Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

THE KINGS OF ENGLAND AS KNIGHTS.

FROM STUART TO BRUNSWICK.

Charles II. loved the paraphernalia of courts and chivalry. He even designed to create two new orders of knighthood—namely “the Knights of the Sea,” a naval order for the encouragement of the sea-service; and “the Knights of the Royal Oak,” in memory of his deliverance, and for the reward of civil merit. He never went much farther than the intention. He adopted the first idea at another’s suggestion, and straightway thought no more of it. The second originated with himself, and a list of persons was made out, on which figured the names of the intended knights. The matter never went further.

At Charles’s coronation, the knights of the Bath were peculiarly distinguished for their splendor. They were almost too gorgeously attired to serve as waiters, and carry up, as they did the first course to the king’s own table, at the coronation banquet, after a knight of the Garter had been to the kitchen and had eaten a bit of the first dish that was to be placed before his Sacred Majesty.

If the king was fond of show, some at least of his knights, shared in the same feeling of vanity. The robes in recent times were worn only on occasions of ceremony and service. The king revived a fashion which his knights followed, and which sober people (who were not knights) called a ridiculous humor. They were “so proud of their coats,” as the expression went, that they not only wore them at home, but went about in them, and even rode about the park with them on. Mr. Pepys is particularly indignant on this matter especially so, when told that the Duke of Monmouth and Lord Oxford were seen, “in a hackney-coach, with two footmen in the park with their robes on; which,” adds the censor, “is a most scandalous thing, so as all gravity may be said to be lost, among us.” There was more danger of what Pepys calls “gravity” being lost, when the Order, at command of the Sovereign head, elected such men as the Elector of Saxony, who had no other distinction but that of being a good drinker.

I do not know what the rule now may be in St. George’s Chapel, but in the reign of Charles II., a singular regulation is noticed by Pepys. He went in good company to the royal chapel, where he was placed, by Dr. Childe, the organist, “among the knights’ stalls, and pretty the observation,” he adds, “that no man, but a woman, may sit in a knight’s place, where any brass plates are set.” What follows is also, in some degree, germane to our purpose. “Hither come cushions to us, and a young singing boy to bring us a copy of the anthem to be sung. And here, for our sakes, had this anthem and the great service sung extraordinary, only to entertain us. Great bowing by all the people, the poor knights particularly, toward the altar.”

Charles II. was the first monarch who allowed the Knights of the Garter to wear, as at present, the star of the order on the breast of the coat. Our present queen has renewed in her gracious person, the custom that was once observed, if we may believe Ashmole, by the ladies, that is, the wives of Knights of the Garter—namely, of wearing the symbol of the order as a jewelled badge, or a bracelet, on the arm. This is in better taste than the mode adopted by Lady Castlereagh, at the gay doings attendant upon the sitting of the Congress of Vienna; where the noble lady in question appeared at court with her husband’s jewelled garter, as a bandeau, round her forehead!

James II. has had not merely his apologists but his defenders. He had far more of the knightly character than is commonly supposed. For a long time he labored under the disadvantage of being represented, in England, by historians only of the Orange faction. Poor Richard the Third has suffered by a similar misfortune. He was wicked enough, but he was not the monster described by the Tudor historians and dramatists.

James, in his youth, had as daring and as crafty a spirit as ever distinguished the most audacious of pages. The tact by the employment of which he successfully made his escape from the republican guards who kept him imprisoned at St. James’s, would alone be sufficient proof of this. When Duke of York, he had the compliment paid to him by Condé, that if ever there was a man without fear it was he. Under Turenne he earned a reputation of which any knight might be proud; and in the service of Spain, he won praise for courage, from leaders whose bravery was a theme for eulogy in every mouth.

Partisans, not of his own faction, have censured his going publicly to mass soon after his accession; but it must be remembered that the Knights of the Garter, in the collar of their order, complacently accompanied him, and that the Duke of Norfolk was the only knight who left him at the door of the chapel.

He had little of the knight in him in his method of love, if one may so speak. He cared little for beauty; so little, that his brother Charles remarked that he believed James selected his mistresses by way of penance. He was coarsely minded, and neither practised fidelity nor expected it in others. Whatever he may have been in battle, there was little of the refinement of chivalry about him in the bower. It was said of Louis XIV. and his successor, that if they were outrageously unfaithful to their consorts, they never failed to treat them with the greatest politeness. James lacked even this little remnant of chivalrous feeling; and he was barely courteous to his consort till adversity taught him the worth of Mary of Modena.

