The Lewkenor Circle · Biography
Captain John Smith: Lewkenor’s Soldier and Falstaff
“Drinking as deeply in the cup of misery” — a Norfolk captain, unpaid soldiers and the world of Falstaff.
The captain from Norfolk
Captain John Smith belongs to the English soldiers described in Lewes Lewkenor’s The Estate of English Fugitives. Associated with recruitment in Lincolnshire and service in the Low Countries, he appears within the troubled economy of men, wages and military patronage.
This is the Norfolk captain in Lewkenor’s narrative, distinct from the later Virginia colonist and from Sir John Smythe of Essex, the military writer who disputed the merits of firearms with Roger Williams.
Thirty soldiers at the court gate
In October 1587, a memorial in Burghley’s hand recorded the appearance of thirty soldiers at court. They identified their captain as “one Smith of Norfolk” and said they had been levied in Lincolnshire. Their complaint concerned unpaid service and their treatment by their captain:
These reports, though it may be they are false in parts, yet they move great commiseration where the numbers are so great and all concur in one sort of complaint. And for an instance, yesterday there came thirty to the Court gate, who said they were of the company of one Smith of Norfolk, and levied in Lincolnshire, and her Majesty hearing thereof, caused only two to be brought to the Council, who did allege the foresaid kind of misusage by their captain, adding that he had done the like to all the rest of their company. But for to stay the report of any more to come to the Court to offend her Majesty they were dismissed with sharp speeches, as being not to be believed; and the marshal ordered to threaten [them] with the stocks to depart; yet for pity of their manifest poverty, the Council made a purse with some money, and caused the sub almoner, as of his own pity, to give to every of them a portion to conduct them to their countries.
Memorial in Burghley’s hand, October 1587; Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 21, part 3, “Elizabeth: October 1587, 21–31” (1929), pp. 380–397.
The memorial records accusations and calls for an inquiry. Its opening qualification — “though it may be they are false in parts” — matters. What it establishes directly is that the men came to court, named their captain, described their misusage and received money collected by the Council to help them home.
Falstaff’s account of his surviving recruits gives the comparison its force:
I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered: there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive; and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.
Falstaff, Henry IV, Part One, V.iii.
In both passages, the men who survive service are left to beg. The historical complaint and the dramatic speech expose the cost borne by ordinary soldiers beneath the comedy of their captain.
“One day well tippled”
Lewkenor gives Smith a memorable encounter with the treasurer Juan de Lasture. The captain wants his money; the treasurer responds with insults:
“But by the way I think it not amiss to tell you a merry accident that fell out between the treasurer and one captain Smith, an Englishman, spoken of before in this treatise; who being one day well tippled, came in all haste to demand his money of Juan de Lasture, who, seeing him come in that unreverent sort, grew so far gone with choler as the other was with wine, and reviled him by many foul names, as perro, luterano, borachio, &c.”
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
The treasurer’s Spanish insults call Smith a dog, a Lutheran and a drunkard. Smith has no Spanish with which to answer him:
“Smith had not a word of Spanish, nor any other language, but a little Dutch, wherein he requited the treasurer in as snarling terms as he could, calling him honscont, Schellam, and Turk.”
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives; spelling modernised.
The dagger and the stairs
“Wherewith the treasurer came in a great rage, and would have thrust him down the stairs, but Smith drew out his dagger, and had without doubt mischieved him, if coronel Boyd and other Scottish gentlemen, that were there present as suitors for money, had not come between them. The matter came before the Duke, who, as always hating Juan de Lasture exceedingly, made but a jest of it; and Smith being sober, submitted himself, imputing his fault to the wine, and so the matter was ended.”
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives; spelling modernised.
The scene already has the movement of a comic episode: a drunken entrance, mutual incomprehension, escalating insults, a drawn weapon and a superior who treats the quarrel as a joke. Behind it lies the serious problem of soldiers trying to obtain payment.
