Part 4

The pages of old time occasionally met with dreadful harsh treatment from their chivalrous master. The most chivalrous of these Christian knights could often act cowardly and unchristian-like. I may cite, as an instance, the case of the great and warlike Duke of Burgundy, on his defeat at Muret. He was hemmed in between ferocious enemies and the deep lake. As the lesser of two evils, he plunged into the latter, and his young page leaped upon the crupper as the Duke’s horse took the water. The stout steed bore his double burden across, a breadth of two miles, not without difficulty, yet safely. The Duke was, perhaps, too alarmed himself, at first, to know that the page was hanging on behind; but when the panting horse reached the opposite shore, sovereign Burgundy was so wroth at the idea that the boy, by clinging to his steed, had put the life of the Duke in peril, that he turned upon him and poignarded the poor lad upon the beach. Lassels, who tells the story, very aptly concludes it with the scornful yet serious ejaculation, “Poor Prince! thou mightest have given another offering of thanksgiving to God for thy escape, than this!” But “Burgundy” was rarely gracious or humane. “Carolus Pugnax,” says Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, “made Henry Holland, late Duke of Exeter, exiled, run after his horse, like a lackey, and would take no notice of him.” This was the English peer who was reduced to beg his way in the cities of Flanders.

Of pages generally, we shall have yet to speak incidentally--meanwhile, let us glance at their masters at home.

KNIGHTS AT HOME.

“Entrez Messìeurs; jouissez-vous de mon coin-de-feu. Me voilà, chez moi!”--_Arlequin à St. Germains._

Ritter Eric, of Lansfeldt, remarked, that next to a battle he dearly loved a banquet. We will, therefore, commence the “Knight at Home,” by showing him at table. Therewith, we may observe, that the Knights of the Round Table appear generally to have had very solid fare before them. King Arthur--who is the reputed founder of this society, and who invented the table in order that when all his knights were seated none could claim precedency over the others--is traditionally declared to have been the first man who ever sat down to a whole roasted ox. Mr. Bickerstaff, in the “Tatler,” says that “this was certainly the best way to preserve the gravy;” and it is further added, that “he and his knights set about the ox at his round table, and usually consumed it to the very bones before they would enter upon any debate of moment.”

They had better fare than the knights-errant, who

“as some think, Of old, did neither eat nor drink, Because when thorough deserts vast, And regions desolate they passed, Where belly-timber above ground, Or under, was not to be found, Unless they grazed, there’s not one word Of their provision on record: Which made some confidently write, They had no stomachs but to fight.”

This, however, is only one poet’s view of the dietary of the errant gentlemen of old. Pope is much nearer truth when he says, that--

“In days of old our fathers went to war, Expecting sturdy blows and scanty fare, Their beef they often in their morion stewed, And in their basket-hilt their beverage brewed.”

--that basket-hilt of which it is so well said in Hudibras, that--

“it would hold broth, And serve for fight and dinner both.”

The lords and chivalric gentlemen who fared so well and fought so stoutly, were not always of the gentlest humor at home. It has been observed that Piedmontese society long bore traces of the chivalric age. An exemplification is afforded us in Gallenga’s History of Piedmont. It will serve to show how absolute a master a powerful knight and noble was in his own house. Thus, from Gallenga we learn that Antonio Grimaldi, a nobleman of Chieri, had become convinced of the faithlessness of his wife. He compelled her to hang up with her own hand her paramour to the ceiling of her chamber; then he had the chamber walled up, doors and windows, and only allowed the wretched woman as much air and light, and administered with his own hand as much food and drink, as would indefinitely prolong her agony. And so he watched her, and tended her with all that solicitude which hatred can suggest as well as love, and left her to grope alone in that blind solitude, with the mute testimony of her guilt--a ghastly object on which her aching eyes were riveted, day by day, night after night, till it had passed through every loathsome stage of decomposition. This man was surely worse in his vengeance than that Sir Giles de Laval, who has come down to us under the name of Blue-Beard.

