Henry re-modelled the order, and framed the statutes by which it is now chiefly governed. Among them was the one directing that no person of mean birth should be elected, and this the King himself very speedily broke, by electing Thomas Cromwell. The latter returned thanks for the honor in the very humblest strain, and while he seemed conscious that he was entirely unworthy of the distinction, he appeared desirous to assure the sneering knights’ companions who had been compelled to give him their suffrages, that ignoble as he was, he would imitate nobility as closely as possible. But there were men, from the period of the institution of the order downward to Henry’s time, who, if of higher birth than Cromwell, were not of higher worth. Very many had forfeited their dignity as knights by treasonable practices; and Henry decreed that wherever these names occurred in the records, the words “Vœ Proditor!”—Out upon the traitor—should be written against them in the margin. The text had thus a truly Tudor comment.
Under the succeeding sovereign, Edward VI., a great portion of the splendor of the religious ceremonies at the installation was abolished. It was in this reign that Northumberland procured the ejection of Lord Paget from the order, on the ground that the meanness of his birth had always disqualified him, or as Edward VI. says in his journal, “for divers his offences, and chiefly because he was no gentleman of blood, neither of father-side nor mother-side.” Lord Paget, however, was restored under Mary, and the record of his degradation was removed from the register.
Under Mary, if there was some court servility there was also some public spirit. When the Queen created her husband Philip a knight, an obsequious herald, out of compliment to the “joint-sovereigns,” took down the arms of England in the chapel at Windsor, and was about to set up those of Spain. This, however, was forbidden “by certain lords,” and brave men they were, for in such a display of English spirit there was peril of incurring the ill-will of Mary, who was never weary of heaping favors on the foreign King-consort, whom she would have made generalissimo of her forces if she had dared. It is a curious fact that Philip was not ejected from the order, even when he had despatched the Spanish Armada to devastate the dominions of the sovereign.
In illustration of the fact that the Garter never left the leg of a knight of the order, there are some lines by the Elizabethan poet Peele, which are very apt to the occasion. Speaking of the Earl of Bedford, Peele says—
—“Dead is Bedford! virtuous and renowned
For arms, for honor, and religious love;
And yet alive his name in Fame’s records,
That held his Garter dear, and wore it well.
Some worthy wight but blazon his deserts:
Only a tale I thought on by the way,