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.”