conquest, the gentlemen with new honors did not always obtain peaceable
possession of the estates which were sometimes added to the title. Here
is an instance in the case of the ancient family of the Kinnersleys.
William’s commissioners had appeared in Herefordshire, and in course
of their predatory excursion, they came before the castle of John
de Kinnersly, an old man, who is described as a knight, albeit some
assert that there were no more knights in England before the conquest
than there was rain on the earth before the flood. The old man who
was blind, stood at his castle-gate in front of a semicircle formed
by his twelve sons. Each had sword on thigh and halberd in hand. When
the sheriffs and other commissioners asked him by what tenure he held
his castle and estates, blind John exclaimed, “By my arms; by sword
and spear; and by the same will keep them!” To which all his lively
lads uttered a vigorous “Ay, ay,” and the Norman commissioners were so
satisfied with the title, that they did not venture to further question
the same, but left the possessor of castle and land undisturbed in that
possession which is said to be nine points out of the ten required by
the law.
During many reigns, no man was knighted, but who was of some “quality,”
and generally because he was particularly useful to his own or
succeeding generations. These require no notice. Some of these
introduced customs that are worth noticing, and here is a sample.
Among the lucky individuals knighted by Edward I., Sir William Baud
holds a conspicuous place. Sir William gave rise to a curious custom,
which was long observed in Old St. Paul’s. During his lifetime, the
dean and chapter had made over to him some laud in Essex. In return, or
perhaps in “service” for this, the knight presented at the high altar
of the cathedral, a doe “sweet and seasonable,” on the conversion of
St. Paul, in winter; and a buck, in equally fitting condition, on the
commemoration of St. Paul in summer. The venison was for the especial
eating of the canons resident. The doe was carried to the altar by one
man, surrounded by processional priests, and he was to have nothing
for his trouble. The buck had several bearers and a more numerous
accompaniment of priests, who disbursed the magnificent sum of twelve
pence to the carriers. The knight’s buck made the dean and chapter
so hilarious that when they appeared at the doors of the cathedral
to escort it to the altar, they wore copes and vestments, and their
reverences wore wreaths of roses on their solemn heads! Indeed, there
was a special dress for the cathedral clergy on either day; each,
according to the occasion, being ornamented with figures of bucks
or does. At the altar, the dean sent the body to be baked, but the
head was cut off and carried on a pike to the western door, where the
huntsmen blew a _mort_, and the notes proclaiming the death of the stag
were taken up and repeated by the “horners” of the city, who received
a trifle from the rosy dean and chapter, for thus increasing the noisy
importance of the occasion.
There is something, too, worthy of notice in the fact that Richard
II. was the first king who knighted a London tradesman. Walworth, who
struck down Wat Tyler, and who was knighted by that king for his good
service, was engaged in commercial pursuits. This lord mayor, however,
derived very considerable profits from pursuits less creditable to him.
He was the owner of tenements by the water side, which were of the very
worst reputation, but which brought him a very considerable yearly
revenue. Sir William pocketed this with the imperially-complacent
remark of “non olet.” The dagger in the city arms is not in memory
of this deed; it simply represents the sword of St. Paul, and it
has decorated the city shield since the first existence of a London
municipality.
Walworth then is not a very respectable knight. We find one of better
character in a knight of ancient family name, whose deeds merit some
passing record.
Sir Robert Umfreville, a knight of the Garter, who owed his honors
to the unfortunate Henry VI., found leisure, despite the busy and
troubled times in which he lived, to found the Chantry of Farmacres,
near Ravensworth, where two chaplains were regularly to officiate
according to the law of Sarum. If the knight’s charity was great, his
expectations of benefit were not small. The chaplains were daily to
perform service for the benefit of the souls of the founder, and of
all his kith, kin, and kindred. Nay, more than this, service was to
be performed for the soul’s profit of all knights of the Garter, as
long as the order existed, and of all the proprietors of the estate of
Farmacres. The chaplains were to reside, board, and sleep, under the
roof of the chapel. Once every two years the pious will of the founder
allowed them a renewal of costume, consisting of “a sad and sober vest
sweeping to their heels.” Upon one point Sir Robert was uncommonly
strict; he would not allow of the presence of a female in the chapel,
under any pretence whatever--even as a servant to the chaplains--_quia
frequenter dum colitur Martha, expellitur Maria_. The latter, too, were
bound to exercise no office of a secular nature, especially that of
bailiff. To a little secular amusement, however, the sagacious knight
did not object, and two months’ leave of absence was allowed to the
chaplains every year; and doubtless no questions were asked, on their
return, as to how it had been employed.
