Le Morte Darthur
accordingly, at the yearly feast at Windsor, in honour of the order and
brotherhood of the Knights of the Blue Garter, there established on St.
George’s day.’ Again, when the king of Scots had advanced to Newcastle,
while king Edward lay before Calais, we see the queen arriving to meet
the English army, and going from division to division, ‘desiring them
to do their devoir’—duty was then, as now, the English soldier’s
word—‘to defend the honour of her lord the king of England, and, in
the name of God, every man to be of good heart and courage; promising
them that to her power she would remember them as well or better as
though her lord the king were there personally. Then the queen departed
from them, recommending them to God and St. George.’ She does not seem,
like some of the ladies of that generation, to have considered the
field to be her place while the battle was going on; but after it was
won she returned, and with her council made all necessary arrangements
and plans. Shortly after she joined her husband while he lay before
Calais, ‘bringing many ladies and damsels with her, as well to
accompany her, as to see their husbands, fathers, brethren, and other
friends that lay at siege there before Calais, and had done a long
time.’ And I think we may attribute it as well to the general
humanising influence of all those ladies, as to the personal persuasion
of Philippa, that Calais did not suffer the same horrors of war as did
Limoges at the hands of the Black Prince. To what I have already quoted
from Froissart as to this story, I must now add what he tells us of
Philippa, after Edward had refused to hear Sir Walter of Manny. ‘Then
the queen kneeled down, and sore weeping, said, “Ah, gentle sir, sith I
passed the sea in great peril, I have desired nothing of you; therefore
now I humbly require you, in the honour of the Son of the Virgin Mary,
and for the love of me, that ye will take mercy of these six
burgesses.” The king beheld the queen, and stood still in a study a
space, and then said, “Ah dame, I would ye had been as now in some
other place; ye make such request to me that I cannot deny you;
wherefore I give them to you, to do your pleasure with them.”’
And lastly, as a counterpart to the picture I have already given of the
death of the knight of romance, here is the account of the death of her
who was the lady of the brightest day of historical chivalry:—
‘In the mean season there fell in England a heavy case and a common:
howbeit it was right piteous for the king, his children, and all his
realm; for the good queen of England—that so many good deeds had done
in her time, and so many knights succoured, and ladies and damosels
comforted, and had so largely departed of her goods to her people, and
naturally loved always the nation of Haynault, the country where she
was born—she fell sick in the castle of Windsor, the which sickness
continued on her so long, that there was no remedy but death; and the
good lady, when she knew that there was no remedy but death, she
desired to speak with the king her husband, and when he was before her,
she put out of her bed her right hand, and took the king by his right
hand, who was right sorrowful at his heart. Then she said, “Sir, we
have in peace, joy, and great prosperity, used all our time together:
sir, now I pray you at our departing, that ye will grant me three
desires.” The king, right sorrowfully weeping, said, “Madam, desire
what ye will, I grant it.” The three requests of the dying woman
were—that the king should pay all that she owed to any man; that he
should fulfil all the promises she had made to the churches where she
had “had her devotion,” and that “it might please him to take none
other sepulture, whensoever it should please God to call him out of
this transitory life, but beside her in Westminster.” The king, all
weeping, said, “Madam, I grant all your desire.” Then the good lady and
queen made on her the sign of the cross, and commended the king her
husband to God, and her youngest son Thomas, who was there beside her;
and anon after she yielded up the spirit, which I believe surely the
holy angels received with great joy up to heaven; for in all her life
she did neither in thought nor deed thing to lose her soul, as far as
any creature could know. Thus the good queen of England died in the
year of our Lord 1369, in the vigil of our Lady, in the midst of
August.’
We have all pictured to ourselves, again and again, how the lady sat in
her bower with her embroidery and her missal or romance, and saw from
her lattice window her knight going from the castle with lance and
pennon, hoping to meet his foe: how the minstrel recited in the castle
hall the feats of arms of this or that hero in some distant
battle-field; and how the matron or the maiden heard those feats, and
thought with silent joy that it was her lord, her husband, or her
lover, whose deeds were thus winning the praises of the troubadour, and
the applause of the listening knights and squires. We have all seen in
imagination the tournament, with the pomp and splendour of its mimic
contests: contests which surpassed the Olympic and Corinthian games of
classic antiquity, not only in their gorgeous show, but still more in
the presence of the ladies, noble in birth, and fame, and beauty; whose
scarf, or glove, the combatants wore as the token of that favour which
was their highest incentive to distinguish themselves; and from whose
hands the conqueror received the prize of skill and bravery: while the
honourably vanquished might be sure that he would have the hardly less
welcome lot of being cared for by the same ladies, who never shrank
from this their acknowledged and well-fulfilled duty of tending the
wounded knight.
