Dr. Doran

“ What more could true knights desire? Chivalry was satisfied; and commonplace men, with only common sense to direct them, had to look on in admiring silence, at risk of being cudgelled if they dared to speak out.
Jacques was now at the height of his renown. He was “the good knight without fear and without doubt;” and Duke Philip placed the last rose in his chaplet of honor, by creating him a knight of the illustrious order of the Golden Fleece. Thus distinguished, he rode about Europe, inviting adversaries to measure swords with him, and meeting with none willing to accept the invitation. ”

“ A Spanish captain in Paris, saw the haughty chevalier d’Ambres pass by him. “Is he,” said the Spaniard, “as valiant as he is proud?” The reply was in the affirmative. “Then,” remarked the Iberian, “he is almost as good a man as myself.” We hear of another, less gallant, perhaps, than brave, who made it a great favor to ladies when he put off a combat at their request, and passed a pleasant hour with them, in place of knocking out brains upon the field. It was a knight of similar notions who cudgelled his page for boasting of the knight’s valor. ”

“ Guise lived, it is true, at a period when nothing was held so cheap as life. Acts of cruelty were but too common in all factions. If he delivered whole towns to pillage and its attendant horrors, compared with which death were merciful, he would himself exhibit compassion, based on impulse or caprice. He was heroic, according to the thinking of his age, which considered heroism as being constituted solely of unflinching courage. In all other respects, the duke, great as he was, was as mean as the veriest knave who trailed a pike in his own bands. ”

“ Rambouillet was then the abiding-place of all the virtues. There the home-loving knight read the Scriptures while the duchess sat at his side making garments for the poor. There, the Chevalier Florian, his secretary and friend, meditated those graceful rhymes and that harmonious prose, in which human nature is in pretty masquerade, walking about like Watteau’s figures, in vizors, brocades, high heels, and farthingales. When the duchess died in child-birth, of her sixth child, her husband withdrew to La Trappe where, among other ex-soldiers, he for weeks prayed and slept upon the bare ground. ”

“ Heroes have been buried, with whole nations for mourners, whose offences in this worse respect have been forgotten. Not that I would apologise for the knight’s familiarity with either the Hostess or that remarkably nice young lady, Miss Dorothea Tearsheet. I do not know what the private life of that Lord Chief Justice may have been who was so very merciless in his censure upon the knight; but I do know that there have been luminaries as brilliant who have hidden their lights in very noisome places and who had not Falstaff’s excuse. ”

“ Further, every knight was bound to wear the Garter in public, wherever he might be, on pain of a mulct of half a mark. Equally obligatory was it on the knight, in whatever part of the world he was residing, or however he was engaged, to wear the sanguine mantle of the order from the eve of St. George till vesper-time on the morrow of the festival. Some of the chevaliers who were in distant lands must have caused as much surprise by their costume, as a Blue-coat boy does, wandering in his strangely-colored garb, in the streets of Paris. ”

“ William, Earl of Salisbury, is known by his chivalric surname of “Longsword,” but Geoffrey, Bishop of Lincoln, the second son of Henry and Rosamond, was not the less a knight for being a bishop before he was twenty. It was this prelate who, at the head of an armed force put down the first great northern insurrection. He was on his triumphant way back, at the head of one hundred and forty knights, when he was met by his royal sire, who embraced him warmly, exclaiming the while, “Thou alone art my legitimate son, the rest are all bastards.” ”

“ Having spoiled the edges of these, and loosened them from their handles, by battering at each other’s skulls, they finally drew their lusty and well-tempered swords, and fought so fiercely that the gleaming of their swiftly manœuvred blades made them seem as if they were smiting each other with lightning. Jacques had well-nigh dealt a mortal thrust at the Sicilian, when, at the intervention of the Duke of Orleans, Philip the Good flung his truncheon into the lists, and so saved the foreign knight, by ending the fray. ”