While touching on the matters which occurred during the reign of that
unhappy Lancastrian king, Henry VI., I will observe that we have
foreign testimony to the fact of our civil wars having been carried
on with more knightly courtesy than had hitherto been the case in any
other country. “In my humble opinion,” says Comines, “England is, of
all the dominions with which I am acquainted, the one alone in which
a public interest is properly treated. There is no violence employed
against the people, and in war-time no edifice is destroyed or injured
by the belligerents. The fate and misery of war falls heaviest on those
immediately concerned in carrying it on.” He alludes particularly to
the knights and nobles; but it is clear that, let war be carried on in
ever so knightly a fashion, the people must be the chief sufferers.
The warehouses may stand, but so also will commerce--very still and
unproductive.
Courteous as the knights of this age may have been, they were by
no means incorruptible. There were many of them in the service of
Edward IV., who were the pensioners of Louis XI., who used to delight
in exhibiting their names at the foot of acknowledgments for money
received. One official, however, Hastings, would never attach his
autograph to his receipt, but he had no scruples with regard to taking
the money. The Czar buys Prussian service after the fashion of Louis XI.
Henry VIII. cared more for merit than birth in the knights whom he
created. He first recognised the abilities of him who was afterward
Sir John Mason, the eminent statesman of five reigns. This king was
so pleased with an oration delivered in his presence by Mason, at All
Souls, Oxford, that he took upon himself the charge of having him
educated abroad, as one likely to prove an able minister of state. He
was a faithful servant to the king. Elizabeth had one as gallant in
Sir Henry Unton, who challenged the great Guise for speaking lightly
of his royal mistress. The motives for the royal patronage of these
knights was better than that which moved Richard I. when he raised the
lowly-born Will Briewer to favoriteship and knighthood. Henry VIII. was
fond of conferring the honor of chivalry on those who served him well;
thus of the Cornish lawyer, Trigonnel, he made a knight, with forty
pounds a year to help him to keep up the dignity, in acknowledgment
of the ability with which, as proctor, he had conducted the case of
divorce against Queen Katharine. It was better service than John
Tirrell rendered to Richard III., who knighted him for his aid in the
murder of the young princes, on which occasion he kept the keys of the
Tower, and stood at the foot of the stairs, while Forest and Dighton
were despatching the young victims. We have a knight of a different
sort of reputation in Sir Richard Hutton, Charles I.’s “honest judge,”
at whose opposition against the levying of ship-money, even the king
could not feel displeased. Sir Richard deserved his honors; and we may
reckon among them the fact, that “when he was a barrister at Gray’s
Inn, he seldom or never took a fee of a clergyman.”
The old crest of the Huntingdonshire Cromwells was a lion rampant,
holding a diamond ring in its fore-paw. This crest has reference to
an individual knighted by Henry VIII. In the thirty-second year of
that king’s reign, Richard Williams, _aliàs_ Cromwell, with five other
gentlemen, challenged all or any comers from Scotland, Flanders,
France, or Spain, who were willing to encounter them in the lists.
The challenge was duly accepted, and on the day of encounter, Richard
Cromwell flung two of his adversaries from their horses. Henry loved
the sport, and especially such feats as this exhibited by Cromwell,
whom he summoned to his presence. The king said, “You have hitherto
been my Dick, now be my diamond;” and taking a diamond ring from his
own finger, and placing it on that of Cromwell, he bade the latter
always carry it for his crest. The king, moreover, knighted Richard,
and what was better, conferred on him Romney Abbey, “on condition of
his good service, and the payment of £4,663 4_s._ 2_d._ held in capite
by the tenth part of a knight’s fee, paying £29 16_s._”
It was in the reign of Henry VIII. that for the first time a
serjeant-at-law received the honor of knighthood. This seems to
have been considered by the learned body as a corporate honor, by
which the entire company of sergeants were lifted to a level with
knights-bachelors, at least. It is doubtless for this reason that
sergeants-at-law claim to be equal in rank with, and decline to go
below those said knight’s bachelors.
