called the “courteous,” was a very “rough customer” indeed, when he
had his hand on the throat of an antagonist. 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. Thus we hear of a damsel coming to a fountain at
which four knights were sitting, and one of them wishes to take her.
The other three object, observing that the damsel is without a knight
to protect her, and that she is, therefore, according to the law of
chivalry, exempt from being attacked. And again, if a knight slew an
adversary of equal degree, he did not retain his sword if the latter
was a gift from some lady. The damsel, in such case, could claim it,
and no knight worthy of the name would have thought of refusing to
comply with her very natural request. Even ladies were not to be won,
in certain cases, except by valor; as Arthur, that king of knights,
would not win, nor retain, Britain, by any other means. The head of
Bran the Blessed, it may be remembered, was hidden in the White Hill,
near London, where, as long as it remained, Britain was invulnerable.
Arthur, however removed it. He scorned to keep the island by any other
means than his own sword and courage; and he was ready to fight any man
in any quarrel.
Never did knight meet death more nobly than that Captain Douglas, whose
heroism is recorded by Sir William Temple, and who “stood and burnt
in one of our ships at Chatham, when his soldiers left him, because
it never should be said a Douglas quitted his post without orders.”
Except as an example of heroic endurance, this act, however, was in
some degree a mistake, for the state did not profit by it. There was
something more profitable in the act of Von Speyk, in our own time.
When hostilities were raging between Holland and Belgium, in 1831,
the young Dutch captain, just named, happened to be in the Scheldt,
struggling in his gun-boat against a gale which, in spite of all his
endeavors and seamanship, drove him ashore, under the guns of the
Belgians. A crowd of Belgian volunteers leaped aboard, ordered him to
haul down his colors and surrender. Von Speyk hurried below to the
magazine, fell upon his knees in prayer, flung a lighted cigar into an
open barrel of powder, and blew his ship to atoms, with nearly all who
were on board. If he, by this sacrifice, prevented a Dutch vessel from
falling into the enemy’s power, he also deprived Holland of many good
seamen. The latter country, however, only thought of the unselfish act
of heroism, in one who had been gratuitously educated in the orphan
house at Amsterdam, and who acquitted his debt to his country, by
laying down his life when such sacrifice was worth making. His king and
countrymen proved that they could appreciate the noble act. The statue
of Von Speyk was placed by the side of that of De Ruyter, and the
government decreed that as long as a Dutch navy existed there should be
_one_ vessel bearing the name of Von Speyk.
To return to the knights of earlier days, I will observe that
indifferent as many of them were to meeting death, they, and indeed
other men of note, were very far from being so as to the manner in
which they should be disposed of _after_ death. In their stone or
marble coffins, they lay in graves so shallow that the cover of the
coffin formed part of the pavement of the church. Whittingham, the
Puritan Dean of Durham, took up many of their coffins and converted
them into horse or swine troughs. This is the dean who is said to have
turned the finely-wrought holy-water vessels into salting-tubs for his
own use.
Modern knights have had other cares about their graves than that
alluded to above. Sir William Browne, for instance, one of George II.’s
knights, and a medical man of some repute, who died in 1770, ordered by
his will that when his coffin was lowered into the grave, there should
be placed upon it, “in _its_ leathern case or coffin, my pocket Elzevir
Horace, comes viæ vitæque dulcis et utilis, worn out with and by me.”
There was nothing more unreasonable in this than in a warrior-knight
being buried with all his weapons around him. And, with respect to
warrior-knights and what was done with them after death, I know nothing
more curious than what is told us by Stavely on the authority of
Streder. I will give it in the author’s own words.
“Don John of Austria,” says Stavely, “governor of the Netherlands for
Philip II. of Spain, dying at his camp at Buge” (Bouges, a mile from
Namur), “was carried from thence to the great church at Havre, where
his funeral was solemnized and a monument to posterity erected for him
there by Alexander Farnese, the Prince of Parma. Afterward his body was
taken to pieces, and the bones, packed in mails, were privately carried
into Spain, where, being set together with small wires, the body was
rejointed again, which being filled or stuffed with cotton, and richly
habited, Don John was presented to the King, entire, leaning upon his
commander’s staff, and looking as if he were alive and breathing.
