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,