Part 15
Shakespeare makes Richard III. swear by his George, his Garter, and his Crown; but the George and Collar were novelties introduced by Henry VII. The latter King held one of the most splendid chapters which ever assembled, at York, prefacing the work there by riding with all the knights, in their robes, to the morning mass of requiem, and following it up by similarly riding to even-sung. This was more decent than Henry VI.’s tavern chapter of the (Red) Lion, in Brentford. Henry VII. was fond of the solemn splendor of installations, at which he changed his costume like a versatile actor, was surrounded by ladies as well as knights, and had Skelton, the poet, near to take notes for songs and sonnets, descriptive of the occasion. A sovereign of the order, like Henry VII., so zealous to maintain its splendor and efficiency, merited the gift which was conferred upon him by the Cardinal of Rouen--of the bones of one of the legs of St. George. The saint had many legs, but it is not said where these bones were procured, and they who beheld them, at the chapter held in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1505, probably little troubled themselves as to whence the precious relics were derived. Henry, in return, left an image of St. George, of one hundred and forty ounces, adorned with masses of precious stones, to the College of Windsor, “there to remain _while the world shall endure_, to be set upon the high altar at all solemn feasts.” Leg bones and costly image would now be sought for in vain. The world has outlived them, and suffers nothing by their loss.
It was the successor of Richmond, namely Henry VIII. who granted to these knights what may be termed a sumptuary privilege, that of being permitted to wear woollen cloth made out of the realm. None but a knight, save the peers, dared don a coat or mantle made of foreign cloth. In love of splendor, Henry was equal to his predecessor, and perhaps never was a more brilliant spectacle seen than on the 27th of May, 1519, when the King and a glittering cortège rode from Richmond to Windsor, and changed steeds and drank a cup at the “Catherine’s Wheel,” in Colnbrook, by the way. The Queen and a galaxy of ladies met them in Eton, and the usual solemnities were followed by a gorgeous banquet, at which there were such meat and music as had scarcely ever been so highly enjoyed at a festival before. The middle of the hall was crowded with spectators, but at the close of the repast, these were turned out, when “the King was served of his void, the knights also, standing all along”--which must have been a remarkably edifying exhibition.
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, As I observed his honorable name. I heard it was his chance, o’erta’en with sleep, To take a nap near to a farmer’s lodge. Trusted a little with himself belike, This aged earl in his apparel plain, Wrapt in his russet gown, lay down to rest, His badge of honor buckled to his leg. Bare and naked. There came a pilfering swad And would have preyed upon this ornament Essayed t’ unbuckle it, thinking him asleep. The noble gentleman, feeling what he meant-- ‘Hold, foolish lad,’ quoth he, ‘a better prey: ‘This Garter is not fit for ev’ry leg, ‘And I account it better than my purse. The varlet ran away, the earl awaked. And told his friends, and smiling said withal, ‘’A would not, had ’a understood the French ‘Writ on my Garter, dared t’ have stol’n the same.’ This tale I thought upon, told me for truth, The rather for it praised the Posy, Right grave and honorable, that importeth much-- ‘Evil be to him,’ it saith, ‘that evil thinks.’”
Elizabeth was distinguished for loving to hold newly-chosen knights in suspense, before she ratified their election by her approval. The anniversary banquets too fell into disuse during her reign, and she introduced the most unworthy knight that had ever stood upon the record of the order. This was Charles IX. of France. On the other hand she sent the Garter to Henri Quatre. He was the last French monarch who was a companion of the order, till the reign of Louis XVIII. On the day the latter came up from Hartwell to Stanmore, on his way to France, at the period of the first restoration, the Prince Regent invested him with the brilliant insignia at Carlton House. It was on this occasion Louis XVIII. observed that he was the first King of France who had worn the garter since the period of Henri Quatre. Louis had erased his own name from the Golden Book of Nobility of Venice, when he heard that the name of Bonaparte had been inserted therein. He, perhaps, would have declined receiving the Garter, if he could have foreseen that the royal niece of the Prince Regent would, in after years, confer the order on the imperial nephew of Napoleon.