Afterward the corpse being carried to the Church of St. Laurence, at
the Escurial, was there buried near his father, Charles V., with a
fitting monument erected for him.”
Considering that there was, and is, a suspicion that Philip II. had
poisoned his kinsman, the interview must have been a startling one.
But Philip II. was not, perhaps, so afraid of dead men as the fourth
Spanish king of that name. Philip IV., by no means an unknightly
monarch, was born on a Good Friday, and as there is a Spanish
superstition that they who are born on that day see ghosts whenever
they pass the place where any one has been killed or buried, who died
a violent death, this king fell into a habit of carrying his head
so high, in order to avoid seeing those spirits, that his nose was
continually _en l’air_, and he appeared to see nobody.
Romance, and perhaps faithful history, are full of details of the
becoming deaths of ancient knights, upon the field. I question,
however, if even Sir Philip Sidney’s was more dignified than that of a
soldier of the 58th infantry, recorded in Nichols’s “Anecdotes of the
Eighteenth Century.” A straggling shot had struck him in the stomach.
As he was too dreadfully wounded to be removed, he desired his comrades
would pray by him, and the whole guard knelt round him in prayer
till he died. Bishop Hurd remarked, when this was told him, that “it
was true religion.” There was more of religion in such sympathy than
there was of taste in the condolence of Alnwick, on the death of Hugh,
Duke of Northumberland--a rather irascible officer, and Knight of the
Garter. “O,” cried the Alnwick poet--
“O rueful sight! Behold, how lost to sense
The millions stand, suspended by suspense!”
But all fruitlessly were the millions so suspended, for as the minstrel
remarked in his Threnodia--
“When Time shall yield to Death, Dukes must obey.”
“Dying in harness,” is a favorite phrase in chivalric annals to
illustrate the bravery of a knight falling in battle, “clothed in
complete steel.” So to die, however, was not always to die in a fray.
Hume says of Seward, Earl of Northumberland, that there are two
circumstances related of him, “which discover his high sense of honor
and martial disposition. When intelligence was brought to him of his
son Osborne’s death, he was inconsolable till he heard the wound was
received on his breast, and that he had behaved with great gallantry
in the action. When he found his own death approaching, he ordered his
servants to dress him in a complete suit of armor, and sitting erect on
the couch, with a spear in his hand, declared that in that position,
the only one worthy of a warrior, he would patiently await the fatal
moment.”
See how the chief of many a field
Prepares to give his latest breath;
And, like a well-trimmed warrior, yield
Becomingly t’impending death--
That one, stern conqueror of all,
Of chieftain in embattled tower,
Of lord within his ancient hall,
And maiden in her trellised bower.
To meet that surest of all foes,
From off his soft and pillowed bed,
With dignity old Seward rose,
And to a couch of state was led.
Fainting, yet firm of purpose there,
Stately as monarch on his throne,
Upright he sat, with kingly air,
To meet the coming foe, alone.
“Take from these limbs,” he weakly cried,
“This soft and womanish attire;
Let cloak and cap be laid aside--
Seward will die as died his sire:
Not clad in silken vest and shirt,
Like princes in a fairy tale;
With iron be these old limbs girt--
My vest of steel, my shirt of mail.
“Close let my sheaf of arrows stand;
My mighty battle-axe now bring;
My ashen spear place in my hand;
Around my neck my buckler sling.
Let my white locks once more be pressed
By the old cap of Milan steel;
Such soldier’s gear becomes them best--
They love their old defence to feel.
“’Tis well! Now buckle to my waist
My well-tried gleaming blade of Spain
My old blood leaps in joyful haste
To feel it on my thigh again.
And here this pendent loop upon,
Suspend my father’s dagger bright;
My spurs of gold, too, buckle on--
Or Seward dies not like a knight.”
’Twas done. No tear bedimmed his eyes--
His manly heart had ne’er known fear;
It answered not the deep-fetched sighs
Of friends and comrades standing near.
Death was upon him: that grim foe
Who smites the craven as the brave.
With patience Seward met the blow--
Prepared and willing for the grave.
