The Knight in History (34 page)

To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,

To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,

To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,

To honour his own word as if his God’s,

To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,

To love one maiden only, cleave to her

And worship her by years of noble deeds,

Until they won her….
²⁸

The code of chivalry was primly summed up by Tennyson as: “Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King.”
²⁹

Other Victorian writers and artists joined the Poet Laureate. The Pre-Raphaelites fell in love with Galahad, Lancelot, Arthur, and Guinevere. The enthusiasm infected architecture, not only in the form of castle restoration but in an outburst of “Gothic” style, in which battlements and towers festooned country houses enclosing all the peaceful Victorian comforts. Armor came down from the attic, and antique dealers prospered. The most eminent Victorians, including Prince Albert, had their portraits done wearing plate armor or had themselves represented in effigy as knights on their marble tombs. Above all, the heroes of the Round Table were offered as examples to boys in school, in sport, and finally (1908) in the founding of the Boy Scouts.

The most memorable single expression of Victorian enthusiasm was the Eglinton Tournament, organized in 1839 by a rich young Tory lord, the earl of Eglinton, and described by Disraeli in
Endymion
. Samuel Pratt’s showrooms in London furnished armor, horse trappings, pavilions, shields, banners, lances, swords, and medieval costumes. The setting was Lord Eglinton’s castle, in Ayrshire, Scotland, near the English border, anachronistically built in 1797. The tournament drew an enormous throng, even though its sponsor sought to limit the gathering to members of the Conservative party, which was represented by numerous peers, baronets, knights, and ladies. Foreign guests included Prince Louis Napoleon.

The day dawned brightly, but by the time the grand procession to the lists was organized, clouds were gathering, and a thunder clap heralded a torrential downpour. Umbrellas went up, and the procession plodded through the mud, its leader, Lord Londonderry, the “paladin of the chivalric life and gallant bearing,” under a large green umbrella, the Queen of Beauty and her maids of honor in closed carriages. The knights bravely tilted in a sea of slippery mud, and the tournament ended in chaos with bogged-down carriages and collapsing temporary buildings. Lord Eglinton and his guests stuck it out, and two days later the tournament was reenacted in sunshine, slightly marred only when in the closing melee two knights lost their tempers and had to be separated by the Knight Marshal. A medieval banquet at which each knight was attended by a page carrying his banner was followed by a ball in medieval dress.
³⁰
But the fiasco in the mud was the image that lingered. “The Knights threw down their lances, and put up their umbrellas,” Edward FitzGerald wrote,
³¹
and the knight-with-the-umbrella became a derisive symbol.

Eglinton and Tennyson were doing what Henry VIII and Francis I, Caxton and Malory had done, evoking an illusive and beguiling past, and finding in it a code of behavior for their own time. But the past had grown far more remote, not only with the passage of centuries but through the vast metamorphosis of Western society. The spirit of Eglinton survived into the twentieth century in a variety of forms, and traces of the chivalric code are preserved in details of latter-day etiquette. Such is the superficial legacy of the age of knighthood, now vanished beyond the reach of the irony of an Ariosto or a Cervantes.

Yet something more serious has endured. The ideals that Scott admired still command respect, at least in part because many men in the Middle Ages embraced them and tried to live by them: honor, unselfish service, dedication to justice, and the protest against war’s brutalities embodied in the Peace of God. A nineteenth-century admirer of the chivalric code and critic of the Middle Ages, Eton master Johnson Cory, observed: “Bayard, instead of being the last of the true knights, was the first.”
³²
A shrewd comment, but if Bayard surpassed the real-life knights of the medieval period in knightliness, he did so by adhering to the model they had created.

Of the three elements of chivalry, the military, the courtly, and the religious, the medieval knight found the first the easiest to practice. Many successfully imitated the heroes of the
chansons de geste
in their loyalty and courage, and too many in their rashness and vainglory. The second element, the courtesy and liberality of the troubadour tradition, also fitted broadly into knightly life-style, though real-life behavior toward women often fell short of the prescribed ideal. It was the third set of virtues, set forth in the codes of chivalry and celebrated in the Arthurian romances, that was the most neglected. Knights fought for profit and killed without mercy, robbed those whom they should have defended, and violated those whom they should have respected.

Many medieval knights were Rolands, few were Galahads.

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