Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

From the East, veneration for this name, and some imaginary person who once bore it, extended itself throughout the West. It is a curious fact, that long before England placed herself under the shield of this religious soldier, France had made selection of him, at least as a useful adjutant or aide-de-camp to St. Denis. Indeed, our saint was at one time nearly monopolized by France. St. Clotilde, the wife of the first Christian king of France, raised many altars in his honor—a fact which has not been forgotten in the decorations and illustrative adornments of that splendid church which has just been completed in the Faubourg St. Germain, and which is at once the pride and glory of Paris. That city once possessed relics which were said to be those of St. George; but of their whereabouts, no man now knows anything. We do, however, know that the Normans brought over the name of the saint with them, as that of one in whose arm of power they trusted, whether in the lists or in battle. In this respect we, as Saxons, if we choose to consider ourselves as such, have no particular reason to be grateful to the saint, for his presence among us is a symbol of national defeat if not of national humiliation. Not above six centuries have, however, elapsed since the great council of Oxford appointed his feast to be kept as a holyday of lesser rank throughout England; and it is about five hundred years since Edward III. established the Order of the Garter, under the patronage of this saint. This order is far more ancient than that of St. Michael, instituted by Louis XI.; of the Golden Fleece, invented by that ‘good’ Duke Philip of Burgundy, who fleeced all who were luckless enough to come within reach of his ducal shears; and of the Scottish Order of St. Andrew, which is nearly two centuries younger than that of St. George. Venice, Genoa, and Germany, have also instituted orders of chivalry in honor of this unknown cavalier.

These honors, however, and a very general devotion prove nothing touching his birth, parentage, and education. Indeed, it is probably because nothing is known of either, that his more serious biographers begin with his decease, and write his history, which, like one of Zschokke’s tales, might be inscribed “Alles Verkerht.” They tell us that he suffered under Diocletian, in Nicomedia, and on the 23d of April. We are further informed that he was a Cappadocian—a descendant of those savagely servile people, who once told the Romans that they would neither accept liberty at the hands of Rome, nor tolerate it of their own accord. He was, it is said, of noble birth, and after the death of his father, resided with his mother in Palestine, on an estate which finally became his own. The young squire was a handsome and stalwart youth, and, like many of that profession, fond of a military life. His promotion must have been pretty rapid, for we find him, according to tradition, a tribune or colonel in the army at a very early age, and a man of much higher rank before he prematurely died. His ideas of discipline were good, for when the pagan emperor persecuted the Christians, George of Cappadocia resigned his commission and appointments, and not till then, when he was a private man, did he stoutly remonstrate with his imperial ex-commander-in-chief against that sovereign’s bloody edicts and fiercer cruelty against the Christians. This righteous boldness was barbarously avenged; and on the day after the remonstrance the gallant soldier lost his head. Some authors add to this account that he was the “illustrious young man” who tore down the anti-Christian edicts, when they were first posted up in Nicomedia, a conjecture which, by the hagiographers is called “plausible,” but which has no shadow of proof to give warrant for its substantiality.

The reason why all knights and soldiers generally have had confidence in St. George, is founded, we are told, on the facts of his reappearance on earth at various periods, and particularly at the great siege of Antioch, in the times of the crusades. The Christians had been well nigh as thoroughly beaten as the Russians at Silistria. They were at the utmost extremity, when a squadron was seen rushing down from a mountain defile, with three knights at its head, in brilliant panoply and snow-white scarfs. “Behold,” cried Bishop Adhemar, “the heavenly succor which was promised to you! Heaven declares for the Christians. The holy martyrs, George, Demetrius, and Theodore, come to fight for you.” The effect was electrical. The Christian army rushed to victory, with the shout, “It is the will of God!” and the effect of the opportune appearance of the three chiefs and their squadron, who laid right lustily on the Saracens, was decisive of one of the most glorious, yet only temporarily productive of triumphs.

When Richard I. was on his expedition against enemies of the same race, he too was relieved from great straits by a vision of St. George. The army, indeed, did not see the glorious and inspiring sight, but the king affirmed that he did, which, in those credulous times was quite as well. In these later days men are less credulous, or saints are more cautious. Thus the Muscovites assaulted Kars under the idea that St. Sergius was with them; at all events, Pacha Williams, a good cause, and sinewy arms, were stronger than the Muscovite idea and St. Sergius to boot.

