Part 34

We come upon another social trait, when we find the author lamenting that, however much it becometh a gentleman to be acquainted with hawking and hunting, yet that these pastimes are so abused by being followed to excess, that “gentlemen will almost do nothing else, or at the least can do that better than any other thing.” To the excess alluded to does the author trace the fact that “there are so many raw soldiers when time of war requireth their help. This is the cause of so many unlearned gentlemen, which, as some say, they understand not the inkhorn terms that are lately crept into our language. And no marvel it is, though they do not understand them, whereas in their own hawking and hunting terms they be ignorants as ‘Auvent’ and ‘Retrouvre,’ which they call ‘_Houent_’ and ‘_Retrires_.’” What better could be expected from men who had given up the practice of the long bow to take to the throwing of dice? But there was now as wild extravagance of dress as ignorance of uncommon things, in the class of foolish knights and gentlemen. This is alluded to in the chapter on dress, wherein it is said that “the sum of one hundred pounds is not to be accounted in these days to be bestowed of apparel for one gentleman, but in times past, a chamber gown was a garment which dwelt with an esquire of England twenty years”--and I believe that the knights were as frugal as the esquires. “Then flourished the laudable simplicity of England,” exclaims the author; “there were no conjurors and hot scholars, applying our minds to learne our new trifle in wearing our apparel.” Upon the point of fashions, the author writes with a feeling as if he despaired of his country. “The Englishman,” he observes, “changeth daily the fashion of his garment; sometimes he delighteth in many guards, welts and pinks, and pounces. Sometimes again, to the contrary, he weareth his garments as plain as a sack; yet faileth he not to change also that plainness if any other new fangle be invented. This is the vanity of his delight.” And this vanity was common to all men of high degree in his time--to those to whom “honor” was due, from men of less degree--and these were “dukes, earls, lords, and such like, of high estate,” as well as to those who were entitled to the “worship” of smaller men, and _these_ were “knights, esquires, and gentlemen.” There is here, I think, some confusion in the way such terms are applied; but I have not made the extract for the purpose of grounding a comment upon it, but because it illustrates one portion of my subject, and shows that while “your honor” was once the due phrase of respect to the peerage, “your worship” was the reverential one paid to knights, esquires, _and_ gentlemen. We still apply the terms, if not to the different degrees named above, yet quite as confusedly, or as thoughtlessly with respect to the point whether there be anything honorable or worshipful in the individual addressed. This, however, is only a form lingering among the lower classes. As matters of right, however, “his honor” still sits in Chancery, and “your worship” is to be seen behind any justice’s table.

We will now return to a race of kings who, whatever their defects, certainly did not lack some of the attributes of chivalry.

THE KINGS OF ENGLAND AS KNIGHTS.

THE STUARTS.

“May’t be pleasure to a reader’s ear, That never drew save his own country’s air, To hear such things related.” HEYWOOD, _the English Traveller_

It is an incontrovertible fact, that the king of England, who least of all resembled a knight in his warlike character, was the one who surpassed all his brother sovereigns in his knightly spirit as a lover. I allude to James I. The godson of Charles IX. of France was in his childhood, what his godfather had never been, a dirty, droll boy. He is the only king who ever added an original remark to a royal speech set down for him to deliver. The remark in question was, probably, nearly as long as the speech, for James was but four years old when he gave utterance to it. He had been rolling about on the throne impishly watching, the while, the grim lords to whom he, ultimately, recited a prepared speech with great gravity and correctness. At the end of his speech, he pointed to a split in the tiled roof of the hall, or to a rent in the canopy of the throne, and announced to the lords and others present the indisputable fact, that “there was a hole in the parliament.”

The precocious lad passed no very melancholy boyhood in Stirling Castle, till the Raid of Ruthven took him from his natural protectors, and placed him in the hands of Gowrie. His escape thence exhibited both boldness and judgment in a youth of sixteen; and when Frederick II., of Denmark, gave him the choice of the two Danish princesses for a wife, no one thought that so gallant a king was undeserving of the compliment. When it was, however, discovered that the royal Dane required James either to accept a daughter or surrender the Orkney and Shetland islands, as property illegally wrested from Denmark, men began to look upon the Danish king as guilty of uncommonly sharp practice toward the sovereign of the Scots. A world of trouble ensued, which it is not my business to relate, although were I inclined to be discursive--which, of course, I am _not_--I might find great temptation to indulge therein, upon this very subject. Suffice it then to say, that a world of trouble ensued before James made his selection, and agreed to take, rather than prayed to have granted to him, the hand of Elizabeth, the elder daughter of Frederick II.

