Shakespeare · Windsor, soldiers and royal entertainment
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Lewkenor at Egham, the German visitors, Falstaff’s military world and the fairy entertainment of the Garter.
Published in Elias Ashmole’s history of the Order of the Garter, 1672.
Image source.
Lewkenor near Windsor
On 2 September 1594, Lewes Lewkenor wrote from Egham to Robert Cecil. His brother Samuel had returned from Bohemia, and Lewes wanted Cecil to receive him. He also asked for the return of a manuscript previously delivered at Hampton Court:
“This bearer, my brother, newly arrived in these parts from Bohemia, is one that ever desireth humbly to rest at your LL’s service and commandment, and the rather because it pleased your LL to deal so honestly with him in his absence by delivering a letter of his to me. I doubt not his behaviour there hath been such as becomes a good subject, but he will give a reckoning of himself.”
“By reason of some indisposition of body I cannot conveniently accompany him though very desirous to do so. I beseech you to deliver unto the bearer a poor treatise in written hand which I once delivered unto your Lordship at Hampton Court. An honorable personage hath desired to see it and there is no other copy.”
Lewes Lewkenor to Robert Cecil, Egham, 2 September 1594; spelling modernised.
The letter places Lewkenor close to Windsor, identifies Samuel as the bearer and records the circulation of Lewes’s writing through Cecil. It does not name the treatise or the person who wished to read it.
Egham stands within the landscape surrounding the comedy: Windsor, Datchet, the Thames and the royal park. Lewkenor’s presence there gives the investigation a dated geographical starting point.
Falstaff and the soldiers of the Low Countries
Title-page source.
Falstaff brings the appetites and expedients of military life into Windsor’s households. He needs money and hopes to obtain it through Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. His companions carry the quarrels, insults and opportunism of the history plays into a domestic comedy.
Describing English pensioners in Spanish service, Lewkenor writes:
“As for those that have their pensions granted them to follow the court without any obligation of service, as in a manner all the pensions granted to the Englishmen are, the Spanish soldier maketh the most base and contemptible reckoning of them that may be, even as of men that live by charity, as our poor knights do at Windsor.”
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
The passage connects soldiers dependent on pensions with Windsor’s poor knights. Falstaff is not one of those pensioners, but the comparison brings military reputation, financial dependence and Windsor together in Lewkenor’s prose.
The comedy gives Falstaff a distinctly continental colouring:
“What an unweighed behaviour hath this Flemish drunkard picked—with the devil’s name!”
The Merry Wives of Windsor, II.i.
Elsewhere Falstaff remembers being “more than half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish”. Such jokes belong beside the soldiers returning from the Low Countries whose conduct Lewkenor describes.
Captain Smith: drink, money and a drawn dagger
One of Lewkenor’s most theatrical anecdotes concerns Captain John Smith and the treasurer Juan de Lasture:
“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.”
“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 quarrel escalates until Smith draws his dagger. Scottish gentlemen intervene, and the matter reaches the Duke:
“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 episode combines a serious grievance over payment with drunkenness, linguistic confusion and a superior who enjoys the joke. It offers a contemporary military setting for the comic disorder Falstaff brings to Windsor.
This Captain Smith is the soldier from Norfolk, distinct from the Virginia colonist and from Sir John Smythe of Essex, the military controversialist.
The wives take control
_MET_DP859563.jpg)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art; image source.
Mistress Ford and Mistress Page recognise Falstaff’s scheme and turn it against him. His confidence in his powers of seduction leaves him dependent upon their instructions, their servants and their household equipment.
The laundry basket makes that reversal physical. The soldier who hopes to command the situation becomes something the women conceal, carry away and dispose of. Ford’s jealous searches expose his credulity while the wives retain control of the plot.
These searches can also be read against the religious anxieties of Elizabethan households. Concealed visitors, sudden searches and improvised disguises had serious counterparts in the protection and pursuit of Catholic priests. That contextual reading adds another possible resonance to the comedy’s machinery of concealment.
The German visitors and the missing horses
A separate intrigue concerns the Host of the Garter and the horses supplied to supposed German gentlemen. Their departure leaves the Host robbed and humiliated.
The episode has long attracted comparison with the English visit of Frederick, Count of Mömpelgard, in 1592. Frederick became Duke of Württemberg in 1593; during his visit he was still the Count. His secretary Jacob Rathgeb recorded the journey, and the account appeared in print in 1597.
James Orchard Halliwell drew attention to the German references and the early quarto’s “cozen Garmombles”, a phrase read alongside Mömpelgard and Württemberg. The comparison concerns the topical handling of foreign visitors and royal hospitality. The journal does not establish that the Count committed the horse theft represented in the play.