“ What was to become of London without an opera? How could the world, the infinitesimal London world, exist without its usual allowance of roulades and rigadoons? Our knight was just the champion to come in beneficially at such an extremity. He opened the little theatre in the Haymarket, and nobody went to it. Fashion turned up its nose in scorn, and kept away; nay, it did worse, it acted ungratefully, and when some speculators established an opera at the Pantheon, Fashion led the way from the Haymarket, and a host of followers went in her train to Oxford street. ”

“ Lisbon was as dull to the Belgian as Donnybrook Fair without a skrimmage used to be to all its lively habitués. “I have had a turn with the Queen,” said Jacques, “let me now have a tourney with your captains.” “Burgundy is my good friend,” answered the King—and he was right in a double sense, for Burgundy was as dear to him as Champagne is to the Czar’s valet, Frederick William, who resides at Berlin. “Burgundy is our good friend,” answered Alphonso, “and Heaven forbid that a knight from such a court should be roughly treated by any knights at mine.” “By St. George! I defy them!” ”

“ He lived the life of a soldier of fortune, or knight-errant; and when peace temporarily reigned, he rode over the country with a band of followers, in search of adventures, and always found them at the point of their swords. He left the altar to draw on his boots, gird his sword to his hip, and provoke his cousin De Nevers to a duel, by striking him in the face. The indignant young noble regretted that the profession of his insulter covered the latter with impunity, and recommended him, at the same time, to abandon it, and to give De Nevers satisfaction. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is a pleasanter picture of Christian chivalry than any other that is given by this picturesque chronicler.
Chivalry, generally, has been more satirized and sneered at by the philosophers than by any other class of men. The sages stigmatize the knights as mere boasters of bravery, and in some such terms as those used by Dussaute, they assert that the boasters of their valor are as little to be trusted as those who boast of their probity. “Defiez vous de quiconque parle toujours de sa probité comme de quiconque parle toujours de bravoure.” ”

“ The latter forgot the dignity, not only of knight, but of manhood, when he was seen casting his cap violently to the earth, flinging away his belt, tearing his clothes from his body, and dragging the silk coverlet from his bed, on which, in presence of his captains, he rolled himself like a maniac, grasping the mattress in his mouth, and gnawing the wool and the horsehair which he drew out with his teeth.
Richard I. has a brilliant reputation as a knight, and if valor were the only virtue required, he would not be undeserving of the pre-eminence which is claimed for him. ”

“ We hear of him jumping with all his force upon a fallen and helpless foe, tearing his helmet from its fastenings by main force, battering the knight’s face with it till he was senseless, and then beating on his head with the pommel of his sword, till the wretched fellow was dead. At this sort of pommelling there was never knight so expert as the great Bayard. The courtesy of the most savage in fight, was however undeniable when a lady was in the case. ”

“ The ceremony was interrupted by a loud knocking at the castle gates. The wary Jean looked first at the clamorous visitors through the wicket, whence he descried Henri III. flurried, yet laughing, seated in an old carriage, around which mustered dusty horsemen, grave cavaliers, and courtiers scantily attired. Some had their points untrussed, and many a knight was without his boots. An illustrious company, in fact; but there were not two nobles in their united purses. Jean threw open his portals to a king and his knights flying from De Guise. ”

“ The old chevalier went down to his tomb heart-broken and heirless.
Le Roi, Lord of Chavigny, and who must not be mistaken for an ancestor of that Le Roi who died at the Alma under the title of Marshal St. Arnaud, is a good illustration of the blunt, honest knight. Charles IX. once remarked to him that his mother, Catherine de Medicis, boasted that there was not a man in France, with ten thousand livres a year, at whose hearth she had not a spy in her pay. “I do not know,” said Le Roi, “whether tyrants make spies, or spies tyrants. For my own part, I see no use in them, except in war.” ”

