While touching on the matters which occurred during the reign of that unhappy Lancastrian king, Henry VI., I will observe that we have foreign testimony to the fact of our civil wars having been carried on with more knightly courtesy than had hitherto been the case in any other country. “In my humble opinion,” says Comines, “England is, of all the dominions with which I am acquainted, the one alone in which a public interest is properly treated. There is no violence employed against the people, and in war-time no edifice is destroyed or injured by the belligerents. The fate and misery of war falls heaviest on those immediately concerned in carrying it on.” He alludes particularly to the knights and nobles; but it is clear that, let war be carried on in ever so knightly a fashion, the people must be the chief sufferers. The warehouses may stand, but so also will commerce—very still and unproductive.
Courteous as the knights of this age may have been, they were by no means incorruptible. There were many of them in the service of Edward IV., who were the pensioners of Louis XI., who used to delight in exhibiting their names at the foot of acknowledgments for money received. One official, however, Hastings, would never attach his autograph to his receipt, but he had no scruples with regard to taking the money. The Czar buys Prussian service after the fashion of Louis XI.
Henry VIII. cared more for merit than birth in the knights whom he created. He first recognised the abilities of him who was afterward Sir John Mason, the eminent statesman of five reigns. This king was so pleased with an oration delivered in his presence by Mason, at All Souls, Oxford, that he took upon himself the charge of having him educated abroad, as one likely to prove an able minister of state. He was a faithful servant to the king. Elizabeth had one as gallant in Sir Henry Unton, who challenged the great Guise for speaking lightly of his royal mistress. The motives for the royal patronage of these knights was better than that which moved Richard I. when he raised the lowly-born Will Briewer to favoriteship and knighthood. Henry VIII. was fond of conferring the honor of chivalry on those who served him well; thus of the Cornish lawyer, Trigonnel, he made a knight, with forty pounds a year to help him to keep up the dignity, in acknowledgment of the ability with which, as proctor, he had conducted the case of divorce against Queen Katharine. It was better service than John Tirrell rendered to Richard III., who knighted him for his aid in the murder of the young princes, on which occasion he kept the keys of the Tower, and stood at the foot of the stairs, while Forest and Dighton were despatching the young victims. We have a knight of a different sort of reputation in Sir Richard Hutton, Charles I.’s “honest judge,” at whose opposition against the levying of ship-money, even the king could not feel displeased. Sir Richard deserved his honors; and we may reckon among them the fact, that “when he was a barrister at Gray’s Inn, he seldom or never took a fee of a clergyman.”
The old crest of the Huntingdonshire Cromwells was a lion rampant, holding a diamond ring in its fore-paw. This crest has reference to an individual knighted by Henry VIII. In the thirty-second year of that king’s reign, Richard Williams, aliàs Cromwell, with five other gentlemen, challenged all or any comers from Scotland, Flanders, France, or Spain, who were willing to encounter them in the lists. The challenge was duly accepted, and on the day of encounter, Richard Cromwell flung two of his adversaries from their horses. Henry loved the sport, and especially such feats as this exhibited by Cromwell, whom he summoned to his presence. The king said, “You have hitherto been my Dick, now be my diamond;” and taking a diamond ring from his own finger, and placing it on that of Cromwell, he bade the latter always carry it for his crest. The king, moreover, knighted Richard, and what was better, conferred on him Romney Abbey, “on condition of his good service, and the payment of £4,663 4s. 2d. held in capite by the tenth part of a knight’s fee, paying £29 16s.”
It was in the reign of Henry VIII. that for the first time a serjeant-at-law received the honor of knighthood. This seems to have been considered by the learned body as a corporate honor, by which the entire company of sergeants were lifted to a level with knights-bachelors, at least. It is doubtless for this reason that sergeants-at-law claim to be equal in rank with, and decline to go below those said knight’s bachelors.
Of Elizabeth, it is sufficient to name but one sample of her knights. She created many, but she never dubbed one who more nobly deserved the honor than when she clapped the sword on the shoulder of Spielman, the paper-maker, and bade him rise a knight. This was done by way of recompense for the improvements he had introduced into his art, at a time when printers and paper-makers were considered by Romanists anything but angels of light.
