“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!”