Real Falstaff, historian Stephen Cooper examines the link in full, shedding light on his story as well as the declining English fortunes during the last phase of the Hundred Years War. Witnessing both the triumphs of Henry V, and the disasters of the 1450s, Fastolf was one of the last of the brave but often brutal English soldiers who made their careers waging war in France.
Cooper retraces the entire course of Fastolf's long life, putting special focus on his many campaigns. A vivid picture of the old soldier emerges and of the French wars in which he played such a prominent part. But the author also explores Fastolf's legacy, his connection to the Paston family—famous for the Paston letters—and the use Shakespeare made of Fastolf's name, career, and character when he created Sir John Falstaff.

Chapter 1

The Real Falstaff

Everyone has heard of Sir John Falstaff, but hardly anyone has heard of Sir John Fastolf of Southwark and Caister (1380–1459). Shakespeare’s fat rogue was immediately popular with his Elizabethan audience when he appeared in Henry IV in 1597–8 and was resurrected in the farcical Merry Wives of Windsor of 1602. Though he was a fictional character, Falstaff quickly took on a life of his own and has remained a favourite with audiences, in addition to inspiring Verdi, Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Orson Welles. By contrast, Fastolf is known only to scholars of the Late Middle Ages. Yet Shakespeare wrote about both men.

Shakespeare’s Fastolf

Shakespeare wrote for the stage, and at high speed. He was interested in telling a good story and creating great drama, less interested in getting his facts right. Henry VI was a dramatic counterblast to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, which celebrated overweening ambition, but it is full of anachronism. The rebel Jack Cade condemns printing, years before Caxton printed his first book in England, and the Duke of York refers to Machiavelli, years before the Italian was born. Shakespeare regularly telescopes many years into a single scene: Sir John Talbot is killed at the Battle of Castillon some twenty years before it was fought. Joan of Arc sweeps all before her in Normandy and Aquitaine, whereas she actually fought on the Loire, in Champagne and the Île de France.

Almost everything about Shakespeare is controversial, not least the dating of his plays, but it seems to be generally agreed that he wrote all three parts of Henry VI some years before he wrote Henry IV, so that the former counts, paradoxically, as an early play. Henry VI was a commercial success, but the drama is crude. Sir John Talbot is shown as a paragon of English knighthood and he dies a heroic death; on the other hand, Sir John Fastolfe is the personification of evil. We are told early on that he has ‘played the coward’ at the Battle of Patay in 1429 and he is never given a chance to refute the allegation. Even before he appears on stage, a messenger announces:

Here had the conquest fully been seal’d up,
If Sir John Fastolfe had not play’d the coward.
He being in the vanward, placed behind
With purpose to relieve and follow them,
Cowardly fled, not having struck one stroke,
Hence grew the general wreck and massacre.

The story is taken up in a scene outside the walls of the city of Orléans, where Talbot inveighs against his rival:

But O! The treacherous Fastolfe wounds my heart:
Whom with my bare fists I would execute
If I now had him brought into my power.

This account of what happened at Patay, in the plains of the Beauce, has some foundation in history, though the chronology is wrong at several points; but, a few scenes later, Shakespeare presents a scene which has no evidential basis at all. Fastolfe appears outside Rouen and is approached by a captain, who asks him what he is doing:

CAPTAIN: Whither away, Sir John Fastolfe, in such haste?
FASTOLFE: Whither away! To save myself by flight:
                      We are like to have the overthrow again.
CAPTAIN: What! will you fly, and leave Lord Talbot?
FASTOLFE: Ay. All the Talbots in the world, to save my life.
CAPTAIN: Cowardly knight! Ill fortune follow thee!

At the beginning of Act IV, when Henry VI is crowned King of France, Fastolfe appears again, and is immediately taken to task by Talbot. He is accused of having abandoned a fellow Garter Knight, of being unfit to be a member of the brotherhood. This is pure fiction, since Talbot was a prisoner at the time, but it is highly effective drama:

FASTOLFE: My gracious sovereign, as I rode from Calais,
      To haste unto your coronation,
      A letter was deliver’d to my hands,
      Writ to your grace from the Duke of Burgundy.
TALBOT: Shame to the Duke of Burgundy and thee!
      I vow’d, base knight,when I did meet thee next,
       To tear the garter from thy craven’s leg,
       [Plucking the garter off Fastolfe’s leg]
       Which I have done, because unworthily
       Thou wast installed in that high degree.
       Pardon me, princely Henry, and the rest
      This dastard, at the battle of Patay,
       When but in all I was six thousand strong
      And that the French were almost ten to one,
      Before we met or that a stroke was given,
      Like to a trusty squire did run away.