How the intrigues of Queen Elizabeth prevented this marriage I must not pause to relate. The Danish Princess espoused a reigning duke, and James was on the point of engaging himself to Katherine of Navarre, when the offer of the hand of Anne the younger daughter of Frederick being made to him, coupled with the alternative of his either taking Anne, or losing the islands, he “prayed and advised with God, for a fortnight,” and wisely resolved to wed with “pretty Anne.”

The matter progressed anything but smoothly for a time. At length, after endless vexations, the young princess was married by proxy, in August, 1589, and set sail, soon after, for Scotland under convoy of a dozen gallant ships, and with prospects of a very unpleasant voyage.

A terrible storm blew bride and convoy on to the inhospitable coast of Norway, and although two or three witches were executed for raising this storm out of very spite, the matter was not mended. Disaster pursued the fleet, and death overtook several who sailed in it, till the coast of Scotland was fairly in sight. The Scotch witches, or perhaps other causes not less powerful than witches, in those seas, in the fall of the year, then blew the fleet back to the mouth of the Baltic. “I was commissioned,” said Peter Munch, the admiral, “to land the young queen in Scotland; it is clear, therefore, that I can not return with her to Denmark. I will put her majesty ashore, therefore, in Norway.” The conclusion was not logically attained, but the fact was as we have described it. Letters reached James announcing to him the deplorable condition in which his queen was lying at Upslo, on the Norwegian coast--storm-bound and half-famished. After many projects considered for her relief, James resolved to set forth and seek the princess himself. It is in this passage of his life that we have an illustration of the degree in which he surpassed all other kings who have sat on the English throne--as a gallant knight _es amours_.

Toward the end of October, of this year, in the very stormiest portion of the season, James went, privately, on board a diminutive vessel, with a very reluctant party of followers and confederates, leaving behind him, for the information of the astonished lieges, a promise to be back in twenty days; and for their especial profit, a solemn exhortation to live peaceably till he arrived again among them, with his wife.

The knightly lover landed in Norway, early in November, and made his way along the coast, now on foot, now on horseback anon in sledges, and occasionally in boats or on shipboard, until with infinite pains, and in a sorry plight, he reached Upslo, to no one’s astonishment more than the queen’s, about the 19th of November. Accoutred and travel-soiled as he was, he proceeded at once to her presence. He was so well-pleased with the fair vision before him, that he made as if he would at once kiss the queen, who stood gazing at him. “It is not the form of my country,” said pretty Anne, not very violently holding her head aside. “It’s good old Scottish fashion,” said the young king: and it was observed that in less than an hour, Anne had fallen very completely into the pleasant mode from beyond seas, and quite forgotten the forms of Denmark.

The young couple were duly married in person, on the Sunday following the arrival of James. The latter, like any Paladin of romance, had perilled life, and contended with almost insurmountable obstacles, in order to win the royal lady after a less easy fashion than marks the wooing and wedding of kings generally. Such a couple deserved to have the merriest of marriage banquets, but while such a storm was raging without as Norway itself had never seen since the sea-wind first blew over her, such a tempest was raised within, by the Scottish nobles, on a question of precedence, that the king himself was chiefly occupied in soothing the quarrellers, and only half succeeded in accomplishing the desired end. Added to this was the prospect of a long winter among the melancholy huts of Upslo. James, however, again exhibited the spirit of a knight of more than ordinary gallantry. He not only resolved that the young queen should not be thus imprisoned amid the Norway snows till May, but he resolved to conduct her himself across the Norwegian Alps, through Sweden, to her Danish home. The idea of such a journey seemed to partake of insanity, but James proceeded to realize it, by means of method and judgment. He first performed the perilous journey alone, as far as Sweden, and finding it practicable, returned for his wife, and departed a second time, in her company. Much peril but small accident accompanied them on their way, and when the wedding party arrived safely at Cronenburg, toward the end of January, the marriage ceremony was not only repeated for the third time--to despite the witches who can do nothing against the luck that is said to lie in odd numbers, but there was a succession of marriage feasts, at which every gentleman drank deeper and deeper every day, until such uproar and dissension ensued that few kept their daggers in sheath except those who were too drunk to draw them. That all were not in the more disgraceful state, or were not continually in that condition, may be conjectured from the fact that James paid a visit to Tycho Brahe, and conversed with the astronomer in his observatory, in very vigorous Latin. The king, however, was not sorry to leave old Denmark, and when a Scottish fleet appeared off Cronenburg, to convey his bride and himself homeward, he could no more be persuaded to stay a day longer, than Tycho Brahe could be persuaded that Copernicus was correct in dislodging the earth from its Ptolemaic stand-point as centre of the solar system. The bridal party set sail on the 21st of April, 1590, and was safely moored in Leith harbor on May-day. A pretty bride could not have arrived at a more appropriate season. The royal knight and his lady deserved all the happiness that could be awarded to the gallantry of the one and the beauty of the other. But they did not escape the trials common to much less dignified couples; and here the knightly character of James may be said to terminate. Exemplary as he had been as a lover, and faithful as he continued to be as a husband, he was in all other respects, simply a shrewd man; and not indeed always _that_. There is little of this quality in a husband who begins and continues his married life with an indifference upon the matter of borrowing. With James it was silver spoons to-day, silk stockings to-morrow, and marks and moidores from any one who would give him credit. The old French knight who drank broth out of his own helmet rather than sip it from a borrowed bowl, was moved at least by a good principle. James rather agreed with Carlo Buffone, in Jonson’s “Every Man out of his Humor,” that “it is an excellent policy to owe much in these days.” A policy which, unfortunately, is still deemed excellent, in spite of the ruin which attends its practice.