Of Elizabeth, it is sufficient to name but one sample of her knights.
She created many, but she never dubbed one who more nobly deserved the
honor than when she clapped the sword on the shoulder of Spielman,
the paper-maker, and bade him rise a knight. This was done by way of
recompense for the improvements he had introduced into his art, at
a time when printers and paper-makers were considered by Romanists
anything but angels of light.
Hume, referring to the chivalry of James I.’s time, remarks that the
private soldiers were drawn from a better class of men than was the
case in Hume’s time. They approached, he says, nearer to an equality
with the rank of officers. It has been answered that no such rank
existed as that from which they are chiefly drawn now. This, however,
is not the case. There were then, as now, doubtless many of the peasant
and working classes in the army; but there is not now, as there was
then, any encouragement to men of respectable station to begin the
ascent in profession of arms at the lowest round of the ladder.
One of James I.’s knights was the well-known Sir Herbert Croft. James
knighted him at Theobalds, out of respect to his family, and personal
merits. Some years subsequently Sir Herbert, then above fifty years of
age, joined the Church of Rome, and retired to Douay, where he dwelt a
lay-brother, among the English Benedictines. He died among them, after
a five years’ residence, in the year 1622. His eldest son William was
also knighted, I think, by Charles I. He is an example of those who
were both knights and clergymen, for after serving as colonel in the
civil wars, he forsook catholicism, in which he had been brought up
by his father, entered the Church of England, and like so many other
knights who in former times had changed the sword for the gown, rose
to the dignity of carrying an episcopal pastoral staff, and was made
Bishop of Hereford in 1661. It was a descendant of his who wrote the
very inaccurate biography of Young, in “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.”
Wood, in his _Athenæ_, shows that the first Sir Herbert was a literary
knight, who took up pen in the service of the communion into which
he had entered. These were;--1. Letters persuasive to his wife and
children to take upon them the Catholic religion. 2. Arguments to show
that the Church, in communion with the See of Rome, is the true Church.
3. Reply to the answers of his daughter, Mary Croft, which she made
to a paper of his sent to her concerning the Roman Church. All these
pieces appeared in the same year, 1619, and they seem to have been very
harmless weapons in the hands of a very amiable knight.
Among the most worthy of the knights created by James I. was Leonard
Holliday, who served the office of Lord Mayor in 1605, and was dubbed
chevalier by a king who is said never to have conferred the honor
without being half afraid of the drawn sword which was his instrument.
Sir Leonard did good service in return. In his time Moorfields
consisted of nothing but desolate land, the stage whereon was enacted
much violence and terrible pollution. In this savage locality, Sir
Leonard effected as wonderful a change as Louis Napoleon has done
in the Bois de Boulogne; and even a greater; for there were more
difficulties in the knight’s way, and his will was less sovereign and
potent to work mutation. Nevertheless, by perseverance, liberal outlay,
and hard work of those employed in the manual labor, he transformed the
hideous and almost pathless swamp into a smiling garden, wherein the
citizens might take the air without fearing violence either to body or
goods. They blessed king James’s knight as they disported themselves in
the rural district with their wives and children. The laborers employed
were said to have been less lavish of benedictions upon the head of him
from whom they took their wages. They complained bitterly of the toil,
and for a long time in London, when any great exertions were necessary
to produce a desired end, promptly, men spoke of the same as being mere
“Holiday work.”