The manner of the death, or rather of the dying of Seward, Earl of
Northumberland, was in part, unconsciously, imitated by the great
Mansfeldt. When the career of the latter was nearly at its close, his
fragile frame was already worn out by excess of action--his once stout
soul irritated by disappointment, and his former vigorous constitution
shattered by the ravages of a disease which had long preyed on it in
secret. The erst gallant knight lay helpless in the miserable village
of Zara, in Dalmatia. As he found his last moment drawing near, he
put on one of his richest uniforms, and girded his favorite sword to
his side. It was the one he most constantly carried in battle. Thus
accoutred, he summoned his chief officers to attend him. He was held
up by the two whom he most wished to distinguish, because of their
unwavering fidelity. Thus upheld, he exhorted all to go on, unwearied,
in the path of glory; and, living or dying, never to bate a breath of
inveterate hatred for Austria--whose government has been accursed
in all time, since there has been an Austria, for its unmitigated
infamy. “With the indifference of a man preparing for a journey of no
extraordinary importance,” thus speaks Naylor, when describing the
scene, “he continued tranquilly to converse with his friends to the
latest moment of his existence. His body was interred with military
pomp at Spalatio, in Dalmatia, at the expense of the Venetians. Thus
was the emperor delivered from an enemy who, though often defeated,
never ceased to be formidable; and whose transcendent genius was so
fertile in resources, that, without the smallest funds to support
the expenses of war, he maintained an honorable contest during seven
campaigns against the most powerful monarchs in Europe.”
His hour at length is come:
The hero of a hundred fields,
Who never yielded, only yields
To Him who rules the tomb.
He whose loud trumpet’s blast,
Carried upon the trembling gale
The voice of death o’er hill and dale,
Is struck himself at last.
The same who, but of late,
Serenely saw destruction hurled,
And slaughter sweeping through the world,
Serenely meets his fate.
The spirit of the brave,
That led him o’er the embattled plain
’Gainst lines of foes, o’er countless slain,
Waits on him to the grave.
And with his latest breath
The warrior dons his proud array,
Prepared to meet, and to obey,
His last commander--Death!
The mournful tears and sighs
Fall not for him who, like the swan,
Wears his best plumes, sings sweetly on,
Sounds his last song--and dies!
With regard to the burial of knights, we may observe that, down to
a comparatively late period the knights and barons of England were
buried with much solemn splendor. At the obsequies of a baron, there
was an official present who wore the armor of the defunct, mounted a
horse in full trappings, and carried the banner, shield, and helmet, of
the deceased. So, in Henry the Eighth’s time, Lord William Courtney was
buried with the ceremonies observed at the funeral of an earl, to which
rank it had been the king’s intention to elevate him. On this occasion
Sir Edmund Carew, a gallant knight, rode into the church in full armor,
with the point of his battle-axe downward--a token, like a reversed
torch, of death.
The latest instance I have met with of a union of ancient and modern
customs at the burial of a knight, occurred at Treves, in 1781, at
the interment of the Teutonic knight, General Frederick Casimir. This
gallant soldier’s charger was led to the brink of the grave in which
the body had just been deposited; the throat of the steed was swiftly
cut by an official, and the carcass of the horse was flung down upon
the coffin of the knight. Such sacrifices were once common enough. At
the funerals in England of cavalry soldiers, or of mounted officers,
the horse is still processionally conducted to the brink of the grave,
but we are too wisely economical to leave him there, or to fling him
into it.
Where chivalry had great perils and temptations, we need not be
surprised to find that there were many scions of noble houses who
either declined to win spurs by encountering mortal danger, or who
soon grew weary of making the attempt. Let us, then, consider the
unambitious gentlemen who grew “tired of it.”
THE KNIGHTS WHO GREW “TIRED OF IT.”
“How blest are they that waste their weary hours
In solemn groves and solitary bower
Where neither eye nor ear
Can see or hear
The frantic mirth
And false delights of frolic earth;
Where they may sit and pant,
And breathe their pursy souls;
Where neither grief consumes, nor griping want
Afflicts, nor sullen care controls!
Away false joys! Ye murder where ye kiss;
There is no heaven to that, no life to this.”
FRANCIS QUARLES.