The grave chivalry impressed on the face and features of Charles I., is strikingly alluded to by Ben Jonson in his Masque of “The Metamorphosed Gypsies;” for example:--

“His brow, his eye, and ev’ry mark of state, As if he were the issue of each grace, And bore about him _both his fame and fate_.”

Echard says of him, that he was perfect in all knightly exercises, “vaulting, riding the great horse, running at the ring, shooting with cross-bows, muskets, and sometimes great guns; that if sovereignty had been the reward of excellences in those arts, he would have acquired a new title to the crown, being accounted the most celebrated marksman, and the most perfect manager of the great horse, of any in the three kingdoms.”

It was with reference to the expression of the face, alluded to by Jonson, that Bernini the sculptor said, on executing the bust of Charles, that he had never seen any face which showed so much greatness, and withal such marks of sadness and misfortune. The knight, Sir Richard Bulstrode, tells us, that when the bust was being carried across Greenwich Park, it suffered, what Moore calls on another occasion, some “Tobit-like marks of patronage” from the sparrows. “It was wiped off immediately,” says Charles’s good knight--“but, notwithstanding all endeavors, it would not be gotten off, but turned into blood.” No chevalier in poetic romance meets with more threatening portent than the above.

The Scotch soldiers of fortune, at this period, were as good representatives as could be found of the old knight-errant. To them, Vittorio Siri imputes many of the misfortunes of the period. Some one tells of an old Scottish knight exclaiming, in a year of universal peace, “Lord, turn the world upside-down, that gentlemen may make bread of it.” So, for the sake of furthering their trade of arms, the Scottish, and, indeed, other mercenary men-at-arms, fanned the flame. The words of Siri are precise on this point, for he says, “Le Leslie, le Gordoni, le Duglas ed altri milordi della Scotia, del’ Inghilterra, e dell’ Irlanda.”

Never had knights of romance worse fare in the dungeons of morose magicians than they who entered the bloody lists, where was fought out the quarrel between royalty and republicanism. “I heard a great officer say,” remarks Blount, “that during the siege of Colchester, he dined at an entertainment, where the greatest delicacies were roast horseflesh.”

The warlike spirit was, probably, never stronger than in this reign. It is well illustrated by Hobbes, who remarks that, the Londoners and citizens of other county capitals, who fought against Charles, “had that in them which, in time of battle, is more conducing to victory, than valor and experience both together; and that was _spite_.”

But it is as a lover that Charles I. is chiefly distinguished when we consider him solely to discover his knightly qualities. In his early days he was strongly impressed by romance, and possessed of romantic feelings. This fact is best illustrated by his conduct in connection with the Spanish Match; and to this matter we will devote a brief space, and go back to the time when James was king, and Charles was Prince of Wales.

THE SPANISH MATCH.

This unhappy and ill-advised affair, will ever remain one of the darkest blemishes on the uniformly pacific but inglorious reign of the royal pupil of Buchanan;--the whole detail is an ungrateful one of intrigue and ill-faith, and however justly Buckingham may be accused of exerting his baleful influence to dissolve the treaty, and that he did so in the wantonness of his power is now past doubt; the disgrace which should have attached to him, still hangs round the memory of the timid king and his weak yet gallantly-disposed son. I am more inclined to allow a high-mindedness of feeling to Charles than to his father. The king, who supposed the entire art of reigning lay in dissimulation, may not be charged with an over-scrupulous nicety in his observations of the rules of fair dealing; but the young prince, at this period, had the sentiments without the vanity of a knight-errant, his only error was in the constitutional weakness which bent to the arrogance of Buckingham’s somewhat stronger mind. With such a disposition, the favorite found it as easy to persuade Charles to break off the match, as he had with facility advised him to the romantic journey--as rash as it was impolitic. It would be almost an unprofitable occupation to search for Buckingham’s motives, they are quite unattainable, and, like hunting the hare in a wagon, conjecture might lead us on, but we should, at every step, be farther from our object. It is the received opinion, that the prince’s visit was begun in caprice; and with caprice it ended. Buckingham viewed it, perhaps, at first as a mere adventure, and he terminated it, because his wounded pride suggested to him that _he_ was not the favorite actor in the piece. His terms were, “Ego et rex meus,” and a less-distinguished station would not satisfy the haughty insolence of Somerset’s succession in the precarious favor of the king.