Such, then, is the hagiography of our martial saint. Gibbon has sketched his life in another point of view—business-like, if not matter-of-fact. The terrible historian sets down our great patron as having been born in a fuller’s shop in Cilicia, educated (perhaps) in Cappadocia, and as having so won promotion, when a young man, from his patrons, by the skilful exercise of his profession as a parasite, as to procure, through their influence, “a lucrative commission or contract to supply the army with bacon!” In this commissariat employment he is said to have exercised fraud and corruption, by which may be meant that he sent to the army bacon as rusty as an old cuirass, and charged a high price for a worthless article. In these times, when the name and character of St. George are established, it is to be hoped that Christian purveyors for Christian armies do not, in reverencing George the Saint, imitate the practices alleged against him as George the Contractor. It would be hard, indeed, if a modern contractor who sent foul hay to the cavalry, uneatable food to the army generally, or poisonous potted-meat to the navy, could shield himself under the name and example of St. George. Charges as heavy are alleged against him by Gibbon, who adds that the malversations of the pious rogue “were so notorious, that George was compelled to escape from the pursuit of justice.” If he saved his fortune, it is allowed that he made shipwreck of his honor; and he certainly did not improve his reputation if, as is alleged, he turned Arian. The career of our patron saint, as described by Gibbon, is startling. That writer speaks of the splendid library subsequently collected by George, but he hints that the volumes on history, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, were perhaps as much proof of ostentation as of love for learning. That George was raised by the intrigues of a faction to the pastoral throne of Athanasius, in Alexandria, does not surprise us. Bishops were very irregularly elected in those early days, when men were sometimes summarily made teachers who needed instruction themselves; as is the case in some enlightened districts at present. George displayed an imperial pomp in his archiepiscopal character, “but he still betrayed those vices of his base and servile extraction,” yet was so impartial that he oppressed and plundered all parties alike. “The merchants of Alexandria,” says the historian of the “Decline and Fall,” “were impoverished by the unjust and almost universal monopoly which he acquired of nitre, salt, paper, funerals, &c., and the spiritual father of a great people condescended to practise the vile and pernicious arts of an informer. He seems to have had as sharp an eye after the profit to be derived from burials, as a certain archdeacon, who thinks intramural burial of the dead a very sanitary measure for the living, and particularly profitable to the clergy. Thus the example of St. George would seem to influence very “venerable” as well as very “martial” gentlemen. The Cappadocian most especially disgusted the Alexandrians by levying a house tax, of his own motion, and as he pillaged the pagan temples as well, all parties rose at length against the common oppressor and “under the reign of Constantine he was expelled by the fury and justice of the people.” He was restored only again to fall. The accession of Julian brought destruction upon the archbishop and many of his friends, who, after an imprisonment of three weeks, were dragged from their dungeons by a wild and cruel populace, and murdered in the streets. The bodies were paraded in triumph upon camels (as that of Condé was by his Catholic opponents, after the battle of Jarnac, on an ass), and they were ultimately cast into the sea. This last measure was adopted in order that, if the sufferers were to be accounted as martyrs, there should at least be no relics of them for men to worship. Gibbon thus concludes: “The fears of the Pagans were just, and their precautions ineffectual. The meritorious death of the archbishop obliterated the memory of his life. The rival of Athanasius was dear and sacred to the Arians, and the seeming conversion of those sectaries introduced his worship into the bosom of the Catholic church. The odious stranger, disguising every circumstance of time and place, assumed the rank of a martyr, a saint, and a Christian hero; and the infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the famous St. George of England, the patron of arms, of chivalry, and of the garter.”

