THE KINGS OF ENGLAND AS KNIGHTS.
THE STUARTS.
“May’t be pleasure to a reader’s ear,
That never drew save his own country’s air,
To hear such things related.”
Heywood, the English Traveller
It is an incontrovertible fact, that the king of England, who least of all resembled a knight in his warlike character, was the one who surpassed all his brother sovereigns in his knightly spirit as a lover. I allude to James I. The godson of Charles IX. of France was in his childhood, what his godfather had never been, a dirty, droll boy. He is the only king who ever added an original remark to a royal speech set down for him to deliver. The remark in question was, probably, nearly as long as the speech, for James was but four years old when he gave utterance to it. He had been rolling about on the throne impishly watching, the while, the grim lords to whom he, ultimately, recited a prepared speech with great gravity and correctness. At the end of his speech, he pointed to a split in the tiled roof of the hall, or to a rent in the canopy of the throne, and announced to the lords and others present the indisputable fact, that “there was a hole in the parliament.”
The precocious lad passed no very melancholy boyhood in Stirling Castle, till the Raid of Ruthven took him from his natural protectors, and placed him in the hands of Gowrie. His escape thence exhibited both boldness and judgment in a youth of sixteen; and when Frederick II., of Denmark, gave him the choice of the two Danish princesses for a wife, no one thought that so gallant a king was undeserving of the compliment. When it was, however, discovered that the royal Dane required James either to accept a daughter or surrender the Orkney and Shetland islands, as property illegally wrested from Denmark, men began to look upon the Danish king as guilty of uncommonly sharp practice toward the sovereign of the Scots. A world of trouble ensued, which it is not my business to relate, although were I inclined to be discursive—which, of course, I am not—I might find great temptation to indulge therein, upon this very subject. Suffice it then to say, that a world of trouble ensued before James made his selection, and agreed to take, rather than prayed to have granted to him, the hand of Elizabeth, the elder daughter of Frederick II.
How the intrigues of Queen Elizabeth prevented this marriage I must not pause to relate. The Danish Princess espoused a reigning duke, and James was on the point of engaging himself to Katherine of Navarre, when the offer of the hand of Anne the younger daughter of Frederick being made to him, coupled with the alternative of his either taking Anne, or losing the islands, he “prayed and advised with God, for a fortnight,” and wisely resolved to wed with “pretty Anne.”
The matter progressed anything but smoothly for a time. At length, after endless vexations, the young princess was married by proxy, in August, 1589, and set sail, soon after, for Scotland under convoy of a dozen gallant ships, and with prospects of a very unpleasant voyage.
A terrible storm blew bride and convoy on to the inhospitable coast of Norway, and although two or three witches were executed for raising this storm out of very spite, the matter was not mended. Disaster pursued the fleet, and death overtook several who sailed in it, till the coast of Scotland was fairly in sight. The Scotch witches, or perhaps other causes not less powerful than witches, in those seas, in the fall of the year, then blew the fleet back to the mouth of the Baltic. “I was commissioned,” said Peter Munch, the admiral, “to land the young queen in Scotland; it is clear, therefore, that I can not return with her to Denmark. I will put her majesty ashore, therefore, in Norway.” The conclusion was not logically attained, but the fact was as we have described it. Letters reached James announcing to him the deplorable condition in which his queen was lying at Upslo, on the Norwegian coast—storm-bound and half-famished. After many projects considered for her relief, James resolved to set forth and seek the princess himself. It is in this passage of his life that we have an illustration of the degree in which he surpassed all other kings who have sat on the English throne—as a gallant knight es amours.
Toward the end of October, of this year, in the very stormiest portion of the season, James went, privately, on board a diminutive vessel, with a very reluctant party of followers and confederates, leaving behind him, for the information of the astonished lieges, a promise to be back in twenty days; and for their especial profit, a solemn exhortation to live peaceably till he arrived again among them, with his wife.
The knightly lover landed in Norway, early in November, and made his way along the coast, now on foot, now on horseback anon in sledges, and occasionally in boats or on shipboard, until with infinite pains, and in a sorry plight, he reached Upslo, to no one’s astonishment more than the queen’s, about the 19th of November. Accoutred and travel-soiled as he was, he proceeded at once to her presence. He was so well-pleased with the fair vision before him, that he made as if he would at once kiss the queen, who stood gazing at him. “It is not the form of my country,” said pretty Anne, not very violently holding her head aside. “It’s good old Scottish fashion,” said the young king: and it was observed that in less than an hour, Anne had fallen very completely into the pleasant mode from beyond seas, and quite forgotten the forms of Denmark.
