Part 2

But even Mr. Hallam is compelled at last, reluctantly, to confess that the morals of chivalry were not pure. After all his praise of the system, he looks at its literature, and with his eye resting on the tales and romances written for the delight and instruction of chivalric ladies and gentlemen, he remarks that the “violation of marriage vows passes in them for an incontestable privilege of the brave and the fair; and an accomplished knight seems to have enjoyed as undoubted prerogatives, by general consent of opinion, as were claimed by the brilliant courtiers of Louis XV.” There was an especial reason for this, the courtiers of Louis XV. might be anything they chose, provided that with gallantry they were loyal, courteous, and munificent. Now loyalty, courtesy, and that prodigality which goes by the name of munificence, were exactly the virtues that were deemed most essential to chivalry. But these were construed by the old knights as they were by the more modern courtiers. The first took advantages in combat that would now be deemed disloyal by any but a Muscovite. The second would cheat at cards in the gaming saloons of Versailles, while they would run the men through who spoke lightly of their descent. So with regard to courtesy, the knight was full of honeyed phrases to his equals and superiors, but was as coarsely arrogant as Menschikoff to an inferior. In the same way, Louis XIV., who would never pass one of his own scullery-maids without raising his plumed beaver, could address terms to the ladies of his court, which, but for the sacred majesty which was supposed to environ his person, might have purchased for him a severe castigation. Then consider the case of that “first gentleman in Europe,” George, Prince of Wales: he really forfeited his right to the throne by marrying a Catholic lady, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and he freed himself unscrupulously from the scrape by uttering a lie. And so again with munificence; the greater part of these knights and courtiers were entirely thoughtless of the value of money. At the Field of the Cloth of Gold, for instance, whole estates were mortgaged or sold, in order that the owners might outshine all competitors in the brilliancy and quality of their dress. This sort of extravagance makes one man look glad and all his relatives rueful. The fact is that when men thus erred, it was for want of observance of a Christian principle; and if men neglect that observance, it is as little in the power of chivalry as of masonry to mend him. There was “a perfect idea” of chivalry, indeed, but if any knight ever realized it in his own person, he was, simply, nearly a perfect Christian, and would have been still nearer to perfection in the latter character if he had studied the few simple rules of the system of religion rather than the stilted and unsteady ones of romance. The study of the latter, at all events, did not prevent, but in many instances caused a dissoluteness of manners, a fondness for war rather than peace, and a wide distinction between classes, making aristocrats of the few, and villains of the many.

Let me add here, as I have been speaking of the romance of “Lancelot du Lac,” that I quite agree with Montluc, who after completing his chronicle of the History of France, observed that it would be found more profitable reading than either Lancelot or Amadis. La Noue especially condemns the latter as corrupting the manners of the age. Southey, again, observes that these chivalric romances acquired their poison in France or in Italy. The Spanish and Portuguese romances he describes as free from all taint. In the Amadis the very well-being of the world is made to rest upon chivalry. “What would become of the world,” it is asked in the twenty-second book of the Amadis, “if God did not provide for the defence of the weak and helpless against unjust usurpers? And how could provision be made, if good knights were satisfied to do nothing else but sit in chamber with the ladies? What would then the world become, but a vast community of brigands?”

Lamotte Levayer was of a different opinion. “Les armes,” he says, when commenting upon chivalry and arms generally; “Les armes detruisent tous les arts excepté ceux qui favorisent la gloire.” In Germany, too, where chivalry was often turned to the oppression of the weak rather than employed for their protection, the popular contempt and dread of “knightly principles” were early illustrated in the proverb, “Er will Ritter an mir werden,” He wants to play the knight over me. In which proverb, knight stands for oppressor or insulter. In our own country the order came to be little cared for, but on different grounds.

Dr. Nares in his “Heraldic Anomalies,” deplores the fact that mere knighthood has fallen into contempt. He dates this from the period when James I. placed baronets above knights. The hereditary title became a thing to be coveted, but knights who were always held to be knights bachelors, could not of course bequeath a title to child or children who were not supposed in heraldry to exist. The Doctor quotes Sir John Ferne, to show that Olibion, the son of Asteriel, of the line of Japhet, was the first knight ever created. The personage in question was sent forth to battle, after his sire had smitten him lightly nine times with Japhet’s falchion, forged before the flood. There is little doubt but that originally a knight was simply _Knecht_, servant of the king. Dr. Nares says that the Thanes were so in the north, and that these, although of gentle blood, exercised the offices even of cooks and barbers to the royal person. But may not these offices have been performed by the “unter Thans,” or deputies? I shall have occasion to observe, subsequently, on the law which deprived a knight’s descendants of his arms, if they turned merchants; but in Saxon times it is worthy of observation, that if a merchant made three voyages in one of his own ships, he was thenceforward the Thane’s right-worthy, or equal.