The period of James is marked by some pretty quarrels among the officials. Thus at the installation of Prince Henry, there was a feast which was well nigh turned into a fray. At the very beginning of it, the prebends and heralds fell to loggerheads on the delicate question of precedency. The alms-knights mingled in the quarrel by siding with the prebends, and claiming the next degree of precedency before the heralds. Reference was made to the Earls of Nottingham and Worcester. The referees adjudged the heralds to have right of precedency before the prebends. Thereupon the proud prebends, oblivious of Christian humility, refused to go to church at the tail of the heralds. The latter went in exultingly without them, and the prebends would not enter until a long time had elapsed, so that it could not be said they followed the gentlemen of the tabard. The delicate question was again angrily discussed, and at length referred to the whole body of knights. The noble fraternity, after grave deliberation, finally determined that on the next day of St. George, being Sunday, in the procession to the church, the alms-knights should go first, then the pursuivants of arms, then the prebends (many of whom were doctors of divinity), and finally the heralds. The latter were cunning rogues, and no inconsiderable authority in matters of precedency; and they immediately declared that the knights had decreed to them the better place, inasmuch as that in most processions the principal personages did not walk first.
Of the knights of this reign, Grave Maurice, Prince of Orange, and Frederick the (Goody) Palsgrave of the Rhine, were among the most celebrated. They were installed in 1613, the Prince by proxy, and the Palsgrave in person. A young and graceful Count Ludovic of Nassau, was chosen at the last moment, to represent the Prince, whose appointed representative, Count Henry, was detained in Holland by adverse winds. “The feast,” says an eye-witness, “was in the Great Hall, where the king dined at the upper table alone, served in state by the Lord Gerard as Sewer, the Lord Morris as Cupbearer, the Lord Compton as Carver; all that were of the order, at a long cross table across the hall. The Prince by himself alone, and the Palatine a little distance from him. But the Count Nassau was ranged over-against my Lord Admiral, and so took place of all after the Sovereign Princes, not without a little muttering of our Lords, who would have had him ranged according to seniority, if the king had not overruled it by prerogative.”
Wilson, in his history of James I., narrates a curious anecdote respecting this Grave Maurice and the ribbon of the order. “Prince Maurice took it as a great honor to be admitted into the Fraternity of that Order, and wore it constantly; till afterward, some villains at the Hague, that met the reward of their demerit (one of them, a Frenchman, being groom of the Prince’s chamber) robbed a jeweller of Amsterdam that brought jewels to the Prince. This groom, tempting him into his chamber, to see some jewels, there, with his confederates, strangled the man with one of the Prince’s Blue Ribbons; which being afterward discovered, the Prince would never suffer so fatal an instrument to come about his neck.”
James, by raising his favorite Buckingham, then only Sir George Villiers, to the degree of Knight of the Garter, was considered to have as much outraged the order as Henry VIII. had done by investing Cromwell with the insignia. Chamberlain, in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, says, “The King went away the next day after St. George’s Feast, toward Newmarket and Thetford, the Earl of Rutland and Sir George Villiers being that morning elected into the order of the Garter, which seemed at first a strange choice, in regard that the wife of the former is an open and known recusant, and _he_ is said to have many dangerous people about him; and the latter is so lately come into the sight of the world, and withal it is doubted that he had not sufficient likelihood to maintain the dignity of the place, according to express articles of the order. But to take away that scruple, the King hath bestowed upon him the Lord Gray’s lands, and means, they say, to mend his grant with much more, not far distant, in the present possession of the Earl of Somerset, if he do _cadere causâ_ and sink in the business now in hand.” The last passage alludes to the murder of Overbury.
The going down to Windsor was at this time a pompous spectacle. The riding thither of the Knights Elect is thus spoken of by a contemporary: “On Monday,” (St. George’s day, 1615), “our Knights of the Garter, Lord Fenton and Lord Knollys, ride to Windsor, with great preparation to re-vie one with another who shall make the best show. Though I am of opinion the latter will carry it by many degrees, by reason of the alliance with the houses of the Howards, Somerset, Salisbury, and Dorset, with many other great families that will bring him their friends, and most part of the pensioners. Yet most are persuaded the other will bear away the bell, as having the best part of the court, all the bed-chamber, all the prince’s servants and followers, with a hundred of the Guard, that have new rich coats made on purpose, besides Sir George Villiers (the favorite), and Mr. Secretary--whose presence had been better forborne, in my judgment, for many reasons--but that every man abound in his own sense.” James endeavored to suppress, in some measure, the expensive ride of the Knights Elect to Windsor, but only with partial success. His attempted reform, too, had a selfish aspect; he tried to make it profitable to himself. He prohibited the giving of livery coats, “for saving charge and avoiding emulation,” and at the same time ordered that all existing as well as future companions should present a piece of plate of the value of twenty pounds sterling at least for the use of the altar in St. George’s Chapel.