James I. was not so perfect a knight in presence of a sword as he was
in presence of a lady. He made more knights than any other king, not
excepting William IV.; but he never dubbed one without some nervousness
at the sight of the weapon with which he laid on the honor. Kenelm
Digby states that when _he_ was knighted by James, the sword, had it
not been guided in the King’s hand by the Duke of Buckingham, would
have gone, not upon his shoulder, but into his eye. James’s aversion
from the sight of a sword is said to have descended to him from his
mother who, a short time previous to his birth, was the terrified
spectator of the murder of Rizzio. The same King used to remark that
there were two great advantages in wearing armor, namely, that the
wearer could neither receive nor inflict much injury. Indeed, as James
sagaciously remarked, the chief inconvenience to be dreaded from armor
was in being knocked down in it, and left without a squire to lend
assistance. In this case the knight stood, or lay, in imminent peril
of suffocation; the armor being generally too heavy to admit of a
knight rising from the ground without help. If he lay on his face his
condition was almost hopeless. The sentiment of chivalry was, after
all, not so foreign to James as is popularly supposed. Witness the
circumstance when Sully came over here as embassador extraordinary,
James made the embassador lower his flag to the pennant of the English
vessel sent out to receive or escort him. This, however, had been
well nigh construed into an affront. The poets of this time too began
to have a chivalrous feeling for the hardships of common women. The
feeling used to be all for princesses and courtly dames, but it was now
expressed even for shop-wives, behind counters. Thus the author of “The
Fair Maid of the Inn” says:--
“A goldsmith keeps his wife
Wedged into his shop like a mermaid; nothing of her
To be seen, that’s woman, but her upper part.”
The ladies too, themselves were growing ambitious, and as fanciful as
any knight’s “dame par amour” of them all. The Goldsmith’s daughter in
“Eastward Ho!” who wants to be made a lady, says to her “sweet knight,”
“Carry me out of the scent of Newcastle coal and the hearing of Bow
bells!” and _à-propos_ to titles, let me add that, in James’s time, it
was, according to Jonson--
“----a received heresy
That England bears no Dukes.”
Southey commenting on this passage, said that the title was probably
thought ominous, so many dukes having lost their heads.
In the second year of the reign of James I., he made not less than
three hundred knights; and on another occasion he is said to have made
two hundred and thirty-seven in six weeks. In France, when the state
was in distress, knighthood was often a marketable commodity; but it
probably was never more so there, than it was in England under the
first James. No one was more conscious than he, when he had an unworthy
person before him; and it sometimes happened that these persons had the
same uncomfortable consciousness touching themselves. Thus, we are told
that when “an insignificant person” once held down his head, as the
king was about to knight him, James called out, “Hold up thy head, man,
I have more need to be ashamed than thou.”
The indiscriminate infliction of the order caused great confusion.
Knights-aldermen in the city claimed precedence of knights-commoners,
and violent was the struggle when the question was agitated.
Heralds stood forth and pleaded before “my lords,” as lawyers do,
with reference to the party by which they were retained. One party
considered it absurd that a knight who happened to be an alderman
should take precedence of one who was only a knight. The civic
dignitary, it was said, was no more above the chivalric, than a
rushlight was superior to the sun. Such an idea, it was urged, by York
against Garter, was an insult to God and man. The case was ultimately
gained by the chivalric aldermen, simply because the knights-commoners
did not care to pursue it, or support their own privileges. York
thought that knights-commoners, though tradesmen, who _had_ been lord
mayors, and yet were not now aldermen, ought to take precedence of mere
alderman knights. The commoners lost their cause by neglect; but it has
been ruled that ex-lord mayors, and provosts of Scotland, shall precede
all knights, as having been the Sovereign’s lieutenants.
James may be said, altogether, to have shown very little regard for
the dignity of knights generally. By creating a rank above them, he
set them a step lower in degree of precedence. This monarch is, so to
speak, the inventor of the baronet. When money was required for the
benefit of the Irish province of Ulster, a suggestion was made that
they who supplied it liberally should have the hereditary title of
“Sir” and “Baronet.” James himself was at first a little startled at
the proposition, but he soon gave it his sanction upon Lord Salisbury
observing, “Sire, the money will do you good, and the honor will do
_them_ none.” James thought that a fair bargain, and the matter was
soon arranged. The knights were not pleased, but it was intimated to
them, that only two hundred baronets would be created, and that as the
titles became extinct, no new hereditary “Sirs” would be nominated. The
successors of James did not think themselves bound by the undertaking
of their predecessor. George III. the least regarded it, for during
four or five years of his reign he created baronets at the rate of one
a-month.