He was arrogant in prosperity, but the slightest check dreadfully depressed him, and it is hardly necessary to say that he who is easily elated or easily depressed, has little in him of the hero. His conduct when his throne was menaced was that of a poor craven. It had not about it the dignity of even a decent submission. He rose again, however, to the heroic when he attempted to recover his kingdom, and took the field for that purpose. This conduct has been alluded to by a zealous and impartial writer in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” for November, 1855. “After the battle of the Boyne,” he says, “the Orange party circulated the story that James had acted in the most cowardly manner, and fled from the field before the issue was decided. Not only was this, in a very short time believed, but even sensible historians adopted it, and it came down to us as an historical fact. Now in the secret archives of France there are several letters which passed between Queen Mary and the Earl of Tyrconnel, and these together with some of the secret papers, dispose at once of the whole story. It has now been placed beyond a doubt, that the king was forced from the field. Even when the day was lost and the Dutch veterans had routed the half-armed and undisciplined Irish, James rallied a part of the French troops, and was leading them on, when Tyrconnel and Lauzun interposed, pointed out the madness of the attempt, and seizing the reins of his horse, compelled him to retreat.”

This is perhaps proving a little too much, for if the day was lost, it was not bravery, but rashness, that sought to regain it; and it is the first merit of a knight, the great merit of a general, to discern when blood may be spilled to advantage. As for the archives in France, one would like to know upon what authority the papers preserved there make their assertions. Documents are exceedingly valuable to historians, but they are not always trustworthy. The archives of France may contain Canrobert’s letter explaining how he was compelled to put constraint upon the bravery of Prince Napoleon, and send him home, in consequence of severe indisposition. And yet the popular voice has since applied a very uncomplimentary surname to the Prince—quite as severe, but not so unsavory, as that which the people of Drogheda still apply to James. In either case there is considerable uncertainty. I am inclined to believe the best of both of these illustrious personages, but seeing that the uncertainty is great, I am not sure that Scarron was wrong when he said that the best way of writing history was by writing epigrams, pointed so as to prick everybody.

Cottington (Stafford’s Letters) tells us of a domestic trouble in which James was concerned with one of his knights. The king’s perplexities about religion began early. “The nurse is a Roman Catholic, to whom Sir John Tunston offered the oath of allegiance, and she refused it; whereupon there grew a great noise both in the town and court; and the queen afflicted herself with extreme passion upon knowledge of a resolution to change the woman. Yet after much tampering with the nurse to convert her, she was let alone, to quiet the queen.” The dissension is said to have so troubled the nurse, as also to have injured the child, and never had knight or king more difficult task than James, in his desire to please all parties.

It was one of the characteristics of a knight to bear adversity without repining; and if Dodd may be believed, James II. was distinguished for this great moral courage in his adversity. The passage in Dodd’s Church History is worth extracting, though somewhat long: “James was never once heard to repine at his misfortune. He willingly heard read the scurrilous pamphlets that were daily published in England against him. If at any time he showed himself touched, it was to hear of the misfortunes of those gentlemen who suffered on his account. He would often entertain those about him with the disorders of his youth, but it was with a public detestation of them, and an admonition to others not to follow his example. The very newspapers were to him a lesson of morality; and the daily occurrences, both in the field and the cabinet, were looked upon by him, not as the result of second causes, but as providential measures to chastise both nations and private persons, according to their deserts. He would sometimes say that the exalted state of a king was attended with this great misfortune, that he lived out of the reach of reproof, and mentioned himself as an example. He read daily a chapter in the Bible, and another in that excellent book, ‘The Following of Christ.’ In his last illness he publicly forgave all his enemies, and several of them by name, especially the Prince of Orange, whom he acknowledged to be his greatest friend, as being the person whom Providence had made use of to scourge him and humble him in the manner he had done, in order to save his soul.” As something very nearly approaching to reality, this is more pleasing than the details of dying knights in romance, who after hacking at one another for an hour, mutually compliment each other’s courage, and die in the happiest frame of mind possible. Some one speaking of this king, and of Innocent II., made an apt remark, worth the quoting; namely, that “he wished for the peace of mankind that the pope had turned papist, and the king of England, protestant!” How far the latter was from this desired consummation is wittily expressed in the epitaph on James, made by one of the poet-chevaliers, or, as some say, by one of the abbés who used to lounge about the terrace of St. Germains.

“C’est ici que Jacques Second,

Sans ministres et sans maitresses,

Le matin allait à la messe,

Et le soir allait au sermon.”