Charles I. held chapters in more places in England than any other king--now at York, now at Nottingham, now at Oxford, and in other localities. These chapters were sometimes attended by as few as four knights, and for the most part they were shorn of much of the ancient ceremony. He held some brilliant chapters at Windsor, nevertheless. At one of them, the election of the Earl of Northumberland inspired a bard, whose song I subjoin because it is illustrative of several incidents which are far from lacking interest.
“A brief description of the triumphant show made by the Right Honorable Aulgernon Percie Earl of Northumberland, at his installation and initiation into the princely fraternity of the Garter, on the 13th of May, 1635.”
_To the tune of “Quell the Pride.”_
“You noble buds of Britain, That spring from honor’s tree, Who love to hear of high designs, Attend awhile to me. And I’ll (in brief) discover what Fame bids me take in hand-- To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“The order of the Garter, Ere since third Edward reigned Unto the realm of England hath A matchless honor gained. The world hath no society, Like to this princely band, To raise The praise Of great Northumberland.
“The honor of his pedigree Doth claim a high regard, And many of his ancestors For fame thought nothing hard. And he, through noble qualities, Which are exactly scanned, Doth raise The praise Of great Northumberland.
“Against the day appointed, His lordship did prepare; To publish his magnificence No charges he did spare. The like within man’s memory Was never twice in hand To raise The praise Of great Northumberland.
“Upon that day it seemed All Brittany did strive, And did their best to honor him With all they could contrive. For all our high nobility Joined in a mutual land To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“The common eyes were dazzled With wonder to behold The lustre of apparel rich, All silver, pearl, and gold, Which on brave coursers mounted, Did glisten through the Strand, To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“But ere that I proceed This progress to report, I should have mentioned the feast Made at Salisbury Court. Almost five hundred dishes Did on the table stand, To raise The praise Of great Northumberland.”
_The Second Part, to the same tune._
“The mightiest prince or monarch That in the world doth reign, At such a sumptuous banquet might Have dined without disdain, Where sack, like conduit water, Was free ever at command, To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“The famous Fleet-street conduit, Renowned so long ago, Did not neglect to express what love She to my lord did owe. For like an old proud woman The painted face doth stand To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“A number of brave gallants, Some knights and some esquires, Attended at this triumph great, Clad in complete attires. The silver half-moon gloriously Upon their sleeves doth stand, To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“All these on stately horses, That ill endured the bit, Were mounted in magnific cost, As to the time was fit. Their feathers white and red did show, Like to a martial band, To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“The noble earls and viscounts, And barons, rode in state: This great and high solemnity All did congratulate. To honor brave Earl Percy Each put a helping hand To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“King Charles, our royal sovereign, And his renownéd Mary, With Britain’s hope, their progeny, All lovingly did tarry At noble Viscount Wimbleton’s, I’ the fairest part o’ th’ Strand, To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“To famous Windsor Castle, With all his gallant train, Earl _Pearcy_ went that afternoon His honor to obtain. And there he was installed One of St. George’s band, To blaze The praise Of great Northumberland.
“Long may he live in honor, In plenty and in peace; 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.
There is something quite as curious touching the history of the Garter worn by Charles I., as what Mr. Macaulay tells concerning the George. The diamonds upon it, forming the motto, were upward of four hundred in number. On the day of the execution, this valuable ornament fell into the hands of one of Cromwell’s captains of cavalry, named Pearson. After one exchange of hands, it was sold to John Ireton, sometime Lord-Mayor of London, for two hundred and five pounds. At the Restoration, a commission was appointed to look after the scattered royal property generally; and the commissioners not only recovered some pictures belonging to Charles, from Mrs. Cromwell, who had placed them in charge of a tradesman in Thames street, but they discovered that Ireton held the Garter, and they summoned him to deliver it up accordingly. It has been said that the commissioners offered him the value of the jewel if he would surrender it. This is not the case. The report had been founded on a misapprehension of terms. Ireton did not deny that he possessed the Garter by purchase, whereupon “composition was offered him, according to the direction of the Commission, as in all other like cases where anything could not be had in kind.” That is, he was ordered to surrender the jewel, or if this had been destroyed, its value, or some compensation in lieu thereof. Ireton refused the terms altogether. The King, Charles II., thereupon sued him in the Court of King’s Bench, where the royal plaintiff obtained a verdict for two hundred and five pounds, and ten pounds costs of suit.