This celebrated personage, famous by his pseudonym, was not less so in his own proper person. There was not a braver knight in France, during the reigns of Charles VI. and VII., than this Marquis de Laval, Marshal of France. The English feared him almost as much as they did the Pucelle. The household of this brave gentleman was, however, a hell upon earth; and licentiousness, blasphemy, attempts at sorcery, and, more than attempts at, very successful realizations of, murder were the little foibles of this man of many wives. He excelled the most extravagant monarchs in his boundless profusion, and in the barbaric splendor of his court or house: the latter was thronged with ladies of very light manners, players, mountebanks, pretended magicians, and as many cooks as Julian found in the palace of his predecessor at Constantinople. There were two hundred saddle-horses in his stable, and he had a greater variety of dogs than could now be found at any score of “fanciers” of that article. He employed the magicians for a double purpose. They undertook to discover treasures for his use, and pretty handmaids to tend on his illustrious person, or otherwise amuse him by the display of their accomplishments. Common report said that these young persons were slain after a while, their blood being of much profit in making incantations, the object of which was the discovery of gold. Much exaggeration magnified his misdeeds, which were atrocious enough in their plain, unvarnished infamy. At length justice overtook this monster. She did not lay hold of him for his crimes against society, but for a peccadillo which offended the Duke of Brittany. Giles de Laval, for this offence, was burnt at Nantes, after being strangled--such mercy having been vouchsafed to him, because he was a gallant knight and gentleman, and of course was not to be burnt alive like any petty villain of peasant degree. He had a moment of weakness at last, and just previous to the rope being tightened round his neck, he publicly declared that he should never have come to that pass, nor have committed so many excesses, had it not been for his wretched education. Thus are men, shrewd enough to drive bargains, and able to discern between virtue and vice, ever ready, when retribution falls on them at the scaffold, to accuse their father, mother, schoolmaster, or spiritual pastor. Few are like the knight of the road, who, previous to the cart sliding from under him, at Tyburn, remarked that he had the satisfaction, at least, of knowing that the position he had attained in society was owing entirely to himself. “May I be hanged,” said he, “if that isn’t the fact.” The finisher of the law did not stop to argue the question with him, but, on cutting him down, remarked, with the gravity of a cardinal before breakfast, that the gentleman had wronged the devil and the ladies, in attributing his greatness so exclusively to his own exertions.

I have said that perhaps Blue-Beard’s little foibles have been exaggerated; but, on reflection, I am not sure that this pleasant hypothesis can be sustained. De Laval, of whom more than I have told may be found in Mezeray, was not worse than the Landvogt Hugenbach, who makes so terrible a figure in Barante’s “Dukes of Burgundy.” The Landvogt, we are told by the last-named historian, cared no more for heaven than he did for anybody on earth. He was accustomed to say that being perfectly sure of going to the devil, he would take especial care to deny himself no gratification that he could possibly desire. There was, accordingly, no sort of wild fancy to which he did not surrender himself. He was a fiendish corruptor of virtue, employing money, menaces, or brutal violence, to accomplish his ends. Neither cottage nor convent, citizen’s hearth nor noble’s château, was secure from his invasion and atrocity. He was terribly hated, terribly feared--but then Sir Landvogt Hugenbach gave splendid dinners, and every family round went to them, while they detested the giver.

He was remarkably facetious on these occasions, sometimes ferociously so. For instance, Barante records of him, that at one of his pleasant soirées he sent away the husbands into a room apart, and kept the wives together in his grand saloon. These, he and his myrmidons despoiled entirely of their dresses; after which, having flung a covering over the head of each lady, who dared not, for her life, resist, the amiable host called in the husbands one by one, and bade each select his own wife. If the husband made a mistake, he was immediately seized and flung headlong down the staircase. The Landvogt made no more scruple about it than Lord Ernest Vane when he served the Windsor manager after something of the same fashion. The husbands who guessed rightly were conducted to the sideboard to receive congratulations, and drink various flasks of wine thereupon. But the amount of wine forced upon each unhappy wretch was so immense, that in a short time he was as near death as the mangled husbands, who were lying in a senseless heap at the foot of the staircase.