“ Rambouillet is an old château where feudal knights once lived like little kings. In its gardens Euphuism reigned supreme. It is a palace, in whose chambers monarchs have feasted, and at whose gates they have asked, when fugitives, for water and a crust of bread. It commenced its career as a cradle of knights; it is finishing it as an asylum for the orphan children of warriors. The commencement and finale are not unworthy of one another; but, between the two, there have been some less appropriate disposals of this old chevalier’s residence. ”

“ His great ambition was to rank among knights and nobles. He took but an ill-method to arrive at such an object; but his reverence for nobility was seen even when he was very near to his violent end. If he was ever a hero, it was when certain death by process of law was before him. But even then it was his boast and solace, that throughout the affair there was not a man employed, even to handle a spade, in furtherance of the end in view, who was not a gentleman. Guy died under the perfect conviction that he had done nothing derogatory to his quality! ”

“ Accordingly, when the monarch was seated in his tribune, and the brazen throats of the trumpets had bidden the rough sport to begin, the young squire of Lord Hay, a handsome youth [Pg 411] of twenty, straight of limb, fair of favor, strong-shouldered, smooth-faced, and with a modesty that enhanced his beauty, rode up on a fiery steed, to lay his master’s shield and lance at the feet of the monarch. The action of the apprentice warrior was so full of grace, his steed so full of fire, and both so eminently beautiful, that James was lost in admiration. ”

“ To the storm which now beset the gates, the latter yielded; and as they swung open, they disclosed the duke, who, girt in a white apron, and with a ladle in his hand, received his visiters with the announcement that he was engaged in helping to make soup for the poor. The monarch and his followers declared that no poor could be more in need of soup than they were. They accordingly seized the welcome supply, devoured it with the appetite of those for whom it was intended, and paid the grave knight who was their host, in the false coin of pointless jokes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not think it survived till the reign of George II. In that reign chivalry was defunct, but there was an exclusive class, whose numbers arrogated to themselves that nice sense of honor which was supposed, in olden times, to have especially distinguished the knight. The people alluded to were par excellence, the people of “fashion.” The gentlemen who guarded, or who were supposed to guard, the brightest principle of chivalry, were self-styled rather than universally acknowledged, “men of honor.”
The man of honor has been painted by “one of themselves.” ”

“ But there is a Nemesis at every man’s shoulder, and if Falstaff was cavalierly careless enough to run up a score at the Boar’s Head, and to accept even a present of Holland shirts, which he ungratefully designates as “filthy dowlas,” the way in which he was dunned must have been harsh to the feelings of a knight and a gentleman. In reviewing his gallantries and his extravagances, we must not, in justice to him, forget that he was a bachelor. If he degraded himself, he inflicted misery on no Lady Falstaff at home. ”

“ He mixed himself up in every quarrel, and could not see a lion and a dragon quietly settling their disputes in a wood, by dint of claws, without striking in for the lion, slaying his foe, and receiving with complacency the acknowledgments of the nobler beast.
He achieved something more useful when he met Lord Terry in a wood, looking for his wife who had been carried off by a score of ravishers. While the noble lord sat down on a mossy bank, like a gentleman in a melodrama, Guy rescued his wife in his presence, and slew all the ravishers, “in funeral order,” the youngest first. ”

“ For a knight, Jacques was really a respectable man, and so disgusted with his butcher-like occupation, that, just before his death, he had resolved to surrender his estate to a younger brother, and, since fate had made of him a licensed murderer, to henceforth murder none but eastern infidels—to slay whom was held to be more of a virtue than a sin. ”

“ The roof, however, of this royal palace, looked very much like the covering of a place in which very much harm might be very quietly effected. But there were dwelling there two beings who might have been taken for spirits of good, so winning, so natural, and so loveable were the two spirits in question. They were no other than the two daughters of Charlemagne, Gisla and Rotrude. The romancers, who talk such an infinite deal of nonsense, say of them that their sweet-scented beauty was protected by the prickles of principle. ”