As marriage or the cloister was the alternative submitted to most
ladies in the days of old, so young men of noble families had small
choice but between the church and chivalry. Some, indeed, commenced
with arms, won knightly honors, cared nothing for them when they had
obtained the prize, and took up the clerical profession, or entered
monasteries. There are many distinguished examples. There was first St.
Mochua or Cluanus, who, after serving in arms with great distinction,
entered a monastery and took to building churches and establishing
cities. Of the former he built no less than thirty; and he passed as
many years in one church as he had built of churches themselves. He was
the founder of one hundred and twenty cells. He is to be looked upon
with respect. Old warriors in our own days are often moved by the same
impulse which governed Mochua; and when we see retired admirals taking
the chair at meetings where Dr. Cumming is about to exhibit; or infirm
major-generals supporting, with unabated mental energy, their so-called
Puseyite pastors, we only look upon men who, acting conscientiously,
are worthy of respect, and are such Mochuas as modern times and
circumstances will admit of.
We have another example in Adelard, the cousin of Charlemagne. He was a
gay and gallant chevalier at his imperial cousin’s court, and there was
no stouter wielder of a sword in all the army; but Alard, or Adelard,
grew weary of camp and court alike. He fled from some very pretty
temptations in the one, as well as great perils in the other. The young
prince, he was only twenty, took the monastic habit at Corbie, where
he was employed as a gardener, and spoiled cartloads of vegetables
before he got his hand and his thoughts to his new profession. He
was occasionally busy too in the kitchen, but not to the visible
gratification of the monks. Charlemagne often insisted on his appearing
at court, where at last he held one or two high offices; and, when he
left, wrote a book for the guidance of courtiers generally, by which
the latter as little profited, say wicked wits, as other nobility, for
whom a nation has long prayed that grace, wisdom, and understanding
might be their portion. St. Adelard, for the imperial knight was
canonized, lived to be the chief authority in the monastery where he
had commenced as cook and gardener, and St. Gerard composed an office
in his honor, in gratitude for having been cured of a violent headache
through the saint’s interposition. This seems to me one of the oddest
ways of showing gratitude for a small service that I ever heard of.
I believe that St. Cedd, Bishop of London, in very early days, was also
of a family whose profession was military. When or why he entered the
church I do not know; but he has some connection with military matters
in the fact that Tilbury Fort occupies part of the site of a monastery
which St. Cedd had founded, in which he resided, and which was the
pride of all the good people in the then pleasant and prosperous city
of Tillabury.
Touching St. Aldric, Bishop of Mans, there is no doubt whatever. He
was of a noble family, and commenced life at twelve years old, as page
to Louis le Debonnaire, at the court of Charlemagne. He was speedily
sick of the court, and as speedily sick of the camp. At the age of
twenty-one he withdrew to Metz, entered the clerical profession, and
became chaplain and confessor to the sovereign whom he had once served
as page. His military training made him a very sharp disciplinarian
during the quarter of a century that he was bishop; and it is only
to be regretted that he had not some influence over the king whose
conscience he directed, and of whom a legend will be found in another
part of this volume.
There was a second son of Eric, King of Denmark, known by the name of
St. Knudt or Canute. He was Duke of Schleswig, and was much more of a
monk than a duke. He was canonized accordingly for his virtues. He had
a rough way of joking. His knights were nothing better than robbers
and pirates, and he resolved to make them forswear violence and live
peaceably. They represented, in vain, that they had a right to live as
became knights, which Canute did not dispute; he simply dissented from
the construction of the right as set down by the knights themselves.
To prevent all mistakes on the matter, he one day condemned seven of
these gentlemen to be hanged for acts of piracy. One of these exclaimed
that, “fitting as the sentence might be for his fellows, there must
necessarily be exemption for him.” He was like the German corporal in
the “Etoile du Nord,” who can very well understand that it is quite
proper that a man should be hanged, but could _not_ comprehend that
_he_ himself should be the man. The Schleswig knight claimed special
exemption on the ground that he was a kinsman of Canute. The latter
allowed that this entitled him to some distinction, and the saintly
duke hung his cousin six feet higher than any of his accomplices.