They who would like to learn further of this respectable individual, are referred to the pages of Barante. They will find there that this knight and servant of the Duke of Burgundy was more like an incarnation of the devil than aught besides. His career was frightful for its stupendous cruelty and crime; but it ended on the scaffold, nevertheless. His behavior there was like that of a saint who felt a little of the human infirmity of irritability at being treated as a very wicked personage by the extremely blind justice of men. So edifying was this chivalrous scoundrel, that the populace fairly took him for the saint he figured to be; and long after his death, crowds flocked to his tomb to pray for his mediation between them and God.

The rough jokes of the Landvogt remind me of a much greater man than he--Gaston de Foix, in whose earlier times there was no lack of rough jokes, too. The portrait of Gaston, with his page helping to buckle on his armor, by Giorgione da Castel Franco, is doubtless known to most of my readers--through the engraving, if not the original. It was formerly the property of the Duke of Orleans; but came, many years ago, into the possession, by purchase, of Lord Carlisle. The expression of the page or young squire who is helping to adjust Gaston’s armor is admirably rendered. That of the hero gives, perhaps, too old a look to a knight who is known to have died young.

This Gaston was a nephew of Louis XII. His titles were Duke of Nemours and Count d’Etampes. He was educated by his mother, the sister of King Louis. She exulted in Gaston as one who was peculiarly her own work. “Considering,” she says, “how honor became her son, she was pleased to let him seek danger where he was likely to find fame.” His career was splendid, but proportionally brief. He purchased imperishable renown, and a glorious death, in Italy. He gained the victory of Ravenna, at the cost of his life; after which event, fortune abandoned the standard of Louis; and Maximilian Sforza recovered the Milanese territories of his father, Ludovic. This was early in the sixteenth century.

But it is of another Gaston de Foix that I have to speak. I have given precedence to one bearer of the name, because he was the worthier man; but the earlier hero will afford us better illustrations of the home-life of the noble knights who were sovereigns within their own districts. Froissart makes honorable mention of him in his “Chronicle.” He was Count de Foix, and kept court at Ortez, in the south of France. There assembled belted knights and aspiring ’squires, majestic matrons and dainty damsels. When the Count was not on a war-path, his house was a scene of great gayety. The jingle of spurs, clash of swords, tramp of iron heels, virelays sung by men-at-arms, love-songs hummed by audacious pages, and romances entoned to the lyre by minstrels who were masters in the art--these, with courtly feasts and stately dances, made of the castle at Ortez anything but a dull residence. Hawking and hunting seem to have been “my very good Erle’s” favorite diversion. He was not so much master of his passions as he was of his retainers; and few people thought the worse of him simply because he murdered his cousin for refusing to betray his trust, and cut the throat of the only legitimate son of the Earl.

We may form some idea of the practical jests of those days, from an anecdote told by Froissart. Gaston de Foix had complained, one cold day, of the scanty fire which his retainers kept up in the great gallery. Whereupon one of the knights descended to the court-yard, where stood several asses laden with wood. One of them he seized, wood and ass together, and staggering up-stairs into the gallery, flung the whole, the ass heels uppermost, on to the fire. “Whereof,” says Froissart, “the Earl of Foix had great joy, and so had all they that were there, and had marvel of his strength, how he alone came up all the stairs with the ass and the wood on his neck.”

Gaston was but a lazy knight. It was high noon, Froissart tells us, before he rose from his bed. He supped at midnight; and when he issued from his chamber to proceed to the hall where supper was laid, twelve torches were carried before him, and these were held at his table “by twelve varlets” during the time that supper lasted. The Earl sat alone, and none of the knights or squires who crowded round the other tables dared to speak a word to him unless the great man previously addressed him. The supper then must have been a dull affair.