Shakespeare based his history plays on the chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed. Hall gives Fastolf credit for being the Duke of Exeter’s lieutenant at Harfleur in 1415–16, for capturing Passy-en-Valois in 1424 and for being the Regent’s deputy; but, like Holinshed, his account of what happened at Patay was a travesty of the truth, and very damaging to Fastolf ’s posthumous reputation:

From this battle departed without any stroke stricken Sir John Fastole [sic], the same year for his valiantness elected into the Order of the Garter. But for doubt of misdealing at this brunt the Duke of Bedford took from him the image of St George, and his garter, though afterwards by means of friends, and apparent causes of good excuse, the same were to him again delivered, against the mind of the lord Talbot.

Though it was a crude and inaccurate summary, the account given by the early Tudor historians was adopted wholesale by Shakespeare, but it is fair to say that he had good reason for doing so. Whereas Fastolf had been a member of the gentry and had died without issue, Talbot had been a nobleman and had founded a powerful dynasty. He left a son who succeeded him as Earl of Shrewsbury, and the earldom descended to Gilbert Talbot, the 7th Earl (1562–1616), who was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. Gilbert Talbot was a highly influential figure at the court of Queen Elizabeth and the playwright could not afford to offend him. Moreover, Talbot was still popular with the audience. Another Elizabethan wordsmith wrote enthusiastically about the commercial success of Shakespeare’s Henry VI: ‘How it would have joyed brave Talbot to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his Tomb, he should triumph again on the stage.’ There is little doubt that Talbot’s triumph was Fastolf ’s nemesis.

Shakespeare’s Falstaff

In the original version of Henry IV, the character who became Falstaff was called Sir John Oldcastle (c.1378–1417). In his day, this man was one of the ‘Lollard knights’, a rebel who plotted against his old friend Henry V and was eventually executed for heresy. Yet, from the earliest days of the English Reformation, Oldcastle’s reputation was transformed. Instead of being regarded as a traitor and a heretic, he became one of the heroes of Protestantism. John Foxe devoted eighty pages to him in his bestselling Book of Martyrs. Shakespeare’s portrayal of him as a fat rogue therefore attracted a good deal of criticism from the staunchly Protestant audience, and not least from Oldcastle’s descendant, William Brook, 7th Lord Cobham. As a result, the playwright changed the name of his fat knight to ‘Falstaff ’.

Falstaff was immediately popular with audiences. Accordingly, at the end of Henry IV, we are promised more of him, though we are also reminded that the character was only loosely based on Oldcastle in the first place:

Our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it … Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already be a’ killed with your hard opinions, Oldcastle died a martyr and this is not the man. (My italics)

Why did Shakespeare substitute ‘Falstaff ’, rather than any other name? The link with the historical Fastolf must always be controversial, since the latter had already appeared in Henry VI. Moreover, Sir John Fastolf was clearly not the only source for the character, which is a mix of human characteristics and dramatic convention: the drunkard, the braggart soldier (of Roman and Renaissance comedy), the Lord of Misrule of medieval morality plays. The fact remains that, faced with the objections of Lord Cobham, Shakespeare had to come up with a new name, and the name he chose was a variant of Fastolf. It should not surprise us that he altered ‘Fastolf ’ to ‘Falstaff ’. The Elizabethans were relaxed about spelling and Shakespeare also changed ‘Hamnet’ (the name of his son) to ‘Hamlet’.

This is not accepted by everyone. Some say that ‘Falstaff ’ – or ‘false-staff ’ is a play on Shakespeare’s own name. Yet it seems unlikely that the name was merely invented, when the playwright was already aware of Fastolf ’s existence and both versions of it can be shown to have been used by the same family. Studies of the rare Shakespearean manuscripts which pre-date the First Folio of the 1620s show that, when he made the alteration, Shakespeare sometimes used the abbreviated prefix ‘Fast’ rather than ‘Falst’ or ‘Fal’. Moreover, we find many variants in fifteenth-century documents: Fastolf and Fastolfe, Falstoff and Falstolfe. Everything points to its being the same name, though the spelling varied wildly. As to pronunciation, we can never be sure of this, but late fifteenth-century court records refer to property in Norwich which was called ‘Fastolf ’s, late of Sir John Fastolf or Forstaff ’.1

The similarity between the historical Fastolf and the Shakespearean Falstaff does not end with the name: they were clearly different men, but they had much in common. They were both captains in the king’s wars, much involved in recruiting and mustering soldiers, including drunken soldiers. They were both associated with a Boar’s Head tavern (though Falstaff ’s was at Eastcheap, Fastolf ’s in Southwark). They may both have been pages to Thomas Mowbray, Earl (and later Duke) of Norfolk. Each man used forceful and colourful language (Fastolf in writing, Falstaff in speech); and each attracted devoted servants. Most importantly in terms of reputation, Shakespeare portrays both men as cowards. We shall see that, in the case of Fastolf, this was most unjust; but Falstaff does not for a moment hide his cowardice. On the contrary, in Henry IV he makes a famous speech, criticizing honour:

What is that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible then? Yea, to the dead … Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism.