I have noticed, in a previous page, the very scant courtesy which the queen of Charles I. met with at the hands of a Commonwealth admiral. The courtesy of some of the Stuart knights toward royal ladies was not, however, of a much more gallant aspect. I will illustrate this by an anecdote told by M. Macaulay in the fourth volume of his history. The spirit of the Jacobites in William’s reign had been excited by the news of the fall of Mons.... “In the parks the malcontents wore their biggest looks, and talked sedition in their loudest tones. The most conspicuous among these swaggerers was Sir John Fenwick, who had in the late reign been high in favor and military command, and was now an indefatigable agitator and conspirator. In his exaltation he forgot the courtesy which man owes to woman. He had more than once made himself conspicuous by his impertinence to the queen. He now ostentatiously put himself in her way when she took her airing, and while all around him uncovered and bowed low, gave her a rude stare, and cocked his hat in her face. The affront was not only brutal but cowardly. For the law had provided no punishment for mere impertinence, however gross; and the king was the only gentleman and soldier in the kingdom who could not protect his wife from contumely with his sword. All that the queen could do was to order the park-keepers not to admit Sir John again within the gates. But long after her death a day came when he had reason to wish that he had restrained his insolence. He found, by terrible proof, that of all the Jacobites, the most desperate assassins not excepted, he was the only one for whom William felt an intense personal aversion.”

The portrait of William III. as drawn by Burnet, does not wear any very strong resemblance to a hero. The “Roman nose and bright sparkling eyes,” are the most striking features, but the “countenance composed of gravity and authority,” has more of the magistrate than the man at arms. Nevertheless, and in despite of his being always asthmatical, with lungs oppressed by the dregs of small-pox, and the slow and “disgusting dryness” of his speech, there was something chivalrous in the character of William. In “the day of battle he was all fire, though without passion; he was then everywhere, and looked to everything. His genius,” says Burnet in another paragraph, “lay chiefly in war, in which his courage was more admired than his conduct. Great errors were often committed by him; but his heroical courage set things right, as it inflamed those who were about him.” In connection with this part of his character may be noticed the fact that he procured a parliamentary sanction for the establishment of a standing army. His character, in other respects, is not badly illustrated by a remark which he made, when Prince of Orange, to Sir W. Temple, touching Charles II. “Was ever anything so hot and so cold as this court of yours? Will the king, who is so often at sea, never learn the word that I shall never forget, since my last passage, when in a great storm the captain was crying out to the man at the helm, all night, ‘Steady, steady, steady!’” He was the first of our kings who would not touch for the evil. He would leave the working of all miracles, he said, to God alone. The half-chivalrous, half-religious, custom of washing the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday, was also discontinued by this prince, the last of the heroic five Princes of Orange.

Great as William was in battle, he perhaps never exhibited more of the true quality of bravery than when on his voyage to Holland in 1691, he left the fleet, commanded by Sir Cloudesley Shovel and Sir George Rooke, and in the midst of a thick fog attempted, with some noblemen of his retinue, to land in an open boat. “The danger,” says Mr. Macaulay, who may be said to have painted the incident in a few words, “proved more serious than they had expected.” It had been supposed that in an hour the party would be on shore. But great masses of floating ice impeded the progress of the skiff; the night came on, the fog grew thicker, the waves broke over the king and the courtiers. Once the keel struck on a sandbank, and was with great difficulty got off. The hardiest mariners showed some signs of uneasiness, but William through the whole night was as composed as if he had been in the drawing-room at Kensington. “For shame,” he said to one of the dismayed sailors, “are you afraid to die in my company?” The vehis Cæsarem was, certainly, not finer than this.

The consort of Queen Anne was of a less chivalrous spirit than William. Coxe says of him, that even in the battle-field he did not forget the dinner-hour, and he appears to have had more stomach for feeding than fighting. Of George I., the best that can be said of him in his knightly capacity, has been said of him, by Smollet, in the remark, that this prince was a circumspect general. He did not, however, lack either courage or impetuosity. He may have learned circumspection under William of Orange. Courage was the common possession of all the Brunswick princes. Of some of them, it formed the solitary virtue. But of George I., whom it was the fashion of poets, aspiring to the laureatship, to call the great, it can not be said, as was remarked of Philip IV. of Spain, when he took the title of “Great,” “He has become great, as a ditch becomes great, by losing the land which belonged to it.”

One more custom of chivalry observed in this reign, went finally out in that of George II. I allude to the custom of giving hostages. According to the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, “two persons of rank were to reside in France, in that capacity, as sureties to France that Great Britain should restore certain of its conquests in America and the West Indies.” The “Chevalier,” Prince Charles Edward, accounted this as a great indignity to England, and one which, he said, he would not have suffered if he had been in possession of his rights.

