To return to the knights of earlier days, I will observe that indifferent as many of them were to meeting death, they, and indeed other men of note, were very far from being so as to the manner in which they should be disposed of after death. In their stone or marble coffins, they lay in graves so shallow that the cover of the coffin formed part of the pavement of the church. Whittingham, the Puritan Dean of Durham, took up many of their coffins and converted them into horse or swine troughs. This is the dean who is said to have turned the finely-wrought holy-water vessels into salting-tubs for his own use.
Modern knights have had other cares about their graves than that alluded to above. Sir William Browne, for instance, one of George II.’s knights, and a medical man of some repute, who died in 1770, ordered by his will that when his coffin was lowered into the grave, there should be placed upon it, “in its leathern case or coffin, my pocket Elzevir Horace, comes viæ vitæque dulcis et utilis, worn out with and by me.” There was nothing more unreasonable in this than in a warrior-knight being buried with all his weapons around him. And, with respect to warrior-knights and what was done with them after death, I know nothing more curious than what is told us by Stavely on the authority of Streder. I will give it in the author’s own words.
“Don John of Austria,” says Stavely, “governor of the Netherlands for Philip II. of Spain, dying at his camp at Buge” (Bouges, a mile from Namur), “was carried from thence to the great church at Havre, where his funeral was solemnized and a monument to posterity erected for him there by Alexander Farnese, the Prince of Parma. Afterward his body was taken to pieces, and the bones, packed in mails, were privately carried into Spain, where, being set together with small wires, the body was rejointed again, which being filled or stuffed with cotton, and richly habited, Don John was presented to the King, entire, leaning upon his commander’s staff, and looking as if he were alive and breathing. Afterward the corpse being carried to the Church of St. Laurence, at the Escurial, was there buried near his father, Charles V., with a fitting monument erected for him.”
Considering that there was, and is, a suspicion that Philip II. had poisoned his kinsman, the interview must have been a startling one. But Philip II. was not, perhaps, so afraid of dead men as the fourth Spanish king of that name. Philip IV., by no means an unknightly monarch, was born on a Good Friday, and as there is a Spanish superstition that they who are born on that day see ghosts whenever they pass the place where any one has been killed or buried, who died a violent death, this king fell into a habit of carrying his head so high, in order to avoid seeing those spirits, that his nose was continually en l’air, and he appeared to see nobody.
Romance, and perhaps faithful history, are full of details of the becoming deaths of ancient knights, upon the field. I question, however, if even Sir Philip Sidney’s was more dignified than that of a soldier of the 58th infantry, recorded in Nichols’s “Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century.” A straggling shot had struck him in the stomach. As he was too dreadfully wounded to be removed, he desired his comrades would pray by him, and the whole guard knelt round him in prayer till he died. Bishop Hurd remarked, when this was told him, that “it was true religion.” There was more of religion in such sympathy than there was of taste in the condolence of Alnwick, on the death of Hugh, Duke of Northumberland—a rather irascible officer, and Knight of the Garter. “O,” cried the Alnwick poet—
“O rueful sight! Behold, how lost to sense
The millions stand, suspended by suspense!”
But all fruitlessly were the millions so suspended, for as the minstrel remarked in his Threnodia—
“When Time shall yield to Death, Dukes must obey.”
“Dying in harness,” is a favorite phrase in chivalric annals to illustrate the bravery of a knight falling in battle, “clothed in complete steel.” So to die, however, was not always to die in a fray. Hume says of Seward, Earl of Northumberland, that there are two circumstances related of him, “which discover his high sense of honor and martial disposition. When intelligence was brought to him of his son Osborne’s death, he was inconsolable till he heard the wound was received on his breast, and that he had behaved with great gallantry in the action. When he found his own death approaching, he ordered his servants to dress him in a complete suit of armor, and sitting erect on the couch, with a spear in his hand, declared that in that position, the only one worthy of a warrior, he would patiently await the fatal moment.”