A particular annoyance to the poor knights was, that esquires could
purchase the title, and so leap over them at a bound, or could be
dubbed knights first, if they preferred to take that rank, by the way.
But if the knights were aggrieved, much more so were their ladies, for
the wife of a baronet was allowed precedence of all knights’ ladies,
even of those of the Garter. The baronets themselves took precedence of
all knights except of those of the Garter; and their elder sons ranked
before simple knights, whose distinction of “Sir” they were entitled to
assume, at the age of twenty-one, if they were so minded. Few, however,
availed themselves of this privilege.
This matter went so much to the satisfaction of James, that he resolved
to sell another batch of baronet’s titles, and thereupon followed his
“Baronets of Nova Scotia.” All these titles were bought of the crown,
the pecuniary proceeds being applied to the improvement of the outlying
province of Nova Scotia. A sneer, not altogether rightly directed, has
been occasionally flung at these purchased hereditary baronetcies. No
doubt a title so acquired did not carry with it so much honor as one
conferred for great and glorious service rendered to the country. But
there have been many titled sneerers whose own dignity stood upon no
better basis than that their ancestress was a king’s concubine, or the
founder of their house an obsequious slave to monarch or minister.
The first baronets, whether of Ulster or Nova Scotia, rendered some
better service than this to their country, by giving their money for
purposes of certain public good. They were not, indeed, rewarded
accordingly. They were public benefactors, only on condition that they
should be recompensed with an hereditary title. The morality here is
not very pure; the principle is not very exalted; but a smaller outlay
of morality and principle has purchased peerages before now, and the
baronets, therefore, have no reason to be ashamed of the origin of
their order. Least of all have those baronets of later creation, men
who have made large sacrifices and rendered inestimable services to
their country. On these the rank of baronet conferred no real dignity
which they did not before possess, but it served as an acknowledgment
of their worth in the eyes of their fellow-men. I may notice here, that
when Sir Walter Scott makes record of the gallant action performed
at Pinkie by Ralph Sadler, when he rallied the English cavalry so
effectually as to win a battle almost lost, and seized the royal
standard of Scotland with his own hand, the biographer adds that the
rank to which the gallant Ralph was then raised--of knight-banneret,
“may be called the very pinnacle of chivalry. Knight-bannerets could
only be created by the king himself or, which was very rare, by a
person vested with such powers as to represent his person. They were
dubbed either before or after a battle, in which the royal standard
was displayed; and the person so to be honored, being brought before
the king led by two distinguished knights or nobles, presented to the
sovereign his pennon, having an indenture like a swallow’s tail at the
extremity. The king then cut off the fished extremity, rendering the
banner square, in shape similar to that of a baron, which, thereafter,
the knight-banneret might display in every pitched field, in that more
noble form. If created by the king, the banneret took precedence of all
other knights, but if by a general, only of knights of the Bath and
knights-bachelors. Sir Francis Brian, commander of the light horsemen,
and Sir Ralph Vane, lieutenant of the men-at-arms, received this honor
with our Sir Ralph Sadler, on the field of Pinkie. But he survived
his companions, and is said to have been the last knight-banneret of
England.”
I suppose Washington thought that he had as much right as the English
Protector to dub knights; which is not, indeed, to be disputed. But
Washington went further than Cromwell, inasmuch as that he instituted
an order. This was, what it was said to be, trenching on the
privilege of a king. It was a military order, and was named after the
agricultural patriot, who was summoned from his plough to guide the
destinies of Rome; for the Romans had a very proper idea that nations
created their own destinies. The order of Cincinnatus being decreed,
the insignia of the order were sent to Lafayette, then in Paris, where
the nobility, who could no more spell than Lord Duberly, trusting to
their ears only, took it for the order of St. Senatus. A little uproar
ensued. The aristocracy not only sneered at the American Dictator for
assuming the “hedging” of a king, but they considered also that he had
encroached upon the privileges of a pope, and, as they had searched
the calendar and could not find a St. Senatus, they at once came to
the conclusion that he had canonized some deserving but democratic
individual of the city of Boston.