We come back more immediately to a knight who grew tired of his
vocation, in the person of Nathalan, a Scottish noble of the fifth
century. He sold arms, horses, and estate, divided the proceeds among
the poor, and devoted himself to preparations for ordination, and the
cultivation of vegetables. He bears a highly respectable reputation on
the roll of Bishops of Aberdeen.
We meet with a man more famous, in Peter of Sebaste, whose pedigree
showed more heroes than could be boasted by any of Peter’s
contemporaries. He is not an example, indeed, of a man quitting the
camp for the cloister; but he and two of his brothers exhibit to us
three individuals who might have achieved great worldly profit, by
adopting arms as a vocation, but who preferred the Church, and became,
all three, bishops.
We have a similar example in the Irish St. Felan. His high birth and
great wealth would have made him the flower of Irish chivalry, but
he selected another profession, and despising chivalry, entered the
Church. He went _a Mundo ad Mundum_, for it was from the hands of
Abbot Mundus that he received the monastic habit. Thus, as it was
wittily said, the world (Mundus) at once drove and drew him into the
Church. It is clear, however, that, like the old war-horse, he pricked
up his ears at the sound of battle, and took an interest in stricken
fields. To such conclusion we must come, if it be true, as is asserted
of him, that the battle of Bannockburn, in 1314, was won by Bruce
through the saint’s especial intercession. The Dukes of Normandy owed
equal obligations to St. Vaneng, who unbuckled the armor from his
aristocratic loins, to cover them with a frock; and built churches for
the Normans, where he offered up continual prayer for the Norman dukes.
Then again, there was William Berringer, of the family of the Counts
of Nevers. No persuasion could induce the handsome William to continue
in the career he had embraced, the career of chivalry and arms. His
uncle, Peter the Hermit, may have had considerable influence over him,
and his change of profession was by no means unprofitable, for the once
horse-loving William became Archbishop of Bourges: and he defended the
rights of his Church against kings and councils with as much boldness,
zeal, and gallantry, as any knight could have exhibited against the
stoutest of assailants.
Among our English saints, the one who most nearly resembles him is
St. Egwin, who was of the royal blood of the Mercian kings, and who,
after a short trial of the profession of arms, retired to the cloister,
but was ultimately raised to the see of Worcester. The spirit of the
man may perhaps be seen through the legend which says that on setting
out on a penitential pilgrimage to Rome, he put iron shackles on
his legs, the key of which shackles he flung into the Avon. This is
very possible; but when we are told that on requiring the key at a
subsequent period, he found it inside a fish, we see that the author of
the legend has plagiarized from the original constructor of the story
of Polycrates and his ring.
St. Egwin was far less a benefactor to his fellow-men than St. Benedict
Biscop, a noble knight of the court of Oswi, the pious king of the
Northumbrians. When Benedict, or Bennet, as he is familiarly called,
retired from the profession of arms to follow that of the Church, he
continued quite as active, and twice as useful, as he had been before.
He was a great traveller, spent and gave liberally, and brought over
with him, from the continent, workers in stone to erect that monastery
at Weremouth which, in its ruins, commemorates his name and deeds. He
also brought from France the first glaziers who ever exercised the art
of glass-making in England. Altogether St. Bennet is one of those who
find means to effect good to others, whatever may be the position they
are in themselves.
Aelred of Ridal was a man of similar quality. He was a young
North-of-England noble, when he figured as the handsomest cavalier at
the court of that “sair saint to the Church,” the Scottish king, David.
He was remarkable for his good temper, and was as well-disciplined
a monk as he had been a military man; for when he once happened to
inadvertently break the rule of permanent silence, which prevailed
in the monastery at Ridal, into which he entered at the age of
twenty-five, he became so horror-stricken that he was eager to increase
the penalty put upon him in consequence. He had only dropped a single
word in the garden, to a monk who, like himself, had been a knight, but
who gave him in return so edifying a scowl, that in an instant poor
Aelred felt all the depth of his unutterable iniquity, and accounted
himself as criminal as if he had set fire to the neighboring nunnery.
He never afterward allowed himself the indulgence of reading his
favorite Cicero, but confined his reading to his own work “On Spiritual
Friendship,” and other books of a similar description.