Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

THE ORDER OF THE HOLY GHOST.

There is a singular circumstance connected with this order. It was founded by the last of the Valois, and went out with the last of the Bourbons. Louis Philippe had a particular aversion for the orders which were most cherished by the dynasty he so cleverly supplanted. The Citizen King may be said to have put down both “St. Louis” and the “Holy Ghost” cavaliers. He did not abolish the orders by decree; but it was clearly understood that no one wearing the insignia would be welcome at the Tuileries.

The Order of the Holy Ghost was instituted by Henri, out of gratitude for two events, for which no other individual had cause to be grateful. He was (when Duke of Anjou) elected King of Poland, on the day of Pentecost, 1573, and on the same day in the following year he succeeded to the crown of France. Hence the Order with its hundred members, and the king as grand master.

St. Foix, in his voluminous history of the order, furnishes the villanous royal founder with a tolerably good character. This is more than any other historian has done; and it is not very satisfactorily executed by this historian himself. He rests upon the principle that the character of a king, or his disposition rather, may be judged by his favorites. He then points to La Marck, Mangiron, Joyeuse, D’Epernon, and others. Their reputations are not of the best, rather of the very worst; but then St. Foix says that they were all admirable swordsmen, and carried scars about them, in front, in proof of their valor: he evidently thinks that the bellica virtus is the same thing as the other virtues.

On the original roll of knights there are names now more worthy of being remembered. Louis de Gonzague, Duke de Nevers, was one of these. On one occasion, he unhorsed the Huguenot Captain de Beaumont, who, as he lay on the ground, fired a pistol and broke the ducal kneepan. The Duke’s squire bent forward with his knife to despatch the Captain; the Duke, however, told the latter to rise. “I wish,” said he, “that you may have a tale to tell that is worth narrating. When you recount, at your fireside, how you wounded the Duke de Nevers, be kind enough to add that he gave you your life.” The Duke was a noble fellow. Would that his generosity could have restored his kneepan! but he limped to the end of his days.

But there was a nobler than he, in the person of the Baron d’Assier, subsequently Count de Crussol and Duke d’Uzes. He was a Huguenot, and I confess that I can not account for the fact of his being, at any time of his life, a Knight of the Order of the Holy Ghost. Henri III. was not likely to have conferred the insignia even on a pervert. His name, however, is on the roll. He was brave, merciful, pious, and scrupulously honest. When he captured Bergerai, he spared all who had no arms in their hands, and finding the women locked up in the churches, he induced them to return home, on promise of being protected from all molestation. These poor creatures must have been marvellously fair; and the baron’s eulogy on them reminds me of the expression of the soldiers when they led Judith through the camp of Holofernes: “Who could despise this people that have among them such women.”

The baron was not a little proud of his feat, and he thought that if all the world talked of the continence of Scipio, he had a right to claim some praise as the protector of female virtue. Accordingly, in forwarding an account of the whole affair to the Duc de Montpensier, he forwarded also a few samples of the ladies. “I have only chosen twenty of the handsomest of them,” he writes, “whom I have sent you that you may judge if they were not very likely to tempt us to reprisals; they will inform you that they have suffered not the least dishonor.” By sending them to Montpensier’s quarters the ladies were in great danger of incurring that from which the Baron had saved them. But he winds up with a small lecture. He writes to the Duke: “You are a devotee [!]; you have a ghostly father; your table is always filled with monks; your hear two or three masses every day; and you go frequently to confession. I confess myself only to God. I hear no masses. I have none but soldiers at my table. Honor is the sole director of my conscience. It will never advise me to order violence against woman, to put to death a defenceless enemy, or to break a promise once given.” In this lecture, there was, in fact, a double-handed blow. Two birds were killed with one stone. The Baron censured, by implication, both the Duke and his religion. I was reminded of him by reading a review in the “Guardian,” where the same skilful method is applied to criticism. The reviewer’s subject was Canon Wordsworth’s volume on Chevalier Bunsen’s “Hippolytus.” “The canon’s book,” said the reviewer (I am quoting from memory), “reminds us—and it must be a humiliation and degradation to an intelligent, educated, and thoughtful man—of one of Dr. Cumming’s Exeter Hall lectures.” Here the ultra high church critic stunned, with one blow, the merely high-church priest and the no-church presbyterian.

There was generosity, at least, in another knight of this order, Francis Goaffier, Lord of Crèvecœur. Catherine of Medicis announced to him the appointment of his son to the command of a regiment of foot. “Madame,” said the Knight of the Holy Ghost, “my son was beset, a night or two ago, by five assassins; a Captain La Vergne drew in his defence, and slew two of the assailants. The rest fled, disabled. If your majesty will confer the regiment on one who deserves it, you will give it to La Vergne.”—“Be it so,” said Catherine, “and your son shall not be the less well provided for.”

One, at least, of the original knights of this order was famous for his misfortunes; this was Charles de Hallewin, Lord of Piennes. He had been in six-and-twenty sieges and battles, and never came out of one unscathed. His domestic wounds were greater still. He had five sons, and one daughter who was married. The whole of them, with his son-in-law, were assassinated, or died accidentally, by violent deaths. The old chevalier went down to his tomb heart-broken and heirless.

Le Roi, Lord of Chavigny, and who must not be mistaken for an ancestor of that Le Roi who died at the Alma under the title of Marshal St. Arnaud, is a good illustration of the blunt, honest knight. Charles IX. once remarked to him that his mother, Catherine de Medicis, boasted that there was not a man in France, with ten thousand livres a year, at whose hearth she had not a spy in her pay. “I do not know,” said Le Roi, “whether tyrants make spies, or spies tyrants. For my own part, I see no use in them, except in war.”