Recruiting and “food for powder”
Falstaff’s recruitment scenes make the captain’s treatment of his men a sustained subject. In Henry IV, Part Two, the muster becomes a joke at the recruit’s expense:
Shadow will serve for summer; prick him, for we have a number of shadows to fill up the muster-book.
Falstaff, Henry IV, Part Two, III.ii.
In the earlier play, Prince Henry sees the men Falstaff has brought with him:
PRINCE HENRY: I did never see such pitiful rascals.
FALSTAFF: Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.
WESTMORELAND: Ay, but, Sir John, methinks they are exceeding poor and bare, too beggarly.
Henry IV, Part One, IV.ii.
Smith’s recruits and Falstaff’s muster belong to a recognisable military economy: captains raise companies, money fails to reach the men, and those discharged return in poverty. This is a more specific comparison than a shared reputation for drinking.
Butter, cheese and the “Flemish drunkard”
Lewkenor follows Smith beyond the drunken quarrel. The captain becomes a seller of provisions, trying to survive by trading butter and cheese. His account ends in a prolonged and distressing illness:
Smith held yet somewhat longer out, though drinking as deeply in the cup of misery, or rather deeplier than any of the rest; for he fell through sicknesses and poverty into such extremity of wants, that of a captain he was fain to become a victualler, and to buy butter and cheese, and by making sale thereof again to help and relieve his poor estate. Withal, he fell into so strange and extreme a dropsy, that I scarcely believe the like was ever heard of; neither truly do I speak this to amplify the matter, for all those that have seen him beyond sea will approve my speeches; either of his legs was swollen to that bigness of a mans middle, his face only was bare of flesh and miserable, and his eyes sunk into his head, in such sort, that I never remember to have beheld a more pitiful spectacle: in which misery, after he had languished well near a year and a half, he died finally in extreme calamity, as it is told me since, at Gaunt, in the year 1588.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
Lewkenor distinguishes what he saw from what he subsequently heard. His description of Smith’s swollen legs, wasted face and sunken eyes is personal testimony; the final report of his death at Ghent in 1588 is qualified by “as it is told me since”.
Butter and cheese also enter the language surrounding Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ford declares:
I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself.
Ford, The Merry Wives of Windsor, II.ii.
Mistress Page calls Falstaff a “Flemish drunkard”:
What an unweighed behaviour hath this Flemish drunkard picked—with the devil’s name!—out of my conversation, that he dares in this manner assay me?
Mistress Page, The Merry Wives of Windsor, II.i.
The comparison brings together the Low Countries, drink, the trade in provisions and a soldier’s reduced circumstances. These details support a reading of Smith alongside Falstaff..
“That swollen parcel of dropsies”
Lewkenor’s account of Smith’s dropsy gives a further point of comparison with Prince Henry’s abuse of Falstaff:
Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years?
Prince Henry, Henry IV, Part One, II.iv.
The theatrical insult makes bodily excess comic. Lewkenor’s description of Smith makes illness and poverty pitiful. Read together, the passages reveal how closely the humour of military life can sit beside its suffering.
Falstaff’s promised death
The epilogue to Henry IV, Part Two promises a continuation of the story with Sir John:
One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France: where, for any thing I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already a’ be killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.
Henry IV, Part Two, Epilogue.
Smith supplies a striking contemporary comparison: Norfolk origins, recruiting, drink, conflict over wages, poverty and bodily collapse. Sir John Smythe of Essex and the historical Sir John Fastolf belong to separate strands of the discussion.
Sources
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), the quarrel with Juan de Lasture and the account of Smith’s illness and death.
Memorial in Burghley’s hand, October 1587; Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 21, part 3 (1929), pp. 380–397. The court-gate episode is also reproduced in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s The Elizabethan Court Day by Day, 1587.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, II.iv, IV.ii and V.iii; Henry IV, Part Two, III.ii and Epilogue; The Merry Wives of Windsor, II.i–ii. Quotations use modernised spelling.