The treasurer of the Collegiate Church of Chimay relates in a very delicate manner how Gaston came to murder his little son. Gaston’s wife was living apart from her husband, at the court of her brother, the King of Navarre, and the “little son” in question was residing there on a visit to his mother. As he was on the point of returning, the king of Navarre gave him a powder, which he directed the boy to administer to his father, telling him that it was a love-powder, and would bring back his father’s affection for the mother. The innocent boy took the powder, which was in fact poison; and a night or two after his return to Ortez, an illegitimate son of Gaston found it in the boy’s clothes. The base-born lad informed against his brother, and when Gaston had given the powder to a dog, which immediately died, he could scarcely be kept from poniarding his son upon the spot. The poor child was flung into a dungeon, where, between terror and despair, he refused to take any food. Upon being told of this, the earl entered the chamber in which the boy was confined, “he had at the same time a little knife in his hand, to pare withal his nails.... In great displeasure he thrust his hand at his son’s throat, and the point of his knife a little entered into his throat into a certain vein; and the earl said, ‘Ah, traitor, why dost thou not eat thy meat?’ and therewith the earl departed without any more doing or saying.” Never was brutal murder more daintily glozed over, but Froissart is so afraid that he may not have sufficiently impressed you with a conviction of its being a little accident, that he goes on to say “The child was abashed, and afraid of the coming of his father, and was also feeble of fasting, and the point of the knife a little entered into his throat, into a certain vein of his throat; and so [he] fell down suddenly _and died_!”

The rascally sire was as jolly after the deed as before it; but he too one day “fell down suddenly and died.” He had overheated himself with hunting, and in that condition bathed in cold water as soon as he reached home. The description of the whole of this domestic scene is one of the most graphic in Froissart, but it is too long for quotation. It must suffice that the vast possessions of the count fell into the hands of that villanous illegitimate son, Sir Jenbayne de Foix. The latter was one of the six knights who, with Charles VI., entered a ball-room disguised as satyrs, and fast chained together. Some one, who is supposed to have owed no good-will to the king, flung a torch into the group. Their inflammable dresses immediately caught fire, and Sir Jenbayne de Foix was one of those who was burned to death. The king himself, as is well known, had a very narrow escape.

Perhaps one of the chief home pleasures enjoyed by knights when not engaged in war, was the pleasure of the chase. Idle country gentlemen now resemble their chivalrous ancestors in this respect, and for want of or distaste for other vocations, spend three fourths of their rural time in the fields. In the old days too, as ever, there were clerical gentlemen very much addicted to hunting and moreover not less so to trespassing. These were not reverend rectors on their own thorough-breds, or curates on borrowed ponies, but dignified prelates--even archbishops. One of the latter, Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, presumed to hunt without permission, on the grounds of a young knight, the Earl of Arundel, a minor. On the day the Earl came of age, he issued a prohibition against the archiepiscopal trespasser, and the latter in return snapped his fingers at the earl, and declared that his way was as legally open to any chase as it was free into any church. Accordingly, the right reverend gentleman issued forth as usual, with hounds and horses, and a “numerous meet” of clerical friends and other followers, glad to hunt in such company. Their sport, however, was spoiled by the retainers of the young earl. These, in obedience to their master’s orders, called off the dogs, unstopped the earths, warned off the riders, and laughed at the ecclesiastical thunder of the prelate, flung at them in open field. Edmund, finding it impossible to overcome the opposition of the men, addressed himself to the master, summarily devoting him _ad inferos_ for daring to interfere with the prelatic pastimes. Nothing daunted, the young earl, who would gladly have permitted the archbishop to hunt in his company, whenever so disposed, but who would not allow the head of the church in England to act in the woods of Arundel as if he were also lord of the land, made appeal to the only competent court--that of the Pope. The contending parties went over and pleaded their most respective causes personally; the earl with calmness, as feeling that he had right on his side; Edmund with easy arrogance, springing from a conviction that the Pontiff would not give a layman a triumph over a priest. The archbishop, however, was mistaken. He not only lost his cause, but he was condemned in the expenses; and if any one thinks that this decree checked him in trespassing, such an idea would show that the holder of it knew little of the spirit which moved prelates fond of hunting. The archbishop became the most confirmed poacher in the country; and if he did not spoil the knight’s sport by riding in advance of the hounds with a red herring, he had resort to means as efficacious for marring the pleasures of others in the chase. He affected, too, to look down upon the earl as one inferior to him in degree, and when they encountered at court, the prelate exhibited no more courtesy toward the gallant knight than was manifested by Lord Cowley in Paris toward the English Exhibition Commissioners, when the mere men of intellect were kept at what the peer thought a proper distance by the mere men of rank.