Lewkenor’s later work escorting ambassadors makes this material relevant to his career. His presence in the Count’s retinue in 1592 is not established by the surviving account.
Samuel Lewkenor and Württemberg
The family’s German knowledge appears directly in Samuel Lewkenor’s book on foreign university cities, published in 1600. Describing Tübingen, he writes:
“Which Academy yet maintaineth well his place and dignity among the most learned and flourishing Universities of Germany. Many excellent learned scholars have issued from this University, among the which most worthily may be numbered John Stoflerus, a sage and profound Mathematician, who did write a learned Treatise of Astronomy.”
Samuel Lewkenor, A Discourse Not Altogether Unprofitable, Nor Unpleasant (1600), account of Tübingen; spelling modernised.
Samuel describes an intellectual centre within Württemberg, the territory associated with the visiting Count. His book and Lewes’s Egham letter place the brothers within a world of continental travel, writing and English political patronage.
Elizabeth I, Windsor and the Garter
Portrait source.
Windsor was a royal residence and the ceremonial home of the Order of the Garter. Its castle, chapel and chivalric associations gave the comedy a setting that could carry a compliment to Elizabeth’s court as well as a story about local households.
George Carey, second Baron Hunsdon, became Lord Chamberlain in 1597 and was elected to the Order of the Garter that year. Shakespeare’s company performed under his patronage as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
The play’s Garter references have encouraged the suggestion that it was prepared for a celebration associated with Carey’s election. The ceremonial compliment is explicit; the particular occasion remains a proposed explanation of it.
In the final scene, the Fairy Queen directs her attendants to bless the castle:
“Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out.
Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room,
That it may stand till the perpetual doom,
In state as wholesome as in state ’tis fit,
Worthy the owner, and the owner it.”
The Merry Wives of Windsor, V.v.
The humiliation of Falstaff opens into a compliment to the royal household. Windsor’s local comedy becomes an entertainment concerned with monarchy, chivalry and the ceremonial identity of the castle.
Herne’s Oak and the fairy revels
Image source.
Falstaff arrives at Herne’s Oak expecting a romantic encounter. Instead, children and townspeople disguised as fairies surround him. The community turns the woodland setting into a stage.
That transformation belongs beside Elizabethan progress entertainments, where trees, gardens and parks became settings for allegorical figures and speeches. At Cowdray in 1591, Elizabeth encountered such entertainments during a visit that also brought her to Richard Lewkenor’s house at West Dean.
The Queen dined there on 20 August. Richard was then Mr Lewkenor, not yet Sir Richard. The stop connects the family directly with the hospitality surrounding the Sussex progress.
The Windsor entertainment works on several levels: a punishment devised by the wives, a communal performance, a use of local folklore and a compliment to the royal castle.
The Windsor connections
The strongest starting point is Lewkenor’s dated letter from Egham: a writer seeking the return of his manuscript, introducing his travelled brother to Cecil, close to the landscape of Windsor.
His published account supplies soldiers, drinking, quarrels over money and an explicit comparison with Windsor’s poor knights. Samuel’s writing supplies Württemberg and Tübingen. The play brings foreign visitors, household authority and Garter ceremony into the same English setting.
These connections provide distinct routes through the comedy, joining its domestic plots to the military, literary and ceremonial world inhabited by the Lewkenor brothers.
Film: Falstaff and Shakespeare’s Soldiers
The historical military personalities and experiences examined alongside Shakespeare’s Falstaff.
Watch Falstaff and Shakespeare’s Soldiers on YouTube →
Sources and further reading
Lewes Lewkenor to Robert Cecil, Egham, 2 September 1594, concerning Samuel’s return from Bohemia and the recovery of a manuscript.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), passages on pensioners and Windsor’s poor knights, and Captain Smith’s quarrel with Juan de Lasture.
Samuel Lewkenor, A Discourse Not Altogether Unprofitable, Nor Unpleasant (1600), description of Tübingen.
Jacob Rathgeb, account of Frederick of Mömpelgard’s English journey in 1592, published in 1597; English translation in William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners (1865).
Read Rye’s edition of the travel accounts →
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, particularly II.i, III.iii, IV.v and V.v. The early quarto and the Folio preserve different versions of the play.
Read the play at the Folger Shakespeare Library →
James Orchard Halliwell, studies of the German references and the Count of Mömpelgard’s visit; records of George Carey’s theatrical patronage and election to the Garter.
The Elizabethan Court Day by Day: 1591, entry for 20 August, for the Queen’s dinner at Richard Lewkenor’s house.
William Corbett, The Master of the Ceremonies, Windsor, the German Count and the Lewkenor brothers sections. Lewkenor quotations follow its transcriptions, with spelling modernised.