Hume, referring to the chivalry of James I.’s time, remarks that the private soldiers were drawn from a better class of men than was the case in Hume’s time. They approached, he says, nearer to an equality with the rank of officers. It has been answered that no such rank existed as that from which they are chiefly drawn now. This, however, is not the case. There were then, as now, doubtless many of the peasant and working classes in the army; but there is not now, as there was then, any encouragement to men of respectable station to begin the ascent in profession of arms at the lowest round of the ladder.
One of James I.’s knights was the well-known Sir Herbert Croft. James knighted him at Theobalds, out of respect to his family, and personal merits. Some years subsequently Sir Herbert, then above fifty years of age, joined the Church of Rome, and retired to Douay, where he dwelt a lay-brother, among the English Benedictines. He died among them, after a five years’ residence, in the year 1622. His eldest son William was also knighted, I think, by Charles I. He is an example of those who were both knights and clergymen, for after serving as colonel in the civil wars, he forsook catholicism, in which he had been brought up by his father, entered the Church of England, and like so many other knights who in former times had changed the sword for the gown, rose to the dignity of carrying an episcopal pastoral staff, and was made Bishop of Hereford in 1661. It was a descendant of his who wrote the very inaccurate biography of Young, in “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.” Wood, in his Athenæ, shows that the first Sir Herbert was a literary knight, who took up pen in the service of the communion into which he had entered. These were;—1. Letters persuasive to his wife and children to take upon them the Catholic religion. 2. Arguments to show that the Church, in communion with the See of Rome, is the true Church. 3. Reply to the answers of his daughter, Mary Croft, which she made to a paper of his sent to her concerning the Roman Church. All these pieces appeared in the same year, 1619, and they seem to have been very harmless weapons in the hands of a very amiable knight.
Among the most worthy of the knights created by James I. was Leonard Holliday, who served the office of Lord Mayor in 1605, and was dubbed chevalier by a king who is said never to have conferred the honor without being half afraid of the drawn sword which was his instrument. Sir Leonard did good service in return. In his time Moorfields consisted of nothing but desolate land, the stage whereon was enacted much violence and terrible pollution. In this savage locality, Sir Leonard effected as wonderful a change as Louis Napoleon has done in the Bois de Boulogne; and even a greater; for there were more difficulties in the knight’s way, and his will was less sovereign and potent to work mutation. Nevertheless, by perseverance, liberal outlay, and hard work of those employed in the manual labor, he transformed the hideous and almost pathless swamp into a smiling garden, wherein the citizens might take the air without fearing violence either to body or goods. They blessed king James’s knight as they disported themselves in the rural district with their wives and children. The laborers employed were said to have been less lavish of benedictions upon the head of him from whom they took their wages. They complained bitterly of the toil, and for a long time in London, when any great exertions were necessary to produce a desired end, promptly, men spoke of the same as being mere “Holiday work.”
James I. was not so perfect a knight in presence of a sword as he was in presence of a lady. He made more knights than any other king, not excepting William IV.; but he never dubbed one without some nervousness at the sight of the weapon with which he laid on the honor. Kenelm Digby states that when he was knighted by James, the sword, had it not been guided in the King’s hand by the Duke of Buckingham, would have gone, not upon his shoulder, but into his eye. James’s aversion from the sight of a sword is said to have descended to him from his mother who, a short time previous to his birth, was the terrified spectator of the murder of Rizzio. The same King used to remark that there were two great advantages in wearing armor, namely, that the wearer could neither receive nor inflict much injury. Indeed, as James sagaciously remarked, the chief inconvenience to be dreaded from armor was in being knocked down in it, and left without a squire to lend assistance. In this case the knight stood, or lay, in imminent peril of suffocation; the armor being generally too heavy to admit of a knight rising from the ground without help. If he lay on his face his condition was almost hopeless. The sentiment of chivalry was, after all, not so foreign to James as is popularly supposed. Witness the circumstance when Sully came over here as embassador extraordinary, James made the embassador lower his flag to the pennant of the English vessel sent out to receive or escort him. This, however, had been well nigh construed into an affront. The poets of this time too began to have a chivalrous feeling for the hardships of common women. The feeling used to be all for princesses and courtly dames, but it was now expressed even for shop-wives, behind counters. Thus the author of “The Fair Maid of the Inn” says:—