Among the Romans a blow on the ear gave the slave freedom. Did the blow on the shoulder given to a knight make a free-servant of him? Something of the sort seems to have been intended. The title was doubtless mainly but not exclusively military. To dub, from the Saxon word _dubban_, was either to gird or put on, “don,” or was to _strike_, and perhaps both may be meant, for the knight was girt with spurs, as well as stricken, or _geschlagen_ as the German term has it.

There was striking, too, at the unmaking of a knight. His heels were then degraded of their spurs, the latter being beaten or chopped away. “His heels deserved it,” says Bertram of the cowardly Parolles, “his heels deserved it for usurping of his spurs so long.” The sword, too, on such occasions, was broken.

Fuller justly says that “the plainer the coat is, the more ancient and honorable.” He adds, that “two colors are necessary and most highly honorable: three are very highly honorable; _four_ commendable; _five_ excusable; more disgraceful.” He must have been a gastronomic King-at-Arms, who so loaded a “coat” with fish, flesh, and fowl, that an observer remarked, “it was well victualled enough to stand a siege.” _Or_ is the richest coloring, but, as Fuller again says, “Herbs _vert_, being natural, are better than _Or_.” He describes a “_Bend_ as the best _ordinary_, being a belt athwart,” but a coat bruised with a bar sinister is hardly a distinction to be proud of. If the heralds of George the Second’s time looked upon that monarch as the son of Count Königsmark, as Jacobite-minded heralds may have been malignant enough to do, they no doubt mentally drew the degrading bar across the royal arms, and tacitly denied the knighthood conferred by what they, in such foolish case, would have deemed an illegitimate hand.

Alluding to reasons for some bearings, Fuller tells us that, “whereas the Earls of Oxford anciently gave their ‘coats’ plain, quarterly _gules_ and _or_, they took afterward in the first a _mullet_ or _star-argent_, because the chief of the house had a falling-star, as it was said, alighting on his shield as he was fighting in the Holy Land.”

It is to be observed that when treating of precedency, Fuller places knights, or “soldiers” with seamen, civilians, and physicians, and after saints, confessors, prelates, statesmen, and judges. Knights and physicians he seems to have considered as equally terrible to life; but in his order of placing he was led by no particular principle, for among the lowest he places “learned writers,” and “benefactors to the public.” He has, indeed, one principle, as may be seen, wherein he says, “I place first princes, good manners obliging all other persons to follow them, as religion obliges me to follow God’s example by a royal recognition of that original precedency, which he has granted to his vicegerents.”

The Romans are said to have established the earliest known order of knighthood; and the members at one time wore rings, as a mark of distinction, as in later times knights wore spurs. The knights of the Holy Roman Empire were members of a modern order, whose sovereigns are not, what they would have themselves considered, descendants of the Cæsars. If we only knew what our own Round Table was, and where it stood, we should be enabled to speak more decisively upon the question of the chevaliers who sat around it. But it is undecided whether the table was not really a house. At it, or in it, the knights met during the season of Pentecost, but whether the assembly was collected at Winchester or Windsor no one seems able to determine; and he would impart no particularly valuable knowledge even if he could.

Knighthood was a sort of nobility worth having, for it testified to the merit of the wearer. An inherited title should, indeed, compel him who succeeds to it, to do nothing to disgrace it: but preserving the lustre is not half so meritorious as creating it. _Knights bachelors_ were so called because the distinction was conferred for some act of _personal_ courage, to reward for which the offspring of the knight could make no claim. He was, in this respect, to them as though he had been never married. The knight bachelor was a truly proud man. The word _knecht_ simply implied a servant, sworn to continue good service in honor of the sovereign, and of God and St. George. “I remain your sworn servant” is a form of epistolary valediction which crept into the letters of other orders in later times. The manner of making was more theatrical than at the present time; and we should now smile if we were to see, on a lofty scaffold in St. Paul’s, a city gentleman seated in a chair of silver adorned with green silk, undergoing exhortation from the bishop, and carried up between two lords, to be dubbed under the sovereign’s hand, a good knight, by the help of Heaven and his patron saint.

