They’re vulgar dogs, but for his creed
I hold that no man will be d——d.
The Cavalier was the inheritor of the mediaeval knight and the forerunner of the modern gentleman. To the stern Puritan conscience he opposed, as his guiding motive, the knightly sense of honor, a sort of artificial or aristocratic conscience. The Puritan looked upon himself as an instrument of the divine will. He acted as ever in his great taskmaster’s eye: his sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. Hence his sturdy, sublime courage. You cannot lick a Calvinist who knows that God is with him. But honor is not so much a regard for God as for oneself—a finer kind of self-respect. Inferior in momentum to the Puritan’s sense of duty, there is something gallant and chivalrous about it. The Cavalier spirit was not so grave as the knight’s. Though he fought for church and king, there was lacking the vow of knighthood, the religious dedication of oneself to the service of the cross and of one’s feudal suzerain. But you notice how the Cavalier, like the knight, relates his honor to the service of his lady. Lovelace’s famous lines:—
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more,
may stand for the Cavalier motto.
Like the knight, the chevalier of the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century Cavalier too, as his name implies, was a horseman. Rupert’s cavalry was the strongest arm of the King’s service. Prince Rupert or Ruprecht, the nephew of the King, was the son of that Elizabeth Stuart, nicknamed the Queen of Hearts, whom Sir Henry Wotton celebrated in his lofty lines “On his Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia,”
You meaner beauties of the night
That poorly satisfy our eyes,
More by your number than your light;