A little later comes the line which no speaker of the English language is likely to be ignorant of:

The better part of valour is discretion …

Falstaff dies at the beginning of Henry V, but he had already taken on a life of his own, and Shakespeare brought him back in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a farce in which he has a central role. This is knockabout comedy and the fat knight is a figure of fun who at one point appears in disguise, at another in women’s clothing. Nothing remains of the historical Fastolf; and indeed the play is entirely set in the late sixteenth century, not in the fifteenth at all. The New World has now been discovered and the characters talk about the riches of Guiana, and potatoes.

For more than two and a half centuries after Shakespeare lived and died, it was always assumed that the character of Falstaff was based on Sir John Fastolf. In his best-selling Worthies of England, Thomas Fuller (1608–61) even affected to be angry with the playwright, for making the knight into a ‘Thrasonical Puff and emblem of mock valour’. In 1789 the antiquarian Drake regretted that Fastolf had become ‘an object of national contempt and detestation’.2 In the mid-nineteenth century Sir George Poulett Scrope (a descendant of Fastolf ’s wife) shared the same assumption. However, by 1907 the link had become controversial, so that the Rector of Caister in Norfolk felt moved to write a tract in support of the traditional view, entitled The Case of Sir John Fastolf. Nowadays, the debate is much less heated. Most students of the subject, while recognizing the link with Oldcastle, also accept a link between Fastolf of Caister and Falstaff of Eastcheap, though no one would nowadays argue that the characters were identical.

It is time to return to the real Fastolf, while acknowledging the difficulty of setting the record straight. Shakespeare damned Fastolf in Henry VI and doubledamned him when he created the character of Falstaff. Whatever doubts there may be in the minds of scholars, the public will always associate both men with cowardice, however unjust that may be to Fastolf. When Anstis was searching for material relating to past Knights of the Garter in 1721, he wrote to Sir Hans Soane to ask for the loan of some documents:

You will very much oblige me by the loan of the Phisicall Collections in manuscript of William Wyrcester alias Botaner, for I suppose he may mention somewhat of his patron Sir John Fastolf … the Knights of the Garter having enjoined me to lay before them some notices of the lives of their predecessors (whereof Sir John Fastolf was one whose memory ought to be vindicated from that inimitable scoundrell character given him by Shakespeare).

It is very doubtful if Anstis’s own attempt to vindicate Fastolf was successful, even with a select readership like the current Knights of the Garter. As the travel writer Turner wrote a hundred years later: ‘Not one individual troubles himself about history, whilst a thousand read the drama, and the stains which Shakespeare’s pen has affixed to the name of Fastolf are of a nature never to be taken away.’3

Yet it is surely worth trying to rescue Fastolf. The real person was a man who had more in common with the ‘perfect gentle knight’ of Chaucer and the chivalric ideals of Froissart’s Chronicles than with the cowardly rogue who still treads the boards. He was a soldier and a Christian (albeit of the medieval variety) and he lived a long life, packed with extraordinary events and adventures. There are numerous traces of him still to be found, in Norfolk and in Wiltshire, in Oxford and in London, in Paris, Maine and Normandy and all along the central section of the River Loire.

Chapter 2

Early Travels and Campaigns, 1380–1413

Jerusalem

Fastolf was born around 1380 at Caister Hall in Norfolk, a house he later rebuilt on the grand scale. Nearby Great Yarmouth was a thriving port and East Anglia the most prosperous region in England, with a long and deep connection with the North Sea. The surname Fastolf is thought to be of Viking origin and there is a tomb in the Church of St Nicholas in Yarmouth which commemorates another John Fastolf, who was a mariner. The maritime connection was to remain important to Fastolf all his life: when he wanted a house in London in the 1440s, he bought land next to the Thames in Southwark. He owned two wharves there, as well as a barge-house at Caister Castle.

Between 1280 and 1391 ten Fastolfs served as bailiffs of Yarmouth, and va...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Boxed Text
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Real Falstaff
• Chapter 2: Early Travels and Campaigns, 1380–1413
• Chapter 3: In the King’s Name of England, 1413–22
• Chapter 4: From Triumph to Disaster, 1422–9
• Chapter 5: Soldiering On, 1429–39
• Chapter 6: The Army of Occupation
• Chapter 7: The Fall of the Lancastrian Empire, 1439–53
• Chapter 8: ‘The Old Vulture’
• Chapter 9: The War of the Dukes, 1447–59
• Chapter 10: The Legacy
• Conclusion: Fastolf and the Hundred Years’ War
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index