There is, however, no lack of instances of young knights themselves being brought up in arrogance and wilfulness. This sort of education lasted longer, perhaps, in France than elsewhere. As late as the last century this instruction prevailed, particularly where the pupil was intended for the army. Thus, the rearing of the little Vidame d’Amiens affords us an illustration. He was awkward and obstinate, but he might have been cured of both defects, had his mother been permitted to have some voice in his education. She was the last to be consulted, or rather, was never consulted at all. The more the little man was arrogant, the more delighted were his relatives with such manifestation of his spirit; and one day, when he dealt to his aunt, the Marquise de Belliere Plessis, a box of the ear which sent the old lady staggering, her only remark was, “My dear, you should never strike me with the left hand.” The courteous Vidame mortally hated his tutor, and expressed such a desire to kill him, that the pedagogue was asked to allow the little savage to believe that he had accomplished the desired act of homicide. Accordingly, a light musket was placed in the boy’s hands, from which the ball had been drawn, unknown to him, and with this, coming suddenly upon his instructor, who feigned the surprise he did not feel, the Vidame discharged the piece full at the breast of his monitor and friend. The servile sage pretended to be mortally wounded, and acted death upon the polished floor. He was quietly got rid of, and a pension of four hundred francs, just sixteen pounds a year, rewarded his stupid servility. The little chevalier was as proud as Fighting Fitzgerald of having, as he supposed, “killed his man.”

Let us return to earlier times for illustrations of the knight at home, and also abroad. There is no lack of such illustration in the adventures of Fulke Fitzwarren. Fulke was one of the outlawed barons of the reign of King John. In his youth, he was brought up with the four sons of King Henry; he was much beloved by them all, except John. “It happened that John and Fulke were sitting all alone in a chamber playing at chess; and John took the chess-board, and struck Fulke with a great blow. Fulke felt himself hurt, raised his foot and struck John in the middle of the stomach; and his head flew against the wall, and he became all weak, and fainted. Fulke was in consternation; but he was glad that there was nobody in the chamber but they two, and he rubbed John’s ears, who recovered from his fainting fit, and went to the king his father, and made a great complaint. ‘Hold your tongue, wretch,’ said the king, ‘you are always quarrelling. If Fulke did anything but good to you, it must have been by your own desert;’ and he called his master, and made him beat him finely and well for complaining. John was much enraged against Fulke, so that he could never afterward love him heartily.”

The above, as has been remarked, evinces how little respect there was in those early times for royal authority and the doctrine of non-resistance. But it may be observed, that even in these more polite times, were the heir-apparent to strike a playfellow, his royal highness would probably meet in return with as ready-handed, if not quite so rough a correction as was inflicted upon John. The latter could not forgive a bold companion of his boyhood, as James I. did, in subsequent times, with regard to “Jamie Slates.” On the contrary, when John became king, he plotted with as unscrupulous a person as himself, to deprive Fulke of his estate. The conversation between the king and his confederate, Moris de Powis, was overheard; and what came of it is thus told in the history of Fulke Fitzwarren, as edited by Thomas Wright Esq., for the Warton Club:--