In old days belted earls could create knights. In modern times, the only subject who is legally entitled to confer the honor of chivalry is the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; and some of his “subjects” consider it the most terrible of his privileges. The attempt to dispute the right arose, perhaps, from those who dreaded the exercise of it on themselves. However this may be, it is certain that the _vexata questio_ was finally set at rest in 1823, when the judges declared that the power in question undoubtedly resided in the Lords Lieutenant, since the Union, as it did in the viceroys who reigned vicariously previous to that period. According to the etiquette of heraldry, the distinctive appellation “Sir” should never be omitted even when the knight is a noble of the first hereditary rank. “The Right Honorable Sir Hugh Percy, Duke of Northumberland,” would have been the proper heraldic defining of his grace when he became Knight of the Garter, for it is a rule that “the greater dignity doth never drown the lesser, but both stand together in one person.”

A knight never surrendered his sword but to a knight. “Are you knight and gentleman?” asked Suffolk, when, four hundred years ago, he yielded to Regnault: “I am a gentleman,” said Regnault, “but I am not yet a knight.” Whereupon Suffolk bade him kneel, dubbed him knight, received the accustomed oaths, and then gave up his old sword to the new chevalier.

Clark considered that the order was degraded from its exclusively military character, when membership was conferred upon gownsmen, physician, burghers, and artists. He considered that civil merit, so distinguished, was a loss of reputation to military knights. The logic by which he arrives at such a conclusion is rather of the loosest. It may be admitted, however, that the matter has been specially abused in Germany. Monsieur About, that clever gentleman, who wrote “Tolla” out of somebody else’s book, very pertinently remarks in his review of the fine-art department of the Paris Exhibition, that the difference between English and German artists is, that the former are well-paid, but that very few of them are knights, while the latter are ill-paid and consequently ill-clothed; but, for lack of clothes, have abundance of ribands.

Dr. Nares himself is of something of the opinion of Clark, and he ridicules the idea of a chivalric and martial title being given to brewers, silversmiths, attorneys, apothecaries, upholsterers, hosiers, tailors. &c. He asserts that knighthood should belong only to military members: but of these no inconsiderable number would have to be unknighted, or would have to wait an indefinite time for the honor were the old rule strictly observed, whereby no man was entitled to the rank and degree of knighthood, who had not actually been in battle and captured a prisoner with his own hands. With respect to the obligation on knights to defend and maintain all ladies, gentlewomen, widows, and orphans; the one class of men may be said to be just as likely to fulfil this obligation, as the other class.

France, Italy, and Germany, long had their forensic knights, certain titles at the bar giving equal privileges; and the obligations above alluded to were supposed to be observed by these knights--who found esquires in their clerks, in the forensic war which they were for ever waging in defence of right. Unhappily these forensic chevaliers so often fought in defence of wrong and called it right, that the actual duty was indiscriminately performed or neglected.

It has often been said of “orders” that they are indelible. However this may be with the clergy, it is especially the case with knights. To whatever title a knight might attain, duke, earl, or baron, he never ceased to be a knight. In proof too that the latter title was considered one of augmentation, is cited the case of Louis XI., who, at his coronation, was knighted by Philip, Duke of Burgundy. “If Louis,” says an eminent writer (thus cited by Dr. Nares), “had been made duke, marquis, or earl, it would have detracted from him, all those titles being in himself.”

The crown, when it stood in need of the chivalrous arms of its knights, called for the required feudal service, not from its earls as such, but from its barons. To every earldom was annexed a barony, whereby their feudal service with its several dependent duties was alone ascertained. “That is,” says Berington, in his Henry II., “the tenure of barony and not of earldom constituted the legal vassal of the crown. Each earl was at the same time a baron, as were the bishops and some abbots and priors of orders.”

Some of these barons were the founders of parish churches, but the terms on which priest and patron occasionally lived may be seen in the law, whereby patrons or feudatarii killing the rector, vicar, or clerk of their church, or mutilating him, were condemned to lose their rights; and their posterity, to the fourth generation, was made incapable of benefice or prelacy in religious houses. The knightly patron was bound to be of the same religious opinions, of course, as his priest, or his soul had little chance of being prayed for. In later times we have had instances of patrons determining the opinions of the minister. Thus as a parallel, or rather in contrast with measures as they stood between Sir Knight and Sir Priest, may be taken a passage inserted in the old deeds of the Baptist chapel at Oulney. In this deed the managers or trustees injoined that “no person shall ever be chosen pastor of this church, who shall differ in his religious sentiments from the Rev. John Gibbs of Newcastle.” It is rather a leap to pass thus from the baronial knights to the Baptist chapels, but the matter has to do with my subject at both extremities. Before leaving it I will notice the intimation proudly made on the tombstone in Bunhill Fields Cemetery, of Dame Mary Page, relict of Sir George Page. The lady died more than a century and a quarter ago, and although the stone bears no record of any virtue save that she was patient and fearless under suffering, it takes care to inform all passers-by, that this knight’s lady, “in sixty-seven months was tapped sixty-six times, and had taken away two hundred and forty gallons of water, without ever repining at her case, or ever fearing its operation.” I prefer the mementoes of knight’s ladies in olden times which recorded their deeds rather than their diseases, and which told of them, as White said of Queen Mary, that their “knees were hard with kneeling.”