Our British Solomon who willed, but could not restore, the Palatinate to his son-in-law, had long been accustomed to consider the union of Charles with the Infanta, as the only available means left by which he could secure the object he had so much at heart. He was not made of the stern stuff, which in other kings would have set a whole army in motion. That “sagacious simpleton” was never in so turbulent a vein. His most powerful weapon was an ambassador, and the best of these were but sad specimens of diplomacy, and thus, weak as he was, both in the cabinet and field, we may guess at his rapture when the marriage was agreed to by the Court of Spain--the restoration of the Palatinate talked of as a wedding present, and the bride’s dowry two millions of eight.

It was at the expiration of five years of negotiation, that James at length saw the end of what had hitherto been an ever-continuing vista. The dispensation of the Pope, an indispensable preliminary to the union of a Most Catholic princess, with a Protestant heir-apparent, had been held up as a difficulty; James immediately loosened the reins with which he had held in the Catholic recusants--he set them at liberty, for the good of the reformed religion, _he said_; then apologized to his subjects for having so set them at liberty--for the benefit of Protestantism; and finally, he exulted in having accomplished so honorable an end for England, as making her the first to enter the path of moderation. He, moreover, sent to Spain, Digby, the good and great Lord Bristol, and while _he_ was negotiating with Philip IV., the Infanta’s brother, George Gage, “a polite and prudent gentleman,” was employed at Rome to smooth down the obstacles which the zeal of the Fourteenth Gregory raised in behalf of his mother-church. The parties were a long time at issue as to what period the presumed offspring of this marriage should remain under the guardianship of their mother; that is to say, under the Catholic tuition of her confessors. The period of “fourteen years,” was suggested by the Pope, and agreed to by the Court of Spain. Now, George Gage, we are told, was both polite and prudent; George made some slight objection. The father of the faithful and the descendant of Roderic now named twelve years as the stipulated period of maternal or ecclesiastical rule. Mr. Gage, without losing sight of his prudence, retained all his civility; he treated the Pope courteously. Gregory, in return, granted the dispensation, condescended even to agree to the term of nine years, and merely asked a few privileges for the Catholic suite of the Infanta, which were not hard to grant, and would have been impolitic to refuse. James’s advisers counselled him to demand the restitution of the Palatinate by a preliminary treaty. This he wisely refrained from doing; he saw that his desired object was considered inseparable from the marriage, and he was content to trust to the existing treaty which, probably, would not have been changed, had he so expressed his wish. There is a curious item in all these diplomatic relations; beside the public treaty there were various private articles, passed between and signed by the parties concerned, agreeing that more toleration should be granted to the papists, and that more of the penal laws against them should be repealed than was expressed in the public document. There appears also to have existed a yet more private treaty, of even more restricted circulation, whereby James was not to be required to act up to the very letter of that article, by which his royal word pledged what was then considered--emancipation to the Catholics.

Thus far had proceeded this tedious affair of state; the nation was beginning to consider its accomplishment with diminished aversion, and a few months would have brought a Spanish Princess of Wales to England, when all this goodly and fair-wrought edifice was destroyed by the temerity of the man who was the evil spirit of the age. Charles’s youth and inexperience readily lent a willing ear to the glowing description which Buckingham recounted of the celebrated journey. His young melancholy was excited into cheerfulness, when he dwelt on the hoped-for and surprised rapture with which his destined bride would receive a prince whose unusual gallantry spurned at the laws of political interest, and whose chivalric feeling had broken through state negotiation, and, despising to woo by treaty, had brought him to her feet to win her by his merits. His blood warmed at the popularity he would acquire by such a step, from a nation famed for its knightly devotion to the fair, and whose watch-word, according to one of its poets, has ever been, “love and the ladyes.” Charles would have been a dull lover, indeed, had he only, like other princes, thought his bride not worth the fetching. He would have been doubly dull and undeserving had he paused to consider the bearings, the risks, or the probable absurdity of the act. There was a certain political danger; but Charles, young, and a lover, refused to see it; he was tearing the bonds which might bind more ignoble princes, but were too weak to confine him; he rent the shackles which proxies force on their principals, and stood in his own princely strength to win a prize which has often lost the world.