Perhaps too we have listened in fancy to the proceedings of the
so-called Courts of Parliaments of Love, in which the ladies were wont
to hear questions of gallantry gravely argued on both sides by poets
pleading in verse, and then to give their judgments according to the
logical and metaphysical rules which the schoolmen applied to
theological enquiries. But I can now but remind my reader that such
things were; and must hasten forward, leaving ungathered flowers that
would make many a wreath and nosegay.
The golden age of chivalry was the period from about the middle of the
eleventh to the end of the fourteenth century. We may say with Gibbon,
that the Crusades were at once a cause and an effect of chivalry. In
the Crusades the spirit of knighthood, with all its characteristic
features, actuated vast bodies of men of every rank and nation, and
found a foe believed by all Christendom to be to it what the individual
robber and plunderer was to the knight errant who went forth in his own
country to defend or rescue the widow and orphan and their possessions,
or the traveller along the road which passed the castle of some
powerful though unworthy baron. The chivalry at home was kept alive,
and raised to its highest energy, both in man and woman, by the
chivalry in the Holy Land. It is in this period that the chief
institutions of chivalry took their rise, or reached their full form;
while their ruder features were gradually softened with the increasing
refinement of the times, till they presented that aspect with which we
find them in the days of Edward III and the Black Prince, as drawn by
Froissart or Chaucer, or in the romances which were then written or
remodelled out of older materials, and which show that even in the
estimation of other nations the English court then afforded the pattern
of knighthood for Christendom.
Thenceforward the outward forms of chivalry began to decay; very
gradually indeed, and not without apparent resuscitations from time to
time. But no real revival was possible; for the immortal spirit was
seeking new habitations for itself, more fitted to the new world which
was succeeding to that of the Middle Ages. And perhaps Cervantes, by
helping to tear up with his merciless satire the last remnants of an
honest faith in the old forms of chivalry, did as real, though we
cannot say as genial, a service to the cause of chivalry itself, as
Spenser did in endeavouring to preserve its spirit by transferring it
to the region of allegory. The last expiring token of the old spirit in
the old forms which I have found, is in the records of the Knights of
Malta—the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem—when the news
of the great earthquake in Sicily, in 1783, arrived at Malta. Then
those poor feeble-minded sybarites remembered for a moment their
manhood and their knighthood, and their vows as Hospitallers; they
manned their galleys, and, with food and clothing and medicines, and
the consolations of their faith, were speedily seen, in their
half-military, half-priestly garb—the armour covered by the black robe
with the white cross—at the bedsides of the wounded and the dying, as
they lay amid the still tottering ruins of their devastated houses. In
a very few years, in that same generation, the Order had passed away
for ever; but it is pleasant to him who stands in the palace of the
Grand Masters among the trophies of their former greatness, or treads
the aisles of the cathedral of St. John, where every step is upon the
emblazoned gravestone of a knight, to think of this, and not of any
less worthy deed, as their last act.
‘The knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust:
His soul is with the saints, I trust:’—
but he has left to us an imperishable and a rich inheritance, won for
us by him. To him we owe our MANNERS—all that world of existence
implied in the names LADY and GENTLEMAN. Through the Middle Ages it was
‘Our Lady,’ the Virgin mother who embodied and represented to all men
and women, from the prince to the peasant, their ideals of womanhood
and ladyhood. In modern times St. Paul has been held to be the model of
a gentleman; in whose acts and writings are found all the principles,
maxims, and spirit of a character entirely chivalrous, in the amplest
sense of the term: while one of our old dramatists has ventured, in
words of touching tenderness and reverence, to point to a yet higher
realisation of that ideal;—
‘The best of men
That e’er wore earth about him, was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.’
And it was the transference of these Christian ethics, into the
practice of common daily, worldly life, in rude, half-barbarous times,
which we owe to the knights and ladies of the Middle Ages; a
transference effected slowly, and with much mixture of evil with the
good: nor is the work nearly completed yet; but the worth of it can
hardly be overrated.
This is not indeed all, but there is much truth in the old motto,
‘Manners makyth man.’ Manners, like laws, create a region and
atmosphere of virtue within which all good more easily lives and grows,
and evil finds it harder to maintain itself. How large a portion of the
small, spontaneous kindnesses of hourly life, in which, after all, so
much of our happiness consists, are not only unknown, but impossible,
where habitual, unaffected politeness is wanting.
But manners are good, not only as affording a fairer field for the
exercise of the higher virtues, but good in themselves. They are a real
part of the beauty and grace of our human life. Courtesy, and
self-possession, and deference and respect for others; modesty and
gentleness towards all men, and recognition in all of the true gold of
humanity, whether it bear the guinea stamp or no; love of truth and
honour; and not only readiness, but eagerness to help the weak, and