“A goldsmith keeps his wife
Wedged into his shop like a mermaid; nothing of her
To be seen, that’s woman, but her upper part.”
The ladies too, themselves were growing ambitious, and as fanciful as any knight’s “dame par amour” of them all. The Goldsmith’s daughter in “Eastward Ho!” who wants to be made a lady, says to her “sweet knight,” “Carry me out of the scent of Newcastle coal and the hearing of Bow bells!” and à-propos to titles, let me add that, in James’s time, it was, according to Jonson—
“—— a received heresy
That England bears no Dukes.”
Southey commenting on this passage, said that the title was probably thought ominous, so many dukes having lost their heads.
In the second year of the reign of James I., he made not less than three hundred knights; and on another occasion he is said to have made two hundred and thirty-seven in six weeks. In France, when the state was in distress, knighthood was often a marketable commodity; but it probably was never more so there, than it was in England under the first James. No one was more conscious than he, when he had an unworthy person before him; and it sometimes happened that these persons had the same uncomfortable consciousness touching themselves. Thus, we are told that when “an insignificant person” once held down his head, as the king was about to knight him, James called out, “Hold up thy head, man, I have more need to be ashamed than thou.”
The indiscriminate infliction of the order caused great confusion. Knights-aldermen in the city claimed precedence of knights-commoners, and violent was the struggle when the question was agitated. Heralds stood forth and pleaded before “my lords,” as lawyers do, with reference to the party by which they were retained. One party considered it absurd that a knight who happened to be an alderman should take precedence of one who was only a knight. The civic dignitary, it was said, was no more above the chivalric, than a rushlight was superior to the sun. Such an idea, it was urged, by York against Garter, was an insult to God and man. The case was ultimately gained by the chivalric aldermen, simply because the knights-commoners did not care to pursue it, or support their own privileges. York thought that knights-commoners, though tradesmen, who had been lord mayors, and yet were not now aldermen, ought to take precedence of mere alderman knights. The commoners lost their cause by neglect; but it has been ruled that ex-lord mayors, and provosts of Scotland, shall precede all knights, as having been the Sovereign’s lieutenants.
James may be said, altogether, to have shown very little regard for the dignity of knights generally. By creating a rank above them, he set them a step lower in degree of precedence. This monarch is, so to speak, the inventor of the baronet. When money was required for the benefit of the Irish province of Ulster, a suggestion was made that they who supplied it liberally should have the hereditary title of “Sir” and “Baronet.” James himself was at first a little startled at the proposition, but he soon gave it his sanction upon Lord Salisbury observing, “Sire, the money will do you good, and the honor will do them none.” James thought that a fair bargain, and the matter was soon arranged. The knights were not pleased, but it was intimated to them, that only two hundred baronets would be created, and that as the titles became extinct, no new hereditary “Sirs” would be nominated. The successors of James did not think themselves bound by the undertaking of their predecessor. George III. the least regarded it, for during four or five years of his reign he created baronets at the rate of one a-month.