“Not so long at all events,” she answered with a smile, “but that I recollect my poor father would have lost his breakfast, but for your assistance.”
“The time is not long for memory,” replied the Judge, “nor is Salisbury as far from Windsor as Dan from Beersheba; yet how wide the distance between the breakfast at the cage-door at Salisbury, and the Christmas dinner to which we are both proceeding, in the palace of the king!”
“The earl is already there,” added the countess, “and he will be happier than the king himself to welcome the legal knight who has done such willing service to the Lady of the Knight of the Bath.”
To those whose power and privilege it is to create such knights, we will now direct our attention, and see how kings themselves behaved in their character as knights.
THE KINGS OF ENGLAND AS KNIGHTS.
FROM THE NORMANS TO THE STUARTS.
“Un roi abstrait n’est ni père, ni fils, ni frère, ni parent, ni chevalier, ami. Qu’est il donc? Roi, même quand il dort.”— Diderot.
If we judge some of our kings by the strict laws of chivalry, we shall find that they were but sorry knights after all. They may have been terrible in battle; but they were ill-mannerly in ladies’ bower.
William the Conqueror, for instance, had none of the tender sentiment of chivalry; in other words he showed little gentleness in his bearing toward women. It is said by Ingerius, that after Matilda of Flanders had refused his hand, on the ground that she would not have a bastard for a husband, he waylaid her as she was returning from mass in one of the streets of Bruges, dragged her out from among her ladies, pommelled her brutally, and finally rolled her in the mud. A little family difference arose in consequence; but as it was less bitter than family quarrels usually are, a reconciliation took place, and Matilda gave her hand to the knight who had so terribly bruised her with his arm. She loved him, she said, because he had shown more than the courage of common knights, by daring to beat her within sight of her father’s own palace. But all’s well that ends well; they were not only a handsome but a happy couple, and Matilda was head of the household at the Conqueror’s hearth. The general’s wife was there the general.
How William bore himself in fight is too well known to need recapitulating here. He probably never knew fear but once, and that was at the sounds of a tumult in the street, which reached his ears as he was being crowned. Then, indeed, “’tis true this god did shake,” for the first and only time. His successor, who was knighted by Archbishop Lanfranc, was in the field as good a knight as he, and generous to an adversary, although he was never so to any mortal besides. But Rufus was nothing of a knight in his bearing toward ladies. His taste with regard to the fair sex was of the worst sort; and the court of this royal and reprobate bachelor was a reproach at once to kingship and knighthood, to Christianity and civilization. He had been accused, or rather the knights of his time and country, with having introduced into England the practice of a crime of which the real introducer, according to others, was that Prince William who was drowned so fortunately for England, on the sea between Calais and Dover. The chivalrous magnanimity of Rufus is exemplified in the circumstance of his having, in disguise, attacked a cavalier, from whom he received so sound a beating, that he was at length compelled to avow himself in order to induce his conqueror to spare his life. The terrified victor made an apology, in the very spirit of the French knight of the Holy Ghost to a dying cavalier of the Golden Spur, whom he had mortally wounded in mistake: “I beg a thousand pardons,” said the polite Frenchman, “but I really took you for somebody else.” So William’s vanquisher began to excuse himself for having nearly battered the king’s skull to a jelly, with his battle-axe, on the ground of his having been unacquainted with his rank. “Never heed the matter,” said the king, “you are a good fellow, and shall, henceforth, be a follower of mine.” Many similar instances might be cited. Further, Rufus was highly popular with all men-at-arms; the knights reverenced him as the very flower of chivalry, and I am glad that the opprobrium of having slain him in the New Forest no longer attaches itself to a knight, although I am sorry an attempt has been made to fix it upon the church. No one now believes that Sir Walter Tyrrel was the author of the crime, and chivalry is acquitted of the charge against one of its members of having slain the flaxen-haired but rubicund-nosed king.