Shakespeare’s histories · Parts One and Two
Henry IV: Falstaff, Captain Smith and the Price of Service
“Food for powder”—recruiting, unpaid soldiers and military comedy in Lewkenor and Shakespeare.
The battles of Henry IV are fought by men whose recruitment, pay and prospects matter as much as the quarrels of kings. Falstaff converts a military commission into profit, accepts money from those who can afford to escape service, and leads the impoverished men who replace them into battle. Lewes Lewkenor’s The Estate of English Fugitives supplies a contemporary world of captains, unpaid companies, disappointed service and soldiers reduced to begging.
Captain John Smith is a particularly vivid comparison. Lewkenor records his drunken confrontation with a treasurer and his eventual death in poverty. A separate government memorial records the complaints of thirty soldiers who named “one Smith of Norfolk” as their captain. Read beside Falstaff’s own admissions, these sources turn a general resemblance into a set of specific comparisons.
“I have misused the King’s press damnably”
Falstaff explains his method of recruiting without disguise:
If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet. I have misused the King’s press damnably. I have got, in exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers, three hundred and odd pounds. I press me none but good 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.
Falstaff, Henry IV, Part One, IV.ii.
He selects men with something to lose because they will pay to avoid service. Their replacements are the poor and discarded. The speech makes corruption an everyday transaction conducted through the machinery of military recruitment.
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 machinery of unpaid service
Smith’s quarrel is one episode in Lewkenor’s larger account of frustrated payment. A soldier might possess a written grant and still spend months seeking the money:
But first, before I go any further, I think it very necessary to let you understand what manner of thing this liberanca is, of which I speak, to the end that you may be acquainted with the inventions and crafty delays that they use in this matter of payment; for if you have not especial favour, it will be six months after the grant thereof, do what you can, afore it will be fully signed, and in estate for you to demand your money.
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), explanation of the liberanca; spelling modernised.
The liberanca was an assignment for payment that passed through several officials before the recipient could demand his money. Lewkenor’s explanation supplies the practical setting for Smith’s angry visit: entitlement on paper could coexist with persistent want.
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; they do not establish that Shakespeare drew the character from Smith alone.
“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.
Who has earned the name of captain?
In Part Two, Doll Tearsheet attacks Pistol’s claim to military standing:
Captain! Thou abominable damned cheater, art thou not ashamed to be called captain? An captains were of my mind, they would truncheon you out for taking their names upon you before you have earned them. You a captain? You slave, for what? For tearing a poor whore’s ruff in a bawdy house?
Doll Tearsheet, Henry IV, Part Two, II.iv.
The joke depends on a distinction between the title and the service that should earn it. Lewkenor’s captains are similarly judged by their conduct: what they have done, whom they have served, and whether the service has brought honour, reward or disgrace.
“Can honour set to a leg?”
Before Shrewsbury, Falstaff tests the language of honour against a soldier’s wounded body:
Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning.
Falstaff, Henry IV, Part One, V.i.
Lewkenor’s appeal to English captains abroad also turns on the difference between the promise of service and its actual rewards:
Let them not tire out their years and youth in so comfortless and unrewarded a service, the end whereof is never other than untimely death, desolation, or beggary.
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), appeal to the captains and gentlemen abroad; spelling modernised.
Falstaff’s scepticism and Lewkenor’s warning have different purposes. Falstaff questions the value of risking his body for honour; Lewkenor urges men to abandon Spanish service and return to their own country. Both make bodily survival and material support tests of grand military promises.
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.
The promised death “of a sweat” differs from Smith’s reported dropsy. The parallel lies in the decline of the comic soldier, rather than an identical medical history. 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.
Gad’s Hill: a visiting count and a drawn sword
The Gad’s Hill episode has a striking counterpart in the account of Frederick, Count of Mömpelgard’s visit to England in 1592. Frederick—the future Duke of Württemberg—was a noble visitor received by Elizabeth I. His secretary Jacob Rathgeb recorded a frightening encounter on the road between Rochester and Gravesend.
On 4 September, after visiting the Queen’s ships at Rochester, the party rode back towards Gravesend in darkness and high winds. Rathgeb describes what happened:
Afterwards his Highness rode back again to Gravesend, the night being as dark as pitch, and the wind high and boisterous; he slept there that night. On the road, however, an Englishman, with a drawn sword in his hand, came upon us unawares, and ran after us as fast as he could; perhaps he expected to find other persons, for it is very probable that he had an ambush, as that particular part of the road is not the most safe.
Jacob Rathgeb, account of Frederick’s English visit, 1592, translated in William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners (1865), p. 49. Rye’s marginal heading identifies Gad’s Hill.
The narrative gives us the darkness, the road, a drawn sword, pursuit and the fear of an ambush. Rathgeb qualifies his explanation: the stranger may have expected different travellers, and the presence of an ambush is his inference. He does not report a completed robbery.
Falstaff on the same road
In Henry IV, Part One, II.ii, Falstaff and his companions rob the travellers at Gad’s Hill. Prince Henry and Poins then turn the robbery against the robbers, frightening them into abandoning their booty. Henry describes their flight:
Got with much ease. Now merrily to horse.
The thieves are all scattered, and possessed with fear
So strongly that they dare not meet each other.
Each takes his fellow for an officer.
Away, good Ned. Falstaff sweats to death,
And lards the lean earth as he walks along.
Were ’t not for laughing, I should pity him.
Prince Henry, Henry IV, Part One, II.ii.
The parallel is strongest in the shared place and the spectacle of frightened travellers pursued by an armed challenger. The play turns danger on a notorious road into a practical joke; Rathgeb records the anxiety of a visiting party uncertain whom it has encountered in the dark.
Frederick’s visit also connects this comparison with The Merry Wives of Windsor, through the proposed allusions to the German visitor in that play. It brings two Falstaff plays into the discussion of one recorded journey. Lewkenor’s later work escorting foreign visitors makes the episode relevant to his ceremonial world, although Rathgeb does not establish that Lewkenor accompanied Frederick in 1592.
The comparison and its limits
The case rests on a cluster of details: recruiting, the treatment of ordinary soldiers, drink, disputes over money, illness and destitution. Smith’s life provides a contemporary comparison for the military comedy of Henry IV. It does not make him the sole original of Falstaff, or turn every incident in the plays into a disguised episode of his biography.
Sources
Jacob Rathgeb, journal of Frederick, Count of Mömpelgard’s English visit, 1592, translated by William Brenchley Rye in England as Seen by Foreigners (1865), pp. 48–49; Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, II.ii.
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, V.i and V.iii; Henry IV, Part Two, II.iv, III.ii and Epilogue; The Merry Wives of Windsor, II.i–ii. Quotations use modernised spelling.
Follow the evidence
Captain John Smith: the Norfolk soldier →
Henry V: Roger Williams and Fluellen →