The age of chivalry, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, went out before Burke pronounced it as having departed. I do not think it survived till the reign of George II. In that reign chivalry was defunct, but there was an exclusive class, whose numbers arrogated to themselves that nice sense of honor which was supposed, in olden times, to have especially distinguished the knight. The people alluded to were par excellence, the people of “fashion.” The gentlemen who guarded, or who were supposed to guard, the brightest principle of chivalry, were self-styled rather than universally acknowledged, “men of honor.”

The man of honor has been painted by “one of themselves.” The Earl of Chesterfield spoke with connoissance de fait, when he treated of the theme; and his lordship, whose complacency on this occasion, does not permit him to see that his wit is pointed against himself, tells a story without the slightest recollection of the pithy saying of the old bard, “De te fabula narratur.”

“A man of honor,” says Lord Chesterfield, “is one who peremptorily affirms himself to be so, and who will cut anybody’s throat that questions it, even upon the best grounds. He is infinitely above the restraints which the laws of God or man lay upon vulgar minds, and knows no other ties but those of honor, of which word he is to be the sole expounder. He must strictly advocate a party denomination, though he may be utterly regardless of its principles. His expense should exceed his income considerably, not for the necessaries, but for the superfluities of life, that the debts he contracts may do him honor. There should be a haughtiness and insolence in his deportment, which is supposed to result from conscious honor. If he be choleric and wrong-headed into the bargain, with a good deal of animal courage, he acquires the glorious character of a man of honor; and if all these qualifications are duly seasoned with the genteelest vices, the man of honor is complete; anything his wife, children, servants, or tradesmen, may think to the contrary, notwithstanding.”

Lord Chesterfield goes on to exemplify the then modern chivalrous guardian of honor, by drawing the portrait of a friend under an assumed name. He paints a certain “Belville” of whom his male friends are proud, his female friends fond, and in whom his party glories as a living example—frequently making that example the authority for their own conduct. He has lost a fortune by extravagance and gambling; he is uneasy only as to how his honor is to be intact by acquitting his liabilities from “play.” He must raise money at any price, for, as he says, “I would rather suffer the greatest incumbrance upon my fortune, than the least blemish upon my honor.” His privilege as a peer will preserve him from those “clamorous rascals, the tradesmen”; and lest he should not be able to get money by any other means, to pay his “debts of honor,” he writes to the prime minister and offers to sell his vote and conscience for the consideration of fifteen hundred pounds. He exacts his money before he records his vote, persuaded as he is that the minister will not be the first person that ever questioned the honor of the chivalrous Belville.

The modern knight has, of course, a lady love. The latter is as much like Guinever, of good King Arthur’s time, as can well be; and she has a husband who is more suspicious and jealous than the founder of the chivalrous Round Table. “Belville” can not imagine how the lady’s husband can be suspicious, for he and Belville have been play-fellows, school-fellows, and sworn friends in manhood. Consequently, Belville thinks that wrong may be committed in all confidence and security. “However,” he writes to the lady, “be convinced that you are in the hands of a man of honor, who will not suffer you to be ill-used, and should my friend proceed to any disagreeable extremities with you, depend upon it, I will cut the c——’s throat for him.”

Life in love, so in lying. He writes to an acquaintance that he had “told a d——d lie last night in a mixed company,” and had challenged a “formal old dog,” who had insinuated that “Belville” had violated the truth. The latter requests his “dear Charles” to be his second—“the booby,” he writes of the adversary who had detected him in a lie, “was hardly worth my resentment, but you know my delicacy where honor is concerned.”

Lord Chesterfield wrote more than one paper on the subject of men of honor. For these I refer the reader to his lordship’s works. I will quote no further from them than to show a distinction, which the author draws with some ingenuity. “I must observe,” he says, “that there is a great difference between a Man of Honor and a Person of Honor. By Persons of Honor were meant, in the latter part of the last century, bad authors and poets of noble birth, who were but just not fools enough to prefix their names in great letters to the prologues, epilogues, and sometimes even the plays with which they entertained the public. But now that our nobility are too generous to interfere in the trade of us poor, professed authors” (his lordship is writing anonymously, in the World), “or to eclipse our performances by the distinguished and superior excellency and lustre of theirs; the meaning at present of a Person of Honor is reduced to the simple idea of a Person of Illustrious Birth.”