The young couple were duly married in person, on the Sunday following the arrival of James. The latter, like any Paladin of romance, had perilled life, and contended with almost insurmountable obstacles, in order to win the royal lady after a less easy fashion than marks the wooing and wedding of kings generally. Such a couple deserved to have the merriest of marriage banquets, but while such a storm was raging without as Norway itself had never seen since the sea-wind first blew over her, such a tempest was raised within, by the Scottish nobles, on a question of precedence, that the king himself was chiefly occupied in soothing the quarrellers, and only half succeeded in accomplishing the desired end. Added to this was the prospect of a long winter among the melancholy huts of Upslo. James, however, again exhibited the spirit of a knight of more than ordinary gallantry. He not only resolved that the young queen should not be thus imprisoned amid the Norway snows till May, but he resolved to conduct her himself across the Norwegian Alps, through Sweden, to her Danish home. The idea of such a journey seemed to partake of insanity, but James proceeded to realize it, by means of method and judgment. He first performed the perilous journey alone, as far as Sweden, and finding it practicable, returned for his wife, and departed a second time, in her company. Much peril but small accident accompanied them on their way, and when the wedding party arrived safely at Cronenburg, toward the end of January, the marriage ceremony was not only repeated for the third time—to despite the witches who can do nothing against the luck that is said to lie in odd numbers, but there was a succession of marriage feasts, at which every gentleman drank deeper and deeper every day, until such uproar and dissension ensued that few kept their daggers in sheath except those who were too drunk to draw them. That all were not in the more disgraceful state, or were not continually in that condition, may be conjectured from the fact that James paid a visit to Tycho Brahe, and conversed with the astronomer in his observatory, in very vigorous Latin. The king, however, was not sorry to leave old Denmark, and when a Scottish fleet appeared off Cronenburg, to convey his bride and himself homeward, he could no more be persuaded to stay a day longer, than Tycho Brahe could be persuaded that Copernicus was correct in dislodging the earth from its Ptolemaic stand-point as centre of the solar system. The bridal party set sail on the 21st of April, 1590, and was safely moored in Leith harbor on May-day. A pretty bride could not have arrived at a more appropriate season. The royal knight and his lady deserved all the happiness that could be awarded to the gallantry of the one and the beauty of the other. But they did not escape the trials common to much less dignified couples; and here the knightly character of James may be said to terminate. Exemplary as he had been as a lover, and faithful as he continued to be as a husband, he was in all other respects, simply a shrewd man; and not indeed always that. There is little of this quality in a husband who begins and continues his married life with an indifference upon the matter of borrowing. With James it was silver spoons to-day, silk stockings to-morrow, and marks and moidores from any one who would give him credit. The old French knight who drank broth out of his own helmet rather than sip it from a borrowed bowl, was moved at least by a good principle. James rather agreed with Carlo Buffone, in Jonson’s “Every Man out of his Humor,” that “it is an excellent policy to owe much in these days.” A policy which, unfortunately, is still deemed excellent, in spite of the ruin which attends its practice.
The grave chivalry impressed on the face and features of Charles I., is strikingly alluded to by Ben Jonson in his Masque of “The Metamorphosed Gypsies;” for example:—
“His brow, his eye, and ev’ry mark of state,
As if he were the issue of each grace,
And bore about him both his fame and fate.”
Echard says of him, that he was perfect in all knightly exercises, “vaulting, riding the great horse, running at the ring, shooting with cross-bows, muskets, and sometimes great guns; that if sovereignty had been the reward of excellences in those arts, he would have acquired a new title to the crown, being accounted the most celebrated marksman, and the most perfect manager of the great horse, of any in the three kingdoms.”
It was with reference to the expression of the face, alluded to by Jonson, that Bernini the sculptor said, on executing the bust of Charles, that he had never seen any face which showed so much greatness, and withal such marks of sadness and misfortune. The knight, Sir Richard Bulstrode, tells us, that when the bust was being carried across Greenwich Park, it suffered, what Moore calls on another occasion, some “Tobit-like marks of patronage” from the sparrows. “It was wiped off immediately,” says Charles’s good knight—“but, notwithstanding all endeavors, it would not be gotten off, but turned into blood.” No chevalier in poetic romance meets with more threatening portent than the above.
The Scotch soldiers of fortune, at this period, were as good representatives as could be found of the old knight-errant. To them, Vittorio Siri imputes many of the misfortunes of the period. Some one tells of an old Scottish knight exclaiming, in a year of universal peace, “Lord, turn the world upside-down, that gentlemen may make bread of it.” So, for the sake of furthering their trade of arms, the Scottish, and, indeed, other mercenary men-at-arms, fanned the flame. The words of Siri are precise on this point, for he says, “Le Leslie, le Gordoni, le Duglas ed altri milordi della Scotia, del’ Inghilterra, e dell’ Irlanda.”
Never had knights of romance worse fare in the dungeons of morose magicians than they who entered the bloody lists, where was fought out the quarrel between royalty and republicanism. “I heard a great officer say,” remarks Blount, “that during the siege of Colchester, he dined at an entertainment, where the greatest delicacies were roast horseflesh.”
The warlike spirit was, probably, never stronger than in this reign. It is well illustrated by Hobbes, who remarks that, the Londoners and citizens of other county capitals, who fought against Charles, “had that in them which, in time of battle, is more conducing to victory, than valor and experience both together; and that was spite.”
But it is as a lover that Charles I. is chiefly distinguished when we consider him solely to discover his knightly qualities. In his early days he was strongly impressed by romance, and possessed of romantic feelings. This fact is best illustrated by his conduct in connection with the Spanish Match; and to this matter we will devote a brief space, and go back to the time when James was king, and Charles was Prince of Wales.