The romancers have treated St. George and his knightly confraternity after their own manner. As a sample of what reading our ancestors were delighted with, especially those who loved chivalric themes, I know nothing better than “The Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom, St. George of England, St. Denis of France, St. James of Spain, St. Anthony of Italy, St. Andrew of Scotland, St. Patrick of Ireland, and St. David of Wales. Shewing their honourable battles by sea and land. Their tilts, justs, tournaments for ladies; their combats with gyants, monsters, and dragons; their adventures in foreign nations; their enchantments in the Holy Land; their knighthoods, prowess, and chivalry, in Europe, Africa, and Asia; with their victories against the enemies of Christ; also the true manner and places of their deaths, being seven tragedies, and how they came to be called the Seven Saints of Christendom.” The courteous author or publisher of the veracious details, prefaces them with a brief address “to all courteous readers,” to whom “Richard Johnson wisheth increase of virtuous knowledge.” “Be not,” he says, “like the chattering cranes, nor Momus’s mates that carp at everything. What the simple say, I care not. What the spiteful say, I pass not; only the censure of the conceited,” by which good Richard means the learned, “I stand unto; that is the mark I aim at,”—an address, it may be observed, which smacks of the Malaprop school; but which seemed more natural to our ancestors than it does to us.

For these readers Richard Johnson presents a very highly-spiced fare. He brings our patron saint into the world by a Cæsarean operation performed by a witch, who stole him from his unconscious mother, and reared him up in a cave, whence the young knight ultimately escaped with the other champions whom the witch, now slain, had kept imprisoned. The champions, it may be observed, travel with a celerity that mocks the “Express,” and rivals the despatch of the Electric Telegraph. They are scarcely departed from the seven paths which led from the brazen pillar, each in search of adventures, when they are all “in the thick of it,” almost at the antipodes. A breath takes St. George from Coventry, his recovered home, after leaving the witch, to Egypt. At the latter place he slays that terrible dragon, which some think to imply the Arian overcoming the Athanasian, and rescues the Princess Sabra, in whose very liberal love we can hardly trace a symbol of the Church, although her antipathies are sufficiently strong to remind one of the odium theologicum. George goes on performing stupendous feats, and getting no thanks, until he undertakes to slay a couple of lions for the Soldan of Persia, and gets clapped into prison, during seven years, for his pains. The biographer I suspect, shut the knight up so long, in order to have an excuse to begin episodically with the life of St. Denis.

The mystic number seven enters into all the principal divisions of the story. Thus, St. Denis having wandered into Thessaly was reduced to such straits as to live upon mulberries; and these so disagreed with him that he became suddenly transformed into a hart; a very illogical sequence indeed. But the mulberry tree was, in fact, Eglantius the King’s daughter, metamorphosed for her pride. Seven years he thus remained; at the end of which time, his horse, wise as any regularly-ordained physician, administered to him a decoction of roses which brought about the transformation of both his master and his master’s mistress into their “humane shapes.” That they went to court sworn lovers may be taken as a matter of course. There they are left, in order to afford the author an opportunity of showing how St. James, having most unorthodoxically fallen in love with a Jewish maiden, was seven years dumb, in consequence. St. James, however, is a patient and persevering lover. If I had an ill-will against any one I would counsel him to read this very long-winded history, but being at peace with all mankind, I advise my readers to be content with learning that the apostolic champion and the young Jewess are ultimately united, and fly to Seville, where they reside in furnished lodgings, and lead a happy life;—while the author tells of what befell to the doughty St. Anthony.

This notable Italian is a great hand at subduing giants and ladies. We have a surfeit of combats and destruction, and love-making and speechifying, in this champion’s life; and when we are compelled to leave him travelling about with a Thracian lady, who accompanies him, in a theatrical male dress, and looks in it like the Duchess—at least, like Miss Farebrother, in the dashing white sergeant of the Forty Thieves—we shake our head at St. Anthony and think how very unlike he is to his namesake in the etching by Callot, where the fairest of sirens could not squeeze a sigh from the anchorite’s wrinkled heart.

While they are travelling about in the rather disreputable fashion above alluded to, we come across St. Andrew of Scotland, who has greater variety of adventure than any other of the champions. With every hour there is a fresh incident. Now he is battling with spirits, now struggling with human foes, and anon mixed up, unfavorably, with beasts. At the end of all the frays, there is—we need hardly say it—a lady. The bonny Scot was not likely to be behind his fellow-champions in this respect. Nay, St. Andrew has six of them, who had been swans, and are now natural singing lasses. What sort of a blade St. Andrew was may be guessed by the “fact,” that when he departed from the royal court, to which he had conducted the half dozen ladies, they all eloped in a body, after him. There never was so dashing a hero dreamed of by romance—though a rhymer has dashed off his equal in wooing, and Burns’s “Finlay” is the only one that may stand the parallel.