The chivalrous courage of one of our admirals at the close of the reign of George II., very naturally excited the admiration of Walpole. “What milksops,” he writes in 1760, “the Marlboroughs and Turennes, the Blakes and Van Tromps appear now, who whipped into winter quarters and into ports the moment their nose looked blue. Sir Cloudesley Shovel said that an admiral deserved to be broken who kept great ships out after the end of September; and to be shot, if after October. There is Hawke in the bay, weathering this winter (January), after conquering in a storm.”

George III. was king during a longer period than any other sovereign of England; and the wars and disasters of his reign were more gigantic than those of any other period. He was little of a soldier himself; was, however, constitutionally brave; and had his courage and powers tested by other than military matters. The politics of his reign wore his spirit more than if he had been engaged in carrying on operations against an enemy. During the first ten years after his accession, there were not less than seven administrations; and the cabinets of Newcastle and Bute, Grenville and Rockingham, Grafton and North, Shelburne and Portland, were but so many camps, the leaders in which worried the poor monarch worse than the Greeks badgered unhappy Agamemnon. Under the administration of Pitt he was hardly more at his ease, and in no degree more so under that of Addington, or that of All the Talents, and of Spencer Perceval. An active life of warfare could not have more worn the spirit and health of this king than political intrigues did; intrigues, however, be it said, into which he himself plunged with no inconsiderable delight, and with slender satisfactory results.

He was fond of the display of knightly ceremonies, and was never more pleased than when he was arranging the ceremonies of installation, and turning the simple gentlemen into knights. Of the sons who succeeded him, George IV. was least like him in good principle of any sort, while William IV. surpassed him in the circumstance of his having been in action, where he bore himself spiritedly. The race indeed has ever been brave, and I do not know that I can better close the chapter than with an illustration of the “Battle-cry of Brunswick.”

THE BATTLE-CRY OF BRUNSWICK.

The “Battle-cry of Brunswick” deserves to be commemorated among the acts of chivalry. Miss Benger, in her “Memoirs of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia,” relates that Christian, Duke of Brunswick, was touched alike by the deep misfortunes, and the cheerful patience of that unhappy queen. Indignant at the neglect with which she was treated by her father, James I. of England, and her uncle, Frederick of Denmark, Duke Christian “seemed suddenly inspired by a sentiment of chivalric devotion, as far removed from vulgar gallantry as heroism from ferocity. Snatching from her hand a glove, which he first raised with reverence to his lips, he placed it in his Spanish hat, as a triumphal plume which, for her sake, he ever after wore as a martial ornament; then drawing his sword he took a solemn oath never to lay down arms until he should see the King and Queen of Bohemia reinstated in the Palatinate. No sooner had Christian taken this engagement than he eagerly proclaimed it to the world, by substituting on his ensign, instead of his denunciation of priests, an intelligible invocation to Elizabeth in the words ‘For God and for her!’ Fur Gott und fur sie!”

“Flash swords! fly pennons! helm and shield

Go glittering forth in proud array!

Haste knight and noble to the field,

Your pages wait, your chargers neigh.

Up! gentlemen of Germany!

Who love to be where strife is seen,

For Brunswick leads the fight to-day,

For God and the Queen!

“Let them to-day, for fame who sigh,

And seek the laurels of the brave;

Or they who long, ’ere night, to lie

Within a soldier’s honored grave,

Round Brunswick’s banner take their stand;

’Twill float around the bloody scene,

As long as foeman walks the land,

’Gainst God and the Queen.

“Draw, Barons, whose proud homes are placed

In many a dark and craig-topped tower;

Forward, ye knights, who have been graced

In tourney lists and ladies’ bower.

And be your country’s good the cause

Of all this proud and mortal stir,

While Brunswick his true sabre draws

For God and for her!

“To Him we look for such good aid

As knights may not be shamed to ask,

For vainly drawn would be each blade,

And weakly fitted to its task,

Each lance we wield, did we forget

When loud we raise our battle-cry,

For old Bohemia’s Queen, to set

Our hopes with God on high.”

The original superscription on the banner of Brunswick was the very energetic line: “Christian of Brunswick, the friend of God and the enemy of priests.” Naylor, in his “Civil and Military History of Germany,” says, that the Duke imprinted the same legend on the money which he had coined out of the plate of which he had plundered the convents, and he adds, in a note derived from Galetti, that “the greater part of the money coined by Christian was derived from twelve silver statues of the apostles, which the bigotry of preceding ages had consecrated, in the cathedral of Munster.” When the Duke was accused of impiety by some of his followers, he sheltered himself under the authority of Scripture; and pretended to have only realized the ancient precept: “Go hence, into all parts of the earth!”

Having seen the English Kings as knights, let us look at a few of the men whom they knighted.