I will add one more incident, before changing the topic, having reference as it has to knights, maladies, and baptism. In 1660, Sir John Floyer was the most celebrated knight-physician of his day. He chiefly tilted against the disuse of baptismal immersion. He did not treat the subject theologically, but in a sanitary point of view. He prophesied that England would return to the practice as soon as people were convinced that cold baths were safe and useful. He denounced the first innovators who departed from immersion, as the destroyers of the health of their children and of posterity. Degeneracy of race, he said, had followed, hereditary diseases increased, and men were mere carpet-knights unable to perform such lusty deeds as their duly-immersed forefathers.

There are few volumes which so admirably illustrate what knights _should_ be, and what they sometimes were _not_, as De Joinville’s Chronicle of the Crusades of St. Louis--that St. Louis, who was himself the patron-saint of an order, the cross of which was at first conferred on princes, and at last on perruquiers. The faithful chronicler rather profanely, indeed, compares the royal knight with God himself. “As God died for his people, so did St. Louis often peril his life, and incurred the greatest dangers, for the people of his kingdom.” After all, this simile is as lame as it is profane. The truth, nevertheless, as it concerns St. Louis, is creditable to the illustrious king, saint, and chevalier. “In his conversation he was remarkably chaste, for I never heard him, at any time, utter an indecent word, nor make use of the devil’s name; which, however, now is very commonly uttered by every one, but which I firmly believe, is so far from being agreeable to God, that it is highly displeasing to him.” The King St. Louis, mixed water with his wine, and tried to force his knights to follow his example, adding, that “it was a beastly thing for an honorable man to make himself drunk.” This was a wise maxim, and one naturally held by a son, whose mother had often declared to him, that “she would rather he was in his grave, than that he should commit a mortal sin.” And yet wise as his mother, and wise as her son was, the one could not give wise religious instructors to the latter, nor the latter perceive where their instruction was illogical. That it _was_ so, may be discerned in the praise given by De Joinville, to the fact, that the knightly king in his dying moments “called upon God and his saints, and _especially_ upon St. James, and St. Genevieve, _as his intercessors_.”

It is interesting to learn from such good authority as De Joinville, the manner in which the knights who followed St. Louis prepared themselves for their crusading mission. “When I was ready to set out, I sent for the Abbot of Cheminon, who was at that time considered as the most discreet man of all the White Monks, to reconcile myself with him. He gave me my scarf, and bound it on me, and likewise put the pilgrim’s staff in my hand. Instantly after I quitted the castle of Joinville, without even re-entering it until my return from beyond sea. I made pilgrimages to all the holy places in the neighborhood, such as Bliecourt, St. Urban, and others near to Joinville. I dared never turn my eyes that way, for fear of feeling too great regret, and lest my courage should fail on leaving my two fine children, and my fair castle of Joinville, which I loved in my heart.” “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” and here we have the touch the poet speaks of. Down the Saône and subsequently down the Rhone, the crusaders flock in ample vessels, but not large enough to contain their steeds, which were led by grooms along the banks. When all had re-embarked at Marseilles and were fairly out at sea, “the captain made the priests and clerks mount to the castle of the ship, and chant psalms in praise of God, that he might be pleased to grant us a prosperous voyage.” While they were singing the _Veni Creator_ in full chorus, the mariners set the sails “in the name of God,” and forthwith a favorable breeze sprang up in answer to the appeal, and knights and holy men were speedily careering over the billows of the open sea very hopeful and exceedingly sick. “I must say here,” says De Joinville, who was frequently so disturbed by the motion of the vessel, so little of a knight, and so timid on the water as to require a couple of men to hold him as he leant over the side in the helpless and unchivalrous attitude of a cockney landsman on board a Boulogne steamer--“I must say,” he exclaims--sick at the very reminiscence, “that he is a great fool who shall put himself in such dangers, having wronged any one, or having any mortal sins on his conscience; for when he goes to sleep in the evening, he knows not if in the morning he may not find himself under the sea.”