Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

For him, and all his noble friends,

To pray I’ll never cease.

This ditty (which I now will end)

Was only ta’en in hand

To blaze

The praise

Of great Northumberland.”

This illustrative ballad bears the initials “M. P.” These, probably, do not imply either a member of Parliament, or of the house of Percy. Beneath the initials we have the legend, “Printed at London, for Francis Coules, and are” (verses subaudiuntur) “to be sold at his shop in the Old Bayley.” There are three woodcuts to illustrate the text. The first represents the Earl on horseback; both peer and charger are very heavily caparisoned, and the steed looks as intelligent as the peer. In front of this stately, solid, and leisurely pacing couple, is a mounted serving-man, armed with a stick, and riding full gallop at nobody. The illustration to the second part represents the Earl returning from Windsor in a carriage, which looks very much like the Araba in the Turkish Exhibition. The new Knight wears his hat, cloak, collar and star; his figure, broad-set to the doorway, bears no distant resemblance to the knave of clubs, and his aristocratic self-possession and serenity are remarkable, considering the bumping he is getting, as implied by the wheels of his chariot being several inches off the ground. The pace of the steeds, two and twohalves of whom are visible, is not, however, very great. They are hardly out of a walk. But perhaps the bareheaded coachman and the as bareheaded groom have just pulled them up, to allow the running footmen to reach the carriage. Two of these are seen near the rear of the vehicle, running like the brace of mythological personages in Ovid, who ran the celebrated match in which the apples figured so largely. The tardy footmen have just come in sight of their lord, who does not allow his serenity to be disturbed by chiding them. The Percy wears as stupid an air as his servants, and the only sign of intelligence anywhere in the group is to be found in the off-side wheeler, whose head is turned back, with a sneering cast in the face, as if he were ridiculing the idea of the whole show, and was possessed with the conviction that he was drawing as foolish a beast as himself.

The Earl appears to have ridden eastward, in the direction pointed by his own lion’s tale, before he drove down to Windsor. The show seems to have interested all ranks between the Crown and the Conduit in Fleet street. Where Viscount Wimbledon’s house was, “in the fairest part of the Strand,” I can not conjecture, and as I can not find information on this point in Mr. Peter Cunningham’s “Hand-Book of London,” I conclude that the site is not known.

In connection with Charles I. and his Garter, I will here cite a passage from the third volume of Mr. Macaulay’s “History of England,” page 165. “Louvois hated Lauzun. Lauzun was a favorite at St. Germains. He wore the Garter, a badge of honor which has very seldom been conferred on aliens who were not sovereign princes. It was believed, indeed, in the French court, that in order to distinguish him from the other knights of the most illustrious of European orders, he had been decorated with that very George which Charles I. had, on the scaffold, put into the hands of Juxon.” Lauzun, I shall have to notice under the head of foreign knights. I revert here to the George won by Charles and given to Lauzun. It was a very extraordinary jewel, curiously cut in an onyx, set about with twenty-one large table diamonds, in the fashion of a garter. On the under side of the George was the portrait of Henrietta Maria, “rarely well limned,” says Ashmole, “and set in a case of gold, the lid neatly enamelled with goldsmith’s work, and surrounded with another Garter, adorned with a like number of equal-sized diamonds, as was the foresaid.” The onyx George of Charles I. was in the possession of the late Duke of Wellington, and is the property of the present Duke.